The Christmas Eve 1909 airship and Lovecraft's Venus
The mystery airship drew reports across eastern Massachusetts near Christmas Eve 1909. In Providence, H. P. Lovecraft said a crowd was watching Venus.
The Willimantic Chronicle of 24 December 1909 described a flashing light followed from six in the evening until midnight. It went from Marlboro to Fitchburg, doubled back through Worcester, and headed for Boston by way of Newton, Needham, Wellesley and Natick. From Boston it swung northeast over Chelsea and Revere, passed through Lynn and neared the Salem line, then returned west until it dropped out of sight of newspapermen hoping to trace the aviator to his lair. Another paper said the mysterious aviator, by guess Wallace E. Tillinghast, a Worcester man, had startled people around Boston and in many eastern Massachusetts towns the night before.
On 24 December 1909, Christmas Eve, the author H. P. Lovecraft noticed a number of people in Providence's business district gazing at the sky. He was delighted they admired Venus, until he found they thought it was Tillinghast's airship. He named the planet as the object, and wrote about it in the Providence Sunday Journal on 26 December 1909, in a piece of his own.
"The author H. P. Lovecraft witnessed a mass sighting of Tillinghast in Providence, Rhode Island on December 24, 1909. While the crowds of people on the street believed they were viewing Tillinghast's airship, Lovecraft identified the object as the planet Venus.[5]"
- PROJECT 1947: 1909 UFO reports (Willimantic Chronicle, 24 Dec 1909), Project 1947
- The Worcester Aeroplane Hoax (1909), Museum of Hoaxes
- Two Mass Delusions in New England, New England Skeptical Society
- Additional Notes on Venus, Lovecraftian Science