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a time when the number of known existing dirigibles could be counted on one hand and only a few crude airplanes, homemade and of very limited range and capabilities, could be found. In fact, the development of the airplane was very slow until World War I came along and it became necessary to make improvements in design quickly. The first European airplane flight (Santos-Dumont) took place in 1906 in Paris. Except for one or two experimental models, all of the planes of 1909 were fashioned after the Wright brothers’ model, with the pilot sitting on the fore edge of the lower wing, his feet dangling in space, and a modified automobile engine coughing and sputtering behind him. It was almost a tradition for these machines to crash after flying a few miles at low altitude. Lieutenant Thomas E. Selfridge earned the unhappy distinc- tion of being the first man to die in an airplane crash in 1908 when he was a passenger on a plane piloted by Orville Wright which went out of control and plummeted to earth from an altitude of 75 feet. Wright was badly injured, too. In 1910, there were thirty-six licensed pilots, and they outnumbered the available airplanes. So all of the known pilots, planes and dirigibles of 1909 were accounted for. They were not buzzing New Zealand and Sweden. Some- one else was. This someone else next visited the New England states in December 1ann 1909. The story of the Massachusetts flap of 1909 is another jigsaw puzzle that we have pieced together from dozens of newspaper clippings. The sightings of that December were widely published all over the United States. Thousands of witnesses were involved, and the objects described possessed all of the UFO characteristics of the 1896-97 flap. But there is a rather odd fly in this ointment: a self-proclaimed inventor from Worces- ter, Massachusetts. He became the focus of many of the newspaper stories, and he seems to have been surrounded by considerable mystery. The early newspaper accounts suggest that unidentified flying ma- chines might have been sighted with some regularity before journalists really paid any heed to them. First, we have an interesting coincidence. One of the first published sightings — perhaps the very first — of the flap appeared in New York and Long Island newspapers on the same day that our mystery inventor Flexible Phantoms of the Sky / 99 A New “Secret” Inventor