

A lot of hot air? Not entirely.

By the late 1800s, the hot-air balloon was already old news, perfected in the previous century as the first successful means to enable humanity to fly – though Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier, who took to the air in 1783, initially thought it was the dense smoke from the fire beneath their balloon that provided its lift.

A hundred years later, as evidenced by this picture from a leading popular science weekly, what North Americans craved were airships, preferably real, but imaginary would do. The technology required for a powered, lighter-than-air vessel that could be steered and travel against the prevailing winds, was far from being perfected.

But technical journals of the time were happy to write about such craft as if they were an established, flying fact. And people all across America proved themselves capable of believing they'd seen something that wasn't there.

Mass hysteria, wish fulfillment or a desperate dream to counter desperate times make the "Great Airship of 1897" the UFO (though that term hadn't yet been coined) of its time, J.P. Chaplin wrote in his book, Rumor, Fear and the Madness of Crowds. Hundreds of thousands of people believed they'd seen ... something in the sky that was man-made, had engines and could fly.

To put the development of airships into context, Henri Giffard flew 27 kilometres in 1852 in an airship with a steam engine. But he couldn't steer it in the face of any kind of wind.

By 1863, Solomon Andrews had developed an airship that could be steered but had no engine.

In 1872, Paul Haenlein took to the skies in a ship that used coal gas both to inflate the envelope and power its engine.

But it wasn't until 1897 that David Schwartz made a successful flight from Tempelhof field – which became one of Berlin's three airports – in a rigid airship that was a direct forerunner of the globetrotting dirigibles created by Ferdinand von Zeppelin. After Schwartz's death, von Zeppelin bought technical data from his widow.

This early incarnation of what, in the 1920s and '30s, became an icon of exotic, futuristic travel clearly was not what hundreds of thousands of people across the United States reported seeing in 1897.

The country was in the midst of one of the worst economic depressions in its history, with some two million people out of work. Small wonder that they should cast their eyes heavenward for signs of hope.

What they saw – or thought they saw or convinced themselves they'd seen – was a "cigar-like object" with "great wings" several kilometres above the ground.

Sightings were reported from California to New York. In Chicago, around 2 a.m. on April 9, thousands of people, including what contemporary reports called "men of unquestioned veracity," took to the streets to gape at the apparition. It had, they agreed, a white headlight, a green light at its mid-point, and a red light at the tail.

The consensus was that it was a cylindrical gasbag with a metal frame and a gondola suspended beneath it. Some claimed to have seen a man who appeared to be steering the ship. A couple of photographs were quickly dismissed as fakes.

Various people claimed to have invented the airship, to have flown in it, or to know the secret – gently flapping wings was one explanation – of its propulsion.

Chaplin, writing 62 years later, reckoned many of the sightings could have been naturally occurring astronomical phenomena.

Later reports may have been the result of pranksters sending up balloons with lights attached.

There was also, he said, a great willingness to believe, which was why "the hysteria spread so rapidly... The main explanation would seem to lie in the widespread interest in aeronautics... Inventors were on the threshold of solving both the problem of controlling airships in flight and of devising heavier-than-air flying machines.

"There can be little doubt that the interest generated by these pioneer experiments provided an aura of credibility to the reports of an airship cruising over the Midwest."

"An aura of credibility..." Scientific American, first published in 1845, is America's oldest continuously published magazine. Though its aim has always been to bring an understanding of "popular science" to the layperson, it has also always been a well-respected journal.

The Jan. 1, 1887, edition published a story headlined: "A Novel Form of Aerial Vessel," with an engraving of "the invention of Mr. Moses S. Cole, of Greytown, Nicaragua ... It is claimed that this vessel can be raised, lowered, steered and propelled in any direction at the will of the pilot."

The story gave comprehensive details of how the airship was built – "an inflated balloon of semi-spheroidal form, while to the floor is attached a similar balloon" – driven and steered.

The only thing not covered in detail was what exactly powered Cole's brainchild.

Otherwise, the craft was presented as if it existed, had been tested, and was ready to go into operation.

Clearly, none of this was true. Such a machine would have been decades ahead of its time.

But, equally clearly, this was what Scientific American's readers were eager to hear.

As the newspaper editor in the classic western movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance said, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

If you give the people what they want, perhaps one day it might come true.