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Historic UFO Encounters: Newspaper / Magazine Articles

As far as I know, nobody knows ...

I don't recall anyone ever finding evidence of a viable heavier-than-air craft associated with a specific "airship" sighting.

Lighter-than-air craft were certainly available in the mystery airship heyday period (waning years of the 19th century). However, I don't recall any follow-up documentation demonstrating a given sighting had been determined to involve (e.g.) a known balloon or dirigible X.

It's worth noting that the same period was also the heyday of newspapers' taking liberties in printing homegrown fiction as entertainment or simple column-filler - especially during the annual "silly season" (mid to late summer).
Thanks for the reply

With many of them I expect them to be Hoaxes however there were a few that seemed (from the reports) seem to exhibit classic Fairy behaviour, the most common was asking for water The Fey always seem to ask for it rather bizarrely
 
There were a few dirigibles flying in this period, but they could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
421px-Santos-Dumont_flight_around_the_Eiffel_Tower.jpg

Most of these were in Europe, but one chap sold five dirigibles in the USA,
C.F._Ritchel_in_his_dirigible.jpg


I doubt very much that many of the reports in the USA were caused by real airships, and none of the Australian or New Zealand ones were.
Of course I doubt that these reports were anything to do with aliens either.

A nice overview here.
https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/fear-of-floating-137226392/
Newspapers also reported cases in which witnesses refuted zeppelin sightings. Daniel Blight told the South Wales Daily Post, “The airship was of quarter-circle shape, with two bright lights, one at each end of it…. I drew the attention to it of Constable No. 440C., who was passing at the time, and no doubt he will report it.” But the paper also quoted Constable 440C. saying that what he saw that night was “a particularly bright star, and it was there again on Thursday night.”
Excellent chap.

As for the first sighting, a representative from Constable Kettle’s own constabulary told the Peterborough Express that “for some days and nights before PC Kettle’s vision there was a very fine kite flying over the neighbourhood of Cobden Street.... [T]he kite would have been moored at night, and have a Chinese lantern attached to it….”
“But how do you get over the whirring and beating of engines?” asked the Express reporter.
“Oh, that was the motor which goes all night in the Co-operative Bakery in Cobden Street.”
Somebody was finally using their loaf.
 
I ran into a number of practical jokes encluding a balloon using burning coke as fuel. In one case a man claims to have sent a balloon aloft with a gramophone? playing "Just Tell Them That You Saw Me"
--It was reported later by someone else. And of course many want to conflate the Dellschau material with the airships, too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dellschau
Perhaps he saw a UFO for himself.
 
When I went through the online newspaper databases (TROVE, LOC Newspapers, Oregon Historic Newspapers, Fulton newspapers, California Newspapers, and newspapers.com) wringing them for information with every kind of search I could think of, I did indeed run into instances of fire balloons and other things, but those don't explain the described maneuvers (like dropping hundreds of feet in an instant, or flying off into space where one twinkles like a star before reversing course and hovering over the amazed throngs of citizens and shining beams on them).. . Indeed, large powerful flying lights without any discernible superstructure, formations of lights only, moving around ships and over cities are also very common --and the kind of trauma and shock and awe they deal out are just like UFO sightings. They are not the clumsy slow things mentioned as NOT being them in editorials of the period.. They are more like the Sternenshiff of slightly before the wave:
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/52797757?searchTerm=sky AND "strange metalli c"&searchLimits=exactPhrase=strange+metallic|||any Words|||notWords|||requestHandler|||dateFrom|||dat eTo|||sortby
 
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See what you make of this from 1967. Can't give more details for copyright reasons. The origin of the story is not given.

Dangerous Encounter With Unidentified Huge Ball Floating In The Air

Russian pilot Lieutenant Colonel Lev Vyatkin had two encounters with unknown objects. He served at the Yalta military airport, on the airfield Belbek, in military unit 49222. It was located on the Crimea peninsula, Ukraine, on the northern coast of the Black Sea.
 
Great interviews from the Michigan UFO sightings:
Keyhoe was a HERO, and I love his ears, too.
 
Today’s Sun digs up a classic UFO case from 40 years ago.
SCRAMBLING for a pen and paper, PC Alan Godfrey desperately tried to sketch out the vast, hulking vessel that loomed in front of him - until he was suddenly engulfed by a dazzling white light.

When he came to, the young policeman found himself 100 yards down the Yorkshire country lane in his patrol car as the mysterious object vanished in his rear view mirror.

The article also mentions the God machine.
Neuro-scientist Dr Michael Persinger investigated the effects pulses of energy, magnetism and electricity can have on humans - including the out-of-body experiences many UFO encounters centre around.

He created an electromagnetic helmet for participants to put on, dubbed the God machine.

Of the 900 people he tested in the 1990s, many had interactions with religious figures including the Virgin Mary, the Prophet Mohammed and Jesus.

Others who did not follow any religion gave accounts comparable with alien abductions such as PC Godfrey under hypnosis.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13028853/pc-alan-godfrey-famous-ufo-ordeal-40-years-on/
 
I used to call at the Staff of Life just up the road from this sighting and remember
it and the odd Murder that happened around that time though I never saw anything,
either before or after partaking in the Staff, one thing though it likely as no bearing
on the subject, just over a mile from that spot is a air navigation localiser so more
aircraft than would normally be the case are likely seen in the area.
 
The Sun reports that Prince Philip has a huge library about UFOs.

The Prince became interested when his uncle, Lord Mountbatten filed a report about a UFO landing at his estate Broadlands in Hampshire in 1955.

The Lord claims a humanoid came out and knocked off his bike, and then the UFO left the estate.

This report was Top Secret until released in 1979.
 
...which contains a copy of aforementioned report.
I can't recall ever seeing this account before.

We have another, 'flying saucer', just like Kenneth Arnold never described and with all the, 'bells & whistles' - portholes, a being descending on their beam of light...

Did such an advanced technology really rely on portholes to see outside?

What's our alternative then... presumably either a blatant hoax or real events misinterpreted by the witness?

Where did the report end up and was it investigated? Any further insight - surely there must be which I am personally unaware of?

Fascinating case... all seems so genuine.
 
Keyhoe was a HERO...
Then I hope you haven't seen this before. :)

Seemingly uploaded only 2 weeks ago, certainly new to myself and I'm sure most others here - I shall watch this with immense interest.

I don't know of any background to the interview and it isn't explained in accompanying notes, which simply read:

Screenshot_20201216_235411.jpg



Enjoy!
 
The First Flying Saucer Pilot...

What was the first report, following Arnold's 'flying saucers', where someone claimed to have seen the occupant(s) of an archetypal saucer-shaped craft?

I was wondering how they had been depicted - wearing silver space suits?

Was was the first description of their physical appearance, e.g, facial characteristics. Were they, 'humanoid'?

Just a passing thought and then the realisation I didn't actually know the answer!
 
The First Flying Saucer Pilot...

What was the first report, following Arnold's 'flying saucers', where someone claimed to have seen the occupant(s) of an archetypal saucer-shaped craft?

I was wondering how they had been depicted - wearing silver space suits?

Was was the first description of their physical appearance, e.g, facial characteristics. Were they, 'humanoid'?

Just a passing thought and then the realisation I didn't actually know the answer!
Perhaps some of the earliest descriptions of pilots of UFOs (in crashes, etc.) comes from the airship wave of the early 20th century, though most or all were probably hoaxes (not the airships though); all of them were described as humanoids, I think.
 
Going back to1962 when John Glenn was making his three orbital flights, everyone was caught up in Glenn’s description of his fireflies.

Glenn’s mystical fireflies would swirl around his capsule, and then come back to his window.

Glenn said these fireflies were extremely bright, almost blinding.

Glenn told NASA he has never seen or experienced anything like his fireflies.

NASA quickly came up with all kinds of explanations, but the one NASA pushed on the public was floating frost.

Fast forward to now.

UFO hunter, Scott Waring, claims that NASA’s SOHO satellite which photographs our sun and displays the images on the helioviewer shows the exact same fireflies.

Waring is trying to make the argument that Glenn’s fireflies are alive alien things that travel the void of space.

This is not so crazy because Russian cosmonauts claim that had collected a new type of tardigrade on the ISS.

Tardigrades are considered almost indestructible
 
Hmm.. I've heard of the firefly thing but don't know much about it. Did he later say they were ice crystals? I don't think the average NASA employee is covering anything up, but I do think Leroy Chiao was told to shut up and believe in weather ball-- er.. fishing boats. :D
 
Glenn's fireflies were explained long ago, and gave been seen and explained by almost every single flight since. They have nothing to do with the phenomena observed by SOHO. Scott Waring is an idiot.
 
Russian cosmonauts claim that had collected a new type of tardigrade on the ISS.
Not quite. The Russians found some plankton on the outside of the ISS, but it wasn't tardigrades.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme...ace-station-and-arent-sure-how-they-got-there
The bigger mystery is not that the plankton survived, but how they made it all the way up there, 205 miles above Earth. The scientists have already dismissed the possibility that the plankton were simply carried there on a spacecraft from Earth, as the plankton aren’t from the region where any ISS module or craft would’ve taken off.
These are Earth organisms that have somehow accumulated on the outside of the ISS, which orbits about 330 km from Earth's surface. There does seem to be a certain amount of leakage from the top of the Earth's atmosphere, which is interesting, but it has nothing to do with the fireflies.
 
Keyhoe was a HERO...
As I've said, we have infinitely more in common than otherwise.

Was searching for an entirely unrelated old book and found the following - my copy dates from 1973!

IMG_20210102_222206_resize_30.jpg


Also the following, from 1975, which must say I have never seen mentioned anywhere since.

Will absolutely have a browse through this later...

IMG_20210102_222247_resize_77.jpg
 
An old but well known UFO story is from August 23, 1974 was with John Lennon and his production manager May Pang.

John and May were drawn to their balcony by strange lights in New York only to discovery a UFO about 100 feet from them and the UFO stayed for around 15 minutes before it moved on down the river.

The part I just happened to come across just recently is that British magician Uri Geller added to the story.

Uri claims that after the first UFO encounter, John told Uri that one night he awoke and found four small bug eyed aliens in his room and the aliens gave John an egg shaped alien artifact.

May Pang recently said she will stand by the balcony UFO until the day she dies, but can not confirm URI Geller”s story.

If people doubt UFO stories from police and military people, would they believe a UFO story from a famous Beatle ?

We are not alone in this world.
 
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