Hi Fran,
Good to hear from you again. I've come to the conclusion
that there are no genuine UFOs among the 1897 airships, though the
matter is more complicated that just hoaxes. Many honest and
reliable people reported a light in the sky, but their description of
how the light sank slowly toward the horizon makes it clear that they
were looking at Venus or some other heavenly body. Other honest
people reported a structured object with lights, moving in a manner and
direction no heavenly body could manage, but these people were the
victims of a hoax. What they saw was a fire balloon (hot air), a
sort of device popular as a form of 4th of July "firework" but
available in drug stores (the
Targets and
Wal-Marts of the day) all year 'round. A follow-up of airship
sightings in a town often revealed who the jokesters were, or
reported the burnt-out carcass of the fire balloon had landed in some
farmer's field, now and then starting a fire. Then we have the
out-and-out hoaxes. Fakery was an accepted form of newspaper
entertainment in those days, with snake stories and ghosts being
popular and credited to the "snake editor." Airships opened a new
opportunity and the newspapers welcomed it. The local
correspondent, paid by the column inch, could buy the groceries by
cranking out an elaborate airship story. One
town
could play a joke on a neighboring town by attributing airship
sightings to it and then commenting on its lapse from
temperance. Tall-tale tellers could regale their audiences with a
good airship yarn, and practical jokers could contrive
wood-and-sheet-metal contraptions and claim that it crashed. In a
day when people knew their neighbors face to face, affidavits meant
little and airship lies left no blemish on a man's reputation--witness
Alexander Hamilton's calfnapping airship and support of him by the
prominent people of the county, all of whom were in on the joke as
members of a local liars' club.
I was sorry to see the Aurora crash come back to
life
recently, since it was effectively killed off long ago. In the
first place, only one newspaper story reported it. The Dallas
Morning News account was repeated in other newspapers, but no other
reporter went to the scene for independent confirmation. This
contrasts with a Waterloo, Iowa, hoax where the jokers left a model
airship in a field and many papers covered the story, also many people
came to town or took a look while passing through, then commented on
what they had seen when they returned home. None of this happened
with Aurora. Local histories, one of them written only ten years
or so after 1897, fail to mention the
crash
even though it would have been the most sensational event in the
history of the town. Most old residents knew nothing of the
crash when it became popular in the mid-1970s, and those who claimed
that the story was true had ulterior motives or a fanciful
disposition. The real motive behind the story seems to have been
an attempt to attract some attention to a town that had suffered the
recent disappointment of being bypassed by the railroad. In any
case, for a long list of reasons, Aurora was a hoax.
And so it goes: The reliable airship stories are not
spectacular and the spectacular airship stories are not reliable.
This pattern repeats throughout the two thousand or more reports
until there is nothing left that I would want to stand up and defend as
a genuine UFO. There are some impressive UFOs pre-1947, but they
are not to be found in the various sightings waves of UFO prehistory.
Best regards,
Eddie Bullard