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Early Airship Sightings

At the end of the 1800s there was a rash of air ship sightings. It seems that just before man took to the skies there was a proliferation of these things. A couple were even reported to have crashed and people claimed that the pilots, who were said to be killed, were not from this earth. Some of these machines were described almost the same as we describe ufos today, while others were of the slow moving type making us suspect that they could have been some sort of balloon. That is not to say that we don't have slow moving ufos today, far from it. One has just to read a few report on those black triangular craft that have been seen silently floating across the sky to realize that. Could these airships have been a secret project government project in the 1880s and after? Did we even have secret projects then?

Today we are thinking of building something called the Walrus. It is a huge heavy lift blimp that will be able to lift an astounding one - two million pounds and fly it non stop for at least 12,000 miles and not need an airstrip to land on. Think how cheap this will make it to ship cargo. If this works out, it will give cargo ships a run for their money. Someone realized that it is not necessary to get to places like Europe in 6 or 7 hours. If you get there in two or three days with a full cargo that is sufficient. So the question is were these airships, as they were called, ours or THEIRS?

Left: First Photo of UFO, 1870
Right: Enlargement of craft
Photo Source: PD from Wikimedia Commons

The above photo is incredible, if only for the fact that we had nothing like it in the air at that time. The photo shows a very sophisticated structure flying across the skies. Not only that, but altered photos were unheard of at the time as far as I know. If I am wrong and there were some, they were very few indeed. When I looked at the photo I tried to figure out if there was some way it could be a fraud and about the only thing that I could come up with was pasting something on the camera lens or on a window and taking the shot through it. Since ufos were not that well known in those days, I don't think that anyone would have gone to those lengths, because almost no one would have cared.

What most people don't realize is that there was a wave of airship sightings in this country from 1896 to 1897 and it remains unexplained even to this day. Some of those sightings were planets or jokes, but some were very puzzling. Here is an account of two airships that remain unsolved today:
1. On April 19, 1897, Alexander Hamilton who lived in Leroy Kansas saw an airship that was hovering over his cattle. His son was with him and also a tenant. They all saw the same thing. A cable had been lowered and had landed around the neck of a cow. The cable had also gotten caught on the fence. They tried to loosen the cable from the cow, but couldn't. Finally Hamilton broke a piece out of the fence to free the cable. As this happened the ship rose and took the cow with it. Some say that this story wasn't true and that it was an attempt by Hamilton to win a Liar's competition, but others say that Hamilton just said that later, because he got tired of being laughed at. Could this have been one of the first cattle mutilations?
2. This account is perhaps one of the most famous. It was said to have occurred on April 19, 1897, the same day as Hamilton's sighting. An account was published in the Dallas Morning News. A ufo hit a windmill and crashed and burned in Aurora, Texas. When the people of the area got to it, the pilot was said to be dead and not human. The town's folk gave him, or it, a Christian burial in the town cemetery. A well, where it is said that pieces of the craft landed in, is on private land and has been sealed by a giant concrete slab. The owner of the land won't allow any investigators to look in it. The grave marker has disappeared and there is no way to tell where the body had been buried. The people of the area are not happy when investigators come around.
One man, who had worked for a newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, was interviewed almost 60 years after the first airship wave and stated that people on the paper, at the time, actually saw one of these mystery airships in 1897 but wouldn't admit to it because they didn't want to be laughed at.

Is there evan a remote chance that humans had airships back in the 1800s? Startlingly, the answer is yes. The first dirigible airship was invented in New Jersey by Solomon Andrews. He flew it on June 1, 1863 over Perth Amboy. It was the Aereon. It was nothing like the photo however, being composed of 3 eighty foot balloons. In 1865 he established a company that ran a regular flight between Philadephia and New York. Well not exactly regular because after two flights he went out of business. Two other people were suspected of building airships in those days and there could have been more that we didn't know about. They were Lyman Wiswell Gilmore and Charles Dellschau. When Charles Dellschau retired in 1900 he showed several notebooks to the public. They contained drawings and plans for building airships. Gilmore had built a steam powered plane and swore that it flew in 1902. Here was the problem with proving that. He was eccentric and always wore a trench coat and never cut his hair. One day his coat was forcibly taken from him for delousing and burned up. All his papers were in the pockets of the coat. Gilmore never bathed because it thought that it would sap his strength.

Gilmore's Second Plane 1908. The Design was from 1898.
Photo Source: Public Domain

It turns out that there were many pre 1900 inventors that claimed to have flown with their machines. Unfortunately there was no proof of this. The ones that claimed this before photography had no proof and the ones that claimed it after photography neglected, for some reason, to take any photos of their accomplishments, or maybe the photos were lost. What ever the reason, it seems that there were some human created craft in the skies, much earlier than we suspected.