The Invercargill School 'Airship': 23 Children, Two Drawings, 29 July 1909

Six days after the Kelso airship, the scare reached New Zealand’s southernmost city, and it reached the schools. This is the report that later retellings mixed up with Kelso. Here it is on its own, with the original wire.

What the wire said

On Friday 30 July 1909 the Press Association’s Invercargill correspondent sent a short, tired dispatch. The Hawera & Normanby Star ran it under “Nothing convincing from Invercargill”:

There is nothing convincing to report in regard to the airship.

That evening, he said, the Invercargill News was publishing a statement that 23 children at a local school had seen the airship in daylight the afternoon before, Thursday 29 July, and was printing two diagrams the children drew. His verdict was blunt: the two diagrams were “not a bit alike,” and “the testimony of the children need not be taken very seriously.”

The same dispatch reported an afternoon rumour that a telegram had announced the airship’s capture at Waikaka, a small Southland town (the OCR spelling varies). The Nelson Evening Mail’s copy adds that more than 100 people came to the News office asking about it. The story had “no foundation in fact.”

The ledger hasn’t been able to find the Invercargill News for 30 July, so it hasn’t seen the children’s statement or the drawings. Everything here comes through the wire summary and the papers below.

The week around it

The children’s report didn’t come out of nowhere:

• Wednesday 28 July. The Otago Witness reported from Invercargill that about 200 people in the streets had watched a moving light in the sky that night. It drifted south and disappeared.
• Thursday 29 July. That’s the day of the school sighting. The Otago Witness round-up repeats it as “some 23 children in one of the Invercargill schools,” who reported an airship overhead “in broad daylight.”
• Friday 30 July. The Press Association reported from Dunedin that the remains of a “common toy fire balloon” had fallen in a city lane the night before and been grabbed by a crowd of youths. It called this a possible explanation for the lights seen there.
• Saturday 31 July. The Otago Daily Times editorial “The Airship Mystery” noticed the pattern. Those who believed they had seen the machine “in broad daylight,” it said, “appear to have included so far a considerable proportion of school children.” The paper still declined to dismiss adult witnesses.

A correspondent’s explanation

On 2 August the Otago Witness’s Southland correspondent summed up the week. No one in Invercargill, as far as he could find, claimed to have seen an airship, only a large, bright light that bobbed as it moved, which he thought suggested a fire balloon. For one pair of observers the question was settled, because the object “burnt into flames while under observation.”

He listed the other theories going around: toy balloons, “luminous vapours,” St Elmo’s fire, and a practical joker with seagulls carrying acetylene lights. He reported these rather than endorsing them. He also gave the believers’ strongest card: “a large number of children at the North Invercargill School state positively that they saw it in broad daylight.” That’s the only source the ledger has found that names the school.

Why it matters next to Kelso

The two school reports make a useful pair:

• Kelso (23 July): a reporter collected six drawings and said they resembled each other strikingly.
• Invercargill (29 July): the paper printed two drawings, and the wire said they didn’t look alike at all.

Neither set of drawings has been republished here. In both places the children were reacting to an airship scare that adults and newspapers had been feeding for weeks. That’s why the ledger counts this wire item as one source, however many papers ran it.

Ledger status

Disputed. The night lights that week have a documented prosaic explanation in at least some cases (fire balloons). The daylight “ship” rests on children’s testimony that survives only in summary, with two drawings that the press at the time said didn’t agree. It’s part of the Antipodes desk.

Sources

• Press Association wire, Invercargill, 30 Jul 1909: “Jack in the Lantern,” Hawera & Normanby Star, 31 Jul 1909 — Papers Past
• Press Association wires (Dunedin, Invercargill, Greymouth), “That ‘Airship,’” Nelson Evening Mail, 31 Jul 1909 — Papers Past
• “The Airship Mystery” (editorial), Otago Daily Times, 31 Jul 1909 — Papers Past
• “The Mysterious Lights,” Otago Witness, 4 Aug 1909 — Papers Past
• “Southland News Notes” (own correspondent, Invercargill, 2 Aug), Otago Witness, 4 Aug 1909 — Papers Past