http://airminded.org/scareships/1909/05/07/clacton-on-sea-essex/ The British phantom airship scares, 1909-1913 Wed, 03 Mar 2010 03:51:00 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 http://airminded.org/scareships/1909/05/07/clacton-on-sea-essex/comment-page-1/#comment-5080 Airminded · The Scareship Age Thu, 21 Dec 2006 15:38:54 +0000 http://airminded.org/scareships/2005/06/11/clacton-on-sea-essex/#comment-5080 [...] Some of the sightings themselves did support the idea that Zeppelins were responsible. For example, a Mr. Egerton Free of Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, saw a long sausage-shaped airship manoeuvring over the cliffs for a few minutes at dusk. It hovered at 600 feet for a few minutes, and then departed in a north-easterly direction. The next day, Free found ‘a curious object’, a sort of piston weighing 35 lb and stamped with the words ‘Müller Bremen Fabrik’.3 This was taken to mean that it was made in a factory in Bremen, Germany, and the War Office was reported to have confiscated it. But — aside from the fact that investigations failed to turn up any such factory — we now know that it was virtually impossible for German airships to have visited Britain in 1909. No German record has ever been found of such flights, which would have been would have been hazardous in the extreme for the underpowered and slow airships of that time. Also, while Essex and Norfolk were likely enough landfalls for airships crossing the North Sea from Germany, South Wales was not. And the mystery airships were almost universally seen to be carrying searchlights, which they played on the landscape below — a common enough device in drawings of airships at this time (see image above), but not at all common in practice, and not conducive to secrecy, either. [...] [...] Some of the sightings themselves did support the idea that Zeppelins were responsible. For example, a Mr. Egerton Free of Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, saw a long sausage-shaped airship manoeuvring over the cliffs for a few minutes at dusk. It hovered at 600 feet for a few minutes, and then departed in a north-easterly direction. The next day, Free found ‘a curious object’, a sort of piston weighing 35 lb and stamped with the words ‘Müller Bremen Fabrik’.3 This was taken to mean that it was made in a factory in Bremen, Germany, and the War Office was reported to have confiscated it. But — aside from the fact that investigations failed to turn up any such factory — we now know that it was virtually impossible for German airships to have visited Britain in 1909. No German record has ever been found of such flights, which would have been would have been hazardous in the extreme for the underpowered and slow airships of that time. Also, while Essex and Norfolk were likely enough landfalls for airships crossing the North Sea from Germany, South Wales was not. And the mystery airships were almost universally seen to be carrying searchlights, which they played on the landscape below — a common enough device in drawings of airships at this time (see image above), but not at all common in practice, and not conducive to secrecy, either. [...]

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