3 case files, newest first.
On April 19, 1897, The Dallas Morning News printed a dispatch saying an airship had crashed into a judge's windmill in Aurora, Wise County, killing a pilot 'not an inhabitant of this world.' The Texas State Historical Association calls it what it was: a fictional story written to put a dying town back on the map.
On the night of 1 April 1897, thousands in Kansas City watched a moving light the wire called an airship. Flagstaff reprinted the dispatch a week later. Two weeks after that, it printed a cocktail recipe for seeing one.
During the 1897 airship wave, a Kansas rancher's story of a craft that lassoed his heifer became one of the era's best-known yarns. Kansas City's Journal treated it as comedy within days; a 1943 item quoted the local editor saying it was invented.
