AIRSHIPS, AND OTHERS

by Skylaire Alfvegren

The concept of flying machines only received prominence in the American psyche after the Wright brothers’ experiments in 1903, but strange sights were beheld in Nevada’s skies long before that.

The great airship flap of 1896 began, for all intents and purposes, on November 17, above Sacramento, California’s capital, which lies 130 miles to the west of Nevada’s capital, Carson City. Mysterious lights attached to “a dark body… in the form of an egg,” as bartender J. H. Vogel put it, were sighted by hundreds of people, including the mayor’s daughter and the assistant to the secretary of state. On November 22, the mysterious object reappeared, moving northwest to southwest against the wind. Deputy sheriff Walter Mallory described it as “[A] strong white light, seemingly moving… as if it were attached to a balloon, but on a closer observation, I thought I recognized a dark body… of a different shape than a balloon.”

From then on, the term ‘airship’ was used throughout the country to describe what appeared to be intelligently controlled objects in the air. Airships and other aerial oddities were often sighted above the Silver State in days of yore.

Meteors generally leave no trail, but how else to explain this? On September 5, 1879 something shot above northern Nevada’s skies, “leaving in its wake a silver streak apparently miles in length, which finally began to vibrate like a serpent, [and] then changed to zigzag like lightening.” The Reno Weekly Gazette reported that the phenomenon lasted for 85 minutes and was witnessed by hundreds of people. In late July of 1894, the skies of Reno were electrified by what appeared to be the tail of a large comet -- sans the comet. The strange streak hung in the air for some time, cycling from bright white to a glowing crimson hue before fading away.

On December 10, 1896, at 6 p.m. an “airship light” was reported to be gliding west above both Battle Mountain and Elko. It floated slowly, neither star nor meteor, and suddenly shot straight up through the atmosphere… a month before an aerial vessel “as big as a small house” sailed through the skies of Lodi, 35 miles south of Sacramento.

The first successful American dirigible flight took place August 3, 1904, in Oakland, Calfornia, and only a handful of flights took place before America entered the first World War.

Reno resident Claude Wheeler had a reputation for veracity, and so the friends of the bakery truck driver were shocked when he told the Nevada State Journal he had witnessed some kind of “sky craft” above the city in November, 1907. “My attention was first called to it when I noticed a great crowd gathered, looking into the air… the cage hung down, but it was so high above the ground that I could not… tell whether a man was steering. I guess the style of craft would be called dirigible.”

J. B. O’Sullivan confused Nevada scientists with his tale of a meteorite which ‘rose’ from the earth. On December 13, 1913, the Nevada State Journal reported that he saw “a meteor several days ago which seemed to rise from this terrestrial globe somewhere east of Sparks and shot into the heavens like a sky-rocket… he thought it was a skyrocket as though from a ship in distress at sea. He watched it pass over the city… as big as a dollar and a half… pointing a white light into the heavens and carrying a tail that had a long yellow streak. [It] didn’t land but just kept on going.”