Customer Reviews

Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery

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Warning: this review contains spoilers (right up front) about both the book's "solution" and what I believe is a more believable explanation of the mystery.

Unfortunately, the title of this book is misleading, for nothing was even remotely "solved" in its pages. Perhaps the title "The 1897 Airship Mystery: a Romantic Fantasy for Your Amusement" would not have sold as well, but it would have been more realistic.

The author's thesis is that the spate of "airship" sightings during 1897 is attributable to two or three man-made lighter-than-air vehicles of an advanced design for the times. He concludes that they were constructed by a secret cabal of genius inventors, and flown for a period of months until they each met with an accidental destruction over the sea. He rejects the possibilities of mass hysteria and hoaxes, and concludes that it is not necessary to invoke other explanations, such as that they were extraterrestrial vehicles.

From this reviewer's perspective this conclusion is unjustified. For one, mass hysteria is a distinct possibility, as there are aspects of the tale that are quite consistent with it, such as the "airship parties". Nor was a hoax eliminated in any way. Some reports are acknowledged by the author as obvious fabrications, but they are preceded and followed by reports that are just as fabulous, but seemingly accepted at face value. Most telling of all, many characters in this story come across as touts, braggarts, and roustabouts: just the sort of folks who would enjoy poking their finger in the eye of polite society by staging an elaborate hoax.

Railroad men in particular are a key constituency in spreading the news about the airships, and they come across as a veritable conspiracy of clowns. And the book's assertion that telegraphers were notably sober and responsible is very far from a universally held opinion.

The book's conclusions aside, the style in which we are taken to them is also a problem. The writing contains numerous irritants: the author uses "<grin>" and similar gimmicks throughout, as if he is writing an e-mail. Rather than signaling to us where he is being humorous, the author might better have attempted the more conventional approach of simply trying to write in a humorous manner. And on several of the (many) occasions where I encountered the parenthetical words "(pun intended)", I was unable to locate anything resembling a pun in the vicinity.

Unfortunately, little sense of the times can be gained through the author's chosen vehicle for telling this story - a seemingly unending series of newspaper clippings, drearily organized day-by-day, week-by-week, and month-by-month. The author has not really "taken us there" - he has just let us re-read his research database.

The repeated promises that "all will be explained in the final chapters" will tempt the reader to skip the tedious clippings and jump to the ending. I succumbed to that temptation, but felt duty bound to go back afterward and read the chapters I had skipped. Nothing I found there caused me to regret taking that shortcut.

One last item on style: it is hard to regard a book as a serious analysis when it gratuitously dubs the airships being investigated the "Nina, Pina, and Colada". I truly needed one when I encountered that witticism.

In the final analysis, though, the book fails because it neglects to do any skeptical analysis of the claimed airships themselves. Although human technology is assumed in the design and construction of these airships, the patent infeasibility of the reported designs is never addressed. For example, by their rough dimensions, these airships' gas envelope capacities, compared to mid 20th century designs that actually carried passengers, are several orders of magnitude too small to lift any useful load, much less a handful of aeronauts described as living in comfort, with beds, dining tables, cooking stoves, and electric lights and heating(!).

An airship 150 feet long may sound pretty grand, until you consider that the Hindenburg was 800 feet long and 135 feet in diameter! An airship that is 5 times the length of another does not carry 5 times the load, however: it carries about 125 times the load, because the volume of lifting gas increases as the cube of linear dimensions. Given that about 100 people, including crew, were flying on the Hindenburg in a state of comfort similar to that ascribed to the 1897 airships, the latter would have room for about 1/125 as many people, or about 60% of a person! I guess the heating bill would not have been too steep after all.

"Electricity" is repeatedly mentioned as the source of the airships' propulsive power, but the storage battery technology of the day consisted of heavy glass jars full of acid, with electrodes of suspended copper and lead bars or plates. Any such battery sufficient to power the ships could not possibly be lifted by their tiny gas capacities. Even ignoring the batteries, any late-19-th century electric motors powerful enough to drive an airship to 100 mph cruise speeds could not be lifted by them, either. One would be lucky to be able to float such battery-motor assemblies on a cargo barge. In an airship, they could only have been useful as highly effective anchors, in the event of a hurricane.

Speaking further of propulsion, of those visionaries who imagined flight before the Wright brothers quit imagining and did it, essentially every last one assumed that aerial propellers would have to be like gigantic fans, an overgrown ship's screw if you will, in order to derive thrust from the insubstantial air. And those fantasy-propellers are exactly what are described as propelling the 1897 airships. If the Wright brothers' success in flying can be credited to one factor above all, it was their clean-sheet-of-paper approach to propeller design, one that produced the long, thin-bladed props we see today. To think that these airships' propellers (or their flapping sail-wings that are also reported) could push them to over 100 mph is beyond laughable. There is no diplomatic way to say it: the 1897 airships' propulsion systems would not work any better than their lift systems - that is, they would not work at all, not even remotely.

There are also basic errors of fact, such as that "Acetylene gives 90% of the lifting power of Hydrogen". Any high-school chemistry teacher (or student) knows that such a proposition is absurd. If the specific gravity of air is assumed as 1.0, the specific gravity of acetylene is 0.91, and that of hydrogen is .085, or less than 1/10 of that value. So an acetylene blimp would be a sluggish performer indeed. And those high-schoolers would also know that there are no mysterious gaseous elements lighter than hydrogen.

Tangentially, this book does contain one true story of an inventor and his technology that was indeed ahead of its time, but regrettably it is mentioned only in passing as a validation of the author's thesis, of which it decidedly is not. Dr. Solomon Andrews' "Aeron" lighter-than-air craft demonstrated the innovative and perfectly valid concept of producing forward thrust through "gliding" upward in an inclined wing-like balloon, but this was never really elaborated upon in the book. Andrews' achievements occurred in the mid-1860's, thus predating the airship affair by more than 30 years, and they were witnessed by numerous professionals in public demonstrations. But there is no trace at all of the lineage of Andrews' dirigible balloon in the purported 1897 airship designs.

In my opinion, the author's mountain of clippings unintentionally documents the 1897 airships as hoaxes inflamed by mass hysteria (which does not actually mean people behaving "hysterically", but simply participating in group-think on a community or state-wide scale).

The key technical clues are the impossibly Jules-Verne-like designs that could never get airborne, complete with sitting-parlors and flapping sail-like wings. They only lack harnessed flying swans! These are a hoaxer's idea of what an airship would be like, not the design of any secret cadre of brilliant inventors and scientists. If there was actually such an advanced think-tank of super-savants, it is puzzling that they employed classic ship-of-the-sky propellers and flapping wings-sails, when two bicycle-shop mechanics would demonstrate propellers that actually worked, and wings that actually flew, only 5 years later.

The other key technical factor in my conclusion are the constant references to the "high tech" miracles of the popular press of that era: "electricity" in some generic unspecified form of application, mystery gases lighter than hydrogen, and the super-light metal aluminum, which used in combination seem to supply the answer to any engineering impossibility. If their physical design was prototypical of a hoaxer's conception of an airship, it is fair to say that the technologies used imply a newspaper-reporter's conception of one.

I suppose it is not necessary to say that I was disappointed in this book. I would have had absolutely no trouble accepting its thesis, or even an extraterrestrial thesis for that matter, were it even remotely demonstrated to be plausible. But there are just too many "tells" here that the "1897 Airship Mystery" is not a mystery at all, but merely balderdash.

I first learned of the 1897 airship mystery many years ago, through my interest in (and study of) unusual phenomena, particularly the UFO phenomenon. I've read what I've seen published on the topic, including works by Daniel Cohen and Wallace O. Chariton. I was eager to read an analysis of the sightings by a non-ufologist (Busby refers to Nevada's Area 51 as "Area 54").
Aside from the alleged Aurora incident, my own take on this episode was that the sightings were real (Cohen thinks it was all a hoax), were not extraterrestrial (as Chariton believes them to be), but were likely the product of enterprising, creative people. The descriptions given by witnesses depicted an almost Rube Goldberg type craft, with "undulating wings...like a huge bird..." coming from a cigar-shaped object, a powerful search light, fan-like propellers and an undercarriage. There were numerous reports of mechanical sounds, humans being seen (and conversed with), notes dropped from the airship, sightings of repairs being made, etc. No, I was always pretty sure that the airships were of human origin. In 'Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery', author Michael Busby tackles the problem from the perspective of an engineer, coupled with a solid military background (he's a former Marine). He sets out to prove that the airships were in fact built and flown by specific individuals. "Real people, real patents, real flight demonstrations," Busby writes. Has he made the case? Probably 'yes'. But could there be more to the whole episode?

While Busby has constructed a reasonable and logical explanation for the 1897 airship sightings, there are still some facets of the matter that do not fit into his scenario. For example, while there were generally consistent descriptions by witnesses of the airship(s) appearance, size (between 100-200 feet in length) and speed (135-150 mph), there are some reports that do not comport with these descriptions. Some witnesses describe a craft 20 feet in length, some 50 feet; one even said it was "eight feet." The typical report has a craft moving slowly, building up speed, yet at least one eyewitness stated the object took off "like a shot." Busby does not reconcile these differences.

While Busby uses logic and reason to flesh out his thesis, he occasionally takes supposition and speculation to the stretching point. This is most evident in his effort to show that the supposed 'Aurora incident' actually happened (many ufologists think it a hoax), but that it was an airship reportedly seen earlier that day experiencing mechanical difficulties near another Texas town. As those familiar with the Aurora "crash" will recall, the craft that allegedly exploded was piloted by what was described by witnesses as "a Martian." Busby seems convinced that this was in fact a human being, "burned beyond recognition." However, the reports published at the time state that the "Martian" pronouncement was based upon witnesses finding "enough of the original" (i.e. non-burned body parts, probably limbs) to determine that the pilot was not human. It seems reasonable that a scant 30 years after the carnage of the Civil War, people could identify a human body, regardless of how badly burned.

Busby is to be commended for the obvious time, effort and attention to detail that went into this book. He lays out the day-by-day reports (from the actual newspapers), and uses this information most effectively in tracing the probable movements of airships (there were several, according to Busby). He applies his no-nonsense, analytical background and pieces together a fascinating scenario involving very real people who did some truly amazing things well before the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk. He offers people, places, connections, resources, motivation and execution. One could comfortably be done with the mystery by accepting Busby's thesis, and it is tempting to do so. Yet there is still something nagging about the whole thing.

During the reading of this book, I received an unexpected phone call, which led me to later pull out my copy of John Keel's 1970 book 'Operation Trojan Horse' (in which Keel offers his reading of the 1897 airship mystery). I'd read it many years ago, but found myself putting Busby's book aside and quickly re-reading Keel. I then went back and finished Busby's book. For those unfamiliar with Keel, he offers a very provocative, intriguing but very "fringe" solution to the airship mystery. According to Keel, the 1897 airship mystery was but one series of manifestations of a continuum of strange experiences, which include everything from poltergeists to fairies, from 'foo fighters' and 'ghost rockets' to contemporary UFO sightings. Keel rules out hoaxes, mass hallucinations, extraterrestrials and terrestrial humans. Rather, they (and everything associated with them, including the occupants) are a kind of three-dimensional projection that are actually seen and experienced by people, but are illusory. They are, in Keel's mind, injected into the human experience by entities he termed 'ultraterrestrials' who are denizens of a world of different "vibrations" that occupy the same space as we do. He posits a purpose behind these illusory constructs. I found that as I read "Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery', I was assessing it on two levels: Busby's nuts-and-bolts solution and Keel's paranormal take. It was an interesting experience.

As stated earlier, Busby has presented a 'solution' that is easy to accept, and that does provide a rational, logical and somewhat conventional explanation for the 1897 airship mystery. For those who like a neat, tidy and conventional explanation for the seemingly inexplicable, Busby's book is recommended. But there are still sufficient loose ends and contradictory elements to leave the door open to the possibility of other 'solutions'. Still, 'Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery' is a good read, and is well worth adding to your library.

Add-on comment, July 15, 2004: In response to 'Semper Fi'...he apparently did not read my review very thoroughly. I stated at the outset that I'd always thought the whole episode was likely of human origin. I am not in the business of "selling UFOs" or anything else to the public, do not have my head in the sand, and certainly do not need his nor anyone else's "forgiveness." However, it sure was swell of him to be so magnanimous.

Busby really does solve the mystery of the 1897 UFO sightings. This is a first ever as no one in the past 100 years could put all the pieces of this complex story together into a coherent, sensible story. Busby is also a very good storyteller. Combined with the level of research detail, I found the work very admirable and extremely fascinating. I think this book will be a historical document of great value to any student of both aviation and the historical period. Busby's hint of the purpose of the UFOs is chilling and has serious implications for our government's accountability. I recommend this book to anyone who just wants to curl up near a warm fire with a great book.

This book was extremely well researched. Mr Busby seems to have found every significant newspaper article printed at the time concerning the mysterious 'airship'. Based on that evidence and some great (and rational) speculative theories about flight paths, Mr Busby presents a plausible explanation for the wave of sightings in Texas in 1897.

To further support his theory, he also adds biographical information about the possible pilots of these airships. In the end he makes a neat case giving answers to the basic questions of who, what, when, and where.

As someone who tries to approach these types of mysteries with an open mind, Mr Busby seems, to me, has presented a rational theory that is supported by a believable mass of evidence.

Frankly his theory makes sense to me, the technologies and people were totally capable of what he says they did. According to Occam's razor, the simplest explanation is usually correct. Mr Busby has, at least to me, presented the simplest theory.

A lot of things about this book began to make sense when I found that Busby was also the author of a couple of technical manuals.He's done an excellent job of bringing together the primary sources concerning the Airship sightings of the 1890s,in the form of newspaper articles that appeared in the Texas/Louisiana/Oklahoma area in the spring of 1897. However,reading newspaper article after article after article is unbelievably tedious;only a determined reader is going to be able to hack his way through all of the material that Busby includes.Busby also uses tables to present his theories of the locations of landing strips used by the Airships and to draw together their supposed crew members and owners,and that adds to the intimidating tone of the book. In addition,Bubsy is very credulous. Even when the tone of an article is clearly humerous Busby quotes the events noted as if they were being reported in today's New York Times,and that includes the one printed story about the alleged "Aurora crash".If an Airship had crashed in Aurora surely there would have been extensive follow up by the local papers-but there wasn't. Which brings us to another problem-journalistic ethics were much looser in the 1890s than they are today,and Busby seems to be unable to grasp this.To further illustrate his uncritical use of sources;on one page he makes the absurd statement that anyone swearing out a false deposition would be subject to penalties of law.What penalties? What law? A Kansas farmer,member of a "Liars Club", did exactly that-swore a statement concerning the theft of one of his cows by the crew of an Airship-and had his fellow club members sign on as witnesses. Busby refers to this incident in his book,so he was aware that people swore false depositions for amusement.This book will be valuable to future researchers because of the body of primary sources it includes.But this isn't a book for the average reader curious about the Airship mystery.And Busby should fire his editor. He really does refer to "Area 54 in Nevada." There's no excuse for an editor letting a whopper like that get by him.

Michael Busby's "Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery" is the third of the airship flap books I have read after J. Allan Danelek's "The Great Airship of 1897" and Daniel Cohen's "The Great Airship Mystery: A UFO of the 1890s" and it stands as the most well researched and most convincing of all of them.

However, just as all the other authors, Busby's investigation into the mystery airship came directly out of a more contemporary UFO line of research, although he did not seem to have much of a UFOlogy background. This influence is evident early on when he cites an eyewitness description of the airship's "steel snail-shell" engines as "reminiscent of how an unfamiliar person might describe a modern-day jet engine; later-day twentieth-century technology provided by an alien presence."

This may be a nod to the absurdity of such speculation because after a few dismissing comments about the possibility of the airship being alien technology, Busby drops the whole thing until much later in the narrative (and there for good reason).

The bulk of the book is an exhaustive presentation of newspaper reports of airship sightings from April and May of 1897 in Texas. I would have liked if he had covered the entirety of the airship flap from November of 1896 in California and the string of sightings across the midwest into Michigan but he chose to focus on his home state. There is plenty there to report and the repeated retellings of the same basic story by multiple witnesses can get a bit boring but it highlights that Busby did his research and quoted his primary sources.

Through this litany of newspaper reports, he drops comments that show his conclusions before he has sufficiently explained the line of reasoning from the evidence he's been presenting. Most notably that there are three or as many as five airships rather than just one. Eventually he starts using maps and analysis to back that up but I think the earlier statements are supposed to be hints to keep the reader interested while plodding through the journalistic infodump.

It is the last third of the book in which the most compelling case is made. Busby goes through the eyewitness accounts where people say they met airship crewmembers and began tracing back the names to find out if these people actually existed. In fact, many of the names were found in census record and Busby was able to trace them back even further wherein a number of them served in the same regiment during the American Civil War.

Now that's some convincing stuff. A hoaxer might make up a name or a clever journalist might have several names of acquaintances but it is almost impossible to believe that made up names could thread their way through several locations across 30 years to end up in the same place.

Finally, Busby debunks the Aurora crash. The newspaper reports of the day said that a mystery airship crashed into a windmill in Aurora, Texas and the body of its pilot, burned beyond recognition, was buried by local residents. And the reason this is such a big deal to modern UFO hunters is because the newspaper described the pilot as a strange being from Mars. Busby dismisses that claim in saying that of the many other encounters where eyewitnesses claim to have met crewmembers as the airship was grounded for repairs, they were all described as normal people wearing normal clothing working on a machine that, though unfamiliar in its details, was universally normal. The singular report coming out of Aurora describing aliens, Busby speculates, was designed to encourage tourism in a town that had been bypassed by the railroads.

That effort failed but it is that one fiction that continues to cath the attention of UFOlogists and keeps the story of the mystery airship alive.

For myself, I had some issues cleared up in my own beliefs. Cohen's "The Great Airship Mystery" went through a lot of details but ultimately discounted them all in saying that there was no actual airship. Danelek's "The Great Airship of 1897" attempted to be somewhat authoritative in saying that there was an airship but only described one. He left out all the reports that extended south into Texas. Why believe some reports and not others? It seemed arbitrary and I wondered if there might have been multiple airships but also thought that an even larger number of airships and crew would be even more difficult to keep a secret.

Busby seems to work that stuff out though I am not entirely convinced that there were as many airships as he claims. That is why I would like to see as detailed an investigation of all the sightings and not just those of Texas.

I read the reviews below then decided to purchase the book. I think the person (Karen White) who wrote the "Not For The General Reader" amazon.com review was expecting a romance novel when she cracked the book. I can understand her disappointment. However, I found the book very informative, well written, entertaining, and completely on topic! Busby includes many pertinent newspaper articles and includes thought-provoking commentary, as appropriate. Yes, you read some period newspaper articles but for someone keenly interested in this mystery, the articles ADD TO THE STORY in a very artful manner. With Busby's perspective as an engineer with many years of aerospace work included as interesting commentary to the newspaper articles, the facts are seen through the eyes of a person knowledgable of flight. The result is very thought-provoking - if you are not seeking a romance novel.

White points out that "Busby should fire his editor. He really does refer to "Area 54 in Nevada." A few writers in the past have referred to another secret base inside the secret base identified as Area 51 in Nevada. These writers have referred to the base inside Area 51 as Area 54. According to these writers, Area 54 is where the ultra top secret UFO-alien-human contact happens. In referring to "Area 54 in Nevada", I suspect Busby was referring to the supposed secret base inside Area 51. In any case, it is readily apparent Busby is contemptuous of a "alien solution."

White says "This isn't a book for the average reader curious about the Airship mystery" The reviewer must be a below average reader as I am an "average reader" - of everything but romance novels - and I found the book to be just what it claims to be - a solution to the airship mystery. The fact that I happened to UNDERSTAND everything that Busby explains about the airships and did not get side-tracked looking for non-existent issues, of course, added immensely to my pleasure in putting this mystery to rest.

Busby takes neither side of the Aurora airship crash story (the UFO crash that pre-dates Roswell, NM by 50 years). He just presents "the facts," leaving the reader to reach whatever conclusions desired. He does express his opinion, clearly identified as opinion, of the crash's possibility. White claims that since Busby did not include many different newspaper articles of the Aurora crash, then it must be a fake crash and seems to find fault with Busby for including the material in the book. Apparently, White is not an "average reader" because Busby states in the Introduction that the number of newspaper articles presented in the book were limited due to production issues. How many newspaper articles of the Aurora crash existed in April, 1897? I don't know but that has nothing to do with the veracity of the story or Busby's presentation of the material. Also White points out that Busby seems gullible as she mentions "journalistic ethics were much looser in the 1890s than they are today, and Busby seems to be unable to grasp this." Again, apparently White is a below average reader because Busby makes that exact point at the beginning of the book - that one must sift through the chaff to find the wheat - including pointing out the fake stories that appeared in the New York Times last year, resulting in an outrage every bit as much of a journalistic scandal as any that existed in 1897. Busby is very much well aware of the ability of the press to mislead the populace and he discusses this topic at some length in the latter chapters. I guess White is not an average reader if she did not read and understand this section of the book.

Another amazon.com review that I read before I bought the book was Dennis Hawley's review. Dennis Hawley is in the business of selling UFOs to the American public. Therefore, he can be forgiven for proposing that there can still be "other solutions" than the solution Busby considers. After reading Busby's book, only an ostrich with its head in the sand can straight-facedly claim there can be any other solution than that solution Busby lays out with such exquisite finesse. You want an intelligent answer to a 100 year old UFO mystery that makes sense and does not require an unbridled imagination characterized by a brain mass pockmarked with black holes? Buy the book.

It is well documented in the National Archives Dr. Solomon Andrews designed and flew an airship in 1863, demonstrating to the War Department an airship design that was estimated to fly in excess of 120 mph under the physical steering control of Andrews. In a second airship he designed and flew in 1865, New York City reporters and many other witnesses saw him fly over Manhattan with an estimated airspeed of 180 mph. This is more than 30 years before the 1897 airship sightings west of the Mississippi. In the 1960s, a group of naval aviators used the National Archives plans to successfully build and fly an Andrews replica.

I do not know (nor do I care) what J. Runyan's problem is, but he spouts incorrect statement after statement as he attempts to discredit Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery. It is readily apparent to anyone with a brain if something was done once (1863), it can certainly be done again 35 years later (1897).

You should question anyone who goes to such great lengths to write a review of a good book with the first comment "Warning: this review contains spoilers (right up front)" especially when their review contains so many factual errors regarding the book. Since Runyan has so many factual errors in his review, he really does not spoil anything.

I have always been fascinated with the 1897 UFO mystery and wondered for many years what it was all about. Finally, someone has uncovered the real story. I enjoyed every page of this fascinating book. BTW, why isn't this book/story on the History Channel?

During the latter half of 1896 through the first half of 1897, one or more aircraft were observed in the night sky over a large portion of the continental United States. Mr. Busby is convinced that he has determined the origins of these aircraft, who made them, and what happened to them. Unfortunately, there is more hot air holding up his hypothesises that there was in the airships he describes.

For his determinations to have any credability, it is necessary to believe that several groups of people, not in direct contact (but at some point in their lives all supposedly been in the same geographic proximity) developed several new technologies (ie aluminum refining and fabrication) without leaving a single trace of their existance. This in itself is surprising because any one of these technologies would have made the inventors rich beyond the realms of mere avarice.

I won't spoil the deus ex machina that Mr. Busby uses to explain the lack of records just in case you still have a desire to read his book.

Something was in the air, but it wasn't a dirigible.