Page Content (OCR)
long but was very broad. . . . It flew over and past the school grounds, turned around, and went back the way it came. It was flying along very easily and had no trouble in turning.” Unusual flying lights were report- edly observed in the same areas at night. On Friday, August 6, 1909, “‘ten hitherto skeptical workmen’’ saw a “cigar-shaped balloon with a carriage suspended below. It had a powerful white headlight and changed altitude steadily several times.” The mystery airship of 1896-97 had returned! This time it was halfway around the world from Europe and the United States. We have found no mention of the New Zealand sightings in the American press of the period and assume that the news did not travel far. The airship itself did travel very far, Larwerneene however. Late in August 1909, the Russian correspondent of the London Daily Mail filed a dispatch about ‘‘an unknown controllable airship” that had appeared over the city of Reval, making two wide circles before disap- pearing in the direction of Finland. The event was said to have caused great excitement. A month later a machine ‘“‘of great size, elliptical-shaped, and equipped with wings of some kind’’ passed over the Castle Forest near Gothenburg, Sweden, at an altitude of 300 feet. The time of the sighting was 6 P.M. That morning another object—or possibly the same one— flew over the Swedish city of Osthammar at an altitude of 300 feet, coming from the northeast and disappearing in a westerly direction. The date was Friday, September 24, 1909. Gothenburg was revisited at 8:30 P.M., Thursday, December 2, 1909, when an “‘illuminated balloon’”’ appeared high in the sky and moved swiftly toward the sea. The Stockholm newspaper Dagens Nyheter noted: “Suddenly a rocket of some kind was thrown from the gondola into a garden named Redbergs Park. This took place a few minutes before the balloon went out of sight.” The events of 1909, 1913 and 1934 are crucial to our overall understanding of the phenomenon. They provide vital links in the long and tangled chain that we are trying to unravel. These early reports are especially meaningful because they were written as human interest items and routine news stories long before the appearance of the UFO contro- versy or before any government had issued a denial. The people of Sweden were completely unaware of the sightings in New Zealand. And Americans had not heard of either group of events. Skeptical explanations of mass hysteria simply cannot be applied to these early reports. Some mechanical-like object — or group of objects — was circling the globe at 98 / Operation Trojan Horse