Author: J Allan Danelek
Publisher: Adventures Unlimited Press, 2009
Price: £14.50 (paperback)
Isbn: 9781935487036

Asked to date the first great airships, most people would nomin­ate the eponymous dirigibles of Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin. The German count was forced to resign his military command in 1890 because of his obsession with improving lighter-than-air ball­oons for military use.

In retirement he bankrolled pioneering research into light structural materials, efficient fuels and engines, and even propeller design but, generally, his dreams were premature and met official resistance at the highest levels of the Prussian Army. It was only when he was granted a patent in 1895 (for an ‘airship-train’ design made by his engineer several years earlier) that he began to attract the widespread backing from industrialists and engineers that he had long sought.

Construction of the first steerable ‘rigid’ airship did not begin until 1898, when a mighty joint stock company was formed for the purpose, over half its capital invested by Count Zeppelin. Their first airship – the LZ1 – was eventually launched over Lake Constance in July 1900.

So who was flying a classic steerable rigid airship over California in November 1896? According to a breathless account in the Sacramento Evening Bee the next day, the evening twilight of the 17th was pierced from above by “an electric arc lamp propelled by some mysterious force”. The brill­iant light that sailed over the city “at low altitude [..] as if intelli­gently controlled”, was seen by thousands of astonished citizens. Similar sightings of a mysterious airship, its blinding searchlight, and the voices of its crew were reported from other parts of the USA well into 1897.

Almost immediately, prominent scientists and other pundits were condemning the sightings as hoaxes and their witnesses as drunkards; by summer the phen­omenon had faded away.

Some writers have pondered the influence upon the social history of this topic by Jules Verne’s novel Robur the Conquerer, first published in 1886, a decade before the California sightings. In it, the brilliant inventor Robur taunts an elite club of aviation inventors who are still experimenting with dirigibles using lighter-than-air gasses to lift their craft while he, Robur, has made the technological leap to heavier-than-air machine; bristling with vertical propellers, it prefigures a modern helicopter rather than an aeroplane. The legend of a secret cabal of inventors was a favourite explanation for the mystery airships; the forerunner of modern UFO conspiracy theories.

Forteans and ufologists piled into this research which, as detailed in Jerome Clark’s UFO Encyclopedia (vol 2, 1992), became a grand lesson for the whole of UFO research. Our colleague Mike Dash, in Borderlands (2000), noted: “The files of almost 1,500 news­papers from across the United States have been combed for reports, an astonishing feat of research”, but there was no improvement upon the suppos­ition of misidentification or hoaxing, and no unequivocal candidates for a secret inventor.

What did emerge were even earl­ier reports of airships and their lights, or “super-construct­ions” as Charles Fort called them. In New Lands (1927), he commented on the 1897 ‘flap’ of sightings in his characteristic way: “If, in April, 1897, extra-mundane voyagers did visit this earth, likely enough they will visit again,” thus prefiguring by 50 years the modern tropes of ‘alien ufonauts’ and Von Dänikenesque ‘alien intervention’.

Danelek sets out fairly soberly, plotting the distribution of sightings temporally and geographic­ally; the inventors and their available technology are shown against the backdrop of a world reaching towards the era of powered heavier-than-air flight. Sir George Cayley in Britain, and Henri Giffard, Charles Renard, Arthur Krebs and the Tissandier brothers in France – all were moderately successful with their experimental dirigibles before 1896, while in Germany, Count Zeppelin was still looking for official funding and contracts. But, like many other historians of this mystery, Danelek ends the 1897 flap with the infamous incident at Aurora, Texas, in April 1897, when something crashed into a farmer’s windmill. Legend has it that the badly burned body of its “extraterrestrial” pilot was buried in an “unmarked grave”, details that have resisted any verification by serious investigators.

These turbulent waters were further muddied by the discovery of 13 notebooks in a Texas landfill, filled with elaborate drawings of airships. They purported to be the work of Charles Dellschau, a Pruss­ian immigrant to the USA who died in 1923. In highly coded text and graphics, Dellschau records the activities of a secret group of inventors, called the Sonora Aero Club, founded in the mid-1800s to experiment with antigravity and airships.

Could they be behind the 1897 flap? Sadly, no! Researchers have not been able to find any documentary evidence such a club existed outside Dellschau’s imagin­ation. While Dellschau is now lauded by aficionados of ‘outsider art’, we have to wonder about the ‘discovery’ of what is, in effect, a modern Voynich manuscript. [See FT259:60]

Here, Danelek proposes his own solution to the 1897 mystery. His middle chapters chronicle a likely pair – Major William Hewitt and Professor Edward Benjamin – as they invent and fly an airship, before losing their papers and other secrets in a fire. It’s a slab of fiction which does Danelek’s thesis no favours and adds nothing new.

He ends: “And who knows. Perhaps one day an ancient trunk will be unearthed in some dusty attic complete with drawings and schematics of some mysterious 1890s-era airship…”

Hang on! We have now left Kansas behind, transported by hot air in the general direction of an Emerald City.

To be fair, Danelek does promise, in his introduction, “a compelling tale of what might have been”; but a sound or satisfying history of a genuine mystery it is not.