Customer Reviews

The Great Texas Airship Mystery

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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...

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.

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.

Wallace Chariton's "Great Texas Airship Mystery" appears to come at the story of the Airship flap of 1896-97 from a slightly different tack than the other books on the subject that I have read up to this point. Whereas most of the other authors began as UFOlogists of one stripe or another, Chariton came at it investigating Texas mysteries and legends in general (Missing documents from the Alamo, the escape of John Wilkes Booth, the Kennedy assassination). And one might hope that such a thing might lead to a more nuanced conclusion or at least have less of the confirmation bias that UFOlogists would bring to the topic. This is not the case.

More than 80% of the narrative contains the now typical list of newspaper reports retold, covering specifically the string of sightings in Texas during the second half of April 1897. All though this, the author drops few clues as to where this is leading or the conclusion he plans to advance. Was it a secret inventor? A mysterious aero club? A hoax by railroaders or newspapers? Mistaken identity? Martians? Chariton really doesn't say, and only retells the stories and places them in context with other things that were going on at the close of the 19th Century.

And then we reach chapter twelve.

It is here that he relates the tale of Aurora resident S. E. Haydon, reporting to the Dallas Morning News, that on April 17th 1897, an airship flying over Aurora crashed into Judge Proctor's windmill and went down in a ball of flames. Mysterious hieroglyphics. Unknown metals and a dead pilot that "while his remains are badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world."

Given that the first sightings in Texas were less than a week before, it is obvious that Chariton left the mentioning of this particular event to the end for a reason. And even though he says at the very end that "the evidence, albeit circumstantial, seems to point to the unavoidable conclusion that S. E. Haydon pulled the leg of a lot of early Texans," he also says that on the 100th anniversary of the event he will be traveling to Aurora on the off chance that the aliens will return searching for their lost comrade.

I can guess how that went.

Really, though, Chariton comes to no conclusion, at least, not the one he wants to admit to and certainly not one supported by the narrative. Perhaps because he is an author who focuses on Texas mysteries, he finds himself better served by ensuring that he never actually sheds light on the mysteries he is writing about. To come to a conclusion would, of course, take the mystery out of it, which would perhaps affect sales of his next book of Texas mysteries. In the very last chapter, he makes some attempt to analyze the reports, look for corroborating evidence in confirming whether or not the people telling the stories actually existed, but by that time it's too late. Without building that into the narrative for the bulk of the book leading up to this, it seems rushed and shallow. An afterthought after having done a reasonable job of actually researching the subject.

And yet again I am left wanting someone who is actually qualified to investigate this mystery to have a go at it. Not UFOlogists. Not popular myth re-tellers. I want an aviation historian. I want an aeronautical engineer. I want someone who will take all of this data, combine it with real knowledge of the technology of the day, comb through the U.S. Patent office, census and tax records as well of the news reports and put a real critical eye on this subject. The romantic in me believes there was at least one actual airship and even the skeptic in me believes that there is actually a good chance that it's true but until I can trust the credentials of the investigator, I can't really trust my own conclusions.