Name: Marc Dantonio
Information: Contriburtor, Researcher, Author

Contribution:

“I think it is a mystery precisely because there were no recordkeeping capabilities back then other than word of mouth and an occasional written story and scant photo evidence.

Most times the argument is that no one would want to keep having an airship in the sky‘s secret but I don’t believe that to be true. Inventors who sense that airships or a wave of the future would not make it public for fear of their ideas being stolen. Consider Solomon Andrews. He invented an airship that successfully flew in 1863. Well the mystery airship was in 1897 more than 30 years later.

My personal feeling is that the mystery airship was a mystery but was in fact an airship created by some inventor that just didn’t go public with it and wasn’t the only case either of course.

I created a hydrogen airship when I was a kid and I didn’t let anybody know about either. It was only about 5 feet long and I was trying to make the Hindenburg as a working flying model. That is, until it got away never to be seen again!

So for me anyway the mystery airship may not have had a lot of local coverage at the time but I do believe it was an airship actually created by some inventor who never ended up becoming well-known, lost to history.

The additional factor that you have to keep in mind is that people were actually creating hoaxes at that time as well and so it’s possible that some of the reports around that time were just outright hoaxes because the airship was the UFO of its time.”

– Marc Dantonio