Springfield 1897 Airship Sighting

On a sunny Friday in April 1897, W. H. Hopkins said, he came upon a landed metallic airship in the hills a few miles east of Springfield, Missouri, along with two human-looking occupants, and he wrote to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about it.

The mystery airship wave was already underway by April 1897, having begun in California the previous autumn. On April 10, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that “an air ship is floating over the States of Missouri, Illinois, Iowa and Kansas.”

The Post-Dispatch introduced Hopkins as “general traveling agent for the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company.” His wife defended him to a reporter: “What, a man 50 years of age writing such a letter without it being true!” In his letter, Hopkins wrote that he was wandering through hills east of Springfield when he looked down from the brow of a hill and saw the vessel resting in a small clearing. Wikipedia gives the airship’s size as about 20 feet long and 8 feet in diameter. The craft stood on four supports with propeller-like wheels beneath it and at its stern, and gleamed as if polished aluminum.

Near the vessel Hopkins said he saw a petite young woman of unusual beauty, appearing unclothed, with golden hair falling to her waist held by a jeweled band. She carried a fan and gathered flowers while speaking in a language he could not understand. Nearby rested a powerfully built man with shoulder-length auburn hair and a beard, also described as unclothed.

Hopkins reported shaking hands with the man, kissing the woman’s hand and inspecting the vessel before attempting through gestures to learn where the pair had come from. He said both occupants pointed upward toward the sky and uttered something that Hopkins understood or interpreted as sounding like “Mars.” The Post-Dispatch published Hopkins’ letter on its front page on April 19, 1897. A reporter verified Hopkins’s identity at the Hartford Steam Boiler company’s St. Louis headquarters, where manager C. C. Gardiner confirmed that Hopkins was their traveling agent and had been in Springfield on the named date. “He never courts notoriety,” Gardiner said, adding that Hopkins “has been connected with this company for a long time.”

The Springfield Republican wrote on April 16 that an airship had been seen by responsible citizens and was connected to a train stopping when a horse appeared on the tracks; witnesses claimed the craft had dropped the animal.

American Strangeness ties the airship wave to a public that expected powered flight any day, and notes that most sightings were presumed to be secretive inventors testing new aircraft. Some skeptical Post-Dispatch readers blamed Venus and Mercury, brilliant at twilight on the western horizon, for the St. Louis sightings that spring. H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” ran in Cosmopolitan that same April.