UFOs of the First World War E-Book

Nigel Watson

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 331

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Lieutenant R.S. Maxwell took off in his BE2C fighter but saw nothing unusual until 8.25 p.m. when, according to his report: 'My engine was missing irregularly and it was only by keeping the speed of the machine down to 50 mph that I was able to stay at 10,000 feet. I distinctly saw an artificial light to the north of me, and at about the same height. I followed this light northeast for nearly 20 minutes, but it seemed to go slightly higher and just as quickly as myself, and eventually I lost it completely in the clouds.' Such sightings occurred frequently during the war. The reasons are fascinating in themselves: the first is that aviation is in its infancy, so light phenomena at altitude are a new experience. The second is fear: for the first time a real threat came from the skies. It wasn't just the Western Front: on 21 August 1915 twenty New Zealand soldiers allegedly saw eight bread-loaf shaped clouds over Hill 60, Suvla Bay. 'A British regiment, the First- Fourth Norfolk, of several hundred men, was then noticed marching . . . towards Hill 60.' They marched into the cloud, which lifted off the ground, and were never seen again.

Leseprobe

For Granville Oldroyd

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Researchers throughout the world have helped to collect a vast body of information about the phantoms of the sky seen prior to, and during, the First World War. I’d like to thank all of them who have made this book possible.

A vast majority of research into British reports of this period was collected by the late Granville Oldroyd, to whom this work is dedicated.

I would also like to thank David Clarke, whose outstanding work has helped bring the subject out of the shadows of ufology.

Carl Grove and Roger Sandell for their work on researching and appraising British cases.

Thomas Bullard and Robert Bartholomew for their extensive contributions to this topic.

Mr X for information about the Canadian aviation scare.

Brett Holman for information about Australian reports and his collection of information and views on the early airship scares.

Thanks also to the following for their comments about the Angel of Mons visions: Philip Mantle, Nigel Wright, Albert S. Rosales, Robert Moore, Kevin Goodman, Cas Lake, Andrew Hennessey, Paul Bennett, John Rimmer.

And, special mentions to: Peter Rogerson, Chris Aubeck, Kevin McClure, Hilary Evans, Martin Kottmeyer, Mark Pilkington, Robert Rickard, Kay Massingill, Ole Jonny Brænne, Chuck Flood, Gerry Connelly, Ken Gerhard, John Hind, Jerome Clark, Dirk van der Werff, Dr Joaquim Fernandes, John Harney, Jean Sider, Rudy de Groote, Mack Maloney, Thierry Pinvidic, Bill Chalker, Mervyn Wyn Hopkins, David Rees, Lucius Farish, Andy Roberts, Dwight Whalen, Donald Johnson, Harry Wood, Mike Dash, Rob Waugh, Ulrich Magin, Paul Screeton.

To contact Nigel Watson, please email: [email protected], or via the UFOs of the First World War, Facebook page at: www.facebook.com/UFOScares.

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Early Airship Scares

2. Britain 1909

3. New Zealand and Australia 1909

4. The Tillinghast Airship?

5. Incident at Sheerness

6. The British 1913 Scare

7. Pre-War Scares and Sightings

8. Phantom Aircraft over Great Britain in 1914

9. German Aeroplanes over South Africa

10. Phantom Motor Cars, Cossack Armies, Signals and Spies

11. Sightings in the USA

12. The ‘Scareoplanes’ of Canada

13. Great British Sightings in 1915

14. Norway

15. Australia

16. Angels and Visions

17. Recollections of UFOs Past

18. The Disappearing Soldiers

Additional References

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

‘In the future the nation which will count the most will be the one which has command of the air.’

Sheffield Telegraph, 25 February 1913.

Strange objects in the sky have baffled humanity since the dawn of time. Today they are called flying saucers or unidentified flying objects (UFOs). In the past, unusual lights in the sky were regarded as chariots of fire, angels, will o’ the wisps, demonic processions, dragons, witches riding to their Sabbath rituals, dancing fairies, spirits and many other types of threatening supernatural or religious visitations. Most sightings from the 1850s to the 1920s were regarded as ‘phantom airships’, then there were ‘mystery aircraft’, followed by ‘foo fighters’ in the Second World War, and then ‘ghost rockets’ before we arrived at ‘flying saucers’ in 1947.

The use of different terminology, and the associated frames of reference, helps determine how these sightings were perceived, reported, interpreted and explained. From the above we can see that initially sightings were of things of a fantastic, supernatural or religious nature, and then with the phantom airship sightings they were seen as being secular, man-made, mechanical constructions.

The frames of reference are conditioned by many different social, political and cultural factors. For example, the phantom airships seen in the USA in 1896–7, and worldwide during the early years of the twentieth century, can be compared with the airships described in the fiction of the period. The question is, did the reports inspire the fiction or did the fiction inspire the reports?

French and German airship commanders decide to make a little trip to England in 1907, underlining England’s Worry about the threat presented by foreign airships in Simplicissimus, the German satirical weekly magazine.

As Ron Miller notes in his excellent article ‘Jules Verne and the Great Airship Scare’, the phantom airship sightings in America during 1896 to 1897:

… could be either imaginative interpretations of anomalous and amorphous phenomena, simple bandwagoning, or even outright hoaxes. In other words, nothing that we haven’t seen taking place in so many modern UFO reports. Those of a century ago are different only in using 19th-century visual references.1

Hilary Evans similarly saw that historical encounters and today’s alien abduction stories are shaped by our expectations and subconscious:

What varies is the form and the circumstances. From the distant past, the material survives as myth, with fairies, angels or demons as the agents. SF writers regurgitate it in the form of adventure stories; in the 1920s, they tended to attribute responsibility to ‘mad science’ seeking to dominate the world. We, if we are subjected to hypnosis or drugs in a lab, regurgitate the material of the form of an imaginary encounter, now with extraterrestrial humanoids playing the leading parts.2

Some of the American sightings could have been caused by secret inventors, and in the early twentieth century it was even more likely that they could be triggered by real airships or aeroplanes. In the American case, there was a wholehearted delight in the thought that a secret inventor had perfected a flying machine.

Elsewhere, new aerial contraptions were regarded as a severe threat to national security. The art of aerial navigation became increasingly possible with the use of lighter-than-air dirigibles. Ever since his first flight over Lake Constance on 2 July 1909, Count Zeppelin’s name was continually associated with the huge dirigible airship. These craft could travel great distances and carry passengers along with a heavy cargo. Unfortunately, they proved to be very unwieldy at take-off and landing, when they could easily be destroyed by strong winds or bad handling by the ground crew. They were kept aloft by hydrogen gas, which is highly flammable and this factor helped bring about the demise of the airship in the 1930s. In the lead-up to the First World War, these problems were eclipsed by the prestige and power they gave to Germany.

Aeroplanes, on the other hand, were much smaller and had a limited range. They were more highly favoured by the British Government, although it preferred to let private or foreign pioneers do all the research work on the grounds that it would save money and it was not keen on perfecting new forms of transport that would help upset the balance of power.

The Zeppelin and the ever-growing new aeronautical inventions were potentially powerful new weapons that made every country vulnerable to attack. The prophets of doom worried that these craft could easily spy out the land in advance of naval and ground attacks, and they could rain down bombs to devastate cities and towns. They literally put everyone on the frontline, making civilians as vulnerable as combat troops.

For those who possessed the secret of aerial navigation, the promise of a great technological utopia was just around the corner. For this reason, the Americans showed a great enthusiasm for any type of aeronautical invention during their 1896–7 and 1909–10 ‘airship scares’. in contrast, if the enemy was seen to possess this invention, fear of the new and the unpredictable horrors it might unleash took the upper hand. In Britain, this was certainly the case and even in the USA, the wonders of technology soured during the First World War, as is evident from the reports of mystery aeroplanes and associated activities of spies and saboteurs.

The press was largely responsible for helping create, sustain and then deflate most of these airship scares. Indeed, the British 1909 phantom airship scare took on such a life of its own that even the hawkish newspaper baron, Lord Northcliffe (who owned the Daily Express and Evening News), had to put a brake on it to stop the nation looking foolish in the eyes of the world. A fellow scaremonger, Leo Maxse, welcomed this action, because:

People were making pretty considerable asses of themselves over these imaginary airships and they required sitting upon as you have done. The real thing is so serious, it is maddening to have people going off at tangents.3

In contrast, the newspapers that wanted to see more expenditure on social reforms and welfare were more cautious and sceptical about these sightings from the very beginning.

Whether you regard UFOs as a manifestation of psychological and sociological factors, or ‘real’ exotic craft or phenomena, the accounts in this book serve to provide plenty of stimulating food for thought.

References

1. Miller, Ron, ‘Jules Verne and the Great Airship Scare’, International UFO Reporter, Vol. 12, No. 3, May–June 1987.

2. Evans, Hilary, ‘Abducted by an Archetype’, Fortean Times, No.33, Autumn 1980, pp.6-10.

3. Quoted in Morris, A.J.A., The Scaremongers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p.159.

ONE

EARLY AIRSHIP SCARES

Phantom airship, mystery aircraft, flying saucer and UFO sightings generally occur during relatively short periods of time in just one town, county, state or country. These clusters are known as ‘flaps’. If many sightings are also reported in other countries at the same time, this phenomenon is known as a ‘wave’. These two words are often interchangeable, and there are no hard and fast definitions of them. The words scare, panic, rumour, sensation or mass delusion can be applied to these clusters.

Originally, UFO researchers tended to think in terms of historical UFO flaps or waves, but as more studies have been carried out it seems that you can find plenty of individual sightings scattered throughout the world in any year. In addition, flaps of sightings are still being discovered as newspaper and other archives are being digitised and made easier to access via the World Wide Web.

Although the view that mysterious aerial objects represent man-made craft came to dominate, this did not entirely stop the perception of them as religious or supernatural phenomenon in certain circumstances. Even today ambiguous objects in the sky can be interpreted as angels, phantom (Black Operations) helicopters, or extraterrestrial UFOs. These sightings are usually shaped by the prevailing social/cultural/religious context of the observers, so in wartime they are more likely to be viewed in terms of supernatural saviours or enemy aircraft.

UFOs were not seen out of the blue during the First World War. They were conditioned and shaped in much the same way as the pre-war waves. Waves of sightings that were related to enemy activities began in 1908 and continued in many parts of the world right up to the beginning of the First World War.

USA 1908 sightings

This was an active year for US sightings. On the night of 23 January, a bright light was seen at Kent, Washington, and it returned for several evenings at the beginning of February.

There was speculation in the newspapers, in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, that the red glowing light was a Japanese airship, spying on the land.

Further sightings at Tacoma, of a searchlight beam on 12 February and a swaying light at Mud Bay on 27 February, led to speculation that an airship was in the area. An alternative explanation was that these were lights attached to kites that smugglers were using to signal to each other.

Venus, the stars and other planets were also called in as explanations. At that time there was a good deal of fear about Japanese spies in the area, so it was quite easy for witnesses to interpret anything unusual as due to their activities. Similar fears (of Germans instead of Japanese) helped fuel the later British airship scares.1

New England became the focus of airship activity later in the year. On 25 July, at 6.00 p.m., a large airship was sighted at Forestville. As it went westwards, towards Wolcott Mountain, some witnesses thought they could see a man on board it. Later, a resident in east Bristol claimed this was a paper balloon launched at his daughter’s birthday party.

On 31 July, at 3.00 a.m., an airship with a circular row of lights was seen hovering over Springfield, and a mystery balloon made an appearance at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in September.

In October citizens to the north of Rochester saw a large balloon carrying a passenger sailing high in the sky at noon on the 11th. Even weirder, on the 24th, Mr W.E. Foster at the Ware railway power-house was asked by a voice from the sky: ‘What place is this?’ As he answered he could see a flashlight about 150 to 200 feet above him.

On 31 October a balloon was seen at 4.00 a.m. at Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Two witnesses, both undertakers, saw a searchlight moving rapidly before it neared the Earth and played its light on the ground.

Pittsfield again hosted a mystery light in the early hours of 10 December. The next day, a balloon was seen at Lowell, going south-eastwards towards Boston.

Most of the sightings were reported because the witnesses thought they had seen the flights of aeronauts who had received publicity in the press. However, they occurred at times or places when real aircraft were not in the vicinity.2

Danish 1908 Wave

A dark object projecting two beams of light, one upwards, one downwards, was seen by several witnesses to the north of Gammel Skagen on 27 June 1908. More sightings were made on the night of 29 June at Hjorring, Nibe, Norhalne and Robling between 9.00 and 11.00 p.m. One witness said the lights looked like lanterns on an airship; another said they looked like fireworks, but they were much higher up and lasted longer for that explanation to be plausible. The 2 July edition of the Aalborg Amtstidende newspaper published this testimony from Mr Wibroe:

At 22.25 hrs I was sitting looking out of my window. Over Oland, between Hojskoven and Osterby, I saw a large object about the size of an eagle. Through my binoculars I could see two wings, but in about ten minutes it disappeared from view over Jammer Bay. Three other members of my family also saw the airship.

The next night, at Hasseris, a long object was seen through binoculars by Mr Bye-Jorgensen at 10.50 p.m. At first it looked like an unusually large bird, at an elevation of 30 degrees and about 99 feet away. The accountant watched it for 30 minutes and noticed that it seemed to have a motor or steering gear protruding from it. After briefly passing behind a cloud it went away in a north-westerly direction.

On either 26 June or 3 July, at Odense, what looked like a burning balloon was spotted by hundreds of people.

The majority of the reports came from northern Denmark, and it was suspected that the British Navy was responsible as it was carrying out a major exercise in the North Sea at that time. However, it seems unlikely that any British warships were carrying out experiments with balloons or aircraft at that time and location.

Willy Wagner, who unearthed these reports, noted:

1. Many independent witnesses saw something, which they described as an airship, in the sky over the Vendayasel area of Northern Denmark in June 1908.

2. There were no officially notified flights in that period.

3. It is established that there was no possibility of it being a British airship, as was generally supposed at the time.

4. An examination of the flight characteristics and known movements of other airships of that period make it very unlikely that a French or German vessel could have flown in secret to this part of Denmark.3

Sweden 1909

At 7.00 a.m. on 23 September, an airship was seen to fly over Grason. It was heading towards the south-west at an altitude of about 100 metres. The next morning, an aircraft was seen heading westwards at Osthammar, flying at a similar altitude. At 6.00 p.m. a huge elliptical object with wings was visible near Gothenburg. From Olskroken, in Gothenburg, a fast-moving lighted balloon was seen in the west heading out to sea. A few minutes before it went out of sight, a rocket was shot from the balloon in the direction of Redburgs Park. That incident occurred on 2 December at about 8.30 p.m.

Earlier, on 24 August, an unidentified airship circled over Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, before heading towards Finland. This worried the local population so much that they demanded a ‘defensive air-fleet’ to prevent further aerial intruders.4

References

1. Bullard, Thomas, The Airship File (Bloomington, Indiana: Privately published, 1982), p.257, p.259 and p.372; Keel, John, Operation Trojan Horse (London: Abacus, 1976), p.109.

2. Bullard, Thomas, pp.259–260; Fort, Charles, The Complete Books of Charles Fort (New York: Dover, 1974), pp.507–508.

3. Wagner, Willy, ‘The Danish “Airship” of 1908’, Magonia, new series, No. 9, Winter 1977–78, pp.11–12. At: magonia.haaan.com/2009/danish-airship/

4. Bullard, Thomas, p.270; Keel, ibid., p.110; Keel, John A., ‘Mystery Aeroplanes of the 1930s’, Flying Saucer Review, Vol. 16, No. 3, May 1970.

TWO

BRITAIN 1909

The 1909 scare began in March and lasted until the end of May. Many reports came from the east of England, South Wales and some from as as far away as Ireland.

One of the earliest sightings occurred on 23 March in the town of Peterborough. Police Constable Kettle was on patrol when, at 5.15 a.m., he saw a powerful light and heard the sound of a high-powered engine. He described it as travelling at a rapid speed, at a height of 1,200 feet. The light was carried by a narrow oblong-shaped dark-coloured craft.1

Two nights after PC Kettle’s sighting, Arthur Banyard, an engine driver at March Station, near Peterborough, saw with his fellow workers an airship with powerful lights attached to it. It came into view at 11.00 p.m. from the direction of Peterborough and was moving at a good pace even though it looked to be fighting a heavy wind.2

PC Kettle’s sighting, and by implication others made in and around Peterborough, was explained as a ‘fine kite’ that had been launched regularly on the times in question with a Chinese lantern attached to it. The motor sound was explained as a motor at the Co-operative bakery in Cobden Street.3 Though it does not explain why anyone would be flying such a thing at 5.15 in the morning.

By early May there were so many sightings of lights and the whirring sound of a large, fast-moving airship in East Anglia that the national newspapers took as much interest in the sightings as the local media. A Daily Express reporter toured the roads around Peterborough in search of the craft and its base, and found many other motorists taking to the roads at night on the same mission. He also interviewed Mr C.W. Allen who said that on 5 May, when driving through the village of Kelmarsh with two friends, they heard the ‘tock-tock-tock’ of a motor engine. He said:

It was an oblong airship, with lights in front and behind, flying swiftly through the air … it passed out of sight in a northeasterly direction towards Peterborough.4

The airship was viewed at 9.45 p.m. by Mr Egerton Free on 7 May. From his home on a cliff edge near Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, he saw two bright lights attached to a long, torpedo-shaped object. It travelled swiftly and after a few minutes it went out of sight.5 An odd twist to this story is that the next morning Mr Free found a 3-foot-long, hard grey rubber object like a flattened football, with a 5-foot-long steel bar running through it. It had the words ‘Muller Fabrik Bremen’ on the side of the ball, and it was thought it had dropped off the airship the previous night.6 The War Office removed the object and explained it was a ‘reindeer buoy’ used for target practice and had nothing to do with airships.7 In the meantime, two ‘foreign’ looking men were seen hanging around Mr Free’s house and where the object was found for five hours on the afternoon of 16 May. When their young servant girl left for church, the men spoke to her in a strange language that frightened her so much that she ran back to the house.8 Two days later, a ‘foreigner’ came to the house who was most eager to see the object, but Mrs Free sent him away. A local photographer later confessed that he had gone there to take a picture of the object, and was obviously mistaken for a foreigner.9

In the garrison town of Colchester, only a few miles north-west of Clacton, on 18 May, it was reported that two foreigners who spoke with a guttural accent were seen on the East Bridge. They seemed interested in getting details about the East Mills, owned by Messrs. Marriage and Sons. It was also alleged that a foreigner with a fractured skull was found in the district, and it was wondered if he had fallen out of a German airship. Police and other authorities had recently noticed the presence of several foreigners taking notes about the crossroads and buildings in the area.10

An even more startling story came from Mr C. Verney Grahame and Mr W. Bond, who were crossing Ham Common, London, at 11.10 p.m. on the night of 13 May, when they saw a 250 foot-long airship land in front of them:

There were two men on the aeroplane. The first man, who was near the forepart seemed to be in a sort of steel wire cage and had a row of handles in front of him, like the handles of a beer-engine, only thinner.

The moment they saw us this first man, who was clean shaven and looked like a Yankee, turned the searchlight right round on us, and there he was doing this over and over again, blinding us with the glare, evidently so that we could not see too much of the shape of the airship.

The second man, who stood in the middle of the airship, looked like a German, and was smoking a calabash pipe.11

On the same night, 10 minutes earlier, Mr Alfred Moreton saw a large airship that had a cage suspended below it containing two men. It carried a faint light and travelled at a speed of up to 40mph over Nuneaton, near Coventry.12 A torpedo-shaped airship was seen over Tottenham, north-east London, at 3.30 a.m. the following morning.13

The Ham Common encounter sounds more like a tongue-in-cheek joke, with the reference to beer-engine handles.The craft was described as being built of aluminium with steel landing legs to prevent the three propellers, located at its stern, from hitting the ground. Rather than a balloon, Mr Grahame said it was ‘a pure aeroplane’.

A more credible close encounter with an airship occurred on 18 May, at 11.00 p.m., near the summit of Caerphilly Mountain, South Wales. The witness was Mr C. Lethbridge, a Punch and Judy showman, who was described as ‘an elderly man, of quiet demeanour, and did not strike one as given to romancing’.14

He had performed a show at Senghenydd, and as he was walking home with his spring cart loaded with props, he was surprised to see a long tube-shaped object near the summit of the mountain. The sound of his cart surprised two men near the object, who did not seem pleased to see him. They loudly jabbered at each other in a strange language and gathered something up from the ground. The men, who were wearing heavy fur coats and close-fitting fur caps, jumped inside a carriage suspended from the cigar-shaped tube, that had slowly risen into the air.

The next morning, he told reporters at the Western Mail newspaper offices in Cardiff, that:

Gradually the whole affair and the men rose into the air in a zig-zag fashion. When they cleared the telegraph wires that pass over the mountain two lights, like electric lamps, shone out and the thing went higher into the air and sailed away towards Cardiff …

When the thing went into the air I distinctly saw what looked like a couple of wheels on the bottom of a little carriage, and at the tail end of it was a fan whirring away as you hear a motorcar do sometimes.15

The reporters took Mr Lethbridge back to where he had seen the airship, where they found a 54-foot-long gouge in the hard ground and recently trampled grass. An assortment of news clippings relating to aircraft and warfare, thick blue pieces of paper with figures and strange letters on them, the lid of a polish tin and a pin linked by a small chain to a red label, were found in the area. The pin might have belonged to a gas cylinder used for inflating car tyres or a fire extinguisher. These items could have been coincidental, or, if it was a hoax, planted there by the perpetrators.

To add credence to Mr Lethbridge’s story, the residents of Salisbury Road, Cathays, Cardiff, said that they saw the airship on the same night between 10.40 and 10.50 p.m.16 On the following day, at 1.15 a.m., workers at the Queen Alexandra Dock, Cardiff, saw a cigar-shaped ‘boat’ in the sky, travelling at high speed. It carried two lights and flew from the north-east, curved over Cardiff and went away to the south-west over the Bristol Channel.17

Although these sightings seem to independently confirm Lethbridge’s sighting, it is noteworthy that he worked on the docks during the winter months. So it could have been a hoax organised by Lethbridge and his fellow dock workers.

Another explanation was that Paul Brodtman, the managing director of the Continental Tyre Company, had launched a model airship and towed it with a motor car to experiment with the art of aerial advertisement. Shortly after this revelation, Mr Brodtman vigorously denied any connection with the airship sightings and claimed he was totally misrepresented.18

The British 1909 airship sightings were ridiculed by the Northampton Independent newspaper. (Author’s collection)

‘The new Pegasus’, Punch, June 1909.

Percival Spencer, a well-known aeronaut and airship constructor, revealed that he had sold several 25-foot-long model airships. These used a small lamp to generate heat to keep them aloft, which might explain why people always saw a ‘searchlight’ coming from the airship. He had also sold five large man-carrying airships, though none of them were attributed to Lethbridge’s sighting.

The idea of a secret inventor was also discussed. A Dr M.B. Boyd even came forward to say that he had spent eight years perfecting an airship that was 120 feet long and capable of travelling 1,000 miles non-stop. It carried two wings, had a three-crew cabin integrated into the envelope and three sets of wheels that enabled it to be used like a motor car on the ground. The craft was kept in a secret shed only an hour’s drive from London. He said his craft was responsible for Lethbridge’s sighting and for the sightings in Ireland. Needless to say, no more was ever heard of this unlikely aircraft.19

On 16 May, the same day that foreigners were seen by Mr Free near Clacton, a stockbroker’s clerk saw five foreigners on Caerphilly Mountain. They rode from spot to spot in two traps (carriages), photographing and surveying the area. They finished their work at midday, and one of the traps went on the road to Llanishen while the other one took the road to Cardiff.20 The question is left open as to whether they were surveying the area in preparation for an airship visitation or had nothing to do with spying and/or airships.

On the east coast, at Grimsby and surrounding areas, numerous spy rumours went into circulation. The town’s Member of Parliament, Sir George Doughty, asked Mr McKenna, the First Lord of the Admiralty, in the House of Commons, if he knew anything about the story that the German Army had suddenly commandeered two steamers at Hamburg. They had reportedly loaded them with soldiers before crossing the North Sea, then steamed up the Humber with them before returning to Hamburg. Mr McKenna replied that he had no information about this war exercise, and that he would be pleased to have any further information about the episode.21

The next day, 15 May, a rumour was spread that two foreign spies had stolen codebooks from the Admiralty wireless station in Humberstone Avenue, and three German businessmen were regarded as spies when they took photographs of Grimsby docks and attempted to visit Immingham deep-water dock.22 Another story told how workmen at Killingholm, near Immingham, had encountered motorists who wanted to know if there had been any local airship sightings, and whether the Humber between Immingham and Spurn had been mined. But, as a newspaper columnist reported, ‘this story, however, ends rather tamely with the intimation that the motorists finished by enquiring the way to the nearest refreshment house’.23

That evening, airship sightings spread to Ireland. A light high in the sky was seen over Colin Mountain, in the districts of Balmoral and Malone, Belfast.24 A more detailed sighting came from Captain Egenes who skippered the St Olaf steamer. On the night of 14 May, the St Olaf was just a few miles off the coast of Blyth, Northumberland, when:

… a large airship carrying five searchlights suddenly appeared, and hovered directly above the vessel, directed all its lights onto the steamer’s bridge … suddenly the airship swung off after another steamer a mile or so away, on which also the searchlights were directed. The airship afterwards made off at a sharp rate towards the south.25

There were other sightings of an airship in the North Sea, including one by fishermen returning to Ostend, Belgium, after working in the Icelandic fishing grounds. This was on the night of 18 May, and they described it as a ‘dirigible balloon’ manoeuvring about.26

The end of this scare came when Lord Northcliffe, the owner of the Daily Mail, which had given prominent coverage to these sightings, declared that it was causing harm. He warned that the real danger was the German Navy building programme and her alliance with Italy and Austria-Hungary. These ‘imaginary’ Zeppelins he noted, had caused the Germans ‘to believe that England is becoming the home of mere nervous degenerates.’27

‘The catastrophe that may happen if we still remain in our current state of unpreparedness …’ (Lord Roberts)

The crash of LZ-4 at Echterdingen on 5 August 1908 prompted the German public to contribute 6 million marks to build a new Zeppelin. The outpouring of national pride became known as the ‘Miracle at Echterdingen’.

References

1. Peterborough Advertiser, 25 March 1909; Anon, ‘What Did PC Kettle See?’, Flying Saucer Review, Vol. 6, No. 4, July/August 1960, pp.11–12.

2. Evening Star (London), 11 May 1909; Weekly Dispatch (London), 16 May 1909.

3. Peterborough Express, 19 May 1909; Northampton Independent, 15 May 1909.

4. Daily Express, 12 May 1909.

5. Daily Express, 18 May 1909; East Coast Illustrated News (Clacton), 22 May 1909.

6. Daily Express, 18 May 1909.

7. Evening News (London), 18 May 1909; Daily Express, 20 and 21 May 1909.

8. East Anglian Daily Times, 18 May 1909.

9. East Anglian Daily Times, 18 May 1909.

10. Birmingham Gazette and Express, 20 May 1909.

11. Evening Star (London), 15 May 1909.

12. Midland Counties Tribune (Nuneaton, Warwickshire), 15 May 1909.

13. Evening News (London), 20 May 1909; East Anglian Daily Times, 21 May 1909.

14. South Wales Daily News, 20 May 1909.

15. Cardiff Evening Express, 19 May 1909; Daily Express, South Wales Daily News, Western Mail, 20 May 1909.

16. South Wales Daily News, 20 May 1909.

17. South Wales Echo, 19 May 1909.

18. Evening Standard, 21 May 1909.

19. Daily News (London), 6 July 1909; The Aero, 13 July 1909.

20. South Wales Daily News, 21 May 1909.

21. Retford, Worksop, Isle of Axholme and Gainsborough News, 14 May 1909.

22. Grimsby News, 14 and 21 May 1909; Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 15 May 1909; The Times, 20 May 1909; Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 19 May 1909.

23. Louth and North Lincolnshire Advertiser, 22 May 1909.

24. Belfast Telegraph, 18 May 1909.

25. East Anglian Daily Times, 19 May 1909.

26. Daily Mail, 20 May 1909.

27. Daily Mail, 21 May 1909.

THREE

NEW ZEALAND AND AUSTRALIA 1909

In contrast to the British scare of 1909, the New Zealand sightings mainly occurred during daytime and were concentrated in the south-east region of the South Island. One of the first, and best, reports came from the town of Kelso. At noon on 23 July, Mrs James Russell and several schoolchildren saw an object flying towards them from the direction of the Blue Mountains. They said it was broad at the middle and pointed at each end, so that it looked like a boat. Reinforcing its boat-like appearance was a ‘pontoon-shaped part’ and a small mast at its centre. A man was visible inside the craft as it flew over Kelso school. It flew at an indeterminate height as it performed a u-turn over the school and returned in the direction of the Blue Mountains.

When a reporter visited the witnesses a few days later, Mrs Russell claimed the black craft frightened her so much that she thought the end of the world had arrived. One boy said it had a big wheel spinning at its rear, and another said it also had wings on either side of its body.1

Although only Mrs Russell described the airship as boat-like, this impression of its shape was repeated by later witnesses to the craft’s gyrations. Indeed, on 27 July, at 10 a.m., Mr Allan Mitchell and Mr Alex Riach saw such a craft with a mast on top of it. Near the mouth of the Pomahaka River, they observed it high over Pukepeto, heading for the Blue Mountains. As it travelled it kept dipping and rising with a gentle motion as if under intelligent control.2

On the same night, a man said that he was riding his horse when it was disturbed by a grey-coloured, torpedo-shaped object passing overhead. It was carrying three men, and one of them shouted at him in a foreign language. After that it displayed two bright lights and went away, apparently under perfect control.3

A ‘great black thing with a searchlight attached’ was seen at 2.00 a.m., on 28 July, by John McNeill at Northeast Valley.4 The next day there were four more sightings. Mr H.D. Baily saw a boat-like craft with a flat top pass over his yard at Kauroo Hill, which disturbed his horses.5 That afternoon twenty-three children at North Invercargill school saw a long cigar-shaped craft.6 In the evening the lights of a presumed airship were seen in the vicinity of Geraldine.7

Drawings of the airship seen by children at Kelso, New Zealand, in 1909. (Author’s collection)

To the north of Gore, in Waikaka Valley, two dredge hands saw a narrow boat-shaped craft at 5 a.m. on 30 July. At both ends it carried a light and they could plainly see two figures inside it. For several minutes it rose and fell like a bird and circled close to their dredge boat before shooting off, leaving a yellow haze behind it.8

Mr and Mrs Brand, on Saturday night, 31 July, watched a bright light moving like a boat over the Blue Mountains. It seemed to have two large fans on either side of it. Mrs Brand saw it again at 1 a.m. and 3 a.m.9

By now the boat-like shape and movement of the craft was well established. This is reminiscent of when Kenneth Arnold reported his sighting of ‘flying saucers’ over Mount Rainier, USA, on 24 June 1947. He described the objects as moving like saucers would if skipped across water rather than saucer-shaped, but the image of a spinning round disc stuck in the popular imagination.

In New Zealand, a large boat-shaped craft containing two figures appeared over Oamaru, near Sumpter’s Hill. It was seen at 3.00 a.m., on 2 August, by a baker called Mr Thomas Robertson.10 A couple of hours later, Mr Edward Nicholls, in Grosvenor Street, Dunedin, heard a sound like a threshing mill in the sky. On going outside, he saw an object with tapering ends, carrying ‘a monster acetylene lamp’ at the front.11

A correspondent to a local newspaper claimed he saw a large airship heading towards Castlecliff on 4 August. It had two large wings that made a hissing sound, and he calculated it was travelling at a height of 200 feet at a speed of 90mph.12 Two days later, an airship with two occupants was seen over the district of Waihi for a period of three hours.13

As the interest in the reports began to die down, Charlie Baker reported seeing an airship fly up from Maxwelltown early on the morning of 11 August. It was silent, very large, shaped like an egg and carried a sail. As it flew around for a few minutes he distinctly heard voices coming from it before it darted away.14

These stories had at least some credit and authenticity, but as interest in the subject took hold, rumours and fantastic stories soon came into circulation. In early August, a man claimed that as he was cruising along Marlborough Sounds an airship flew overhead. The occupants threw down missiles that missed his launch and fizzled when they hit the water.15

In an isolated part of the Black Hills, a farmer found two petrol cans, which he thought were abandoned by a visiting airship. Another farmer found some screw wrenches in a field near Otama, making him think the airship had stopped there to carry out repairs. More tools were found at Wooden Hill and at the Blue Mountains near Kelso, leading to similar conclusions.16

One rumour spread on the afternoon of 30 July was that an airship had crashed at Waikaka and that its crew of three Germans had been killed. There was also a belief that a special train had been arranged to collect the wreckage. This inspired hundreds of people to rush to the local newspaper office to see if it was true.17

That evening, a well-respected man told the Milton Farmers Club that an airship had crashed on the roof of his stables.18 Another equally ‘honest’ person said he saw the airship land at Port Molyneux, Clutha, and he had a conversation with the crew, who were Japanese. UFO researcher Patrick Gross regards this as a hoax, though he is wrong in thinking that people at that time had ‘no notion of spaceships and extraterrestrial visitors’.19

A resident of Waharoa was even more outrageous. He said that an airship containing the German Emperor flew 2 feet above his head, and he could plainly hear him talking about the native land question. When the Emperor saw the man, he put his mailed thumb on his nose and extended his four other digits in a rude gesture before heading off in the direction of Berlin.20

Nonetheless, there was a serious concern that a German ship off the coast of New Zealand was being used to launch the airship. Some identified the German cruiser Condor or the German Government yacht Seestern as the culprits.21

There were fears that foreigners were using the airship to spy out the land or that it was even being used to bring in illegal immigrants.22