Creepy Nebraska: Ghosts, Monsters, UFOs and other Cornhusker Curiosities by Fort Samuel

Author:Fort, Samuel [Fort, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nisirtu Publishing
Published: 2019-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

The 1897 Nebraska Airship

A nyone who has made a serious study of UFO phenomena is likely familiar with the mysterious, mass "airship" sightings in 1896 and 1897. For anyone not familiar with this episode of American history, during these two years strange lights and cigar-shaped flying objects were seen across the United States and Canada. The first sightings were reported in California. Additional sightings were reported across the continent in subsequent months, first in other western states, then the Midwest, and finally the east coast of the United States. Nebraska had more sightings than most states.

There were, understandably, skeptics who denied the existence of the airships. This was more than a decade before truly cigar-shaped aircraft (such as Zeppelins) existed. About the only thing then in existence that could get a man off the ground was a round hot air balloon with a basket underneath, and those craft weren't capable of traversing the continent.

Also, most of the alleged airships were reported to have powerful spotlights, another technological impossibility because batteries at the time couldn't possibly power such lights. One commenter observed that powering a spotlight as powerful as the ones reported would require a massive 1,500-pound battery which was too heavy and too big for any hot air balloon to carry.

There were, of course, many witnesses who were adamant that they had, indeed, seen an airship, and that they knew what Venus looked like and where it was in the sky, and that what they saw was certainly not Venus. Some pointed out that Venus didn’t move in circles around cities. Many of the witnesses were portrayed as "respectable" or "sober" by newspapers to lend credence to their reports.

But there can be no doubt that newspapers did gain circulation by promoting the airship story and sometimes fabricated or embellished reports to sell more papers. There were also pranksters – usually boys – caught launching small balloons or flying kites with lamps attached to them at night.

With a few exceptions, everyone who saw these objects assumed there were from the earth, not outer space. The suspicion was that they were top secret inventions of some mastermind like Thomas Edison, perhaps making trial runs. Today we can be fairly confident that the things they saw, or think they saw, were not airships (though there are opposing opinions on this point) since no airship or inventor ever materialized in the years that followed. If secret tests of airships were occurring, the secret was so well-kept that we still have no evidence them.

Consequently, today, those people who believe the sightings were legitimate tend to think that the objects seen were UFOs (or, more correctly, alien spacecraft). Put differently, anything that someone might today call a UFO would have been called an airship in 1896 or 1897. Same spectacle, different viewpoint.

If this topic interests you, there are some very good books and articles dedicated to the 1896-97 airship sightings available. Below are just a few of newspaper articles of that era from Nebraska newspapers.

Omaha

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