A few years ago I took part in a very enjoyable Tales from Rat City podcast episode, hosted by David Waldron and centred around the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane panic from the perspective of Ballarat in the Victorian goldfields region. That had actors reading out primary source quotations, which was a great way to highlight […]
Catherine Warr, a Yorkshire-based historian, recently posted a video on the British phantom airship panic of 1909 which you can watch on YouTube, or right here: This is terrific public history: engaging and fun while being informative and accurate. Catherine has dozens more videos on her channel, including a bunch of airminded ones (e.g. British airships;
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
When is an mystery aeroplane panic not a mystery aeroplane panic? When it’s a mystery sampan panic, obviously.
I’m featured in the latest episode of the podcast Tales from Rat City, which is focused on unusual and sometimes bizarre aspects of the history of Ballarat, Victoria’s third largest city (if you’ve heard of the Eureka Stockade, well, that’s where that was). It’s run by David Waldron (a historian at Federation University who co-authored
‘In the future, every historian will be relevant for 15 minutes’, as somebody once said. Here’s my 15 minutes, an interview with journalist Connor Echols for Responsible Statecraft on the parallels between the 1913 phantom airship panic and the 2023 spy balloon panic. As I’ve been busy with other things and have had to watch
After 1903, 1911, 1913 and 1928, it’s time to round off this miscellany of Australian mystery aircraft with 1939 and 1940 — separated by little over a year in time, but quite far apart in place and circumstance.
Continuing this miscellany, on 23 August 1913 the Maitland Daily Mercury published a letter from the Reverend G. W. Payne reporting that he, his wife, and a Mr and Mrs Preston had seen ‘an aeroplane with searchlight hovering fairly high over Newcastle and the Hunter Valley‘.1 This was just before 4am on 22 August 1913,
It’s been a while since I’ve done a mystery aircraft post, so here are a few Australian ones I’ve been saving up for a rainy day (or days):
After its early showing in the 1909 mystery airship wave, Australia was rarely visited by phantom airships proper. Maybe that’s because real airships were even rarer, with none that I know of between 1914 and the late twentieth century: they just weren’t a very plausible thing to think you saw. But they did turn up
