What happened
On the evening of November 17, 1896, residents of Sacramento saw a bright light in the sky that, they believed, belonged to an airship gliding over the rooftops. In the following days similar reports came in from San Francisco, Oakland, and other California cities. In early 1897 the wave moved to the Midwest: in March and April the objects were seen in Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Texas, and Illinois, and on April 9 hundreds of people watched lights over Chicago. Newspapers competed with stories about inventors, conversations with crews, and crashes. Attorney George D. Collins even claimed that his client had built a flying machine, but it was never shown. The wave died out in May 1897.
Witnesses
Thousands of residents of California and the Midwestern states; reports were published by hundreds of newspapers.
Explanations and hypotheses
Historians point out that some of the sightings involved planets – especially Venus, which was bright at the time – as well as stars, balloons, and kites carrying lanterns. Many colorful stories, including conversations with “pilots” and crashes, turned out to be inventions of journalists in the era of sensationalist yellow journalism. Today the wave is a textbook example of how expectations – in this case, of the imminent invention of the airship – shape what people see in the sky. A few reports, however, remain hard to explain.
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.
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