The Great Texas Airship Mystery [Hardcover]

Wallace .O. Chariton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1991

Wallace O. Chariton explores the great Texas airship adventure from beginning to end and retells the story exactly as it unfolded in 1897.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Taylor Trade Publishing (March 1, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556221401
• ISBN-13: 978-1556221408
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,045,359 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars GREAT RESOURCE FOR A CLASSICAL AMERICAN MYSTERY, June 14, 2000

By 

no longer a customer - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Great Texas Airship Mystery (Hardcover)

Wallace O. Chariton has written a wonderful resource, (and one of the few resources), about a great American mystery. Between 1896-1897, mostly in the west and midwest and Texas, came a flurry of reports about a cigar-shaped Airship, complete with crew, long before successful aircraft existed...or so we have thought. While some details of the Aircraft varied from report to report, there were startling similarities, this long before TV and radio. Chariton writes about this great mystery with a sense of fun, awe and intrigue. He also provides a fascinating window on what life was like in the late 1890's. What is fascinating about the book are the startling parallels between the Airship reports and our own Flying Saucer reports and the almost painful see-sawing between outright sceptical dismissal and credulity. Chariton provides his reader with a chronology of events, maps and excerpts from the newspapers of the day and places you right in the middle of the events, as if you were there, one of the befuddled witnesses. So what was the Great Airship? You'll have to read this book and decide for yourself! And I highly recommend it; this book was a fun and adventurous read and will leave you wondering...

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Flawed But Respectable Nonetheless., July 18, 2000

By 

M. Packo (Stratford, CT United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Great Texas Airship Mystery (Hardcover)

Mr Chariton's research seems to have surpassed his ability to compile and present it in an entirely satisfactory way.In respect to the presentation of the sequence of sightings, particularly in Texas - the focus of this work, a more methodical format would have worked better. I think a chronology of sightings with respective maps would have helped a great deal in communicating just how peculiar these sightings were, and how they played out and fit together withinthe few months of 1897.Likewise, I found myself wondering more about how previous newspaper accounts were likely to have influenced later sightings - something the author makes mention of with less than adequate thoroughness.Thus, my central criticism:obvious dedication to ALL facets of this truly important and underevaluated series of UFO sightings, somehow hamstrung in its presentation (publisher's fault, perhaps?) by an over-reliance on anecdotal information. I wound up wishing that Mr. Chariton had spent more time thinking through everything he had gathered together about the airships before finally deciding what to write.In any case, he deserves praise and respect for avery decent and worthwhileattempt at so obscure a subject.One final suggestion:Has anyone attempted to search for any mysterious explosions that might have occured soon after these sightings? If there really was a mysterious inventor named Wilson in NY or Iowa or wherever, perhaps his lab was destroyed in an accident that might have been recorded subsequently.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars This is a Book?, June 11, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Great Texas Airship Mystery (Hardcover)

Chariton offers no explanation for the airship sightings. He just regurgitates some period newspaper reports then advises the reader to decide what the airships were while offering to meet the reader in Aurora, Texas with a jug of Dr. Pepper! Good grief. After wasting my money on this book, I came across Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery (Michael Busby). If you want definitive answers in a tightly wrapped, investigative style format buttressed by extensive tables, graphs, and details written by an expert then pass this book by and go for Busby's book. If you want bubble gum and Dr. Pepper, buy Chariton's book.