“NB Gas” decoded (in plain sight)…?

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Charles Dellschau’s curious notebooks talk elliptically about a mysterious lifting gas called “NB Gas”: this was discovered (or, perhaps more accurately, harnessed) by miner Peter Mennis. It was created by dripping a green liquid (which Dellschau nicknamed “suppe”, for “pea soup”) onto an electrode, releasing the “NB Gas”, thus giving – so the theory goes – an airship buoyancy, and defying gravity. Unlike hydrogen, “NB Gas” was thought to be far less explosive, and thus more suitable for safe airshippery.

Going through the list of possible lifting gases, the best candidate by far would seem to be ammonia (NH3): though because its lifting power is far less than that of hydrogen, ammonia balloon envelopes would need to be significantly larger than hydrogen balloon envelopes (and let’s put all the other practical issues to one side too).

In his notes, Dellschau seemed not to know either what NB Gas was or why it was called that. But perhaps – I wonder – it was supposed to have been written “N-B” Gas instead? Because if so, the reason for the name would have surely been hidden in plain sight:

Now you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it, can you?

Charles Dellschau, Columbia, The Special AKA, and Scooby Doo…

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At the time of his death in Houston, Texas in 1923, Charles Dellschau was nothing more than an unknown (and indeed unremarkable) retired butcher. Yet a century later, his drawings of brightly-coloured (if somewhat implausible-looking) airships are feted as Art Brut and exhibited widely: while researchers continue to rummage through his books of recollections to try to work out how true (or, conversely, how imaginary / fantastical) his accounts of what happened actually are.

Some people even believe not only that Dellschau’s group of (alleged) Californian inventors flew dirigibles (steerable airships) before 1860, but also that this (somehow) proves that a steampunk super-science cadre was living in our midst; and from there spinning off into all manner of alt.history craziness.

To be fair, it does seem entirely plausible that Dellschau was living in / near Sonora or Columbia in California in 1857-1859, and perhaps at the start of 1860 too. For instance, he’s clearly familiar with nearby places (e.g. Knights Ferry), and later parts of his story do line up satisfactorily with actual evidence.

But for all that, 1857-1859 remains a yawning gap in his CV/résumé. And the fact that there is no evidence linking him to Columbia or Sonora in those years is certainly annoying. So… what’s going on here, then?

Columbia, California

Prior to the Gold Rush, Columbia was barely on the Californian map: but with the rapid hyper-scaling that followed the discovery of gold in 1848, the town quickly had its own shops, bars and hookers, and even its own printing press. It grew so fast that the town was even seriously proposed as a new California state capital to replace Sacramento.

But if you fast forward to 1860, Columbia was a bust: it all panned out, you might say. The last hurrah was a rumour that there were copper deposits beneath the town itself, which triggered frantic digging, rendering many of the buildings unsafe. And then, finally, the few remaining miners there decamped to other nearby towns, such as Copperopolis (though the astute ones had gone long before).

And so we already have a direct answer as to why the archives have no concerted trace of Dellschau and his airship-designing drinking buddies. This was because the 1850 and 1860 dates of the US Census stood rigidly either side of Columbia’s all too brief flourishing – its success was a proverbial flash in the pan. By 1860, pretty much everyone had moved on (including Dellschau himself), leaving the town a (literally) hollowed-out shell of its former thriving self.

Once again, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The Special AKA

In my head, the soundtrack to all this is – perhaps inevitably? – the major chord middle 8 in The Specials’ “Ghost Town”.

“Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town?
We danced and sang, and the music played inna da boomtown“

For me, this brief snatch of the lyrics captures Dellschau’s drawings best: specifically, his burning, shining nostalgia for whatever happened in those three brief years in California, “inna da boomtown“. To my eyes, his bright, almost DayGlo images speak of a past full of possibilities, of a shared peak experience, of everyone at their best, but all reconstructed and captured in far greyer days half a century later.

And then, as the old joke goes, “Tea break’s over, back on your heads“. 😮

Scooby Doo

As you may possibly remember, the theme of abandoned gold rush mining towns appeared in the “Miner 49er” Scooby Doo episode “Mine Your Own Business” [S01 E4] (spoiler: the Monster of the Week was Hank the caretaker, on stilts):

Strictly speaking, Columbia never became a Californian ghost town (unlike, say, Agua Fria in Mariposa County): it stumbled along until 1934, when New Deal archaeologists went in to make sense of the mess: in 1945, the town was restored and turned into the core of Columbia State Historic Park.

The questions everyone ends up asking about Dellschau’s notebooks are very often to do with what his motivation was for writing them. Was it all an act of scientific journalism (of real airships), or an act of pure personal creative expression?

All the same, maybe Dellschau saw himself as a kind of caretaker, trying to keep the memories of his boomtown days alive, even if everyone else involved was now far away or long dead: and where it is highly doubtful whether the airships he was documenting were ever constructed, let alone flown.

For me, I can’t help but wonder whether the 1896-1897 Airship Flap was the thing that first triggered Dellschau into writing down his recollections and reconstructing the designs proposed by his drinking club friends back in 1857-1859. Might his actual motivation have been to instead prove that they (rather than these gosh-darn Airship Flap pretenders) were the real inventors of the idea of the airship?

Ultimately, I guess that makes me Fred Jones removing the monster’s mask to reveal Dellschau as an obsessed caretaker not of a lost history of built airships, but of a lost history of conceptual airship inventors. That is to say, I suspect the ‘gold’ Dellschau was trying to attain was a place in airship history for his inventive friends, from his younger boomtown days when everything – briefly – seemed possible.

“And I’d have got away with it too, if it weren’t (etc)“.

On NB gas, suppe, and NYMZA…

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Anyone trying to make sense of Charles Dellschau’s partly-enciphered airship drawings will quickly run into three roadblocks: (1) what was the mysterious “NB gas” that allegedly made the airships buoyant? (2) What was the curious green “soup” that was allegedly used to release additional NB gas whilst in flight? (3) What was the mysterious group “NYMZA”, whose enciphered initials appear on so many pages of Dellschau’s notebooks?

Here’s what “NYMZA” looks like in Dellschau’s cipher:

NB Gas

In terms of chemistry, there are very few substances that are less dense than air at normal air pressures and temperatures (and that can hence be used to lift an airship).

Of these, hydrogen is the best known, but it is prone to explosion; methane too is similarly prone to going bang; while helium was only properly isolated in 1895 (and so was not in play in 1856, the year when – according to Dellschau – Peter Mennis discovered “NB gas”), broadly similar to neon, krypton, argon etc.

However, there is one other “lifting gas” that was within reach of inventors circa 1850: ammonia. Even though ammonia is only half as dense as air (by way of comparison, hydrogen has 8% of the density of air, so an ammonia-filled balloon would need to be a fair bit bigger to get the same lift), and is stinky and noxious, it has many secondary benefits.

Interestingly, there’s a 2016 article by Brett Cohen (Karl Kluge kindly pointed this out to me, thanks Karl!), published in “Shadows of Your Mind” Vol. 1 #10, pp.78-81), that proposes that Peter Mennis’ NB gas was indeed ammonia.

It’s a good theory, certainly better than Jerry Decker’s somewhat forlorn theorification that Mennis may have found one of 26 elements supposedly missing from the periodic table before hydrogen. (*sigh*)

Even if we proceed by Holmesian elimination, ammonia seems a strong pick. And yet… it has to be pointed out that ammonia’s relatively meagre advantage over air as a lifting gas would probably have meant bigger balloon envelopes than the ones depicted by Dellschau. This is a tricky issue that everyone panning Dellschau’s notebooks for historical gold dust has to face up to.

All the same, I think it’s fair to say that ammonia is a very strong candidate for NB gas, with no obvious alternative contender (Dellschau repeats many times the idea that other gases were too explosive to be used in airships – and though ammonia is, ummm, slightly explosive, it’s still less troublesome than the others).

Suppe

The second problem is the “suppe” (which Dellschau always paints green): this is a liquid substance that get somehow poured onto a spiked ‘turner’ device, releasing the NB gas. At one point, Dellschau calls it “pys suppe” (which I believe means “pea soup”, though you will have to form your own opinion).

Want your airship to go up? Pour “suppe” onto your spike turner to release NB gas into your balloon envelope. Want your airship to go down? Release some NB gas from your balloon envelope. Whereas the most technically aware balloonists of the day were using ballonets (inflatable air bags inside the hydrogen gas bag), an ammonia-based airship need – theoretically – not use any such additional mechanism.

Cohen thinks that the two substances that were added together to release ammonia were were ammonium chloride (NH4Cl, A.K.A. sal ammoniac) and sodium hydroxide (NaOH, A.K.A lye, or caustic soda, first properly isolated by Sir Humphry Davy in 1807). The equation he points to is:

NH4Cl + NaOH –> NH3 (ammonia gas) + NaCl (sodium chloride) + H20

In Cohen’s concluding paragraph, he proposes “that ammonia gas (NH3) could be produced from a simple mixture of two solids, ammonium chloride (NH4Cl) and sodium hydroxide (NaOH) dissolved completely in water and allowed to react.”

Incidentally, ammonium chloride is used as a food additive under the title “E510”. If you’ve had “salty liquorice” in Northern Europe, you’ve probably eaten ammonium chloride.

Overall, Cohen’s account is sensible and rational: and yet it has to be said that neither ammonium choride nor sodium hydroxide has a green appearance. In Crenshaw’s book (p.89), Peter Mennis’ discovery of NB gas is phrased in terms of “searching for a better way to extract gold from quartz”, and an experiment that went wrong (in a good way), though Crenshaw doesn’t connect this explicitly with references to Dellschau’s notebooks.

Cohen may be right, or he may be wrong – it’s hard to tell. Even if Mennis’ NB gas is indeed ammonia, I think it’s hard to feel confident the “suppe” secret sauce has yet been figured out properly.

NYMZA

In many places, Dellschau alludes to what seems to be a shadowy group of investors who were at least partially bankrolling the inventors in the Sonora Aero Club: he calls the group “NYMZA” (but only ever writes its initials in cipher, as far as I can tell).

If NYMZA is an acronym, it’s certainly a curious one: though it’s hard not to read the first two letters as “New York” (arguably the investment capital of the world back then), the “MZA” part feels much more like a German acronym.

If the “M” is the first letter of a German word, I wondered if it might be (for example) “mechanisch or mechaniker”. Similarly, I wondered whether the “Z” might stand for “zunft” (guild), “zirkel” (circle), or “zeichner” (draftsman / designer). Finally, I wondered if the “A” might stand for “Assoziation”. However, my cunning websearches for all of these yielded plenty of false positives, but nothing actually helpful.

Yet Dellschau himself was born in Prussia in 1830, and his written language is a mishmash of English, German, French and sometimes apparently phonetic renderings. For example, I personally find it hard not to read all Dellschau’s transcriptions of “Moyk Gorée” and not to wonder whether the person’s name was simply “Mike Grey” (possibly from Britain or Ireland?).

In that context, it’s also quite hard for me to look at “NYMZA” and not wonder whether this was an imaginary Anglo-German group of investors that Dellschau had himself made up. In which case, the question is whether Dellschau had made it up in 1857 in California, or whether he made it up back in Houston many years later.

Your thoughts, Nick?

Though it would be nice to believe that NYMZA and Sonora Aero Club existed just as Dellschau’s notebooks imply, there currently seem to be more historical and technical impediments than supporting evidence.

To be fair, I can imagine that Californian miner Peter Mennis existed, and even that he indeed discovered a lifting “NB gas”; I can even imagine that Mennis may have been able to build a small test balloon using his NB gas, and excite other people’s imaginations.

Yet startup ventures throughout history have faced immense difficulties re-engineering a demonstrator into something that works at scale: and, so far, I don’t really see any way that the rest of the Sonora Aero Club (itself a name that wasn’t really possible until 1900 or so) was anything apart from a local Liar’s Club / drinking club formed to fantasize about manned flight amidst the brutal day-to-day madness of a Gold Rush.

But hopefully I’ll be proved wrong. 😉

Cipher Mysteries is migrating from Feedburner to Follow.it …

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Just a quick post to let you all know that I’ve (at long last, only two years late, etc) moved Cipher Mysteries’ email subscription handling from (the now long defunct) Google Feedburner to sassy new Feedburner replacement Follow.it. Everyone who was formerly subscribed via Feedburner should (fingers crossed) now be subscribed via Follow.it instead.

The nice follow.it people tell me that you can do various funky subscription things via their web interface (e.g. RSS trickery, or redirect it to your Twitter feed, etc). But frankly I guess most people will just receive it via email as before.

Let me know if you run into any problems or anything unexpected! Next stop – finding a new WordPress theme…

Two Hunters on Bolinas Ridge…

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Prompted by Karl Kluge, I’ve been reading Dennis Crenshaw’s “The Secrets of Dellschau” to try to work out my own angle on the mysterious Sonora Aero Club and its alleged airships. However, when Crenshaw mentions Mount Tamalpais (in connection with the 1896 Airship Flap in California), he refers to two articles from The San Francisco Call that I hadn’t previously quoted here. I’ve been relying on newspapers.com, and annoyingly it doesn’t always find the articles you want: the magic keyphrase that happened to unlock the door here was “Bolinas Ridge“.

Bolinas Ridge

Bolinas Ridge starts close to Mount Tamalpais, and has a picturesque trail that runs along it for several miles. For example, here’s an Oct 1896 story about “four ladies from the Hotel Rafael” riding along Bolinas Ridge being caught out by a sudden fog dropping, and having to spend the night in a makeshift campsite under the redwoods sitting on saddles. Other newspaper stories of Bolinas Ridge tell tales of encounters with “an enraged deer” or panther, or of forest fires, etc

More importantly (for airship historians), here’s the Call article from 19 Nov 1896 (p.1) mentioned by Crenshaw, and which was the final one of Daniel Cohen’s four early airship-flap mentions that I wasn’t previously able to dig up:

SEEN THREE WEEKS AGO.

Story Told by a Hunter Living on Bolinas Ridge

On Sunday, the first day of this month, a representative of THE CALL met on Bolinas Ridge, just to the west of Mount Tamalpais, an old hunter living there, named Brown. The old man was very nervous and started a conversation immediately by asking:

“Do I look like a crazy man?”

“Why certainly not, Mr. Brown. Why do you ask?”

“Well,” he replied, “I don’t expect anybody to believe me. To tell the truth I can hardly believe myself. But it’s an honest fact that yesterday morning, when the fog began to lift, I saw an airship right up there a couple of hundred feet over them pines.

“No, I can’t tell you much what she looked like. She didn’t show very plainly through the mist, but it was a large, dark shape with something moving on it. Don’t know whether I saw any people or not. It came on me so sudden I was almost stunned, and by the time I collected my senses she was out of sight.

“I have been kind of dazed ever since, and to have you tell me that I don’t look crazy is a great relief. But I know that what I saw was an airship.”

As the “superior” type of mirage is not uncommon to people living on the Marin hills it was thought that this was what the old man had seen, so no attention was paid to his story. The mirage effect of a large ocean vessel passing through the sky might appear to him like some new-fangled machine for navigating the air.

Perhaps the mirage is what he really saw, but in the face of the stories circulated in regard to the airship there is a probability that is what Mr. Brown really saw. Certainly he would have no object in telling such a story.

Thomas/William Jordan of San Rafael

The other Call article (23 Nov 1896, p.1) referred to a previous article I quoted here:

One of the most interesting of the corroborative stories comes from Thomas Jordan of San Rafael, who states that he found a machine-shop in a mountain fastness some months ago: that six men were working on an airship and that it would soon be completed.

In the first day’s story of the airship, as printed in THE CALL, it was stated that an old hunter named Brown of Bolinas Ridge had seen an airship floating a few hundred feet above the pine trees one morning just as the fogs were lifting from the ridge.

It seems that The Call’s journalist misremembered “William Jordan” as “Thomas Jordan” (as per the original article I quoted here).

“Strange Lights At Sea”

Incidentally, I did find one curious story in the San Francisco Examiner of 19 Jun 1894 (p.8) that might possibly have been related to the 1896 Airship Flap:

STRANGE LIGHTS AT SEA

Will-o’-the-Wisps That Deceive the Life-Saving Crews.

Flare Lights and Rockets Seen at Night Near Bolinas by the Watchers at the Point Lobos Observatory Station.

What are those strange lights at sea, those blue rockets and flare lights and flashes of yellow fire that are thrown at night from the water’s surface against the inky background of the hills that seem to crowd Bolinas into the sea?

Twice within a fortnight that have been seen by the lonely watchers at Point Lobos, and as many times they have been mistaken for signals of distress, whereupon tug boats have been sent out from the city, and these have towed one or more of the life-saving crews out to sea to search for mariners in distress.

Each time these errands have been fruitless, and not a trace could be found of the origin of the mysterious signals.

Two weeks ago last Sunday night the lights were first seen by the Golden Gate Life-Saving crew’s lookout on Point Lobos.

“I began to see the lights flashing about 9 o’clock in the evening,” he says, “and they continued for over two hours.” […]

“They were flare lights mostly, but I am certain there were some blue rockets fired from the same point during the evening. The lights were intermittent and a good deal like those that would be flashed from a ship in distress.

“Last night I saw the same lights again, almost in the same place, over there near Bolinas. Those hills are so black over there at night that I could see the flashes very plainly, though it was a cloudless and moonlight evening. About 9 o’clock they commenced. At times a great streak of yellow would be flashed up straight against the black hills, and I was sure they must be signals of distress from some craft or small boat in Bolinas Bay.”

[…] Some are inclined to think that the lights were signals to or from small crafts engaged in smuggling, but the most prevalent theory now is that picnickers at Willow Camp have been having bonfires and fireworks among their other sports.

Willow Camp Hotel

I’ve been trying to work out who the mysterious “Mr Brown” was. Though by 1896 Mount Tamalpais had started to become a popular summer destination for visitors, October/November would have been out of season. The report (in Cohen p.9) characterised Brown as a recluse, but was that the whole story?

One possibility is that could have been the John W. “Bill” Brown (born May 2, 1863) who owned the nearby Willow Camp Hotel on Stinson Beach in Bolinas Bay, at the foot of Mount Tamalpais. Despite its impressive-sounding name, this was simply a set of tents in the shade of the willow trees. Previously, Brown had shared the ownership with a Mr Jukes, but in 1894 he bought out the other man’s share to run the enterprise with his sister Dolly Brown and mother Lucinda. (He sold it to William Neumann in 1903-1904: Brown died in 1946 in Mill Valley.)

In this 1894 article, we can see more than a hundred people (including Miss Dolly Brown) staying at Willow Camp, and there’s a nice scenic description here (though don’t eat the mussels). From there it would have been a three-mile hike to Bolinas Ridge:

On the other hand, I have to point out that despite his proximity to the ridge, Bill Brown doesn’t sound at all like an “old hunter”: but I haven’t yet got an alternative candidate. I’ll keep looking.

Did the 1896-7 Airship Flap have any cipher mysteries?

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You know, I’m so glad you asked me that question, it’s almost as if I was waiting to be asked.

It turns out that there were in fact two airship ciphers. Well… one. Well… none. Well… maybe a half.

Bear with me, I’ll try to explain.

The 1897 Aurora Alien Incident

Daniel Cohen has a lot of fun with this incident, to the point that it fills an entire chapter (Chapter 8, “The Texas Spaceship Crash“) of his “The Great Airship Mystery” book. This is because he gets a chance to tell a story that involves a whole load of UFO groups doing what they do best (or perhaps worst) – ripping into each other’s methodological, historical and evidential shortcomings, while displaying almost exactly the same ideological blindness and ineptitude themselves. It’s a story with Jacques Vallee, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, and a 1973 incident where the “spaceman’s grave” was robbed out. What’s there not to like?

The first airship cipher story originally appeared in the newspapers as follows:

A Windmill Demolishes It.

Aurora, Wise Co., Tex. April 17. – (To The News.) About 6 o’clock this morning the early risers of Aurora were astonished at the sudden appearance of the airship which has been sailing through the country.

It was travelling due north, and much nearer the earth than ever before. Evidently some of the machinery was out of order, for it was making a speed of only ten or twelve miles an hour and gradually settling toward the earth. It sailed directly over the public square, and when it reached the north part of town collided with the tower of judge Proctor’s windmill and went to pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wrecking the windmill and water tank and destroying the judge’s flower garden.

The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one on board, and while his remains are badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world.

Mr. T.J. Weems, the United States signal service officer at this place and an authority on astronomy, gives it as his opinion that he was a native of the planet Mars.

Papers found on his person – evidently the records of his travels – are written in some unknown hieroglyphics, and can not be deciphered.

The ship was too badly wrecked to form any conclusion as to its construction or motive power. It was built of an unknown metal, resembling somewhat a mixture of aluminium and silver, and it must have weighed several tons.

The town is full of people to-day who are viewing the wreck and gathering specimens of the strange metal from the debris. The pilot’s funeral will take place at noon tomorrow.

For a cut-down re-telling of the whole sorry saga, you could high-tail it to the Wikipedia page: but Cohen leaves his readers in little doubt that it was a local hoax. So the “Papers found on [the alien pilot’s] person [… that] are written in some unknown hieroglyphics, and can not be deciphered” would seem to fall into the ‘outright hoax‘ category, along with the rest of the whole (non-existent windmill-height) tall tale.

The Astoria Cipher

The earliest newspaper appearance of the second airship cipher story I have found is from the Miners Journal of April 20 1897, which runs as follows:

FROM THE “AIR-SHIP”

A Letter Addressed to Edison Found in an Illinois Village.

Astoria, Ill., April 18. A great sensation was caused here to-day when it was learned that a message had been received from the alleged air ship.

“Bert” Swearingin found it on a farm one-half mile north of the town in a piece of reed about three feet long, sticking in the ground, with a red, white and blue streamer attached to the top.

An egg-shaped stone was tied by rags to the lower end, weighing about three pounds.

About half way to the top of the reed was attached a packet, enclosed in a large and dirty envelope, on which was written:

“From air ship. – Notice to the finder: Please mail letter inside. Passed over here about half-past 2 p. m., April 16, 1897, about 2,300 feet high, going east and north. Excuse dirt, as just got done oiling. “HARRIS”

The letter was addressed and ready for mailing to Thomas A. Edison, New York city. It was opened and found to be written in cipher, dated April 16, and signed “C. L. Harris, Electrician Air Ship No. 3.” It will be mailed. Captain James McNeill, Mrs Walters and other here declare they saw the ship last night.

This story fell on ears well-primed by the media. The Chicago Tribune of 16 Apr 1897 (p.4) had just printed a sighting from a fisherman of someone on the airship nearly catching a swordfish on a lake near Cleveland OH (errrm… the one that got away); by “more than a hundred persons” at Mount Vernon, IL; at Carlyle, IL travelling northwest in the evening; and at South Haven, MI, travelling westward. Having said that, I should add that the Tribune printed an Ananias-themed (Liars’ club) airship cartoon on the 18th, and an editorial comparing the airship to mythical sea serpents on the 20th, so was no big airship fan.

Anyhow, the newspapermen of the day immediately whooshed Harris’ enciphered letter to the great man himself in his West Orange Laboratory, who was… somewhat less than impressed, let us say. According to the Bucyrus Evening Telegraph of 5 May 1897 (p.3):

Mr. Edison paused from a luncheon of sandwiches, pumpkin pie and tea to observe: “You can take it from me that that is a pure fake. I have had several men in my employ called Harris, but I know nothing of C. L. Harris.

“I have no doubt that airships will be successfully constructed in the near future, but there has been too much talk about this supposed airship out west. I have always found that there is much talk before these ships are tried and very little afterward.

“It is absolutely absurd to imagine that a man would construct a successful airship and keep the matter secret. When I was young we used to construct big colored paper balloons, inflate them with gas, and they would float about for days. I guess some one has been up to that same game out west. […]”

Yes, yes, that’s all well and good, but… what about the bloomin’ cipher, then? In many ways, it now doesn’t matter if it’s really from an airship or not, it may well have genuinely been enciphered. Without seeing it, who’s to say what it said?

To that end, I tried searching the digital edition of the Thomas A. Edison papers at Rutgers, but found only a pair of newspaper clippings of the story (initially from the New York Herald of April 19 1897) and no cipher, alas; so it seems to be lost. If anyone has a better idea as to where to look for it, please say!

Summary

At the top, I promised you two, or one, or none, or “maybe a half” airship cipher, which is where I think this story is at. Perhaps one day the second cipher will turn up: I’ll be here waiting. Fingers crossed!

When did the 1896 California Airship Flap begin?

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In the last post, I brought together all the sightings of the October 22 1896 Meteor I could find, and was able to conclude that they were all indeed sightings of an unusual meteor (rather than of a mystery airship). So… what remains? What was the first actual sighting of the 1896 California Airship Flap?

Daniel Cohen’s extra sightings

Cohen adds some early extra sightings that weren’t in Loren E. Gross’ book, that I thought need checking out. For example, Cohen reports (p.9) that “in the last week of October [1896], C. T. Musson, a fruit rancher from Placer County, California, also reported three lights in the sky. He estimated that they were moving at about 100 miles an hour, and were the “prettiest sight” he had ever seen.“

After a few searches, I found the original story in the San Francisco Call of 25 November 1896 p.2:

Sighted Triple Lights

A Rapid Aerial Traveler Observed in Placer County

BOWMAN, Placer County, Cal., Nov. 24 – The articles published in THE CALL and other papers in reference to the observed mystical aerial traveler have aroused great interest here. Several persons in this locality have been favored with a view of the strange visitor.

C. T. Musso, a fruit rancher, and several members of his family affirm that about four weeks ago and shortly after dark they saw a singular sight, which they are now convinced could have been nothing else than the much-discussed airship. Mr. Musso says he saw the “prettiest sight that his eyes ever viewed.” It appeared to be three very bright lights moving horizontally and easterly at a rate of perhaps 100 miles an hour.

A. H. Thompson, a painter, states that about the same time he saw a similar sight, which he describes as being three very bright and large lights appearing about eight feet apart, and the forward one as being larger and brighter then the rest, and moving horizontally eastward rapidly and gracefully.

Professor S. D. Musso states that about two weeks ago he and his wife saw a similar sight moving in the same direction and with about the same velocity. He feels quite confident that it was not a meteor, as there were three lights appearing about seven feet from each other in a direct line, the forward one being larger than the other two. The light, he states, was different from meteoric light, the velocity was too slow for a meteor, and it was traveling horizontally as long as was seen, which was for several minutes.

Cohen also briefly mentions (p.9) a sighting from around this earlier time by “a young San Francisco woman named Hegstrom”. Again, I eventually found the original report in the Record-Union of 23 November 1896, p.4:

Miss Hagstrom, who resides on Telegraph avenue, saw the same object about six weeks ago. The feature that impressed her most was the bright light which she distinctly saw. On returning home she told her brother of what she had seen, but nothing more was thought of it until she read recently that a similar object had been seen in another part of the state.

So, replacing Musson/Hegstrom with Musso/Hagstrom, I feel reasonably confident that both were in fact sightings of the October 22 meteor, rather than first sightings of the mystery airship. I’m also reasonably sure that Cohen was relying on a type-written (and probably somewhat faded) list of sightings.

“A Hunter named Jordan”

Our final pre-Sacramento sighting appears in Cohen (p.9): “One of the most astonishing tales was attributed to a hunter named Jordan, who said that he and some friends had tracked a wounded deer to a remote part of Tamalp[a]is Mountain northwest of San Francisco. There in a clearing he came upon a hidden workshop, and in it were six men working over a strange-looking vehicle.“

Gross’ book on Charles Fort tells this same story (but without giving a source) (p.7): “For example, a hunter claimed he had come across the airship and its inventors while walking through the woods in Marin County. The inventors were quite ordinary people he asserted.“

Once again, diligent searching revealed the full story as recounted in a letter published in The San Francisco Call, 23 Nov 1896, p.2, right at the zenith of Californian mystery airship mania:

OTHERS WHO SAW IT

Stories that Corroborate the Fact of the Invention

The following letter from San Rafael explains a phase of the story that has not yet come to light:

SAN RAFAEL, Nov. 22, 1896

Editor Call: The mysterious light mentioned in your valuable paper this morning as seen by several citizens in different parts of the State, and which seems to mystify yourself as well as your readers, is nothing more than an airship, and of this fact I am perfectly cognizant. I think now that I am released of my obligation of secrecy, which I have kept for nearly three months, as the experiment in aerial navigation is a fixed fact and the public or a few of the public at least have seen its workings in the air.

In the latter part of last August I was hunting in the Tamalpais range of mountains, between the high peak and Bolinas Bay. I wounded a deer, and in chasing it I ran onto a circular brushpile about ten feet in height in a part of the mountain seldom visited even by hunters.

I was somewhat astonished, and my curiosity prompted me to approach it, when I encountered a man who sang out: “What are you doing here and what do you want?” I replied that “I had wounded a deer and was chasing it.” He said “that they had been camping here for a month or so and had not seen a deer, but if you think your deer is in the neighborhood I will assist you in finding it as we need a little meat in camp.” This man went with me and in less than 500 yards found my deer. We carried it into the brush corral. And what a sight – a perfect machine shop and an almost completed ship. I was sworn to secrecy and have kept it till this moment. Six men were at work on the “aerial ship.” It is this ship that a few people have seen at night on its trial trip. It returns to its home before daylight and will continue to do so until perfected. Yours, WILLIAM JORDON.”

Once again, even though Cohen’s account has a coupling of niggling typos (Jordan/Tamalpis for Jordon/Tamalpais), it does basically seem to have been well-sourced.

As an aside: according to Familysearch and MyHeritage, there are plenty of “William Jordon”s in California, but my guess is that the right one would prove to be closely related to William Charles Jordon (born 1817), who was registered to vote in San Rafael in 1872 [myheritage], and (I guess) who Familysearch thinks married Mary J. Devine in Sonoma on 15 July 1865.

Mountain Man named Brown

Our final sighting appears in Cohen (p.9), and mercifully doesn’t involve three bright lights in the sky. He writes: “A reclusive mountain man named Brown said he actually observed some sort of vehicle rising from the trees on a mountain ridge near San Francisco. He could not see the thing clearly because of the mountain mist, but he was sure it was quite unlike anything he had ever seen before.“

Well… I’ve searched newspapers.com (and elsewhere) for this without any luck at all (and it doesn’t seem to appear in any of Loren E. Gross’ books). I think there’s a high chance this story did appear in a newspaper around that time, but perhaps a spelling mistake crept in. All the same, this certainly seems to at least be consistent with William Jordon’s story.

Still, three out of four’s not a bad hit rate, and perhaps I’ll find the fourth at some point in the future.

The October 22 1896 Meteor was not an airship

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OK, now that I’ve collected a ton of reports, it seems abundantly clear that the October 22 1896 Meteor sighted in California was indeed a meteor, and not an airship. What seems to have happened is that once the 1896 airship “flap” sightings began (in mid-November 1896), people started misremembering what was seen at Cliff House. However, the original press report (“A Queer Thing in the Sky”, San Francisco Examiner, Oct 23 1896) of what was seen at Cliff House was clearly ‘of a piece’ with all the other reports.

So, my apologies to Loren E. Gross and Daniel Cohen, but it seems that this meteor should be removed from the 1896 California Airship Flap timeline.

Additionally, Stefano Guidoni suggested in a comment here that Professor Lewis Swift’s observation of a comet near the horizon on Sept 20 1896 might well have been of Comet 205P/Giacobini not long after it had split into two. I think this too is very likely: and so, apologies again to Gross and Cohen, but this sighting should probably be removed from the same timeline.

October 22 1896 Reports

(The following includes a brief report from Oakland that appeared in here.)

  • Oakland – CDP
    • Origin: “a little north of west”
    • Height: “rose like a sky-rocket” “parallel to my horizon” “remarkably slow”
    • Path: “an arc of ninety degrees or more”
    • Split: “into four parts, but not with the usual explosive effect”
    • Duration: “about ten seconds”
    • Disappeared: 6:09pm PST “behind the Berkeley Hills”
  • Napa – Mr D. J. Brown
    • Appeared: “about six o’clock”
    • Origin: “from the west”
    • Height: “quite near the Earth, speed slower than that of any other like body”
    • Path: “passing over the valley in the direction of Napa Soda Springs”
    • Split: “head divided into three parts”
    • Disappeared: “went to pieces like a spent sky-rocket”
  • Hunter’s, Tehama – Mr H. F. Stivers
    • Appeared: “6:10 p.m. P. S. T.”
    • Origin: “in the west” “fifteen or twenty degrees above the […] horizon”
    • Path: “directly towards the moon”, “must have described the complete arc of the heavens”
    • Split: “separated twice, making plainly visible three pieces”
    • Duration: “ten to fifteen seconds”
    • Disappeared: “in the moon’s light, not more than ten degrees from that luminary”
  • Wheatland
    • Origin: “in the west as a star of the magnitude of the evening star and in close proximity to Jupiter”
    • Path: “towards the east” “very steadily and slowly”
    • Height: “parallel to the horizon”
    • Split: “increased in size until it gradually separated first into one comet-shaped meteor, then in two, and finally into three distinct comet-shaped meteors”
    • Disappeared: “when five degrees north of east it suddenly disappeared”
  • Highland Springs
    • Appeared: “6:13 o’clock”
    • Path: “from southwest to northeast”
    • Split: “three large balls of fire”
    • Disappeared: “as if the [fire] balls burst on the mountain north of Clear Lake”
  • Nevada [City], California – W. M. Richards
    • Appeared: “ten minutes past 6 o’clock this evening”
    • Origin: “a few degrees above the western horizon”
    • Path: “a direction a little north of east”
    • Split: “three balls of fire, all in a row and connected like a train of cars, with a long fiery tail”
    • Disappeared: “high in the heavens, apparently somewhere over the Great Dipper and North Star”
  • Oakland
    • “The same phenomenon was witnessed in this city, and noted as a remarkable sight”
  • Between Gold Flat and Grass Valley – Capt. Henry Richards and son (was this “W. M.”?)
    • Origin: “West”
    • Path: “from west to east”
    • Height: “on a horizontal line”
    • Split: “in three parts and the line of fire, resembling the tail of a comet, […]”
    • Disappeared: “did not fall to the earth, but passed into space”
  • Stockton – Dr Foreman, John Ahern, Rodney the dog
    • Appeared: “ten minutes past six o’clock”
    • Origin: “a little north of west”
    • Path: “a bit north of east” “The Aurora mill obstructed our view of a portion of it”
    • Height: “appeared […] to traverse space on a level”
    • Split: “three large balls of fire […], the first largest. From the third a rail of fire extended”
    • Disappeared: “gradually faded from our view, going beyond the range of our vision, I suppose”
  • San Jose
    • Origin: “out of the west”
    • Path: “easterly across the city”
    • Height: “apparently quite close to the earth” “on a horizontal line”
    • Split: “divided into two parallel lines of light, each with several balls of fire at regular intervals”
    • Disappeared: (while traveling)
  • Cliff House, San Francisco – Mayor Sutro’s staff
    • Appeared: “shortly after 6 o’clock” “6:15 o’clock”
    • Origin: “about 10 miles out at sea” [west]
    • Path: “eastward, as if it had important business on the other coast”
    • Height: “a straight line horizontally”
    • Split: “seemed to have a head” “a long trail of fire extended behind”
    • Duration: “a few minutes”

“The Meteor of October 22 1896”

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Searching for “W. M. Richards” (who took “A splendid view of the triple-connected meteor”) following my last post, it struck me that that person might well have been an astronomer. Though it seems Richards wasn’t, this hunch quickly led me to the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for 1896, which contained a section on the “Meteor of October 22 1896“, which is what the good folk of that society called the phenomenon that was widely observed on 22 Oct 1896.

Even though some of this overlaps with what I have previously posted, I think that the entirety (pp.324-326) bears reproducing in full.

Note that “CDP” was Professor C. D. Perrine, Director of the Lick Observatory: hence if you wish to see the actual letters to Professor Perrine transcribed below (hopefully with the omitted sketches), I believe you should go to the Lick Observatory Records at UC Santa Cruz. Having said that, I don’t believe any of the 148.5 linear feet of correspondence in the archives there (UA.036.Ser.01) has yet been digitised (bah). Though I am (of course) going to ask if they can retrieve the two drawings omitted from the text for me.

Meteor Seen at Noon (November 1).

A meteor, leaving a broad scintillating track, traversed fifteen degrees of the northwestern heavens at about ten minutes past noon yesterday. It was seen at a point about thirty degrees above the horizon, and the half second of its flight shone as an electric light. The shooting star was seen by a visitor at the Park, in San Francisco. – S. F. Chronicle, November 2.

A Bright Meteor Seen on October 8, 1896.

Mr. P. Perrine, of Alameda, reports a meteor four or five times as bright as Venus on October 8, 1896, at 7h 32m p.m. It was of a brilliant white color and moved rapidly from an altitude of about thirty degrees to near the horizon, inclining toward the east at an angle of about forty-five degrees. C. D. P.

The Meteor of October 22 1896

In the evening of October 22d, while in Oakland, I saw an unusually interesting meteor. I first saw it a little north of west, where it seemed to rise like a sky-rocket, which it so much resembled that at first I had no thought of its true character. Its apparent motion after the first few seconds was almost exactly parallel to my horizon. At first sight the head appeared to be single, but after two or three seconds (during which time it rapidly increased in brightness), it separated into four parts but not with the usual explosive effect, for all the parts pursued the same course in a straight line, each leaving its train of sparks which reached to the next part, a long train following all. The last portion was much the faintest and soon disappeared, while the remaining three were of more nearly equal brightness, the first being somewhal brighter than the others.

After traversing an arc of ninety degrees or more, they all disappeared at 6h 9m 30″ ± 10″ P. S. T. in the smoke of the city and behind the Berkeley hills. When at their brightest, each portion considerably surpassed Venus in brilliancy.

The apparent motion was remarkably slow, the meteor being visible for about ten seconds.

C. D. Perrine.

Mount Hamilton, October 31, 1896.

Abstract of a Letter from Mr. D. J. Brown to Professor Holden.

“Last Camp,” Napa, October 23, 1896.

“At about six o’clock, p.m. yesterday, there appeared in this vicinity a meteor of such remarkable appearance that I deem it proper to report its passage to you.

“It came from the west — its flight was quite near the Earth, and speed slower than that of any other like body I have ever seen. At first it had a solid head, with a train of considerable length. Soon this head divided into three parts, presenting an appearance like this, [the sketch is omitted] slowly passing over the valley in the direction of Napa Soda Springs. It went to pieces like a spent sky-rocket.”

Letter from Mr. H. F. Stivers, at Hunter’s, Tehama County, Cal., October 26, 1896.

“Seeing a meteor, the other evening, that appeared to me more than ordinary, I have roughly sketched [the sketch is omitted] and described its appearance and would be pleased to know if it was seen at the Observatory. Friday, October 22d, at 6:10 p. m., P. S. T., I saw a very brilliant meteor in the west. My attention was drawn to it by the great light it gave. At first view it was not more than fifteen or twenty degrees above the western horizon. It sailed majestically along like an immense rocket directly towards the Moon, and disappeared in the Moon’s light, not more than ten degrees from that luminary. Its zenith was about ten degrees north of mine, on passing which it separated twice, making plainly visible three pieces, the largest the apparent size of a closed hand, the others diminished to about one-half each.

“It was visible from ten to fifteen seconds, and had a trail of twenty-five or thirty degrees.

“It emitted a white light, tinged at times, I should judge, with red and yellow. It must have described the complete arc of the heavens and had it not been for the brightness of the full moon, should nearly all have been observable by me.”

Wheatland, [Yuba County] October 22. — A most remarkable meteor was seen a few minutes past 6 o’clock this evening. It appeared in the west as a star of the magnitude of the evening star, and in close proximity to Jupiter. [i.e. Venus] It increased in size and gradually separated, first into two and finally into three distinct comet-shaped bodies. Following each other they sped toward the east and disappeared. — S. F. Chronicle

Highland Springs, October 23. — At 6:13 o’clock, last night, a meteoric display, such as is seldom seen, passed over here. It was composed of three large balls of fire moving from southwest to northeast. It looked as if the balls burst on the mountain north of Clear Lake.

Three Meteors in Line.

Nevada, Cal., October 22. — A triple connected meteor was observed in the northern heavens at ten minutes past 6 o’clock this evening. Three balls of fire, all in a row and connected like a train of cars, with a long fiery tail, flashed in view just a few degrees above the western horizon and traveled in a direction a little north of east. In half a minute they disappeared from view high in the heavens, apparently somewhere over the Great Dipper and North Star.

The sight was magnificent and awe-inspiring, and one long to be remembered, as it did not appear to be over forty or fifty miles above the earth. A splendid view of the triple-connected meteor was taken by W. M. Richards. — S. F. Examiner, Oct. 23, 1896.

This meteor was also seen by many visitors at the Cliff House, near San Francisco.

“A Wonderful Meteor”

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Following on from my post yesterday, I found a copy of the Stockton Evening Mail for 23 Oct 1896 (p.5) in newspapers.com, which (to my delight) told the story of what happened in Sacramento really rather well. Rodney (John Ahern’s dog) even gets a starring role, which will no doubt please many passing animal lovers. The best thing I can do is reproduce the article in full…

A Wonderful Meteor

Three Balls of Fire with a Trail Pass Across the Northern Sky

A wonderful meteor consisting of three parts connected by a fiery band was seen last evening at ten minutes past six o’clock.

“Four of us had as good a point of observation as anybody, I suppose,” remarked Dr. Foreman to a Mail reporter to-day. “There was myself, John Ahern, the night watchman at the Sacramento-street railway station, a policeman and a fourth party whose name has slipped my memory just at present. We were standing at the corner of Main and Sacramento streets. I happened to see it first. It appeared to start just a little north of west and to traverse space on a level, taking a course just a bit north of east. Three large balls of fire were strung together, the first appearing to be the largest. From the third a tail of fire extended apparently fifteen feet long, while the balls seemed to be ten feet apart. Of course, the distances were much greater than that, but that is how it appeared. It gradually faded from our view, going beyond the range of our vision, I suppose. The Aurora mill obstructed our view of a portion of it for a moment.

“A rather singular thing in connection with it,” continued the doctor, “was the inexplicable conduct of John Ahern’s dog. You know the dog carries his master’s lantern, and has never been known to drop it even when he sees a handsome lady dog that takes his eye. But as soon as the meteor disappeared the dog dropped the lantern and blew the light out. Ahern, who never saw such a phenomenon as a triple meteor before, thought that the end of the world was at hand, and when he witnessed the strange action of the canine he turned pale.”

At Wheatland, Yuba county, about 75 miles north of Stockton, the meteor appeared in about the same quarter of the heavens as it did here. A telegram from there says: “It appeared in the west as a star of the magnitude of the evening star and in close proximity to Jupiter. It increased in size until it gradually separated first into one comet-shaped meteor, thin in two, and finally into three distinct comet-shaped meteors. Tandem it sped toward the east, parallel to the horizon and when five degrees north of east it suddenly disappeared.

“Parties who witnessed this rare sight are at a loss to explain what it really was. In brilliancy it resembled ordinary meteors, but in view of the fact that it moved very steadily and slowly when compared with a meteor’s flight and was not attracted to the earth, but traveled parallel to it, it is believed to have been in space beyond the atmosphere of the earth.

“Its sub-division into three parts, which resembled as a whole three comets joined one to another, is unprecedented and beyond explanation.”

It is possible that the supposed meteor was really a group of asteroids which, in their journey around the sun, chanced to pass near the earth’s orbit. In that case the light they shed was reflected sunlight.

Associated Press

The Wheatland part of the above article had been run by Associated Press Wire, which is why it also appeared in the Los Angeles Daily Times, the Los Angeles Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Berkeley Gazette (all with different levels of abridgement).

However, there was a completely separate article in the San Francisco Examiner on the same day from Nevada City (close to Grass Valley, 50 or so miles north of Sacramento):

Three Meteors In Line

Residents of Nevada, Cal., Witness a Thrilling Light in the Heavens

NEVADA, October 22. – A triple connected meteor was observed in the northern heavens at ten minutes past six o’clock this evening. Three balls of fire all in a row and connected like a train of cars with a long fiery tail flashed in view just a few degrees above the western horizon and traveled in a direction a little north of east. In half a minute it disappeared from view high in the heavens, apparently somewhere over the great Dipper and North Star.

From all accounts this grand sight was not generally observed as the hour and time did not find many people on the streets. The sight was magnificent and awe-inspiring, and one long to be remembered as it did not appear to be over forty or fifty miles above the earth. A splendid view of the triple-connected meteor was taken by W. M. Richards.

Coincidentally, the Examiner printed this on p.7 immediately below “A Queer Thing In The Sky”, which was its report of Mayor Sutro’s staff witnessing a “novel spectacle” on the very same night, which started at “6.15” and “only lasted for a few minutes”.

Timey Wimey Problems

Before Standard Railway Time zones were introduced in 1883, US railways used a complicated mesh of close to 100 local times, while local communities used possibly several thousand different local times. Yet Standard Railway Time only fixed the railways’ use of time: many communities still used their own local time. Standard Time (which imposed a similar but different set of timezones onto the USA) only became legally binding with the Calder Act in 1918 (which, controversially, also brought in Summer Time).

Hence we have the awkward situation that while railway employee John Ahern may well have been working in Standard Railway Time (which, for California, would be Pacific Time), Dr Foreman might equally well have been using Sacramento’s local time. So even in one town, you could very easily have two timezones active at the same, ummm, time. Perhaps someone will now tell me that that was why waistcoats had two pockets, one for each timezone.

Anyway, a good first step here would be to dig up some kind of local historical ‘time map’ or database that says what time each time was, e.g. in Grass Valley, Sacramento, San Francisco, etc. But… if there is such a thing, I haven’t found it yet. So there’s still plenty of work to do here, alas.