Mystery Airship Sightings
Beginning November 1896 over California and spreading across the US, a wave of "mystery airship" sightings described cigar-shaped craft with lights — a foundational pre-modern UFO flap.
At the height of America's Mystery Airship craze, a respected traveling salesman claimed that he encountered the occupants of a strange flying machine in the Missouri countryside. His fantastic story reads like a UFO encounter from the 1950s... except it happened in 1897. https://preview.redd.it/set03i76x4nh1.png?width=1536&format=png&auto=webp&s=b0b69600b746d9c587e8d812635fe362844049af By Kevin J. Guhl On a sunny Friday in April 1897, W. H. Hopkins wandered through the hills a few miles east...
The phantom airship wave is where this story really kicks off, but I have traced these guys back to at least the thirty years war, but that is another story. In the late 1800s(and covering a way longer period than 1896-97,) thousands of witnesses across America, Europe, and beyond watched massive airships cruise through the night sky, and the people operating them shamelessly interacted with witnesses. Some of them came from the Montezuma mountains, they said, or one particular case claimed t...