Quincy Illinois airship sighting (April 1897)

In the evening of April 15, 1897, every passenger aboard a Wabash Railway passenger train approaching Quincy, Illinois, observed an unidentified object in the sky. The train arrived in Quincy at approximately 10 o’clock that night after racing alongside the alleged airship for fifteen minutes, first sighting the craft near Perry Springs, roughly fifty-two miles east of Quincy. All passengers reported seeing two lights on the object: one white and one red.

The Quincy sighting occurred during a months-long wave of airship reports that swept across the United States from late 1896 through mid-1897. Witnesses commonly described the object as oval or cigar-shaped with an undercarriage, a powerful headlight, and giant fans or wings protruding from both sides; several observers said the wings appeared to slowly flop up and down like those of a bird.

Illinois was especially active in the wave. On April 9, five hundred citizens observed a bright light over Evanston. On April 10, hundreds of residents including all police officers on duty and firemen watched an airship pass over Jacksonville. By the evening of the 11th it had reached Springfield, and on April 13 more than 200 people near Lincoln saw its white and green lights, with farmers over by Moline reporting it half an hour later. Among the Chicago Tribune’s dispatches dated April 15 were reports from Mount Vernon, Carlyle and Hillsboro.

The Quincy report ran alongside those as a special dispatch dated April 15. At the time it was widely believed that an inventor was conducting secret test flights; the speculation was so intense that Thomas Edison felt compelled to issue a strongly worded denial of any involvement.

Several alternative explanations have been proposed. It has often been argued that no officially documented test flights of long-range powered airships occurred in the United States during the period, and that the capabilities attributed to the mystery airship exceeded what late-nineteenth-century technology could produce. Some reports were later identified as hoaxes involving balloons or kites fitted with lanterns or candles and launched by pranksters; misidentification of stars, planets, and meteors was another common explanation. The astronomer Professor G. W. Hough of the Dearborn Observatory was certain many observers were looking at Alpha Orionis (Betelgeuse). Other astronomers thought witnesses had mistaken Jupiter, Venus and Mars for the airship.