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NOVEMBER 1896 – APRIL 1897 · THE AIRSHIP WAVE OVER INDIANA
Fifty years before the saucers, the same kind of wave crossed the same country, and this article tests it over Walkerton's ground. The mystery-airship wave ran from mid-November 1896 — a winged ship drawn in the San Francisco Call over Sacramento on November 17 — to the end of April 1897. The scholarly count, from David Jacobs's The UFO Controversy in America (Indiana University Press, 1975) and Daniel Cohen's The Great Airship Mystery (1981), is more than 1,200 newspaper articles in over 400 papers across 41 states and 6 Canadian provinces. The wave died down in December, revived in Nebraska in February 1897, and spread north and east for ten weeks: by mid-April it was over Omaha, Kansas City, Nashville, Chicago and Evanston, and Waterloo, Iowa, and by April 20 there were sightings in Wisconsin and Indiana. Indiana's own entries in the case catalogs are three. On April 13, 1897, the Chicago Record carried the item "Airship seen in Rock Island, Illinois and Elkhart, Indiana!" — Elkhart, the seat of the county directly east of this one. On April 14, at Gas City in Grant County, an object was reported landed two kilometres south of town on John Roush's property, stampeding horses and cattle, with six occupants said to have come out to make repairs before it rose and flew east. On Friday, April 16, at nine in the evening, a mysterious airship passed twice over Vincennes, in the state's southwest, the Vincennes Morning Commercial describing a sphere of golden light and the dark lines of a car beneath it; the rival Western Sun answered with a tongue-in-cheek parody, which is also part of the record.
Over this ground — Walkerton and St. Joseph County — the wave leaves no report at all in the record reached. The catalogs and chronologies swept for this build (NICAP's pre-1947 chronology, which carries the Gas City and Vincennes entries above; the Jacobs and Cohen-based wave summaries; the Chicago papers' day-by-day airship columns) contain no Walkerton, South Bend, or Mishawaka airship report, and no other Indiana entry north of Gas City except Elkhart's. The wave was overhead in the adjoining county on April 13, 1897; on this ground it printed nothing. The verdict the scholarship gives the whole wave is printed with it, as this section's rule requires: Thomas Eddie Bullard, the leading student of the 1897 reports, concluded that "there are no genuine UFOs among the 1897 airships," that "the reliable airship stories are not spectacular and the spectacular airship stories are not reliable," with newspaper fabrication, kites, and Venus doing much of the work — and no practical dirigible existed anywhere in 1896–97 to be the thing seen. The town's own paper of the day, the Walkerton Independent, was publishing in 1897; a full-text sweep of its surviving run in Hoosier State Chronicles is the settling source for the last inch of this negative, and is named here as the gap that remains.
Sources: NICAP, Pre-1947 Chronology (nicap.org), Gas City (Apr. 14, 1897) and Vincennes (Apr. 16, 1897) entries, the Vincennes item from the Vincennes Morning Commercial via the Valley Advance, Mar. 18, 1980; Chicago Record airship columns of Apr. 3–13, 1897, as reprinted in the period literature (Elkhart, Indiana, Apr. 13, 1897); ThinkAnomalous, "Mystery Airship Sightings, 1896–1897," summarizing Jacobs (1975) and Cohen (1981); Nebraska State Historical Society, airship-wave summary (editors' fabrications; Venus and kites among the explanations).