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Illinois, took two photographs of a cigar-shaped craft. ‘‘I had read for some days about the airship,’”’ the news dealer, Walter McCann, was quoted as saying. ‘“‘But I thought it must be a fake.” Because so many people were coming up with airship stories, and many of them were even signing affidavits swearing to the truth of what they had seen, newspapermen naturally turned to the greatest scientific authority of the time, Thomas Alva Edison. “You can take it from me that it is a pure fake,”’ Edison declared on April 22, 1897. ‘I have no doubt that airships will be successfully constructed in the near future but... it is absolutely impossible to imagine that a man could construct a successful airship and keep the matter a secret. When I was young, we used to construct big colored paper balloons, inflate them with gas, and they would float about for days. I guess someone has been up to that fine game out west. “Whenever an airship is made, it will not be in the form of a balloon. It will be a mechanical contrivance, which will be raised by means of a powerful motor, which must be made of a very light weight. At present no one has discovered such a motor, but we never know what will happen. We may wake up tomorrow morning and hear of some invention which sets us all eagerly to work within a few hours, as was the case with the Roentgen rays. Then success may come. I am not, however, figuring on inventing an airship. I prefer to devote my time to objects which have some commercial value. At the best, airships would only be toys.” Forty-one years later, however, a young man named Orson Welles disagreed with Edison. The opening lines of his historic ““War of the Worlds” broadcast on October 30, 1938, were almost prophetic: ““We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own,”’ Welles’ sonorous voice declared. ‘“‘We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply ina drop of water. With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood, which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of time and space. Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool, and unsympa- thetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.” 30 / Operation Trojan Horse