dime_novel_hero | The True Story of the Great Airship Flap

I am a bit of a hobbyist when it comes to the Great Airship Flap of 1897-97. I have half a dozen books on the subject and have scoured the Internet for additional material. From that research I have lectured numerous times at science fiction and steampunk conventions on the topic and am always on the lookout for additional materials and sources of information to improve my understanding and presentation on the subject.

Maximilien de Lafayette has offered up a short work titled “Synopsis of the True Story of the Great Airship Flap and UFOs (sic) Sightings of 1896-1897.”

The title is almost longer than the book. Out of 64 pages in the book, there are about 12 pages of actual text, a little more than twice that taken up in illustrations, five pages advertising his other books and about as many totally blank but numbered pages as there are of text.

This is self publishing.

It took me literally five minutes to read the included text and while he starts off his narrative by saying there are “avalanches of pieces of evidence, hundreds upon hundreds of irrefutable documents, and mountains of historical and scientific findings,” he then completely and utterly fails to back that statement up with a single primary source, footnote or even a bibliography.

One illustration he used was labeled “An airship landed in Iowa, 1987 (sic)” He doesn't source this photograph or explain its relevance but completely fails to note that the photograph was, yes, from Iowa and, yes, from 1897, but was separated from its original newspaper headline and caption identifying it as an obvious hoax.

Another illustration has an airship flying over and Arkansas town. Is it coincidence or irony that has the airship in that particular illustration a literal cut-and-paste from another illustration of the airship above Chicago on the very next page? An illustration that was repeated, though in a poorer resolution scan, several pages earlier. Using the same picture twice? Really?

And, for a book that starts and ends with the strong assertion that the airship flap was an actual airship, his failure to address the crash in Aurora, Texas, the one news report from amongst 10,000 period sightings to mention beings from another world and the entire foundation with modern flying saucer assertions, is a conspicuous absence.

Given those and other mistakes and omissions, there seems little reason to conclude that the author did any significant research. In fact, there were a lot of truly factual details about the events missing or incorrect that have me believing that he didn't even go as far as to use Wikipedia (the German Wiki on the subject is even better).

I will say that some of the illustrations he used are of a better quality than I have been able to find and I will be scanning them to include in my own presentation but I feel I can say with a certain confidence that I could produce a better sourced and more cohesive narrative on the topic off the top of my head.

I have had friends and colleagues advise me that I should write a book on the subject but I always demurred, saying that there were a number of books already out there and my scholarship, without any decent access to primary sources, couldn't measure up. Perhaps I was wrong. De Lafayette has shown me that scant knowledge of a subject, lack of sources and poor lithographic layout is in no way an impediment to being published.

I'm curious how much money he has made peddling his papers. For someone who has claimed “280 international bestsellers” on his website, the bar has been set very low and I want a piece of that action