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November 1896 – April 1897 · Run B #170
Tested negative over this ground, at newspaper strength: between mid-November 1896 and the end of April 1897 the American press carried the mystery-airship wave — more than 1,200 articles in over 400 newspapers in 41 states and six Canadian provinces, by the standard scholarly count — beginning over Sacramento on 17 November 1896, dying down in December, and returning in February 1897 through Nebraska and the Midwest until, by 20 April, the lights were reported over Chicago, Wisconsin and Indiana, and by May they had nearly ceased. Indiana's wave is documented where Indiana's papers survive in the open record: at Gas City on 14 April 1897, where the Magonia catalogue, from the county press, records an object landed two kilometres south of town on John Roush's property with six occupants who seemed to make repairs; and at Vincennes on the night of Friday 16 April 1897, where the Vincennes Morning Commercial reported the airship twice over the city, a sphere of golden light on the eastern horizon and then a slower pass over the fairgrounds. Against that documented state wave, the wave was tested over this ground specifically, in the wave's own catalogues (NICAP's pre-1947 chronology, the Magonia-derived lists) and in the northern-Indiana press record as reached through Hoosier State Chronicles: no airship report names Osceola, Penn Township, South Bend or Mishawaka. The wave's Indiana track in the open record runs through the state's centre and south — Gas City, Vincennes — and the expert verdict on the whole wave, Thomas Eddie Bullard's, quoted in NICAP's chronology, applies here with force: “the reliable airship stories are not spectacular and the spectacular airship stories are not reliable,” and no genuine unknown survives among them. Verdict for this ground: the wave crossed Indiana and left no report on this ground that the searched record carries. The settling door for any late find is named: the South Bend Tribune's and the Mishawaka Enterprise's 1896–97 files on film at the St. Joseph County Public Library and the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library, read day by day — the open digital run does not reach them whole.
The wave's standard accounts and catalogues: ThinkAnomalous's sourced summary (1,200+ articles, 400+ papers, the April 1897 Indiana reach); NICAP's pre-1947 chronology (Gas City, 14 April 1897, Magonia #16; the Vincennes Morning Commercial account of 16 April 1897; Bullard's verdict); searches of the chronologies for St. Joseph County place-names, shown in the article.