Credible sources disagree, and the ledger shows both sides. 8 files.
Two shipyard workers told a Mississippi sheriff they had been taken aboard a craft beside the Pascagoula River. The sheriff left a recorder running when he stepped out. Fifty years on, the tape is still the strongest evidence, and the gaps are still there.
Six days after Kelso, 23 children at an Invercargill school said they had seen the airship in broad daylight. The local paper printed two of their drawings. The Press Association's verdict went around the country: the drawings were “not a bit alike” and the children's testimony “need not be taken very seriously.”
In the last hours of 1978 a TV crew on a cargo flight filmed bright lights off New Zealand's Kaikōura coast, and air-traffic radar logged returns. A government cable from January 1979, now at Archives New Zealand, shows scientists debunking one film, stuck on the other, and guessing at Jupiter or Venus.
At noon on 23 July 1909 schoolchildren in Kelso, West Otago, watched a boat-shaped “airship” circle over their school. A reporter got six drawings that he called “dumbfounding to all sceptics.” Within three weeks the scare had spread nationwide, and the papers were finding fire balloons, a lantern and a confessed hoax.
On the evening of November 17, 1896, a bright light drifted southwest over Sacramento, and by the next day the city was full of people who said they'd heard voices, singing and orders shouted from it. The San Francisco Call ran it across its front page. This is where America's great airship wave starts.
For a couple of years, a 'tiger' was blamed for killing sheep in South Australia's south-east. When a shooter dropped a large canid in August 1895, the local experts called it a European wolf. A modern historian says wildlife experts now think alpine dingo.
A 66-year-old Washington retiree walked into the Superstition Mountains in June 1931 to look for the Lost Dutchman mine and did not come out. Three wire services and a local weekly reported his death three different ways, and none of them recorded a verdict that we can find.
Parthian/Sasanian jars with copper and iron: König’s battery hypothesis remains popular; many archaeologists favor scroll containers.
