Pushpaka Vimana in the Ramayana
The Pushpaka ('flowery') vimana is the most famous flying vehicle in Sanskrit literature. In Valmiki's Ramayana it was built by the divine architect Vishvakarma for…
Livy's Phantom Ships in the Sky
In the anxious winter after Hannibal crossed the Alps and beat the Romans at the Trebia, the historian Livy lists a run of portents reported in and around Rome. The first…
Ships in the Air over Clonmacnoise, c. 749
Several sets of Irish annals (Ulster, Tigernach, Clonmacnoise and the Four Masters) record, in one terse line, that ships with their crews were seen in the air. The…
Agobard of Lyon and the Sky Ships of Magonia
Around 815, Agobard, archbishop of Lyon, wrote a treatise On Hail and Thunder attacking the weather-magic beliefs of his flock. Many people, he complained, believed in a…
Gervase of Tilbury's Sky Anchor
Gervase of Tilbury, an English lawyer and courtier, compiled the Otia Imperialia ('Recreation for an Emperor') for Emperor Otto IV, finishing around 1211. Among its…
Great Airship Wave: Sacramento and California, November 1896
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…
Great Airship Wave: The Midwest, April 1897
After California went quiet, a second and much larger airship wave began in Nebraska in February 1897 and rolled east through the spring. Lights and occasionally dark…
Aurora, Texas Airship Crash, 1897
On 19 April 1897, at the height of the airship wave, the Dallas Morning News printed a short dispatch from Aurora, a fading town in Wise County, signed by local cotton…
Alexander Hamilton's Cattle-Rustling Airship, Le Roy, Kansas, 1897
In late April 1897 the Yates Center Farmer's Advocate published a sworn statement from Alexander Hamilton, a farmer and former Kansas legislator. He said that on the…
New England Phantom Airship Wave, 1909-1910
In December 1909, Worcester businessman Wallace Tillinghast claimed he had built a heavier-than-air machine and had secretly flown it from Worcester to New York and back…
Vaimanika Shastra
The Vaimanika Shastra ('science of aeronautics') is often presented as an ancient Sanskrit manual for building vimanas. Its own history says otherwise. In 1952 G. R…