The Great Airship Mystery: Book Review
Following on my review of J. Allan Danelek's "The Great Airship of 1897", I ten picked up a copy of Daniel Cohen's "The Great Airship Mystery: A UFO of the 1890s".
The first thing you notice is the cover. With the "flying saucer" on the cover, it seems to make it very clear where the author is coming from with this. The next thing is the somewhat disheartening introduction which starts out:
Cohen is not filling me with confidence here, although the fact that he is willing to admit that the ufologist community is rife with hatred of each other and cannot agree on the details of the faith is at least one step in the right direction. He then surprises me by proceeding with a very balanced and thorough presentation of the evidence with page after page of quotes from newspaper articles of the day.
This is the sort of detail that I found lacking in Danelek's "The Great Airship of 1897." Where Danelek has no bibliography and four books in his "suggested reading" list (not even referencing Cohen's book, written 28 years previously), Cohen has a full page of bibliography. Unfortunately, that bibliography has only one citation exclusively for the Airship Flap of 1897 and one book on airships. The rest are UFO books and articles which might only tangentially reference the topic at hand. He at least makes up for it with a lot of quotes from period newspaper articles, though without citing the newspapers as primary sources. I fear that he may be using the UFO books as his source for newspaper quotes, adding a layer of uncertainty to the "facts" as presented.
It is disappointing that he doesn't talk about the history of airship technology, go over any of the contemporary airship experiments or even mention the word "zeppelin" until 3/4 of the way through the book. And then, his focus on the actual technology of the day seems somewhat focused on how knowledge of airship experiments could influence the sightings during the Airship Flap rather than the possibility that people were actually seeing something similar.
Early on in the book, he cited the Wright Brothers being 6 years away from succeeding in building a heavier-than-air flying machine as evidence of the implausibility of the airship flap sightings being real without even bothering to mention that Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin's airship was just 3 years away, David Schwartz's aluminum craft was being developed concurrently, Charles Renard's and Arthur Krebs' machine had flown successfully several years before and Henri Giffard's airship, though underpowered, had proven the concept a full 40 years before. More than the winged Wright Flyer or Samuel Langly's powered gliders, the hydrogen gas bag airships seem to represent the majority of the respectable sightings so, to give them such short attention is a great disservice to the very real technology of the day.
Cohen's conclusion? Venus. And what wasn't a misidentification of the planet or some other aerial phenomena was people being taken in by copy-cat hoaxes, yellow journalism and outright fraud. He rejects the mysterious inventor theory completely for lack of evidence.
I'm sorry, but I just don't buy it. Venus simply doesn't specifically appear on two nights in November and then not on any other other nights. Additionally, both November sightings were documented as being overcast. And, for the midwest flap of 1897, Venus doesn't reveal itself proceeding eastward on subsequent nights at a measurable rate. No doubt, some, or even many, of the sightings were mistaken identity, hoaxes or lies but, at least to my mind, there is too much that is orderly about the sightings to discount the probability that people were seeing an actual something in the sky and the technology of the day solidly places that thing being an airship into the realm of plausibility.
And Cohen's book seems to support this, in a sense.His extensive citation of period sources fails to lead inexorably to the the conclusion that it was all a mistake. While he comes to that conclusion, his case isn't terribly strong. In some ways, showing his lack of knowledge of contemporary airship technology, his case for Venus is even less convincing than Danelek's case, lacking any citations whatsoever, for an actual airship.
True believers will say "Absence of evidence in not evidence of absence," and that is technically true. But if repeated searches for the evidence continue to bring up nothing, then the probability of the hypothesis being true decreases, sometimes to a vanishing degree. And this is where Cohen and I differ. He looks at the lack of physical evidence and concludes that it was all mis-identification. I look at the continuity of many eyewitness accounts that cannot be explained away as Venus and come to the conclusion that the possibility of the airship flap of 1896-97 being an actual airship isn't as low as Cohen does. Time has made it difficult if not impossible to know for sure but I don't believe the possibility has vanished.
The first thing you notice is the cover. With the "flying saucer" on the cover, it seems to make it very clear where the author is coming from with this. The next thing is the somewhat disheartening introduction which starts out:"The world of ufologists is riddled with intrigue and passion. It is a world in which charges like "blind" and "stupid" are the nice things you say about your enemies, and sometimes the nice things you say about your friends. Somewhat nastier epithets are "money-grubbing charlatan" and "McCarhite book burner." "Agent provocateur," "CIA flack," and hints that one is the agent of some sinister ultraterrestrial force are not uncommonly heard. Vendettas can be fiercer between people who agree with one another than they are between believers and skeptics."
Cohen is not filling me with confidence here, although the fact that he is willing to admit that the ufologist community is rife with hatred of each other and cannot agree on the details of the faith is at least one step in the right direction. He then surprises me by proceeding with a very balanced and thorough presentation of the evidence with page after page of quotes from newspaper articles of the day.
This is the sort of detail that I found lacking in Danelek's "The Great Airship of 1897." Where Danelek has no bibliography and four books in his "suggested reading" list (not even referencing Cohen's book, written 28 years previously), Cohen has a full page of bibliography. Unfortunately, that bibliography has only one citation exclusively for the Airship Flap of 1897 and one book on airships. The rest are UFO books and articles which might only tangentially reference the topic at hand. He at least makes up for it with a lot of quotes from period newspaper articles, though without citing the newspapers as primary sources. I fear that he may be using the UFO books as his source for newspaper quotes, adding a layer of uncertainty to the "facts" as presented.
It is disappointing that he doesn't talk about the history of airship technology, go over any of the contemporary airship experiments or even mention the word "zeppelin" until 3/4 of the way through the book. And then, his focus on the actual technology of the day seems somewhat focused on how knowledge of airship experiments could influence the sightings during the Airship Flap rather than the possibility that people were actually seeing something similar.
Early on in the book, he cited the Wright Brothers being 6 years away from succeeding in building a heavier-than-air flying machine as evidence of the implausibility of the airship flap sightings being real without even bothering to mention that Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin's airship was just 3 years away, David Schwartz's aluminum craft was being developed concurrently, Charles Renard's and Arthur Krebs' machine had flown successfully several years before and Henri Giffard's airship, though underpowered, had proven the concept a full 40 years before. More than the winged Wright Flyer or Samuel Langly's powered gliders, the hydrogen gas bag airships seem to represent the majority of the respectable sightings so, to give them such short attention is a great disservice to the very real technology of the day.
Cohen's conclusion? Venus. And what wasn't a misidentification of the planet or some other aerial phenomena was people being taken in by copy-cat hoaxes, yellow journalism and outright fraud. He rejects the mysterious inventor theory completely for lack of evidence.
I'm sorry, but I just don't buy it. Venus simply doesn't specifically appear on two nights in November and then not on any other other nights. Additionally, both November sightings were documented as being overcast. And, for the midwest flap of 1897, Venus doesn't reveal itself proceeding eastward on subsequent nights at a measurable rate. No doubt, some, or even many, of the sightings were mistaken identity, hoaxes or lies but, at least to my mind, there is too much that is orderly about the sightings to discount the probability that people were seeing an actual something in the sky and the technology of the day solidly places that thing being an airship into the realm of plausibility.
And Cohen's book seems to support this, in a sense.His extensive citation of period sources fails to lead inexorably to the the conclusion that it was all a mistake. While he comes to that conclusion, his case isn't terribly strong. In some ways, showing his lack of knowledge of contemporary airship technology, his case for Venus is even less convincing than Danelek's case, lacking any citations whatsoever, for an actual airship.
True believers will say "Absence of evidence in not evidence of absence," and that is technically true. But if repeated searches for the evidence continue to bring up nothing, then the probability of the hypothesis being true decreases, sometimes to a vanishing degree. And this is where Cohen and I differ. He looks at the lack of physical evidence and concludes that it was all mis-identification. I look at the continuity of many eyewitness accounts that cannot be explained away as Venus and come to the conclusion that the possibility of the airship flap of 1896-97 being an actual airship isn't as low as Cohen does. Time has made it difficult if not impossible to know for sure but I don't believe the possibility has vanished.