The 1896 mystery airship wave
From November 1896, hundreds of people in Sacramento, San Francisco and Oakland reported a light or an airship overhead at night, and newspapers spread the reports.
American Heritage's 1979 account starts in Sacramento on Tuesday 17 November, when the evening Bee carried a telegram from New York saying someone would leave that city on Friday and arrive out West in two days. Southern Pacific trains needed four or five days for that run, and the sender said the trip would be made by air.
Wikipedia says Sacramento residents first saw a light that evening, 17 November 1896, moving slowly west at an estimated 1,000 feet. Heavy overcast hid most detail. Most of several hundred witnesses saw only a light, while a handful said they could make out a dark shape behind it. A Duluth News Tribune report of 23 November 1896, quoted on the Readex blog, said some Sacramento residents up at 1 a.m. on a Monday claimed to see an airship pass over fast, some describing a cigar-shaped machine and voices coming from it, and that people in Oakland said they had seen the same. KQED wrote in 2023 that airships were being flown mainly in Europe at the time and had never appeared on the West Coast.
Plane & Pilot magazine argues that the sudden end of the sightings makes the work of several inventors unlikely. It treats the first Sacramento sighting as credible, given its many witnesses and consistent detail, and puts most of the rest down to hoaxes and imaginative reporters.
"A mystery light was first seen over the capital city of Sacramento on the evening of November 17, 1896. Several citizens observed a strange light moving slowly from east to west across the sky at an estimated elevation of 1,000 feet (300 m).[21][22] Due to a heavy overcast that evening, very little detail could be observed; most of the several hundred witnesses reported seeing only a light source but a few said they could discern a vague, dark body behind the bright light.[22][23] A witness named R.L."
- Close Encounters Of The Earliest Kind, American Heritage, vol. 31 no. 1 (December 1979)
- UFO Fever in America's Historical Newspapers: The Mysterious Airships of 1896-97, Readex (blog quoting the Duluth News Tribune, 23 Nov 1896)
- In 1896, a Mysterious UFO Brought Northern California to a Mesmerized Halt, KQED (2023)
- Ghost Airships Of The 1800s, Plane & Pilot