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146 The Great Airship Mystery In the United States, the first widely known wave of sightings of strange objects in the sky occurred in late 1896 and early 1897. Thousands of people from large areas of the central and western states reported that they had seen airships. Some claimed to have interacted with crews, who were humans speaking English; a few even were invited aboard. Many of these observers described the airships as dirigible-type machines driven by a motor attached to an air screw or propeller. This coincided with the then current opinion that the first flying machines would be airships, not heavier-than-air machines like the Wright Brothers’ air- craft that first flew in 1903. The most common explanation for these sightings was that a secret inventor had developed the airships. A dirigiblelike balloon had flown over Paris as early as 1852, and an American inventor went aloft in a similar craft in 1865. Jules Verne’s novel Robur the Conqueror, pub- lished in 1886, described a globe-girdling aerial craft, although it was heavier than air. A less popular theory suggested that the airships were extraterrestrial visitors, the most frequent source being Mars. According to historian David Michael Jacobs, those who had not seen these airships simply would not believe these reports. They assumed that the witnesses did not see what they claimed to see. By contrast, no amount of persuasion could dissuade the people who had sighted such objects from believing that they had seen an airship. These patterns of behavior were repeated in the modern era of UFO sightings that began after World War II. However, we should be cautious about lumping the two eras together and assuming the same explanation for both waves of sightings. Although some reports from the 1896-1897 wave were hoaxes, research has shown that most witnesses really were seeing airships, products of our own civilization. Electrical engineer Michael Busby, who studied hundreds of press reports and mapped the sightings, found a growing body of evidence that a group of individual Americans secretly designed, built, and flew airships as early as the 1840s. Their work led to the manufacture and flight of the several airships sighted in 1896 and 1897. This project may have been quietly supported by the U.S. Government. Busby tells us that the mood of that time was not of anxiety or para- noia (a frequent although unproven explanation for UFO sightings during the Cold War). It was a time of optimistic anticipation, of belief in the creative powers of science and technology.’ What may have been the most widely witnessed sighting took place in 1917 at Fatima in Portugal, where a crowd of 50-70 thousand people watched as the clouds parted to reveal a huge silver disk spinning like a The UFO Controversy