Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Warning: this review contains spoilers (right up front) about both the book's "solution" and what I believe is a more believable explanation of the mystery.

Unfortunately, the title of this book is misleading, for nothing was even remotely "solved" in its pages. Perhaps the title "The 1897 Airship Mystery: a Romantic Fantasy for Your Amusement" would not have sold as well, but it would have been more realistic.

The author's thesis is that the spate of "airship" sightings during 1897 is attributable to two or three man-made lighter-than-air vehicles of an advanced design for the times. He concludes that they were constructed by a secret cabal of genius inventors, and flown for a period of months until they each met with an accidental destruction over the sea. He rejects the possibilities of mass hysteria and hoaxes, and concludes that it is not necessary to invoke other explanations, such as that they were extraterrestrial vehicles.

From this reviewer's perspective this conclusion is unjustified. For one, mass hysteria is a distinct possibility, as there are aspects of the tale that are quite consistent with it, such as the "airship parties". Nor was a hoax eliminated in any way. Some reports are acknowledged by the author as obvious fabrications, but they are preceded and followed by reports that are just as fabulous, but seemingly accepted at face value. Most telling of all, many characters in this story come across as touts, braggarts, and roustabouts: just the sort of folks who would enjoy poking their finger in the eye of polite society by staging an elaborate hoax.

Railroad men in particular are a key constituency in spreading the news about the airships, and they come across as a veritable conspiracy of clowns. And the book's assertion that telegraphers were notably sober and responsible is very far from a universally held opinion.

The book's conclusions aside, the style in which we are taken to them is also a problem. The writing contains numerous irritants: the author uses "<grin>" and similar gimmicks throughout, as if he is writing an e-mail. Rather than signaling to us where he is being humorous, the author might better have attempted the more conventional approach of simply trying to write in a humorous manner. And on several of the (many) occasions where I encountered the parenthetical words "(pun intended)", I was unable to locate anything resembling a pun in the vicinity.

Unfortunately, little sense of the times can be gained through the author's chosen vehicle for telling this story - a seemingly unending series of newspaper clippings, drearily organized day-by-day, week-by-week, and month-by-month. The author has not really "taken us there" - he has just let us re-read his research database.

The repeated promises that "all will be explained in the final chapters" will tempt the reader to skip the tedious clippings and jump to the ending. I succumbed to that temptation, but felt duty bound to go back afterward and read the chapters I had skipped. Nothing I found there caused me to regret taking that shortcut.

One last item on style: it is hard to regard a book as a serious analysis when it gratuitously dubs the airships being investigated the "Nina, Pina, and Colada". I truly needed one when I encountered that witticism.

In the final analysis, though, the book fails because it neglects to do any skeptical analysis of the claimed airships themselves. Although human technology is assumed in the design and construction of these airships, the patent infeasibility of the reported designs is never addressed. For example, by their rough dimensions, these airships' gas envelope capacities, compared to mid 20th century designs that actually carried passengers, are several orders of magnitude too small to lift any useful load, much less a handful of aeronauts described as living in comfort, with beds, dining tables, cooking stoves, and electric lights and heating(!).

An airship 150 feet long may sound pretty grand, until you consider that the Hindenburg was 800 feet long and 135 feet in diameter! An airship that is 5 times the length of another does not carry 5 times the load, however: it carries about 125 times the load, because the volume of lifting gas increases as the cube of linear dimensions. Given that about 100 people, including crew, were flying on the Hindenburg in a state of comfort similar to that ascribed to the 1897 airships, the latter would have room for about 1/125 as many people, or about 60% of a person! I guess the heating bill would not have been too steep after all.

"Electricity" is repeatedly mentioned as the source of the airships' propulsive power, but the storage battery technology of the day consisted of heavy glass jars full of acid, with electrodes of suspended copper and lead bars or plates. Any such battery sufficient to power the ships could not possibly be lifted by their tiny gas capacities. Even ignoring the batteries, any late-19-th century electric motors powerful enough to drive an airship to 100 mph cruise speeds could not be lifted by them, either. One would be lucky to be able to float such battery-motor assemblies on a cargo barge. In an airship, they could only have been useful as highly effective anchors, in the event of a hurricane.

Speaking further of propulsion, of those visionaries who imagined flight before the Wright brothers quit imagining and did it, essentially every last one assumed that aerial propellers would have to be like gigantic fans, an overgrown ship's screw if you will, in order to derive thrust from the insubstantial air. And those fantasy-propellers are exactly what are described as propelling the 1897 airships. If the Wright brothers' success in flying can be credited to one factor above all, it was their clean-sheet-of-paper approach to propeller design, one that produced the long, thin-bladed props we see today. To think that these airships' propellers (or their flapping sail-wings that are also reported) could push them to over 100 mph is beyond laughable. There is no diplomatic way to say it: the 1897 airships' propulsion systems would not work any better than their lift systems - that is, they would not work at all, not even remotely.

There are also basic errors of fact, such as that "Acetylene gives 90% of the lifting power of Hydrogen". Any high-school chemistry teacher (or student) knows that such a proposition is absurd. If the specific gravity of air is assumed as 1.0, the specific gravity of acetylene is 0.91, and that of hydrogen is .085, or less than 1/10 of that value. So an acetylene blimp would be a sluggish performer indeed. And those high-schoolers would also know that there are no mysterious gaseous elements lighter than hydrogen.

Tangentially, this book does contain one true story of an inventor and his technology that was indeed ahead of its time, but regrettably it is mentioned only in passing as a validation of the author's thesis, of which it decidedly is not. Dr. Solomon Andrews' "Aeron" lighter-than-air craft demonstrated the innovative and perfectly valid concept of producing forward thrust through "gliding" upward in an inclined wing-like balloon, but this was never really elaborated upon in the book. Andrews' achievements occurred in the mid-1860's, thus predating the airship affair by more than 30 years, and they were witnessed by numerous professionals in public demonstrations. But there is no trace at all of the lineage of Andrews' dirigible balloon in the purported 1897 airship designs.

In my opinion, the author's mountain of clippings unintentionally documents the 1897 airships as hoaxes inflamed by mass hysteria (which does not actually mean people behaving "hysterically", but simply participating in group-think on a community or state-wide scale).

The key technical clues are the impossibly Jules-Verne-like designs that could never get airborne, complete with sitting-parlors and flapping sail-like wings. They only lack harnessed flying swans! These are a hoaxer's idea of what an airship would be like, not the design of any secret cadre of brilliant inventors and scientists. If there was actually such an advanced think-tank of super-savants, it is puzzling that they employed classic ship-of-the-sky propellers and flapping wings-sails, when two bicycle-shop mechanics would demonstrate propellers that actually worked, and wings that actually flew, only 5 years later.

The other key technical factor in my conclusion are the constant references to the "high tech" miracles of the popular press of that era: "electricity" in some generic unspecified form of application, mystery gases lighter than hydrogen, and the super-light metal aluminum, which used in combination seem to supply the answer to any engineering impossibility. If their physical design was prototypical of a hoaxer's conception of an airship, it is fair to say that the technologies used imply a newspaper-reporter's conception of one.

I suppose it is not necessary to say that I was disappointed in this book. I would have had absolutely no trouble accepting its thesis, or even an extraterrestrial thesis for that matter, were it even remotely demonstrated to be plausible. But there are just too many "tells" here that the "1897 Airship Mystery" is not a mystery at all, but merely balderdash.

I first learned of the 1897 airship mystery many years ago, through my interest in (and study of) unusual phenomena, particularly the UFO phenomenon. I've read what I've seen published on the topic, including works by Daniel Cohen and Wallace O. Chariton. I was eager to read an analysis of the sightings by a non-ufologist (Busby refers to Nevada's Area 51 as "Area 54").
Aside from the alleged Aurora incident, my own take on this episode was that the sightings were real (Cohen thinks it was all a hoax), were not extraterrestrial (as Chariton believes them to be), but were likely the product of enterprising, creative people. The descriptions given by witnesses depicted an almost Rube Goldberg type craft, with "undulating wings...like a huge bird..." coming from a cigar-shaped object, a powerful search light, fan-like propellers and an undercarriage. There were numerous reports of mechanical sounds, humans being seen (and conversed with), notes dropped from the airship, sightings of repairs being made, etc. No, I was always pretty sure that the airships were of human origin. In 'Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery', author Michael Busby tackles the problem from the perspective of an engineer, coupled with a solid military background (he's a former Marine). He sets out to prove that the airships were in fact built and flown by specific individuals. "Real people, real patents, real flight demonstrations," Busby writes. Has he made the case? Probably 'yes'. But could there be more to the whole episode?

While Busby has constructed a reasonable and logical explanation for the 1897 airship sightings, there are still some facets of the matter that do not fit into his scenario. For example, while there were generally consistent descriptions by witnesses of the airship(s) appearance, size (between 100-200 feet in length) and speed (135-150 mph), there are some reports that do not comport with these descriptions. Some witnesses describe a craft 20 feet in length, some 50 feet; one even said it was "eight feet." The typical report has a craft moving slowly, building up speed, yet at least one eyewitness stated the object took off "like a shot." Busby does not reconcile these differences.

While Busby uses logic and reason to flesh out his thesis, he occasionally takes supposition and speculation to the stretching point. This is most evident in his effort to show that the supposed 'Aurora incident' actually happened (many ufologists think it a hoax), but that it was an airship reportedly seen earlier that day experiencing mechanical difficulties near another Texas town. As those familiar with the Aurora "crash" will recall, the craft that allegedly exploded was piloted by what was described by witnesses as "a Martian." Busby seems convinced that this was in fact a human being, "burned beyond recognition." However, the reports published at the time state that the "Martian" pronouncement was based upon witnesses finding "enough of the original" (i.e. non-burned body parts, probably limbs) to determine that the pilot was not human. It seems reasonable that a scant 30 years after the carnage of the Civil War, people could identify a human body, regardless of how badly burned.

Busby is to be commended for the obvious time, effort and attention to detail that went into this book. He lays out the day-by-day reports (from the actual newspapers), and uses this information most effectively in tracing the probable movements of airships (there were several, according to Busby). He applies his no-nonsense, analytical background and pieces together a fascinating scenario involving very real people who did some truly amazing things well before the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk. He offers people, places, connections, resources, motivation and execution. One could comfortably be done with the mystery by accepting Busby's thesis, and it is tempting to do so. Yet there is still something nagging about the whole thing.

During the reading of this book, I received an unexpected phone call, which led me to later pull out my copy of John Keel's 1970 book 'Operation Trojan Horse' (in which Keel offers his reading of the 1897 airship mystery). I'd read it many years ago, but found myself putting Busby's book aside and quickly re-reading Keel. I then went back and finished Busby's book. For those unfamiliar with Keel, he offers a very provocative, intriguing but very "fringe" solution to the airship mystery. According to Keel, the 1897 airship mystery was but one series of manifestations of a continuum of strange experiences, which include everything from poltergeists to fairies, from 'foo fighters' and 'ghost rockets' to contemporary UFO sightings. Keel rules out hoaxes, mass hallucinations, extraterrestrials and terrestrial humans. Rather, they (and everything associated with them, including the occupants) are a kind of three-dimensional projection that are actually seen and experienced by people, but are illusory. They are, in Keel's mind, injected into the human experience by entities he termed 'ultraterrestrials' who are denizens of a world of different "vibrations" that occupy the same space as we do. He posits a purpose behind these illusory constructs. I found that as I read "Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery', I was assessing it on two levels: Busby's nuts-and-bolts solution and Keel's paranormal take. It was an interesting experience.

As stated earlier, Busby has presented a 'solution' that is easy to accept, and that does provide a rational, logical and somewhat conventional explanation for the 1897 airship mystery. For those who like a neat, tidy and conventional explanation for the seemingly inexplicable, Busby's book is recommended. But there are still sufficient loose ends and contradictory elements to leave the door open to the possibility of other 'solutions'. Still, 'Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery' is a good read, and is well worth adding to your library.

Add-on comment, July 15, 2004: In response to 'Semper Fi'...he apparently did not read my review very thoroughly. I stated at the outset that I'd always thought the whole episode was likely of human origin. I am not in the business of "selling UFOs" or anything else to the public, do not have my head in the sand, and certainly do not need his nor anyone else's "forgiveness." However, it sure was swell of him to be so magnanimous.

Busby really does solve the mystery of the 1897 UFO sightings. This is a first ever as no one in the past 100 years could put all the pieces of this complex story together into a coherent, sensible story. Busby is also a very good storyteller. Combined with the level of research detail, I found the work very admirable and extremely fascinating. I think this book will be a historical document of great value to any student of both aviation and the historical period. Busby's hint of the purpose of the UFOs is chilling and has serious implications for our government's accountability. I recommend this book to anyone who just wants to curl up near a warm fire with a great book.