No less than three new phantom airship reports in today’s papers: two from South Wales, which is fast becoming scareship central, and one from Croydon in the south-east of England. To take the last airship first, as the Daily Express says, ‘This is the first time that it has been reported so near London’ (p. […]
‘The Passing Show’, a regular political commentary in the Dublin Sunday Independent, today takes note of the airship mystery (p. 6). It begins in a somewhat lighthearted fashion: The ‘phantom airship’ scare is again occupying the attention of the British public, and, as usual, giving the anti-German section of the said B.P. food for grave
Flight mentions the mystery airships in its editorial comment today, though only briefly and somewhat disparagingly. By the same token, it is quite happy to make use of them. The actual topic, inspired by the Daily Telegraph, is ‘Our aerial fleet’ (p. 107). It begins by claiming that in ‘the matter of our aerial defences
The current issue of Wartime, the official magazine of the Australian War Memorial, has an article by me on the Australian mystery aeroplane scare of 1918. I’m very pleased with how it’s turned out — it’s beautifully illustrated and put together. The theme of the issue is ‘air warfare’, which I imagine may be of
The Daily Express and the Standard both carry articles today trying to make sense of the phantom airship sightings, each framed very differently. The article in the Express begins by asking (p. 5; above): Is a German airship making flights by night over England? That is a question which is being asked by many people
A new mystery airship report today, from a new part of the country — ‘the coast of Mid Wales’ (Daily Express, p. 1; above): An ‘Express’ correspondent at Aberystwyth states that it was seen by country people approaching the village of Chancery, a few miles south of Aberystwyth, at 8.25 on Saturday night [25 January
A somewhat atypical phantom airship report appears in today’s newspapers. It’s from the suburbs of one of the great cities, Liverpool. With a population of around three quarters of a million, Liverpool is more than three times the size of the biggest city to have previously reported a mystery aircraft, Cardiff. According to the Standard,
The Daily Express reports (p. 7, above) on another mystery airship at Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast — this time it was seen rather than heard: Samuel Harris, who is employed at the corporation pumping station at the north end of town, states that a few minutes before midnight on Thursday [23 January 1913] he
The Norfolk News, Eastern Counties Journal, and Norwich, Yarmouth, and Lynn Commercial Gazette, presumably universally known as the Norfolk News, today carries the usual paragraph about the Cardiff airship sighting. Unsurprisingly, it pays considerably more attention to the mystery aircraft heard locally at Yarmouth at midnight last week (above, p. 10). It reproduces Herbert Pertwee’s
Only recycled news today: the Yeovil Western Gazette, p. 2, and the Cambridge Independent Press, p. 5, reprint the paragraph about the Cardiff airship which circulated widely on Tuesday, while the Exeter Western Times, p. 11, reprints its own article on the Bristol lights from yesterday. The Standard has a follow-up to the letter about
