But there is no evidence that a human inventor had flown a Great Airship in 1896 or 1897 anywhere in the country. Although some stories suggested the announcement of the airship’s was about to be made to the world, it never was. Or, those on their way to Cuba to bomb the Spanish never made it to drop those bombs.
A few modern investigators have suggested that there was a solid core of airship sightings. Something had to trigger the tales in 1896. They have suggested that we examine, more closely, those stories told in the Sacramento area in November 1896. Those might provide a clue as to where and why these stories began to circulate. It might be that some kind of airship was seen in northern California but then newspapers in other parts of the country climbed on the bandwagon.
There are no witnesses left to tell us what they really saw in 1896 and 1897 and we have no real records or photographs to examine. Few have interviewed anyone who was around in 1897 and who claimed to have seen the great airship. Ed Ruppelt, while chief of Air Force’s Project Blue Book, wrote that he had had a long conversation with a man who had been a copy boy at the San Francisco Chroniclein the time of the airship. He remembered almost nothing about those long ago events except to tell Ruppelt that the editors and a few others at the newspaper had seen the airship themselves.
But even if that was true, there were so many tales invented by newspaper editors and reporters that a single, fading memory of a copy boy means very little today. Maybe something unusual was seen near San Francisco and Sacramento. Maybe there had been some kind of cigar-shaped object flying over California so long ago. Those seeing it did the best they could in describing it, using the terminology available to them at that time. Maybe there was a sighting or two of something that was not invention, imagination, delusion, misidentification or outright fabrication in the fall of 1896.
What we know today is that the vast majority of the airship cases can be explained as hoaxes but they shouldn’t be completely ignored. They provide us with an insight that will help us better understand the UFO situation as it stands today.
And that is why the airship stories are so frightening for UFO researchers today. How many of those stories mirror the reports made at present? Everything we find in the modern UFO era was predicted by the airship stories in 1897. That means that if we can write off the airship stories as hoaxes and misidentifications, why can’t we do the same thing today? The evidence we find is just as nebulous and nearly unobtainable.
Of course we can argue that we have better information, we have instruments that help us record the flying saucers, and we have many more, trained witnesses. The UFO of today isn’t quite the same thing as the airship of the 19thcentury because the airship, for the most part was a human invention and the flying saucers are alien in origin, and that is the difference.
But the real point here is that studying history can lead us to insights in the present. We see the mistakes made then and can try to avoid them today. We’re not always successful, but we do have a path to follow if we can stay on it. So, sometimes the past tells us a little about the future.
V-2s and the Biological Samples
The Roswell UFO crash story has seemed to have spawned another fake document. This one, supposed to have come from the CIA, comes to me via England, which always raises my suspicions. Why would a classified, American document find its way to British hands first? But even if one did, this particular one didn’t. It isn’t real.
The report, as posted to various places on the Internet, claims, in part:
"…Another rule of secrecy was: You always camouflage your operations from prying eyes. It was not widely known to many that the Air Force and Navy were conducting classified rocket-launched reconnaissance payloads from White Sands, New Mexico, which failed to reach orbiting altitudes and subsequently crashed off range and generated considerable public interest in the United States and abroad.
"As part of a top secret Air Force atomic weapons detection project called MOGUL involving radiation dispersal in the atmosphere, selected monitoring sites across the United States were not acknowledged to by the Air Force and Central Intelligence Group
(CIG) and as a result, wreckage from one of the payloads was accidentally discovered by a sheep rancher not far from the Air Force’s Roswell Army Air Field.
"Also, another fact not widely known among military intelligence was that CIG had planned to utilize artificial meteor strikes as decoy devices ejected from V-2 warheads at 60 miles above the earth to record dispersal trajectories and possible psychological warfare weapons against the Soviets in the advent of a war in Europe.
"One of the projects underway at that time incorporated re-entry vehicles containing radium and other radioactive materials combined with biological warfare agents developed by I.G. Farben for use against allied assault forces in Normandy in 1944.
"When a V-2 warhead impacted near the town of Corona, New Mexico, on July 4, 1947, the warhead did not explode and it and the deadly cargo lay exposed to the elements which forced the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project to close off the crash site and a cover story was immediately put out that what was discovered was the remains of a radar tracking target suspended by balloons.
"In 1994 and again in 1995, the Air Force published what it considered the true account of what lay behind the Roswell story but omitted the radiological warhead data for obvious reasons.
"It may also be pointed out here that this kind of experiment was very similar to those conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission and the military in the late 1940’s. It was known in the CIA that the Soviets were conducting the same kind of radiological and biological warfare experiments in the early 1950’s after their successful detonation of a [sic] atomic bomb based on stolen documents and materials from Los Alamos forwarded to Moscow by communist espionage agents in the United States.
I suppose I should point out that in 1947, no one was thinking in terms of placing any sort of payload into orbit using the V-2. All the missions would be considered “sub-orbital” though many of them failed long before even that term could be applied. And for those who have forgotten their history, the Soviets first put a payload into orbit in late 1957, or ten years after the Roswell crash, whatever it might have been.
The real problem with this new document is the claim that “When a V-2 warhead impacted near the town of Corona, New Mexico, on July 4, 1947, the warhead did not explode and it and the deadly cargo lay exposed to the elements which forced the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project to close off the crash site…”
No record of this flight can be found. Back in the early 1990s, I researched all this carefully. I went to Alamogordo, to the Space Museum there and learned that something about the various flights out of White Sands. And, I went to White Sands to talk to the people there. I have a copy of White Sands History which “…narrates the development and testing of rockets and missiles at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, during the years 1945 through 1955.” It contains a record of every launch and according the documentation, no launch information is missing. All launches are accounted for.
Here’s what I know. On July 3, there was an attempted launch. According to the Albuquerque Journal of July 4, 1947, “Two men were burned seriously by acid and six others suffered minor burns early tonight as they prepared for the launching of a German V-2 rocket… A statement from Lt. Col. Harold Turner, proving grounds commandant, said an investigation has been ordered. Launching of the rocket, 25thto be fired in a series of experiments here, was postponed indefinitely.”