The (true?) 1896-1897 Airship Wave(s)

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

In the last 50 some pages of Albert Rosales’ 350 page  Humanoid Encounters (Volume 1 A.D.-1899), said to be his last effort but containing the earliest listings of anomalous creatures and sightings he has collected and provided in a series, are dozens of Airship sightings accumulated from various sources: Jerome Clark and his books, The Magonia Exchange, various newspapers (large city papers, small town weeklies, et al.), web-sites and even Kevin Randle.

The accounts contain mostly sightings of airships seen by farmers, fishermen, and multiple witnesses … in distress, landed, and being worked on by crew members or passengers.

(This removes the category of sightings addressed by French skeptic Gilles Fernandez who has competently rebuffed some airship sightings by explaining that they were misperceptions of the planet Venus.)

Many have concluded that the great Airship wave, which took place, primarily, in the United States, was a manifold concoction of newspaper reporters working to increase their print circulations.

While newspaper journalism was rife with contrived stories, for various purposes, not all newspapers abdicated their journalistic intents, and many of the listings that Mr. Rosales’ sources cite are from established papers known for their verisimilitude: The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, et cetera.

And I can’t imagine that every paper noted by Mr. Rosales was in on an airship joke, but I do see the possibility of a journalistic hysteria that may have captured normally moderate newspaper men and women, especially those serving smaller venues.

The witness accounts lining the final pages of Mr. Rosales’ book are replete with folksy renditions of persons seeing and speaking with airship passengers and crews who said they were from Mars or some far-flung place in and around America, many offering they were off to Cuba to interact with conflict there.

The ships were invariably described as cigar-shaped, with propellers or fans, odd, moving wings, and bright lights for and aft, with some red and green lights festooning the things.

The passengers were men, women, and children, some small in stature (a few described as “midgets”), some exceedingly tall, many of the men bearded, but many seen as normal in height, dress, and characteristic, often speaking English yet sometimes talking in a undecipherable tongues.

Passengers/crew sometimes asked for food, water or tools, then departed when obtained or when their ships were repaired.

The accounts are fraught with witness details that bespeak either a mass hallucination that afflicted U.S. citizens for a few years or the airship “phenomenon” may be explained, in an oblique way, by Spanish UFO researcher Jose Caravaca’s Distortion Theory.

Notable are the reports that refer to a sighting of “The Airship,” a sop to what persons had read or heard about and a real “viral” story of the time.

But some related experiences seem distant from the rumored and highlighted airship reports that suffused California and the newspapers there. There is a unique patina to many of the references Mr. Rosales provides.

Something was going on in various vicinities of the States in 1896 and 1897 particularly and I am loath to write that it was a delusionary epidemic. But the occurrences do seem to be hallucinatory in most cases.

However, not all the sightings were misperceptions of Venus or newspaper contrivances, nor, it seems, the result of addled minds.

There was something there. What exactly, I have no real idea, but the reports are fascinating no matter what they represent.

N.B. Image above from an interesting site about the 1896 Airship wave: https://www.flyingcarsandfoodpills.com/what-was-it

RR