Airships

Nathan C.: But first, we’ll go back far before the Cold War began to November 18, 1896. On that day, there was an unusual news item in the Sacramento Bee.

Ed Ayers: Last evening, between the hours of 6:00 and 7:00 in the year of our Lord 1896, a more startling exhibition was seen in the sky in this city of Sacramento. People standing on the sidewalk, saw it coming through the sky over the housetops what appeared to them to be merely an electrical arc lamp propelled by some mysterious force.

Thomas Bullard: People saw a big light in the sky.

Nathan C.: This is folklorist Thomas Bullard.

Thomas Bullard: And as it got closer, some people said they could see a dark form behind the light, the form like something that had wings.

Ed Ayers: It came out of the east and sailed unevenly toward the Southwest dropping now near to the Earth and now suddenly rising into the air as if the force that was whirling it through space was sensible of the dangers of collision with objects upon the Earth.

Thomas Bullard: A few people even said they could hear voices coming down from the sky. Someone on the ship was supposed to have said, “Lift her up. We’re going to crash into that stipple,” and the ship lifted up and went on.

Nathan C.: Most spectators didn’t hear that particular exchange but hundreds of people did see the strange sight. The people of Sacramento tried to make sense of what they saw. In the meantime, the airship as it became known seemed to move on to other parts of the country. With each sighting, the winged airship took on a more defined form.

Thomas Bullard: Kind of a cigar-shaped gas bag usually with a basket underneath where the passengers were and then there was always a big headlight in front of the thing and maybe several other lights attached to it.

Nathan C.: By May 1897 Bullard says there were several thousand reports of mysterious airships.

Thomas Bullard: It got to the point where everybody wanted to see an airship. Any town that didn’t see an airship, it was just not up to date. Literally, every town tried to have one apparently and somebody would have to come forward and say they saw an airship.

Nathan C.: So to be considered a modern town, you had to have a sighting that became part of like having fresh drinking water and paved streets. Having a sighting also showed that you were on the cusp of the modern era.

Thomas Bullard: Exactly.

Nathan C.: In terms of what people can document at least, the only thing that we know for sure that was happening in multiple sites at multiple times, sometimes on the same day, was the creation of these stories about the airships themselves. How would you describe the media’s role in disseminating these stories about airships and their sightings?

Thomas Bullard: Well, the media had a tremendous influence, and within a week of the first reports in California, the newspapers in New York were publishing fanciful pictures of what thing supposedly looked like.

Nathan C.: And they never looked like flying saucers in the way we imagine from 1950s era movies I suspect.

Thomas Bullard: No, not in the least. These were very much products of their time and the 19th Century was the time of remarkable inventions that just kept popping up all the time, marvels like steamships, railroad engines, telegraph, light bulb, phonograph, motion pictures, telephone, but the one thing that didn’t appear was the thing that they expected which was the successful machine that would navigate the air.

Nathan C.: And I’m still waiting for my flying cars by the way which we thought we were going to get at the 21st Century.

Thomas Bullard: That’s right. This is disappointing, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Nathan C.: Fair enough.

Thomas Bullard: People were always inventing flying machines and the newspapers would report so and so, a local boy has a flying machine in his barn and he’s going to try it out someday soon, which of course always just crashed or just sat on the ground, but there was some progress being made like by the mid-1850s there were cigar-shaped balloons with some kind of propellers driving it and it could go a short distance if there was no wind resisting it, but it wasn’t really a successful flying machine. What they were seeing or thought they were seeing in 1896-1897 was based on these models.

Nathan C.: So I have to know, where there ever any actual airships found or how do you even explain this wave of stories? Was there evidence of these airships being real?

Thomas Bullard: Well, my opinion of this is that there was not any sort of real genuine UFO or any even a real flying machine. Most of these things were the planet Venus or Mars. It’s pretty demonstrable in many cases. Newspapers who were not believers in it would point out that there were a bunch of people standing on the street pointing at the planet Venus and saying, “Hey, look at that airship.”

Nathan C.: How?

Thomas Bullard: If you get a little bit of thin clouds moving across the face of Venus, it could look like it is moving. It’s like the raising moon effect, sometimes clouds passing across the face of the moon.

Nathan C.: Right.

Thomas Bullard: If your perspective is just right, then you will see the clouds are standing still and the moon moving, but then there were a lot of stories that were hoaxes, like in a lot of towns where people just wanted to have an airship, somebody would come and say, “Hey, I saw the airship.”

Nathan C.: That’s all it took.

Thomas Bullard: Yeah, that’s all it needed, and then in other cases, there would be these really elaborate stories like Alexander Hamilton, a farmer in Kansas, who said an airship came down one night. It was 300-feet long and there were these strange creatures apparently from another planet shining a searchlight around and they lassoed one of his cows, carried it up in the air and went out of sight, and the next day, somebody found the skin of a dead calf in a dusty field, but there were no footprints around it. It turns out that Hamilton was a member of a local liars club.

Nathan C.: That’s actually a club for people who don’t tell the truth.

Thomas Bullard: Yeah, yeah. Right. It’s consisted of the most distinguished people in the area. Hamilton had been a state legislator at one point and the more elaborate stories tended to be the fakes.

Nathan C.: Right, right. [inaudible 00:13:13] pointing out that journalism itself does not have a set of industry standards for verifying a lot of these stories, right? As a field, journalism at the same is figuring out its own editorial standards, I’m guessing.

Thomas Bullard: Right. The standards were if it sells it’s good. Now there were some newspapers that had more integrity than that, but the ones that were more likely to promote the airship where ones that were more interested in attracting readers and fake stories were common place in those days. They were taken for granted. They were a form of entertainment.

Nathan C.: Right.

Thomas Bullard: Tall tales were just very popular on those old newspapers, so if you got airships to work with, go with the airships.

Nathan C.: So Thomas, it sounds like there’s a pattern, both in terms of the way that newspapers are describing some of these sightings in the ways in which people are talking about them with each other. What do we know about how people in America observe unexplainable objects in the sky? How do they tend to talk about them? What would be the common grammar that people use to describe these objects?

Thomas Bullard: Well, these 1890s sightings are dependent in part on the conditions in America. People have always had some notion of unusual flying objects or flying, not necessarily flying machines but something unusual that would be in the air. In the very early days, people use the religious framework were you have like Increase Mather who wrote a book called An Essay for Recording of Illustrious Providences and it included strange sights in the sky, but they were always interpreted in a religious rite and then you’d come to the 18th Century, early 19th Century, it was all some kind of anomalous natural phenomenon.

Nathan C.: The Northern Lights as one example.

Nathan C.: Thomas Bullard Right, yeah. As you get into the later 19th Century, then technology becomes the dominant template for understanding. In the 1890s, the belief system is that there is a flying machine that has just been invented. It’s the fulfillment of that wish, that desire, a realization of that expectation.

Nathan C.: Right.

Thomas Bullard: It was optimism.

Nathan C.: Thomas Bullard is the author of The Myth and Mystery of UFOs. Okay, everyone. There’s another news item from the Sacramento Bee I want to share with you.