What happened
On the evening of 17 November 1896 a bright light drifted slowly over the eastern side of Sacramento, California, at what witnesses judged to be about a thousand feet. It was a cloudy night and most of the hundreds who saw it made out only a brilliant searchlight, but some insisted they saw a dark, egg-shaped body above it with fan-like wheels on either side, and heard voices, laughter and song from on board. One man said he heard someone call out to take her higher to clear a steeple. The light returned on 21 November and was reported that night over Folsom, San Francisco, Oakland and towns across the north of the state. Within days a San Francisco lawyer, George D. Collins, told reporters his client, a wealthy inventor, had flown a working airship from Oroville. Collins soon retreated under ridicule. Sightings spread through dozens of California towns into December before fading, setting the template for the far larger wave of 1897.
The original account
The one topic of conversation in this city to-day has been the reported appearance of an airship over the eastern portion of Sacramento last night... there are hundreds of others who are positive in their declaration that they did see its brilliant searchlight traveling over the city, and who will also swear that they heard the voices of its occupants and distinguished their merry song and laughter... As far as can be learned from eye witnesses, the body of the craft was oblong and egg-shaped, with fan-like wheels on either side.
'Strange Craft of the Sky', San Francisco Call, 19 November 1896, p. 1 (public domain; OCR corrected from the Chronicling America page image)
The official explanation
No working long-range dirigible is known to have existed in the United States in 1896, and historians generally see the wave as a mix of misidentified planets and bright stars, lantern-carrying balloons and kites launched as pranks, and newspaper invention during the peak of yellow journalism. The San Francisco Examiner, under William Randolph Hearst, denounced the whole story as myth in an editorial on 5 December 1896, and the rival Call and Examiner each accused the other of making things up. The publicity-seeking claims of lawyers George Collins and William Henry Harrison Hart, who each said they represented the inventor, collapsed under scrutiny.
The anomalous case
The first night was not a single person's tale. The San Francisco Call's correspondent said he interviewed scores of residents who lived a mile or two apart along the route and whose descriptions agreed: a searchlight about twice the size of an arc lamp, moving against the wind, with a dark body above it. Later sightings were reported by Sacramento's deputy sheriff and district attorney. Something was flying slowly over a state capital, low enough to be described in detail, in a country with no known powered aircraft. Writers such as J. Allan Danelek have argued that a secret prototype dirigible, built quietly to protect patents and investors, could explain the west-to-east progression of sightings. Collins's insistence, before he backed away, that his client's craft was real and nearing a public trial adds a human trail that was never fully run down.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- San Francisco Call, 19 November 1896, p. 1 ('Strange Craft of the Sky') newspaper, loc.gov
- San Francisco Call, 22 November 1896, p. 13 newspaper, loc.gov
- Sacramento Record-Union, 23 November 1896, p. 4 (attorney George D. Collins's claims) newspaper, loc.gov
Sources
- San Francisco Call, 19 November 1896, p. 1 Library of Congress, Chronicling America
- Sacramento Record-Union, 23 November 1896, p. 4 Library of Congress, Chronicling America
- Mystery airship Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
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