Why UFOs? Part 5: The mystery airships

This is Part 5 in a 6-Part series wherein I examine my fascination with UFO Phenomena through the lens of narrative and rhetoric. Much of the information found in this post comes from Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery by Michael Busby and "Close Encounters of the Earliest Kind."

As I wrote of my childhood in Part 1, science fiction was my gateway drug to ufology. The idea that actual aliens could be visiting Earth in flying saucers was just too enticing to resist.

Imagine my surprise when I learned UFO sightings were nothing new. In fact, these unknown aerial phenomena have been seen for a very long time. I'm not even talking about the "ancient aliens" crowd. No, I mean something far less known, at least in pop culture circles.

I'm talking about the Great Airship Mystery of the late 1800s.

During the waning years of the 19th century, particularly between 1896 and 1897, a "flap" of sightings occurred of propeller-driven airships. While dirigibles were nothing new at the time and indeed were used during the Civil War, these airships were bigger, faster, and more advanced than anything else in the air at the time. These sightings stretched from the midsection of the United States to the West Coast. San Francisco and Sacramento, California had particularly significant sightings of these craft with multiple witnesses quoted in newspaper accounts. These balloon/propeller craft even had lights stationed about them, much as with their contemporary counterparts.

There were even accounts of these craft landing and witnesses meeting the occupants. Rather than the alien beings described in previous posts, witnesses reported these occupants as being fully human in appearance, wearing brown leather jackets, scarves, and goggles. Friendly and jocular, they often asked witnesses to perform menial favors, such as mailing letters. When asked who they were or where they came from, the crewmen responded that they worked for a genius inventor who was not yet ready to take his advanced airships public. This later fueled speculation that Nikola Tesla was behind the airships, but then what advanced development wasn't he supposedly responsible for? 

In researching Dulce and UFO occurrences in New Mexico, I found that New Mexico had its own Mystery Airship sighting in 1880. This sighting was of a "fish-shaped" balloon, propelled and directed by fan. Occupants could be heard singing and speaking in a foreign language. That combined with the artistic design of the airship led many to speculate it came from Asia.

"Moreover, allegedly, people on board the balloon’s car tossed out stuff that was picked up by the alleged witnesses. Apparently, the stuff was a beautiful flower with some silk-like paper with characters which reminded the witnesses of designs they had seen on Japanese tea chests."

When I read these accounts now, several thoughts strike me:

-While they come off as "old timey", they hold true to the discourse and genre constraints of a UFO narrative. The craft are spectacular and unbelievable...but not incomprehensible. They could outfly anything in the sky at that time, but the idea of an airship was far from radical.

-The rhetorical tone, just as mentioned in previous posts, matches the science fiction of the time. These airships could have flown straight out of Jules Verne, who had been publishing books and short stories for decades before the time of the sightings.

-Related, the rhetorical stance, or the argument presented by the occupants, is waggish, one of wonder...almost whimsy. These "mystery men in their flying machines" are said to work for a brilliant inventor, but they can't say any more than that. Who is this inventor? What is his plan for his magnificent machines? Whatever it is, there appears to be no malice involved. The airship crewmen only want to mail letters.

Looking at these narratives from a modern perspective, they appear simple and quaint. That's not meant as an insult. In fact, I could go for simple and quaint right about now. What fun it would be to meet jolly adventurers riding about in a steampunk contraption, ready to whisk you away to a land that resembles something out of Sgt. Pepper's. Still, the incidences are recognizable as following the UFO paradigm, as if staying true to a writer's template or outline. This tends to make me believe that UFOs are quite human in origin. Or perhaps, "just perhaps" as Robert Stack would say, it is something responding to our own expectations and perceptions. If that is so, just how weird could it get?

More on that in a future post. 


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