Mystery airship

The mystery airship or phantom airship was a phenomenon that thousands of people across the United States claimed to have observed from late 1896 through mid 1897. Typical airship reports involved nighttime sightings of unidentified flying lights, but more detailed accounts reported actual airborne craft similar to an airship or dirigible. Mystery airship reports are seen as a cultural predecessor to modern claims of extraterrestrial-piloted UFO's or flying saucers.

Reports of the alleged airship crewmen and pilots usually described them as humanoid, although sometimes the crew claimed to be from Mars. It was widely believed at the time that the mystery airships were the product of some inventor or genius who was not ready to make knowledge of his creation public.

It has been frequently argued that the mystery airship sightings could not have represented genuine dirigibles as no officially documented test flights of long-range powered airships or airplanes of any kind in the United States from the period are known to exist and "it would have been impossible, not to mention irrational, to keep such a thing secret." Several functional airships had been manufactured and tested prior to the 1896-97 reports (e.g. Solomon Andrews made successful test flights of his Aereon in New Jersey in 1863 and Frederick Marriott successfully demonstrated his small airship Avitor Hermes Jr. in California in 1869), but their capabilities were far more limited than those of 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 19th century often would have expected the reader to understand that such stories were false.

Initially, most journalists of the period did not appear to take the airship reports very seriously; however, as the sightings continued, several newspapers covered the story with genuine wonder and interest, while others were more skeptical and even hostile. Some newspapers denounced the entire airship story as nonsense and openly mocked and ridiculed the witnesses and believers, dismissing them as drunks, fools or liars. After the major 1896-97 wave ended, the entire airship story quickly fell from public consciousness and was all but forgotten for nearly seventy years. During the mid 1960s, the mystery airship stories began to receive renewed interest as they were gradually rediscovered in the archives of old newspapers by contemporary UFO investigators who suggested the 1896-97 airship waves might represent earlier precursors to the modern era of UFO sightings that began in the United States following World War II.