An advantage of having worked in the skeptical business for 30 years is institutional memory that enables me to place the current claims and controversies into historical context, even that of personal memory. So, when the New York Times published their article on “The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program” in December of 2017, 1 and CBS’s 60 Minutes reported that “UFOs Regularly Spotted in Restricted U.S. Airspace” in May of 2021 2 —the reports bracketing the latest wave of apparent sightings—I forthwith recalled similar such waves in the past, both since the early 1990s when we started publishing Skeptic magazine and devoting numerous issues to the topic, and previous historical upsurges of sightings going all the way back to the 1890s groundswell of “mystery airships” spotted moving across the United States, later identified as dirigibles. Historian Mike Dash’s description of the 1896-1897 series of these mysterious airships will sound familiar to those energized by the latest round of UFO videos:
Not only were [the mystery airships] bigger, faster and more robust than anything then produced by the aviators of the world; they seemed to be able to fly enormous distances, and some were equipped with giant wings…. The files of almost 1,500 newspapers from across the United States have been combed for reports, an astonishing feat of research. The general conclusion of investigators was that a considerable number of the simpler sightings were misidentification of planets and stars, and a large number of the more complex the result of hoaxes and practical jokes. A small residuum remains perplexing. 4