Customer Reviews

Mystery Airships in the Sky

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4 star:		(1)
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This book takes a detailed but often whimiscal stroll through the dense history of airships/UFO sightings in America from the end of the 19th century to early 20th century. Sources are almost completely from newspaper articles, and the author is very fair to debunk ones with little credibility from ones that are more puzzling. He makes associations with the culture of the time, connecting the sightings with anything from drunken imaginings to poetry and science fiction, giving a sense of curiosity, fear, excitement and spiritual anticipation he believes led the Wright Brothers to invent the airplane just a few years later.

I found Mystery Airships relaxing but non-focused to read--the compilation of information is amazing and the overall concept is very interesting to me. Personally, I wish the book would have drawn more conclusive or even opinionated parallels with the information presented because I think it would have made for more impactual reading. Instead the author usually chose to leave that up to the reader, so the style seems a bit more aloof. For this reason I was debating whether to give the author 3 or 4 stars, but chose the higher because my interest in UFOs specifically is not that avid. I'm more interested in the scientific possibilites than the historical connections, so objectively speaking, for someone concerned more with that, this would be an excellent book to buy.