No phantom airships have been seen in the skies over Britain for the better part of a week, but it appears that one may have crashed in, of all places, Germany. The Derby Daily Telegraph carries the following story from Reuter’s in Berlin (p. 3): Eighty chasseurs of the Guards are searching for the remains […]
There is very little phantom airship news today. The Exeter Western Times reports on the airship seen over London on Friday night (p. 4): An airship hoax has been worked on a London crowd. A smithfield [sic] porter, realising how little a thing will attract a crowd, stood for a few seconds looking intently up
The Aero Manual: A Manual of Mechanically-propelled Human Flight, Covering the History of the Work of Early Investigators, and of the Pioneer Work of the Last Century. Recent Successes, and the Reasons Therefor, are Dealt With, Together with Many Constructive Details Concerning Airships, Aeroplanes, Gliders, etc. London: Temple Press, 1910. 2nd edition. Well, the title
For the first time, a phantom airship has been seen over the very heart of London, ‘A full week behind the provinces’, as the Daily Express says (p. 1). Previously, no reports came from closer than Croydon (South London) or Hendon (North London), about a month ago. Yet relatively few newspapers seem to be interested
Phantom airships attract relatively little attention in the press today. For the first time in more than a week there are no new sightings to report. Stale (and slightly garbled) news about the Grimsby box kite and the City of Leeds and Othello sightings appear in the Aberdeen Daily Journal and the Western Gazette, while
Press coverage of mystery airships hasn’t quite fallen off a cliff, but it is perhaps scrabbling down a rocky slope. Only a handful of newspapers mention them today, and not even yesterday’s startling report from the trawler Othello rates a mention. While there is still considerable (mostly negative) discussion of the new aerial navigation regulations,
The big news today is that the government has issued, in the words of the Daily Express, ‘a long list of regulations under the new Aerial Navigation Act to prevent foreign aircraft from flying over Great Britain or Ireland’ (p. 1) The extraordinary thing is that despite their length (9 orders, 4 schedules, a notice,
The Dundee Courier today has a long article providing more details of the airship seen by Captain Lundie and the crew the City of Leeds off Grimsby — ‘It was travelling at a fast rate, and somewhat resembled a shark in shape’ (p. 5) — and the Daily Express has an even longer, more reflective
It’s a new week, and (mercifully) the volume of phantom airship stories has dropped sharply. But not to zero. Mr H. Wooliley of 10a Rose Lane, Mossley Hill, Liverpool, has written in to the Liverpool Echo to report that (p. 7) Last night (Sunday) [2 March 1913] at 7.45, looking over Eastham way, a very
The Observer has ignored the phantom airship scare almost completely, although it was in fact one of the first newspapers to report the Dover incident nearly two months ago (5 January 1913, p. 9). It has broken its silence today because, thanks to the mystery airships, the time seems right for an agitation for a
