Waterloo Mystery Airship Sighting

In the spring of 1897, residents of Waterloo, Iowa, looked up to see a mysterious aerial presence hovering above their city. The sightings arrived as part of the “mystery airship” phenomenon, a wave of reports that swept across the United States from late 1896 through mid-1897, with hundreds of sightings reported in newspapers from coast to coast.

On Saturday, April 10, 1897, retro iowa says, the mysterious airship hovered over Waterloo. After dark, observers could see only two flickering white lights moving above the city.

By mid-April, mass sightings had been reported in Waterloo along with Chicago, Kansas City, and Evanston, Illinois, as the wave of reports spread rapidly eastward from its re-emergence in Nebraska in early February. The phenomenon had first captured national attention over Sacramento, California, in November 1896, when witnesses described brilliant lights and structures with wings and propellers, machinery years ahead of any publicly known aviation technology.

In Waterloo, part of the mystery turned out to be a kite. Five boys had been flying an ordinary kite with Chinese lanterns tied to both ends of its long tail. Even after that prank was unwound, the sightings continued: two men saw the airship flashing green and red lights low over Fairview Cemetery at about 10:30 that Saturday night, and those lights came from an Illinois Central Railway switch light. People in Shell Rock saw a flickering red, white and blue light the same day, which came from a 25-cent striped balloon that some men from Cedar Falls had chipped in to buy before the wind carried it to Shell Rock. “The boys at Cedar Falls,” said The Courier, “declared they never had so much fun in their lives for 25 cents.”

But the kite explanation did not end all reports. A photo credited to the Grout Museum Archives carries the caption “Waterloo airship hoax, April 16, 1897,” the day the hysteria reached Waterloo, when the photo began circulating. The image circulated widely during a period when bogus reports of mysterious flying objects swept American newsrooms from coast to coast.

The broader mystery airship wave captivated the nation. Reports talked of wings, paddle wheels and cigar-shaped objects moved by propellers, and many witnesses claimed they spoke with the pilots of landed airships. Thomas Edison was so widely blamed for the sightings that he felt compelled to issue a public statement denying responsibility. Believers mostly assumed the craft were experimental aircraft being tested by some secret, Edison-like inventor, while denouncers called the sightings hoaxes or hallucinations from bad alcohol, and Prof. G. W. Hough of Dearborn Observatory blamed atmospheric distortions of a red-hued star. Nobody had settled the question by the time the sightings stopped that summer, and the scholarship since comes to no consensus.

Waterloo was only one stop in what retro iowa calls an outbreak of unidentified flying objects over Iowa that year. On April 7 observers in Vinton watched an airship sway “like a bird flying against the wind” for half an hour, and citizens of Wesley sighted a cone-shaped airship with brightly illuminated windows, though they could not tell what propelled it. In Clinton, the Postal Telegraph manager wired Cedar Rapids that “what we all supposed to be the airship” had just passed overhead with three brilliant lights. Iowa Falls residents believed the airship had crashed into the Iowa River after they saw a “meteoric-like flash across the heavens,” and search parties arrived shortly afterward, but no wreckage or bodies were found.

The mystery airships were never identified, and Think Anomalous calls them “an early wave of UFOs before flying saucers, and almost before flight itself.”