The current drone panic on the eastern US seaboard – which started out in New Jersey about a month ago, but has spread to Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, and even US bases in the UK and Germany – is, of course, hardly unprecedented. Not only does it bear obvious similarities to the 2019 drone panic in the US Midwest, and to the Gatwick drones panic in 2018, but also to a whole series of much earlier panics involving threatening objects in the sky which are at least partly imaginary. (Some of the drones may well be drones. But many, if not most, are nothing more unusual than civilian aircraft on routine flights. When they're not stars, that is.) I'm thinking less here of the post-1947 UFO phenomenon, which by and large was not initially viewed with suspicion or alarm, or even the mystery airships seen across the US in 1896 and 1897, which similarly were generally the object of curiosity, not fear, but the British phantom airship panics of 1909 and 1913, as well the mystery aeroplane panic in Australia and New Zealand in 1918. It's a whole new Scareship Age.

While the sociological mechanisms of the construction and transmission of the idea of mystery aircraft has probably remained fairly constant over the last 160-odd years, it has certainly accelerated with the coming of various modes of mass media, including, now, social media. More interestingly, their cultural form is greatly dependent on the technological context. Hence the progression from balloons to airships to aeroplanes to rockets to spaceships to helicopters and now to drones (which, although a retrograde step in terms of their lack of cosmic scope, are novel technologies in the way that the artefacts of the space age can no longer be). But even more interestingly is the way that the threat or promise of mystery aircraft shifts with (geo)political context. So the American mystery airships of the 1890s were generally supposed to be flown by American inventors; the British phantom airships before 1914 were German surveillance platforms; the Scandinavian mystery aeroplanes in the 1930s were Soviet infiltrators; after the Second World War, flying saucers were piloted by space brothers or nocturnal abductors (actually, that is something of a break: the UFO phenomenon became its own, much bigger thing to a large extent – one reason why I steer clear of it). And so on.

Anyway, I want to focus on one aspect of the current flap which has historical antecedents. A New Jersey congressional representative, Jeff Van Drew, has claimed that the mystery drones plaguing his home state are being flown from an Iranian drone ship off the coast.

So the Iranian mothership brought to mind three earlier motherships, two German, one presumably so. The first was theorised to explain the remarkable airship sightings near Cardiff in May 1909, which was were widely assumed to be German in origin. Despite the fact that it was the long range of Zeppelins which made them an obvious explanation for the fly-by-nights, South Wales seemed just a bit too far away for this to be plausible with 1909 technology. So an unnamed 'Cardiff man, who has made a study of aerial navigation for many years, and whose son is at present in London exhibiting a dirigible airship' (and so must be Joseph Willows, father of E. T. Willows) expressed

his belief that the mysterious craft is a small airship sent up from a steamer either in the Bristol Channel or off the South Coast. He adds that it would quite possible to do this, and he conjectures that the steamer, with lights out, approached within four or five miles of the coast during the night, and that then the airship was sent up for its nocturnal journey. Presumably the airship did not turn its light until after it had left the steamer, and extinguished them again shortly before returning to it. If this were so, the fact that after getting out into mid-channel early this morning the airship suddenly put out its lights would point the presence of the vessel from which it came the Bristol Channel.¹

No such ship was ever identified.

The next mothership was just a couple of months later, in July 1909, but this time off New Zealand, where there had been a wave of sightings all over the Dominion. Here I only have second-hand summaries, one hostile, but the gist is that one of the theories put forward to explain the mystery airships (by no means the most popular one, or even a popular one) was that 'the light [seen at Invercargill] was that of an airship sent to reconnoitre by the German yacht Seestern, which has not been heard of recently'.² Or, rather more sarcastically,

These mysterious lights have been appearing, too, in Invercargill, of all places in this world, and Invercargill has decided that the light is probably the head-light of an airship, sent to reconnoitre by the German yacht Seestern. Nothing could be more natural. The night is the best time, and an airship the safest vehicle, for finding out the lay of the country. No self-respecting German would so far affront the current conception of him by hiring a buggy, or using the railway.³

The Seestern, in any case, was not any sort of warship, but a government steamer which serviced the German colony of New Guinea. (That's it in the photo at the top of the post, peacefully anchored off Friedrich-Wilhelmshafen, now Madang.) It went missing after leaving Brisbane on 3 June and no trace of it was ever found again. But the very idea that it was the source of the mystery airship made it possible to talk about the supposed German threat to New Zealand, despite there being no way a Zeppelin could reach the Antipodes in 1909.

The third and best example of a mystery aircraft mothership is from Australia in 1918, where there was an extensive, nation-wide panic over German aeroplanes. As there were no known German aeroplanes anywhere near Australia at the time (and even if there had been any in German colonies in the region, and even if they had evaded capture in 1914, there is no possibility that any could have reached Australian skies, especially not in the numbers and locations seen). Trying to make sense of dozens of widespread reports, by the end of April 1918 the Navy Office in Melbourne had conjectured that

Accepting all the reports as correct, and assuming that some or all of the aircraft are from vessels at sea, there must be at least four such vessels. If the aircraft come from land bases, the number of bases must be at least four, and almost certainly several more than four.⁴

This, finally, was a semi-plausible theory, as a German raider, SMS Wolf, had sailed in Australian waters in 1917. And Wolf did carry a seaplane, which had even supposedly (but probably not actually) flown over Sydney Harbour. Australia's meagre naval and aerial forces at home were mobilised a search for either German ships or German bases in and along Bass Strait. And found nothing.

Which brings us back to the Iranian drone ship. No matter that the Pentagon denies that this ship is the origin of the New Jersey drones, or that the ship in question is still in the Persian Gulf. Just by virtue of having been made, the claim serves to supply a physical link between the drones at home and a foreign, hostile power, as well as constructing it as a military operation. The lack of any clear motive or strategic aim, let alone actual threat, is a feature, not a bug, as it permits and indeed encourages worst-case scenario thinking. As always, mystery aircraft are the projections of our hopes and fears onto the not-so-empty skies above.

Image source: Wikipedia.

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1. Birmingham Mail, 20 May 1909, 3. [↩]
2. Dominion (Wellington), 28 July 1909, 8. [↩]
3. Ibid., 6. [↩]
4. National Archives of Australia: MP1049/1, 1918/066, Directorate of Military Intelligence, General Staff, HB53, ‘Aircraft, lights and objects reported seen in the air’, 28 April 1918, 12. [↩]