Nilwood close encounter (April 12–13, 1897)

At 2:30 p.m. one April afternoon in 1897, an unknown object landed on a farm one mile north of Nilwood, Illinois. Accounts differ on the date: April 12, 1897, in one chronology, April 13, 1897, in another. The encounter occurred during a wave of mystery airship reports that swept across the United States from late 1896 through mid-1897.

Three men, Edward Teeples, William Street, and Franklin Metcalf, were on the property of Z. Thacker when the object descended, approximately 12 miles (19 km) north of Carlinville. They watched as a cigar-shaped craft with a dome rose slowly and headed north.

Around 6:00 p.m., a similar encounter occurred a few miles away near Green Ridge, just south of Girard. P.F. McCraner, a telegraph operator for the Chicago-and-Alton Railroad, received a call from his counterpart at Carlinville who said the airship had passed over Carlinville and was heading in the direction of Girard. (A later chronology gives the operator’s name as Paul McCramer.) He stepped outside, saw what he believed was the airship coming down, and called to William Street, Frank Metcalf and Ed Steeples, who were standing nearby. The four ran down the railroad track and watched the craft drop behind a clump of trees about a quarter mile off.

Before they could reach the spot, the ship rose to a great height and disappeared to the north. McCraner later told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he could see persons inside the craft and distinguish a large letter “M” on its side. All agreed the vessel was cigar-shaped with oars or wings extended.

At the landing site they found what appeared to be the imprint of a man’s feet, but no footprints leading away. McCraner told reporters that the tracks “did not lead anywhere and it was evident they were made by someone who had just jumped out of the ship to repair some of the machinery on the outside.”

The Macoupin County Enquirer described the afternoon landing as a “cigar or boat-shaped” object with “oars” running from the bottom and a “picnic canopy on top.” After sitting in the field for 15 to 20 minutes, it flew off northward. The paper’s account of the Green Ridge sighting wrote that “a man stepped forth,” apparently from the craft itself, “and began to do some repairing on the strange machine” before departing.

Two hours after the Green Ridge repair, the craft was reported at Sherman, north of Springfield, and at 8:45 over Williamsville, still heading north. Around 9 p.m. it was seen over Edwardsville and “circling about St. Louis,” over 100 miles to the south, so either it flew with incredible speed or there was more than one. On April 14 “hundreds of people” at White Hall reported a ship moving at a speed that was “very great, probably 150 miles an hour.”

The Enquirer itself was skeptical. It declared that “some syndicate is creating this excitement by sending up balloons shaped like ships with lights attached,” and predicted the whole thing would turn out to be an advertising scheme for something like the “Podunk corn salve.”