Mystery airships

Mystery airships or phantom airships are a class of unidentified flying objects best known from a series of newspaper reports originating in the western United States and spreading east during late 1896 and early 1897. According to researcher Jerome Clark, airship sightings were reported worldwide during the 1880s and 1890s. Mystery airship reports are seen as a cultural predecessor to modern claims of extraterrestrial-piloted flying saucer-style UFOs. Typical airship reports involved night time sightings of unidentified lights, but more detailed accounts reported ships comparable to a dirigible. Reports of the alleged crewmen and pilots usually described them as human-looking, although sometimes the crew claimed to be from Mars. It was popularly believed that the mystery airships were the product of some inventor or genius who was not ready to make knowledge of his creation public. For example, Thomas Edison was so widely speculated to be the mind behind the alleged airships that in 1897 he "was forced to issue a strongly worded statement" denying his responsibility.

It has been frequently argued that mystery airships are unlikely to represent test flights of real human-manufactured dirigibles as no record of successful sustained or long-range airship flights are known from the period and "it would have been impossible, not to mention irrational, to keep such a thing secret." To the contrary, however, there were in fact several functional airships manufactured before the 1896–97 reports (e.g., Solomon Andrews made successful test flights of his "Aereon" in 1863), but their capabilities were far more limited than the mystery airships. Reece and others note that contemporary American newspapers of the "yellow journalism" era were more likely to print manufactured stories and hoaxes than are modern news sources, and editors of the late 1800s often would have expected the reader to understand that such stories were false. Most journalists of the period did not seem to take the airship reports very seriously, as after the major 1896-97 wave concluded, the subject quickly fell from public consciousness. The airship stories received further attention only after the 1896-97 newspaper reports were largely rediscovered in the mid 1960s and UFO investigators suggested the airships might represent earlier precursors to post-World War II UFO sightings .

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