Page 36 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - February 2023 Edition

36 Mystery Airships or Phantom Airships
Mystery Airships or
Phantom Airships
Continued from Page 35
The November 19, 1896, edition of the
Stockton, California, Daily Mail featured
one of the earliest accounts of an alleged
alien craft sighting. Colonel H.G. Shaw
claimed that while driving his buggy
through the countryside near Stockton, he
came across what appeared to be a landed
spacecraft. Shaw described it as having a
metallic surface which was completely
featureless apart from a rudder, and
pointed ends. He estimated a diameter of
25 feet and said the vessel was around
150 feet in total length. Three slender, 7-
foot-tall (2.1m), apparent extraterrestrials
were said to approach from the craft
while "emitting a strange warbling
noise."
The beings reportedly examined Shaw's
buggy and then tried to physically force
him to accompany them back to the
airship. The aliens were said to give up
after realizing they lacked the physical
strength to force Shaw aboard. They
supposedly fled back to their ship, which
lifted off the ground and sped out of
sight. Shaw believed that the beings were
Martians sent to kidnap an earthling for
unknowable but potentially nefarious
purposes. This has been seen by some as
an early attempt at alien abduction; it is
apparently the first published account of
explicitly extraterrestrial beings
attempting to kidnap humans into their
spacecraft.
• The mystery light reappeared over
Sacramento on the evening of
November 21 1896. It was also seen
over Folsom, San Francisco, Oakland,
Modesto, Manteca, Sebastopol and
several other cities later that same
evening and was reportedly viewed by
hundreds of witnesses.
• One witness from Arkansas –
allegedly a former state senator Harris
– was supposedly told by an airship
pilot (during the tensions leading up to
the Spanish–American War) that the
craft was bound for Cuba, to use its
"Hotchkiss gun" to "kill Spaniards".
• In one account from Texas, three men
reported an encounter with an airship
and with "five peculiarly dressed
men" who asserted that they were
descendants of the lost tribes of Israel,
and had learned English from the
1553 North Pole expedition led by
Hugh Willoughby.
• On February 2, 1897, the Omaha Bee
reported an airship sighting over
Hastings, Nebraska, the previous day.
• An article in the Albion Weekly News
reported that two witnesses saw an
airship crash just inches from where
they were standing. The airship
suddenly disappeared, with a man
standing where the vessel had been.
The airship pilot showed the men a
small device that supposedly enabled
him to shrink the airship small enough
to store the vessel in his pocket. A
rival newspaper, the Wilsonville
Review, playfully claimed that its own
editor was an additional witness to the
incident and that he heard the pilot say
"Weiver eht rof ebircsbus!" The
phrase he allegedly heard is
"subscribe for the Review" spelled
backwards.
• On April 10, 1897, the St. Louis Post-
Dispatch published a story reporting
that one W.H. Hopkins encountered a
grounded airship about 20 feet in
length and 8 feet in diameter near the
outskirts of Springfield, Missouri. The
vehicle was apparently propelled by
three large propellers and crewed by a
beautiful, nude woman and a bearded
man, also nude. Hopkins attempted
with some difficulty to communicate
with the crew in order to ascertain
their origins. Eventually they
understood what Hopkins was asking
of them and they both pointed to the
sky and "uttered something that
sounded like the word Mars."
• An April 16, 1897, a story published
by the Table Rock Argus claimed that
a group of "anonymous but reliable"
witnesses had seen an airship sailing
overhead. The craft had many
passengers. The witnesses claimed
that among these passengers was a
woman tied to a chair, a woman
attending her, and a man with a pistol
guarding their apparent prisoner.
Before the witnesses thought to
contact the authorities, the airship was
already gone.
• An account from Aurora, Texas,
related in the Dallas Morning News
on April 19, 1897, reported that a
couple of days before, an airship had
smashed into a windmill – later
determined to be a sump pump –
belonging to a Judge Proctor, then
crashed. The occupant was dead and
mangled, but the story reported that
the presumed pilot was clearly "not an
inhabitant of this world." Strange
"hieroglyphic" figures were seen on
the wreckage, which resembled "a
mixture of aluminum and silver ... it
must have weighed several tons."In
the 20th century, unusual metallic
material recovered from the presumed
crash site was shown to contain a
percentage of aluminum and iron
admixed. The story ended by noting
that the pilot was given a "Christian
burial" in the town cemetery.
(Continued on Page 37)
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