Brett Holman, whose series post-blogging the Sudeten Crisis inspired my Boxer Uprising Day to Day, is now starting to work his way through the “phantom airship wave” in 1909 Britain:
It’s 90 years since the phantom airship wave of 1909, when mysterious aerial visitors appeared in the night skies over Britain. Or at least, stories about mysterious aerial visitors filled the newspapers of Britain. It’s hard to tell from this distance: the only evidence we have about the scareships are the press reports, which could be a problem if you are interested in a possible underlying reality. But then again, since the number of (alleged) phantom airship witnesses is relatively small, the press was the only way most people would have learned that their sky was being invaded by Zeppelins every night. So for them as for us, the stories are the event itself.
If it lives up to his previous work, it’ll be well worth following.
The Edge of the American West 
5 comments
May 13, 2009 at 9:27 am
ekogan
Unfortunately, 1909 was the last expedition that MASSA (Martian Aetheric Space Survey Agency) could mount using airships because of the rapid destruction of the aether due to the spread of Einsteinian relativity. It wasn’t until 1947 that saucer technology was sufficiently advanced to resume exploration.
May 13, 2009 at 1:33 pm
SEK
You know, we ought to do more posts like these. Or maybe an occasional one like this, seeing how we don’t have a blogroll.
May 13, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Erik Lund
I doubt ekogan’s theory. “The special relativity of Lorentz, Fitzgerald and Poincare,” as Edmund Whittaker so unpleasantly described it, had been around since the 1890s. It just took Einstein (and Minkowski) to make it intuitive and reasonable.
This was clearly Ascended Masters taking a short cut from Mt. Shasta to Mu.
May 13, 2009 at 4:21 pm
ekogan
Lorentz still believed in the aether. Einstein was the one who discarded it.
May 13, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Erik Lund
Fair enough. What makes Whittaker’s take in _History of Theories of the Aether and Electricity_ so antisemitic is that he does obscure the conceptual change from a “contraction” to the elegance of Einstein’s time dilation. I was just trying to sound smart.