Airships over Illinois!!! Exploring 1897 Continues.

            Today, April 12^th marks the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s famous journey aboard Vostok1. A journey which marked humankind’s first steps into outer space. However while Yuri was the first person to leave Earth to go into space, for many years prior to the Volstok’s launch there are those who believe that visitors traveling from somewhere in space to earth had been happening for quite some time. For many the idea of flying saucers and little green men from Mars seems to spring up from the now famous Kenneth Arnold sighting of 1947. It is no secret however that many before Kenneth had reported seeing unusual things in the sky, some of whom even claimed to have been visited by people from other worlds.

            As I have mentioned in my previous two entries. 1897 is noted as being a particularly unusual year filled with many extraordinary events. One of these was a wave of unusual airship sightings that spread across the world, and became the focus of many different news outlets. Many of these cases are known to be exercises of imagination and amusement, however some of them remain mysterious to this very day. 

Dyer Inspired Illustration

            On April 12^th, 1897 two different accounts come to us from Illinois, and it is possible that they are both reports of the same airship as the descriptions have certain similarities. The first account comes to us from three witnesses in Nilwood, Edward Teeples, William Street and Franklin Metcalf. These three men witnessed an airship which they describe as cigar shaped with a dome atop it. The men claim to have watched the airship land on the property of one Z. Thacker,  a little less than twenty miles north of Carlinville. The three men rushed to get a closer view of the airship, but claim it slowly rose into the sky and flew northward before they were able to reach a spot where they could see it better.  This was reported as having taken place at around two thirty in the afternoon.

             Less than four hours later, at roughly six in the evening, an airship was seen in Girard, Illinois, which is only a few miles north east from Nilwood. It is claimed that a large crowd of miners saw the airship land a few miles south of town. Paul McCramer, who was the night operator for the Chicago and Alton Railroad went on record as claiming that he was able to approach the airship close enough to witness an individual emerge from the vehicle and appeared to repair some of its machinery. All agreed that the airship was an elongated nautical like hull with a double canopied roof. Again the mysterious airship flew away towards the north. According to the accounts, trace evidence was found at the landing site, however the report does not provide any details as to what this evidence actually was. We do not know if it was discarded machinery from the repairs observed or if there were marks found upon the ground to indicate the weight and presence of the vehicle, and are simply left to speculate.

            What makes these sightings interesting however, is not only the similarities of the airship observed, but also the time and distances associated with the observances. Both accounts describe an airship landing for a brief time and then floating back up into the sky and flying away. Both descriptions roughly match in that they describe an elongated body with a canopy of some kind atop it, and in both accounts it seemed to fly off in the same direction. The distances between the two towns is not so great and it is certainly possible that an airship of conventional design for the time period could have made such a journey. Controlable airships had been around for a little over a decade it would only be a year later that Templehof Field in Berlin, Germany, would host the Shwarz designed aluminum airship. So it is possible that some unknown inventor was out testing his creation that day, someone whose identity has been lost to history.

            This was not the first airship sighted in 1897, nor would it be the last. It is simply a good example of the things people all around the world were witnessing that year. If the reports can be believed. Over the next several days, many other airship sightings were reported and I will be addressing these in my next installment.