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At the end of the year 1896, residents of California were startled to see an unknown

airship appearing in their skies. This was before the Wright Brothers conducted their first

powered flight in 1903, and although balloons had been used for years, these new airships displayed

unusual flight characteristics that were beyond other craft in their day. In recent years,

many have proposed that the wave of the 1890s airships were early UFO sightings that

heralded contact with extraterrestrials, but others have said that it was all a giant hoax.

But what's the truth about the 1890s airship mystery? Was it aliens? Was it a hoax? Or was it

something else? The mystery airships of 1896 and 1897 are a fascinating phenomenon. The stories

themselves are interesting, and when we look at what could explain the stories, we likely are looking

at multiple causes. However, it's fairly easy to show that while many of the proposed explanations

may have been true in some cases, they are not good general explanations for the overall phenomenon.

We can't simply explain it away by saying that people were misidentifying things like

meteors, fireballs, comets, and the planet Venus. We can't explain it away as just based on

hoaxes by ordinary people, railroad workers, newspaper man, or pranksters. The evidence suggests

that people really were, seeing something like airships in the sky, but despite the claims

in the UFO community, we do not have good evidence that they were extraterrestrial or

interdimensional in nature. Neither do we have good evidence that they were from a crypto-terrestrial

civilization. The evidence supports them being terrestrial craft built by human beings, so the question

is who built them.

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