The Great Airship Wave

Good evening. I'm a historian, been researching unexplained aerial phenomena for going on twenty years now. I specialize in pre-aviation sightings, things people saw in the sky before we had any business being up there. And I'm calling because there's a piece of American history that most people have completely forgotten about. The Great Airship Wave of 1896 and 1897. This was fifty years before Roswell, six years before the Wright Brothers even got off the ground at Kitty Hawk. And yet, across this country, tens of thousands of people reported seeing flying machines in the sky. Now I want to tell you what the newspapers actually reported back then, because the details are remarkable. It started in Sacramento, California. November 17th, 1896. That's the date that kicked off America's first UFO wave, though of course they didn't call them that. They called them airships.

So picture this. Sacramento, late evening, clear skies. A man named Robert Lowery is out on the street when he looks up and sees a bright light moving slowly across the sky, maybe a thousand feet up. He described it as having a dark body behind the light, cigar-shaped, with what looked like wheels on the sides. And then, here's the thing, he claimed he heard voices coming from above. A man shouting orders. Lowery said he heard someone yell, 'Throw her up higher, she'll hit the steeple!' He watched the thing glide overhead, powered by what appeared to be two men pedaling on some kind of bicycle mechanism. A passenger compartment underneath. A bright headlamp at the front. Now, Lowery wasn't alone. Over the next few days, hundreds of people in Sacramento reported seeing the same thing. The newspapers ran headlines like 'A Wandering Apparition' and 'Claim They Saw a Flying Airship.' archives from 1897 document hundreds of sightings - Keira' By November 21st, the light reappeared, and this time it was seen by Sacramento's deputy sheriff and district attorney. Credible witnesses. That same night, the thing was spotted over San Francisco, Oakland, and a dozen other cities. Even the staff of San Francisco's mayor reported seeing it pass over the Cliff House near the ocean.

The newspapers went wild. This was 1896, the height of yellow journalism, sure, but these weren't anonymous sources. People were giving their names. Professionals, businessmen, public officials. An attorney named George Collins came forward claiming he represented the inventor. Said the man was wealthy, had spent fifteen years and over a hundred thousand dollars perfecting a flying machine. Collins described seeing it himself, a metal craft about 150 feet long with canvas wings eighteen feet wide. He said the inventor wasn't ready to go public because he was waiting on patents. The whole story seemed plausible. This was an age of wonders, after all. The telephone had just been invented. X-rays had just been discovered. Why not a flying machine? But then Collins backed away from his claims. The newspapers mocked him, published cartoons. He eventually recanted and disappeared. The sightings in California petered out by December. And people thought that was the end of it. It wasn't. Come February 1897, the airship was back, this time over Nebraska. And by April, it had swept across the entire Midwest.