More about the Gilles Fernandez Airship

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

Max B. Miller, in his 1957 mag/book, Flying Saucers: Fact or Fiction, had this about airships:

On the 22^nd and 30^th of November, 1896, a “cigar-shaped object with stubby wings”…appeared and was viewed by thousands of residents over the areas of Oakland. San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Sacramento, Chico, and other cities of Central California. But not until the following year did the phenomena receive nation-wide import and renown.

On March 29, 1897. Omaha reported a similar object, and Denver on the 30^th.

Kansas City reported a “mysterious light” on April 1^st. “It was directed toward the earth, traveling east at a rate of sixty miles an hour,” reported the New York Sun.

By April 9^th, newspaper accounts had been dispatched from Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Iowa, and Wisconsin.

During the night of April 9-10, at Chicago until 2 a.m., “thousands of amazed spectators,” said the New York Herald on the 14^th, “declared that the lights seen in the northwest were those of an airship, or some floating object….Some declare they saw two cigar-shaped objects and great wings.” And this was five years before the Wright Brothers made their historic flight in a h heavier-than-air craft. The Herald, of April 12^th, reported the “cigar-shaped” object and framework had been photographed by a Chicagoan. [Page 10, Bold type, mine.]

Is this that photograph?

A 1910 photo by famed photographer Alfred Stieglitz of a “dirigible” (or so it is thought to be):

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