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Dennis Crenshaw's "The Secrets of Dellschau: The Sonora Aero Club and the Airships of the 1890s" consists of two concurrent narratives. The first is the story of Charles A. A. Dellschau, a prolific turn of the century artist who produced a large volume of unpublished fanciful airship illustrations and the second; the story of Pete Navarro who, in the 1970s, quested to decode, translate and understand Dellschau's works.
Navarro was inspired in his research beginning with his own sighting of a UFO in the 30s. When the modern UFO craze unfolded in the 50s, Navarro began his reseach into the phenomenon and eventually traced the story to the mystery airship flap of 1896-97. By chance, he came across a number of bound books containing illustrations of fantastical airships. These were the works of C.A.A. Dellschau from about the turn of the century to 1921. The captions of these illustrations were written in a code that Navarro was eventually able to decode and unravel the story that Dellschau supposedly traveled to California in 1858 as a representative of a secret society known as NYMZA to evaluate the airships of the Sonora Aero Club. After a successful demonstration of one of the club's airships, NYMZA provided funding and for the next 10 years a number of airships were built and flown until one of the members, apparently the only one with the chemical secret to the N.B. lifting gas, was killed in an accident. With the chemical formula lost, the club eventually disolved.
Dellschau eventually moved to Texas when he began chronicling the story of the Sonora Aero Club in a prolific series of colorful illustrations, coded to keep the secret. After his death, the books sat in family attics, ultimately found the way to a land fill to be salvaged by a recycler with an eye for the unusual and later stumbled upon by Pete Navarro.
Dennis Crenshaw takes on two tasks in telling these narratives. The first is to convince the reader that Dellschau's story of airships in in 1850s is true. Secondly, he needs to connect those events to the mystery airships of the 1890s.
On the second, Crenshaw really offers only one piece of evidence. In 1897, the Galviston Daily News published a report where an eyewitness met with a crewman of a landed mystery airship. The pilot gave his name as Wilson. Dellschau identified one of the Aero Club members as being Tosh Willson.
That's it?
Oh, and Dellschau was living in East Texas at the time of the sighting.
Really? That's the best you have?
To convince me that Dellschau's narrative was itself true is an even more difficult task, hampered by Crenshaw's lack of objectivity and knowledge.
Crenschaw gives the draftsman Dellschau a tremendouns amount of credit for his highly detailed and accurate mechanical drawings of the airships. My father was a draftsman so I know what drafting looks like. My brother is an architect so I have seen his detailed drawings as well. My grandfather was an electrical engineer and I have seen the mechanical drawings submitted along with his patent applications. I have seen any number of modern and 19th century mechanical drawing and patent applications and Dellschau's drawings bear absolutely no resemblance to any of them. Dellschau may have been a draftsman but this is not drafting work. It looks highly interpretive, speculative or even fancifal. There is no way any engineer could build a working replica of anything based on Dellschau's illustrations.
At one point, Crenshaw says how the Aero Club airships look exactly like the airships described by eyewitnesses of the 1896-97 airship flap. I don't know what newspapers he's read but eyewitnesses almost universally described the mystery airships as being "cigar shaped" or occasionally "fish shaped" (which is not unlike a fat cigar with fins). Those descriptions match favorably with the airships of the day being developed all over the world and are also not unlike the later day zeppelins and blimps we are more familiar with. Of the illustrations presented by Crenshaw and the dozens more I have found online, not one of Dellschau's airships resembled a cigar in any way.
Is Crenshaw mischaracterizing the evidence to present a certainty to his conclusions or does he really not know what he's talking about?
The narrative later adds UFOlogist Jimmy Ward, the free energy Vanguard Sciences group at KeelyNet, an assortment of paranormal and fringe technology people and an apparently famous researcher and publisher of best selling paranormal books whose name has been concealed by pseudonym. It's when these guys start helping to interpret the technology of Dellschau's illustrations and prove the plausability if not the actuality of the Aero Club's airships that the story really jumps the rails.
To explain the mysterious N.B.Gas (neutral buoyancy?) that provided the lifting and propulsive power for the Aero Club's airships, apparently generated by dropping green crystals into water, I will pull a quote on the subject from KeelyNet:
Except, of course, the analogy is total bullshit. If you could remove all the air from a basketball and not have it collapse, it would be more buoyant than if it were filled with air, more buoyant than if it were filled with helium or hydrogen, more buoyant than it would be if it were filled with any mythical sub-hydrogen gas. With a vacuum it could not be made any more buoyant and yet would still lack the buoyancy to overcome its own weight and float in the air, let alone hoist someone holding onto it.
No, really. If you do the math (and it's a formula found in high school science books) you will work out that a hydrogen is only about 8% more buoyant than helium and a vacuum is only about 7.5% more buoyant than hydrogen. Crenshaw and his cadre of pseudoscientists, in spite of their denials of anti-gravity, would have you believe that this N.B.Gas is is just that.
Even more so, they go on to assert that this was all run by a secret society for which we have only the acronym NYMZA (which they conclude stands for New York Mechanical Zephyr Association based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever) and the technology must have been given to them by aliens.
Yea. Aliens.
I believe that the mystery airships of of 1896 and 1897 were, in fact, actual airships sighted over California and the American Midwest. I would like to believe that, in Dellschau's work, we have some actual, physical evidence of those airships instead of just having to rely only on the unsubstantiated reports of witnesses in newspapers over a century ago. Unfortunately, Crenshaw gives me no reason to believe that Dellschau was anything more than a recluse, obsessively illustrating his delusions of magic airships and fanciful secret societies. Maybe if he dropped the pseudoscience and aliens he could have presented a moderate case but, in trying to prove it's plausibility with woo he only added his own delusions to Dellschau's own.
As Crenshaw says at his own website, The Hollow Earth Insider:
Yea. The Earth is hollow. I'm surfing elsewhere.
Navarro was inspired in his research beginning with his own sighting of a UFO in the 30s. When the modern UFO craze unfolded in the 50s, Navarro began his reseach into the phenomenon and eventually traced the story to the mystery airship flap of 1896-97. By chance, he came across a number of bound books containing illustrations of fantastical airships. These were the works of C.A.A. Dellschau from about the turn of the century to 1921. The captions of these illustrations were written in a code that Navarro was eventually able to decode and unravel the story that Dellschau supposedly traveled to California in 1858 as a representative of a secret society known as NYMZA to evaluate the airships of the Sonora Aero Club. After a successful demonstration of one of the club's airships, NYMZA provided funding and for the next 10 years a number of airships were built and flown until one of the members, apparently the only one with the chemical secret to the N.B. lifting gas, was killed in an accident. With the chemical formula lost, the club eventually disolved.Dellschau eventually moved to Texas when he began chronicling the story of the Sonora Aero Club in a prolific series of colorful illustrations, coded to keep the secret. After his death, the books sat in family attics, ultimately found the way to a land fill to be salvaged by a recycler with an eye for the unusual and later stumbled upon by Pete Navarro.
Dennis Crenshaw takes on two tasks in telling these narratives. The first is to convince the reader that Dellschau's story of airships in in 1850s is true. Secondly, he needs to connect those events to the mystery airships of the 1890s.
On the second, Crenshaw really offers only one piece of evidence. In 1897, the Galviston Daily News published a report where an eyewitness met with a crewman of a landed mystery airship. The pilot gave his name as Wilson. Dellschau identified one of the Aero Club members as being Tosh Willson.
That's it?
Oh, and Dellschau was living in East Texas at the time of the sighting.
Really? That's the best you have?
To convince me that Dellschau's narrative was itself true is an even more difficult task, hampered by Crenshaw's lack of objectivity and knowledge.
Crenschaw gives the draftsman Dellschau a tremendouns amount of credit for his highly detailed and accurate mechanical drawings of the airships. My father was a draftsman so I know what drafting looks like. My brother is an architect so I have seen his detailed drawings as well. My grandfather was an electrical engineer and I have seen the mechanical drawings submitted along with his patent applications. I have seen any number of modern and 19th century mechanical drawing and patent applications and Dellschau's drawings bear absolutely no resemblance to any of them. Dellschau may have been a draftsman but this is not drafting work. It looks highly interpretive, speculative or even fancifal. There is no way any engineer could build a working replica of anything based on Dellschau's illustrations.At one point, Crenshaw says how the Aero Club airships look exactly like the airships described by eyewitnesses of the 1896-97 airship flap. I don't know what newspapers he's read but eyewitnesses almost universally described the mystery airships as being "cigar shaped" or occasionally "fish shaped" (which is not unlike a fat cigar with fins). Those descriptions match favorably with the airships of the day being developed all over the world and are also not unlike the later day zeppelins and blimps we are more familiar with. Of the illustrations presented by Crenshaw and the dozens more I have found online, not one of Dellschau's airships resembled a cigar in any way.
Is Crenshaw mischaracterizing the evidence to present a certainty to his conclusions or does he really not know what he's talking about?
The narrative later adds UFOlogist Jimmy Ward, the free energy Vanguard Sciences group at KeelyNet, an assortment of paranormal and fringe technology people and an apparently famous researcher and publisher of best selling paranormal books whose name has been concealed by pseudonym. It's when these guys start helping to interpret the technology of Dellschau's illustrations and prove the plausability if not the actuality of the Aero Club's airships that the story really jumps the rails.
To explain the mysterious N.B.Gas (neutral buoyancy?) that provided the lifting and propulsive power for the Aero Club's airships, apparently generated by dropping green crystals into water, I will pull a quote on the subject from KeelyNet:
We are looking into the Dellschau manuscripts and further researches on this mysterious N.B. gas. From the work of Walter Russell and his development of the Octave Periodic Progression of elements, there would appear to be somewhere on the order of 26 elements BELOW HYDROGEN. This is TOTALLY CONTRARY to any modern understanding of chemistry.
As we understand it, the N.B. gas had incredible lifting power (not anti-gravity per se.). An apt analogy would be that one could fill a basketball with the N.B. gas, hold it in your arms and be carried off into the upper stratosphere. When such an understanding is applied to the majority of cases of the airships, it is seen how they are identical to ships on water or submarines underwater. A simple change in ballast would determine the height to which the airship would rise and remain. Subject of course to wind.
As we understand it, the N.B. gas had incredible lifting power (not anti-gravity per se.). An apt analogy would be that one could fill a basketball with the N.B. gas, hold it in your arms and be carried off into the upper stratosphere. When such an understanding is applied to the majority of cases of the airships, it is seen how they are identical to ships on water or submarines underwater. A simple change in ballast would determine the height to which the airship would rise and remain. Subject of course to wind.
Except, of course, the analogy is total bullshit. If you could remove all the air from a basketball and not have it collapse, it would be more buoyant than if it were filled with air, more buoyant than if it were filled with helium or hydrogen, more buoyant than it would be if it were filled with any mythical sub-hydrogen gas. With a vacuum it could not be made any more buoyant and yet would still lack the buoyancy to overcome its own weight and float in the air, let alone hoist someone holding onto it.
No, really. If you do the math (and it's a formula found in high school science books) you will work out that a hydrogen is only about 8% more buoyant than helium and a vacuum is only about 7.5% more buoyant than hydrogen. Crenshaw and his cadre of pseudoscientists, in spite of their denials of anti-gravity, would have you believe that this N.B.Gas is is just that.
Even more so, they go on to assert that this was all run by a secret society for which we have only the acronym NYMZA (which they conclude stands for New York Mechanical Zephyr Association based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever) and the technology must have been given to them by aliens.
Yea. Aliens.
I believe that the mystery airships of of 1896 and 1897 were, in fact, actual airships sighted over California and the American Midwest. I would like to believe that, in Dellschau's work, we have some actual, physical evidence of those airships instead of just having to rely only on the unsubstantiated reports of witnesses in newspapers over a century ago. Unfortunately, Crenshaw gives me no reason to believe that Dellschau was anything more than a recluse, obsessively illustrating his delusions of magic airships and fanciful secret societies. Maybe if he dropped the pseudoscience and aliens he could have presented a moderate case but, in trying to prove it's plausibility with woo he only added his own delusions to Dellschau's own.
As Crenshaw says at his own website, The Hollow Earth Insider:
Welcome to the cutting edge of the lunatic fringe! If you think this is all a BUNCH OF BULL! If you know that what the establishment educational system, scientists, politicians, "free" press, and other media tell you is the final truth...then... adios, & happy surfin'!
Yea. The Earth is hollow. I'm surfing elsewhere.
