by John A. Keel
Our final contactee is that “well-known Iron Mountain railroad conductor,” the redoubtable Captain James Hooton, who claimed to have seen the airship, talked to men aboard it, and who drew an elaborate sketch for the newspapers, which showed a cigar-shaped vehicle covered with vanes, wings, and propellers. “Those who know Mr. Hooton will vouch for the truth of his statement,” the Arkansas Gazette of April 22, 1897, noted.
It seems that Captain Hooton was hunting near Homan, Arkansas (no date is given for the incident) when he heard a familiar sound, “a sound for all the world like the workings of an air pump on a locomotive.” He walked in the direction of the sound and came upon an open field containing the magnificent airship.
There was a medium-sized-looking man aboard and I noticed that he was wearing smoked glasses [sunglasses]. He was tinkering around what seemed to be the back end of the ship, and as I approached I was too dumbfounded to speak. He looked at me in surprise, and said, “Good day, sir; good day.” I asked, “Is this the airship?” and he replied, “Yes, sir,” whereupon three or four other men came out of what was apparently the keel of the ship. A close examination showed that the keel was divided into two parts, terminating in front like the sharp edge of a knife; in fact, the entire front end of the ship terminated in a knife-like edge, while the sides of the ship bulged gradually toward the middle, and then receded. There were three large wheels upon each side made of some bending metal and arranged so that they became concave as they moved forward. “I beg pardon, sir,” I said. “The noise sounds a good deal like a Westinghouse air brake.” “Perhaps it does, my friend. We are using condensed air and aeroplanes, but you will know more later on.” “All ready, sir,” someone called out, when the party all disappeared below. I observed that just in front of each wheel a two-inch tube began to spurt air on the wheels and they commenced revolving. The ship gradually arose with a hissing sound. The aeroplanes [wings] suddenly sprang forward, turning their sharp edges skyward, then the rudders at the end of the ship began to veer to one side, and the wheels revolved so fast that one could scarcely see the blades. In less time than it takes to tell you, the ship had gone out of sight.
There are many fascinating details in Captain Hooton’s narrative. Again and again in modern contactee stories we are told that the UFO occupants wear goggles or ordinary sunglasses, perhaps to hide distinctive Oriental eyes. Hooton was apparently told very little except that he would “know more later on.” His description of the craft makes it sound like a Rube Goldberg contraption, but rotating disks have been described on modern UFOs, too. And some equally strange-looking objects have apparently been sighted.
Enough of these reports have now been uncovered so that we can safely assume that some of these airships did land and that, at least, bearded men were aboard them. Some researchers point to 1897 as proof that we were being visited by Martians or Venusians at that time. This not only seems unlikely; in view of these stories it seems impossible. No, there has to be another answer to all of this.
Analysis of the 1897 Flap
Working purely from newspaper accounts is not easy, particularly because the standards of journalism in 1897 left much to be desired. But we weeded out 126 accounts that seemed reliable, named witnesses, and appeared to be responsibly written. All of these sample cases were reported in April 1897, and came from fourteen states. Actually the spring flap began in March in several states and tapered off in May. There were mass sightings in Omaha, Nebraska, in March, and in April an airship passed directly over Chicago, Illinois, and was reportedly viewed by thousands. A few days before that sighting (April 9) the Chicago papers had carried articles ridiculing the reports that were coming in from other sections of the country. Maybe the bearded “inventor” decided to put on a show for the skeptical Chicagoans.
In my outline of the flap of March 8, 1967, in Chapter 1 of this book, you will note that case No. 16 was reported in Eldora, a small town of about 3,000 souls smack in the middle of Iowa. On April 9, 1897, they also had sightings in this unlikely place! In fact, if we compare the 1897 flap with the things that are going on now, we find that the sightings have been concentrated in many specific areas for many years. The area around Dallas, Texas, is one. Michigan is another. There was a well-publicized flap in Michigan in March 1966 around Ann Arbor and Hillsdale. There were sightings in Ann Arbor on April 17, 1897. Michigan had, in fact, 30.5 percent of all the sightings used in our 1897 study. There is still constant UFO activity in that state, despite the dearth of publicity.
In 1897, when people saw actual objects they described them as being cigar-shaped or being large dark forms with lights attached. No flying saucers turned up in the reports I have collected. But the night-time observations then were exactly the same as they are now: bright lights with colored lights flashing around them, often moving in an erratic fashion but apparently controlled. It is possible that the airship was nothing more than a decoy—a cover for the real activity that was taking place in 1897. Certainly these objects did not consist of one or two clumsy balloons shuffling across the country.
On the night of Saturday, April 17, 1897, alone, there were reported sightings in seven scattered towns and cities in Michigan. That same night, twelve towns in Texas, far, far from Michigan, had sightings, as did Waterloo, Iowa, and St. Louis, Missouri. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of people involved in some of these sightings. We cannot dismiss them all, nor can we explain them. Texas had more than 20 percent of all the sightings in 1897, and that state has had continuous sightings for the past twenty years.
Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, South Dakota, Texas, and Washington, D.C., had sightings on April 15, 1897. About 25 percent of all the 1897 sightings occurred at approximately 9 P.M.; 20 percent at 8 P.M.; 20 percent at 10 P.M.; 15 percent at midnight.
Others were scattered in the early-morning hours. Most of the reported landings took place at 11 P.M. or later. This time pattern still holds true today.
Obviously, the great 1897 flap had much in common with the sightings of 1968. In short, nothing much has changed.
We have no way of knowing how many sightings went unreported, or how many published reports have been lost or still remain undiscovered. New ones are coming to light all the time. Each new flap since 1964 seems to have begun somewhere in the Midwest, in those mysteriously favored states, and spread out from there. Of course, because the activity seems to cluster in the more thinly populated areas, the reports are reduced to an unsatisfactory trickle. Despite all the collections of descriptions of lights and wheels in the sky, we suffer from a real shortage of geographical data and are only just now beginning to learn how to properly analyze what little “hard” data is available.
If the newspapers of 1897 had not been so willing to ridicule the sightings and the sighters and had not indulged in devising nonsensical and misleading sightings of their own, we might have been able to untangle some of this sooner. There was no one crying “Censorship!” in 1897, yet many skeptical editors probably chose to ignore the phenomenon altogether, just as many of their modern counterparts do. A great cigar equipped with a powerful beacon is supposed to have passed over Sistersville, West Virginia, on April 19, 1897, but when I visited Sistersville in 1967, I learned to my dismay that the old newspaper office—and all of its files—had been destroyed by fire in the early 1950s.[4] Incidentally, many of the 1897 reports refer to powerful beacons or searchlights with which the objects sprayed blinding light over the ground they passed. This is still another thing that turns up repeatedly in modern UFO reports.
I do not doubt that someone was carefully flying over the United States in 1897, paying great attention to special isolated areas. We can lay out on the map the actual courses of some of these objects and find that they often flew an almost straight line over several towns on a given night until they reached a place where a landing was later reported. Meteorites and swamp gas don’t fit into these patterns. But neither do Martians and Venusians.
Whoever was involv
ed in these activities knew precisely what they were doing, and they set up a careful smokescreen to cover their real activities. They engineered much of the ridicule, confusion, and disbelief that followed in their wake. By applying the techniques of what we now call psychological warfare, they managed to deceive a whole generation and they’re still doing it.
Patterns of Deception
The operators of the wonderful 1896 airship(s) followed a careful plan which becomes transparent now that we are able to apply hindsight to the huge pile of newspaper reports. Here is a summary of the staged events, pieced together from many newspaper clippings of the period.
Early in November 1896, before the California airship excitement had erupted, an impressive stranger visited the office of a prominent attorney in San Francisco named George D. Collins. This man, never identified in the numerous newspaper accounts, told Collins that he was the inventor of a marvelous new airship that operated on compressed air. He asked Collins to represent him and help him obtain a patent. The lawyer was shown detailed drawings of the invention and was duly impressed. The mystery man seemed intelligent and articulate, appeared to be in his late forties, was “of dark complexion, dark-eyed, and about 5 feet 7 inches in height and weighed about 140 pounds.” He was described as being very well dressed and projected an aura of wealth.
A few days after the first airship sightings hit the San Francisco newspapers, Collins told reporters that he had met the inventor of the craft and that he knew all about the airship. Reporters were unable to locate the mystery man. However, he soon visited an even better-known legal adviser, one William Henry Harrison Hart, who had once run for the office of state attorney general.
Soon after the flap peaked, a statement signed by Hart appeared on page 1 of the San Francisco Call (Sunday, November 29, 1896): “I have not seen it [the airship] personally but have talked with the man who claims to be the inventor. I have spent several hours with him. He has shown me drawings and diagrams of his invention, and I am convinced that they are more adapted for the purpose for which he claims them than any other invention making such claims that I have ever seen…I asked the gentleman who claims to be the inventor what his desires were in regard to carrying on the business, and he stated that he did not desire any money; that he didn’t ask or want anyone to invest in it; that he was not a citizen of California, and that he had come here to perfect and test his airship …I will admit that this is the first time to my knowledge that anybody had anything in California in which he did not want anybody to invest money.”
According to Hart, the invention operated on gas and electricity, and the inventor expressed interest in using his machine to fly to Cuba and drive out the Spaniards. Some of the local newspapers apparently misquoted both Collins and Hart badly, and this probably led to Hart’s issuance of a signed statement. By the end of November, Collins was so disgusted that he refused to see reporters or discuss the matter further.
The mysterious inventor had managed to single out two of the most respected men in California. They had, in good faith, served as his spokesmen, and their reports were widely circulated. The flap of that Thanksgiving week supported their stories, but the inventor never came forward to enjoy his triumph. He simply vanished after the sightings subsided.
The description of the mystery man—dark-complexioned, dark-eyed, slight in stature—bears a remarkable resemblance to the numerous descriptions of the airship occupants as published five months later during the wave of April 1897. Also, witnesses to some of the 1897 landings claimed that the occupants discussed the situation in Cuba. Some of the minor discrepancies in the published stories of Hart and Collins may have been journalistic errors or may have been based on understandable misinterpretations of the technical data offered by the inventor. Collins thought the objects operated on compressed air, while Hart said they ran on gas and electricity. Compressed air was a favorite with inventors in those days. Gasoline and steam engines and electric motors were primitive, heavy and inefficient. A few years previously, one man, John Keely of Philadelphia, had built a strange contraption that could bend bars of steel and do other things considered impossible for ordinary machines of the period. Detractors claimed that the Keely engine really operated on compressed air. Actually, compressed-air motors required large, heavy tanks and pumps, spent their energy very quickly, and would be completely impractical for use in any flying machines where weight was an important consideration. The only effective use of compressed air was in World War I torpedoes, which had to travel relatively short distances and were expendable.
A summary of the mystery inventor affair appears in Mysteries of the Skies: UFOs in Perspective, by Gordon I. R. Lore and Harold H. Deneault, Jr. UFO historian Lucius Farish has uncovered hundreds of other clippings and reports. When all of this material is carefully studied, it seems, in retrospect, that the “inventor” was actually some kind of front man for the phenomenon and that he had prior knowledge of the impending flap. He therefore planted his airship story convincingly with Collins and Hart, knowing that their reputations would carry it a long way. It did seem like a reasonable explanation for the sightings that occurred, even though none of the witnesses reported an object which fitted Collins’ description of a winged aluminum craft exactly. And as I have already pointed out, the frequency and distribution of the sightings indicated that several objects were actually in operation at one time.
In hundreds of modern UFO events we have repetitions of this tactic, which I call the press-agent game. In these events, small, dark-skinned, dark-eyed gentlemen appear in an area immediately before or immediately after a flying saucer flap. These cases are not widely known and have been poorly investigated because the hard-core cultists have found it impossible to reconcile such seemingly normal beings with “extraterrestrial visitants.”
Striking examples of the press-agent game can be found in the religious and occult lore, going back thousands of years. Weeks before the birth of Christ, three dark-skinned men with Oriental features arrived in King Herod’s court. They were obviously men of wealth and breeding, just like our mystery inventor. The various records say that they generated great excitement with their revelation that a very special child would soon be born somewhere in Judea. By making this appearance before King Herod and spreading this story, they made certain that the impending birth would be recorded in the court records and preserved for the ages. After successfully carrying out this mission, the trio “from the East” proceeded to Bethlehem, where they created another stir and focused attention on the Christ Child. Then, instead of returning to King Herod to report, as they had promised, they “went home by another way.”
If these men had come from India or even farther away, it would have taken them many months or even years to travel by sea and land to Jerusalem. This would have taken considerable planning and expense and would have demanded that they have advance knowledge of the event. If they had been mortal men, they would almost certainly have created a similar stir when they arrived home in India or wherever, and it is likely that some written record of their story would have been preserved. There seems to be no such record.
Like our mystery inventor, they appeared in the area of the action prior to the event. They visited the most important personage they could find. They circulated their story. And then they vanished.
Our UFO mystery men usually travel in threes, also, and have become popularly known as the three Men in Black. They usually wear somber clothing, have olive complexions, and in most cases, high cheekbones and Oriental eyes.
According to Hart, the 1896 inventor had “three assistants with him, all of whom are mechanics.”
The secret inventor was a tremendously successful ploy in 1896, and it was reused again with many added embellishments in 1897. The story was carefully sustained through a series of landings and occasional planted messages.
Saturday, April 17, 1897, two boys were playing in Chicago’s Lincoln Park when they spotted a package wrapped in brown paper rest
ing high in the limbs of a tree. Daniel J. Schroeder, twelve, shinnied up the tree and retrieved it. When they unwrapped their prize, they found a pasteboard box “containing the remnants of a luncheon,” and attached to the box there was a beautifully engraved card on which was printed the following inscription: “Dropped from the airship Saratoga, Friday, April 16, 1897.” The card was folded and had “an embellished front page.” In the upper corner were printed the words “air ship” and below them was a gilded ensign of a boy standing on a pair of outstretched wings. It was made of fine cardboard and looked expensive. Besides the printed words on the first page, this memo was written in blue pencil on the inside: “9:41P.M.—Due northwest, 2,000 ft.; 61 N. Lat., 33 Long. Descending. Dense fog. Drizzling ‘spods.’” If this message was not a complete hoax these figures would have placed the Saratoga over Greenland.[5]
The Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Argus-Leader commented hopefully on April 21: “There were no names or other useful information on the card, but it is expected that by it the persons operating the aerial navigation scheme may be located. The lunch box was either dropped from the airship and lodged in the branches of the tree or was placed there to hoax people.