A deep dive into the wave of “phantom airship” sightings from 1896 to 1897 and what it tells us about the UFO mystery.

Seven years before the Wright brothers’ first flights at Kitty Hawk, thousands of people across the U.S. and Canada saw mysterious phantom airships performing spectacular aerial manoeuvres, and many claimed to meet their pilots. There were hundreds of sightings documented in thousands of newspaper columns, mostly between the fall of 1896 and the spring of 1897. To this day, the sightings remain unexplained, and historians of aviation agree that any such flights would have been impossible at the time.

Flights of Fancy offers a comprehensive review of the airship sightings and explores the cultural context in which they occurred, demonstrating how the sightings were shaped by mythology, science fiction, and a rapidly increasing faith in technology. Though the mystery airships were distinctly of their time, they were not so different from the flying saucers and other UFOs that once again dominated the headlines after 1947.