A number of newspapers print articles of varying length about the Dover airship mystery today, including the Yeovil Western Gazette, the Exeter Western Times, and the Lichfield Mercury. None of these add any new information about this incident, one being a reprint of an article already published in another newspaper and the other two simply […]
Alluding to the airship supposedly seen at Dover (assuming Saturday is meant, rather than Sunday as written), the Devon and Exeter Gazette notes (p. 4; above) that ‘similar lights have been seen on the Somerset coast line of the Bristol Channel during the last three or four weeks’ (so going back to mid-December 1912, at
The Times (p. 6; above) has two paragraphs about the reported visit of an unknown flying machine to Dover at about 5am on Saturday morning, 4 January 1913, evidently coming from the direction of the Continent and heading north-east. It was seen by John Hobbs, a corporation employee (i.e. a council worker), though he heard
Starting tomorrow, I will be be post-blogging the 1913 British phantom airship scare as it appeared in the press, one hundred years earlier to the day. This scare was much longer than the 1909 one: that lasted for less than three weeks, but the 1913 took over three months to run its course. (Longer, if
The XXIII Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association for European History will be held at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in July 2013, and I’ll be presenting a paper with the following title and abstract: ‘What are the Germans up to?’ The British phantom airship scare of 1913 In late 1912 and early 1913,
Over at The Appendix, ‘a new journal of narrative & experimental history’ to which you can subscribe, Felipe Fernandes Cruz has reproduced some intriguing declassified US documents from the early 1940s concerning rumours of clandestine German airfields in Brazil. The reason for the US interest in any evidence of German activity in South America, apart
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] New York waited for an air raid in June 1918. For thirteen nights from 4 June, much of the city was blacked out to avoid giving German pilots any assistance in locating targets to bomb. The New York Times reported the following day that: Electric signs and all
On 1 April 1909, the citizens of Pittsburg (between 1891 and 1911 the ‘h’ was omitted) were the victims of a rather cruel April Fool’s joke. An afternoon edition of one of the city’s newspapers (the Pittsburg Dispatch reported the story so probably wasn’t the hoaxer) informed them that Japan had invaded the United States:
The phantom airships seen over Britain in the early months of 1913 had their counterparts in Europe. It’s hard to reconstruct what happened from the scattered references in English-language sources, but it seems that far fewer were seen than in Britain, even in toto. Here are the ones I’ve been able to find mentioned in
In my discussion of the ill-fated Sykes Memo, I noted that it included proposed force levels for the Dominion air forces, which I haven’t seen discussed before. This is interesting because it came at an interesting moment. It’s early December 1918, with the Empire was in the flush of victory and all things seeming possible
