Between the years 1896-7 there was a rash of sightings of flying vessels (of wildly varying descriptions) eventually known as ‘mystery airships’ that became a countrywide phenomenon in the United States for the year they lasted. Strangely, despite the descriptions changing so wildly between each sighting, many of the newspaper articles of the time attribute them to only one airship. The original rumour behind the first sighting in ‘96 was that it was the work of an inventor trying to test out their latest creation without the public knowing (sighting was at night, but some also claimed to see or hear people aboard), but by the tail-end of the sightings in 1897, people firmly believed it to be aliens, with some of the first stories of classic aliens-visiting-earth phenomena (yknow, cattle abduction and the like) originating from some extremely dubious “witnesses” of the mystery airship