Just before the early days of flight many sightings were made of mysterious airships. If they would have been blimps or dirigibles they would have been ahead of their time since no country or person had announced they had developed one. Airships had been spoken about since the late 1600s and a Jesuit priest named Francisco Lana de Terzi published a description of what he believed an aerial ship would look like. It was all hypothetical of course and the object he described certainly didn’t look airworthy, still the idea was there. When I talk about airships I am not talking about balloons, I am talking about devices which are either blimps or the zeppelin type ships of rigid construction. In 1852 Henri Gifford flew his steam powered airship, but the problem was it was so underpowered he couldn’t control it. He still gets credit for the first powered flight ever made. It wasn’t until 1872 when Paul Haenlein’s ship flew that the first internal combustion engine was used in an aircraft.

You would think anyone developing one of these rare machines would make that fact publicly known, after all it was one way to become famous and probably get backers to help defray the cost of the project. The reason I’m bringing all this up is there was a mysterious wave of machines reported in the skies before there were practical zeppelins or blimps and we have never been able to figure out what they were or where they came from. Some even extended into the early days of airships, but nobody took credit for them. There is a big question and that is were the sightings that of experimental airships or were they sightings of UFOs? In the 1880s and 1890s there was a wave of sightings of airships worldwide. We know there were probably a few airships around at the time being experimented with, but certainly not enough to have caused all of these sightings. Many of the sightings described ships which had the shape of the dirigible, but we know today there are reports of cylindrical UFOs being seen everywhere. It would have been very hard to distinguish between a cylindrical UFO and a dirigible in the early days and even today a blimp at a distance and a dirigible would look much like a cylindrical UFO.

The late 1800s some people believed the ships came from Mars. Could there have been a construction war between countries to see who could produce the best airships? We have to remember airships were big weapons in World War I and used to bomb targets. At the time many believe they were superior to airplanes even though this was disproved as the war went on. A mystery wave of airships occurred in California in the 1890s. What is interesting is the fact some witnesses stated they could see the occupants and they were human, but their dress was very unusual. It was also reported they had a funny way of moving. Some people claim they actually had conversations with these people and were told they were from Mars. What better way to hide a secret project in those days than to make believe it was from another planet? These airships were said to have another feature which seem to set them apart and that was they were described as being faster and more maneuverable than any other airships which were created.

There were many different sightings over the early years. One very strange sighting occurred on April 16, 1897. The story was published in a newspaper and claimed reliable witnesses had seen an airship overhead and this airship was loaded with passengers. As strange as this would sound in that year this is not what makes this sighting so unusual. It is the fact a report was made stating they also saw a woman tied to a chair. Along with this tied up woman they claim there was a man guarding her who had a gun and another woman waiting on her. The witnesses claim they didn’t have time to notify the authorities, because the airship disappeared so quickly.

Probably the most famous of all the airship sightings occurred on April 19, 1897 in Aurora, Texas. Many of you are familiar with this, but I will repeat it for those who are not. While people of Aurora Texas watched in amazement an airship flew overhead and hit a windmill which was powering a sump pump. After hitting the windmill it burst into flames and crashed. Witnesses claim there was only one occupant of the airship and he was terribly burned. They said on observing the airship pilot he clearly was not human. The townspeople decided to give him a Christian funeral and buried him in the local cemetery. Over the years so many people came into the cemetery looking for the grave the townspeople moved it and its location seems to be unknown today. The cemetery is private property and trespassers are forbidden, so we may never know what was truly buried. The wreck of the ship was said to have been pushed into a well and there is a story about a man drinking out of the well many years later who developed an illness.

Some of the stories seem almost comical about the fact of how the ships were constructed, because witnesses believed they were spaceships. One case in question occurred in 1896 when a man named Colonel Shaw stated he was driving his buggy when he came across a spacecraft sitting on the ground. His description of it was it was metal and featureless except for the rudder and pointed ends. He said it was about 150 feet long with a diameter of about 25 feet. He went on to say he saw 3 slender 7 foot tall extraterrestrials who were making a strange noise and approaching him. He said they examined his buggy and tried to force him back to their craft, but they were too weak. They went back to the craft without him and flew away. Shaw stated they must’ve been Martians, because in those days it was thought all aliens were Martians. Some claim this is the first account of an attempted alien abduction.

We may never know what was truly going on in those early days of flight, but something was going on and we have enough sightings to confirm it. Whether all the machines were man-made or only some of them is a question we may never be able to answer.