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
Not a lot of new scareship news today. The Cardiff airship seen last Friday remains the principal focus. The Dundee Evening News reprints, p. 5, the same article about further witnesses carried by a number of newspapers yesterday, so that’s nothing new. The Manchester Guardian says, p. 12 (above) that ‘the noise of its propellers
Captain Lindsay’s appeal for other witnesses to the airship he saw at Cardiff has not been in vain. A number of newspapers today print the same brief paragraph noting the existence of ‘other eye-witnesses’ (not named) — the syndicalist Daily Herald, p. 7; Dundee Courier, p. 6; Liverpool Echo, p. 5; Manchester Courier, p. 10;
Press coverage of the phantom airships has so far been somewhat scattershot, with articles in only two or three newspapers on any given day. Today, however, at least eight newspapers report on an airship seen at Cardiff, five of them London dailies (all politically conservative, as it happens) — though admittedly it is not given
