Articles by Josh Lange

Published April 24, 2025

Last year, a phenomenon swept across the continental United States, starting as the “New Jersey drones.” In November, there were alleged sightings of drones near military installations in New Jersey and surrounding counties. Once the coverage of these alleged drone sightings on the news and social media was shared, people started to be on the lookout for drones. This trend quickly spread, with thousands of Americans from New Hampshire to California being certain that they spotted flying drones in their neighborhoods. Most “drone sightings” were either airplanes, helicopters, or even constellations. Despite this, the certainty of some was unwavering. This mass hysteria of unidentified flying objects being spotted across the entire country around the same time is not a new concept, nor is it uncommon. One such event that took hold in the City of Mishawaka was the “Airship Hysteria of 1896-1897.”

On April 16, 1897, The Mishawaka Enterprise published an article on the front page that read, “That ‘Ere Air Ship Visits Mishawaka.” This short article reads as follows:

“Indiana is now beginning to see things and other states cannot enjoy the monopoly of that mysterious airship. Mishawaka, Elkhart, South Bend, New Carlisle and numerous other Northern Indiana towns enjoyed a glimpse of the noctural [nocturnal] prowler last Sunday night. H.G. Niles and wife and several other reliable and sober Mishawakans claim that they distinctly saw the mysteriously moving lights in the heavens. They appeared in the northeast and were visible for some time. Hundreds of people in Elkhart and New Carlisle swear to the same thing. That something with brilliant lights is afloat in the heavens is undoubted from the weight of testimony daily produced: but the probability is that the something may be merely vagrant baloons [balloons] or kites with lanterns attached to the tails, sent up by practical jokers. Elkhart, however, has the biggest story to tell concerning the alleged airship. A photographer named Schlotterback, according to Truth, [The Elkhart Truth newspaper] succeeded in getting a photograph of the mysterious stranger as it was sailing over that city early Tuesday morning. That does settle it. Now will you believe?”

To better understand the 1897 article, context needs to be established. According to the article, on April 11, 1897, sometime during the night, hundreds of people in Elkhart and St. Joseph County saw strange lights in the sky. To show that reasonable people also saw these alleged lights, one witness’ testimony came from H.G. Niles. Who was H.G. Niles? Henry Gardner Niles was a powerful businessman who owned multiple companies and was a prominent citizen who served on the Mishawaka Board of Education and as President of the Board of Trustees for Mishawaka. Given his status and reputation in the city, H.G. Niles’s testimony was used to make the airships seem more plausible. The Mishawaka Enterprise article also mentioned the Elkhart photographer named Schlotterback, which I looked into. He had an entire front-page article devoted to him in the Elkhart Weekly Truth published on April 15, 1897.

Cassius M. Schlotterback, who owned a photography studio on State Street in downtown Elkhart, claimed that he had taken a perfect photograph of this alleged airship on April 13 at 5:30 AM. Schlotterback claimed that while on his way to his studio, he saw the airship, which prompted him to run to his studio and grab his largest camera to bring out to the street. The article described the photo by stating, “a photograph showing the rear end of the old brick building near the corner of Main and Middlebury streets with the wonderful air ship gracefully poised in midair in the distance.” It went on to say, “According to the photograph the air ship is a cigar shape-affair with a boat or basket attached beneath. Along the sides of the cylinder, as the photographer calls the cigar-shaped arrangement, long triangular wings were adjusted, but Schlotterback says that he could plainly hear the fluttering of these wings.” The description continued with “The basket which hangs beneath the airship proper is evidently occupied by three human beings.”

The writers at the Elkhart Weekly Truth did have multiple questions, though, about Schlotterback’s story and photo. They brought up that it was strange that Schlotterback never tried to get the attention of others, even though he claimed that after taking the photo that the airship stayed in the area for 15 minutes. The writer also asserted that it was peculiar that Schlotterback could hear the wings of the airship flutter, yet it did not catch the attention of anyone else. Schlotterback also waited until the next day when he had the developed photo to even mention the airship to anyone else. The validity of the photo seemed to even be questioned with the following line: “Perhaps it might be a good idea to subject the photo to a careful microscopic inspection.” 128 years later, the photo taken by Schlotterback has been lost to time with no known copies. Hopefully, it can be found one day so there will be a proper analysis of its validity.

The April 11th incident and the alleged Schlotterback Photo on April 13th were not the end of the mysterious airship invasion in St. Joseph and Elkhart County. On April 23rd, The Mishawaka Enterprise included a note from The Nappanee Advance that read, “These air ships that pass in the night are mostly schooners.” This craze was good for business, though, from people purchasing binoculars or other items to spot these illusive airships. One unexpected industry to cash into this airship mania was local bars. The same April 23rd edition had a short column that said, “Since the air ship began commanding so much attention of late a number of bars in South Bend have added a brand of liquor which is labeled ‘Air Ship Whiskey’.” On April 30, The Mishawaka Enterprise wrote on the front page about the airships. An excerpt read, “The air ship is still reported scooting about the heavens, but generally in slow localities.” It seemed that the local air ship craze would never end or have an explanation for that matter. How did the craze end up in Mishawaka?

On April 10, 1897, one day prior to the April 11th airship incident in St. Joseph and Elkhart Counties, Chicago had an alleged airship sighting that was syndicated in newspapers across the Midwest. Two days later, The Chicago Chronicle syndicated a sketch of the airship that looked exactly like the airships written about in science fiction novels at the time. That is also the exact description that Schlotterback claimed he captured in his photograph of the Elkhart airship one day later on April 13. All of this talk of airships meant that residents across the entire Midwest, including Indiana, and more specifically St. Joseph and Elkhart Counties, would have been on the lookout for these alleged rogue airships.

The airship craze originally started months prior with some news reports out of California in the fall of 1896. In “The Airship Hysteria of 1896-97,” published in 1990 by Dr. Robert E Bartholomew, he explores this sociological phenomenon. Bartholomew included facts collected by T.E. Bullard of Indiana University and points out “on the approximately 1,000 newspaper stories detailing sightings that he [Bullard] had collected during the wave, noted that approximately 80 to 90 percent of the cases were reported to have occurred at night.” More crucial details Bartholomew pointed out from Bullard’s research were that “[The survey] shows that most sightings of unidentified aerial objects between November 17, 1896 and May 1897” and that numerous descriptions of the airships were “ambiguous nocturnal aerial lights.” The first recorded sighting in Mishawaka on April 11, 1897, fits this description perfectly.

Dr. Bartholomew concluded that there was a perfect storm during that era. First, it was the age of Yellow Journalism when hoaxes and exaggerated stories were published to drive sales. Second, airships were part of the zeitgeist of the 1890s, where technology was rapidly advancing, and new inventions were constantly being displayed. Prior to the airship hysteria, talk of man conquering the skies with airships was everywhere. Science fiction stories by famous authors of the time, such as Jules Verne, included airships. Inventors were testing out prototype airships, with some exaggeration about the capabilities of these aerial ships to get coverage. People knew that humanity was on the cusp of having a practical airship, so the concept of a scientist secretly testing and flying one in the skies seemed reasonable to them. Third, people saw objects in the night sky, and their imagination filled in the blanks. As Bartholomew puts it, “They expected to see airships and saw them.” While this modern analysis does a conclusive job using hindsight, what were the theories and explanations to the unfolding events by Mishawaka and St. Joseph County residents in 1897?

It is easy for modern audiences to assume that we are more intelligent, or even more wise, than our ancestors, but that is not the case. The airship sightings were not believed by everyone. A lot were skeptical from the beginning, trying to rationalize the sightings. As already mentioned from the first Mishawaka Enterprise article on April 16, the writer remarked that it was probably practical jokers using lanterns attached to kites or balloons. Another theory was that a circus or some other business was attempting to start a publicity stunt for an unorthodox marketing campaign with hot air balloons. Others floated the idea that meteor showers could be behind the lights. A professor in the U.S. Signal Service out of Chicago claimed with certainty that the lights seen across that nation were in fact the star Alpha Orion brightening up. He claimed that Alpha Orion had done the same thing 25 or 30 years prior. The most creative theory, however, showed up in the April 12, 1897, evening edition of The South Bend Tribune, where one of the columnists remarked sarcastically on the St. Joseph County airship sighting by writing, “Perhaps that air ship is loaded with Turks reconnoitering over this country to find out how many Greeks there are in America rushing towards the Macedonian frontier.” For context, the two nations were at war in 1897. On April 23, 1897, The Mishawaka Enterprise republished a syndicated Chicago Record airship parody of the famous lullaby “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” that goes as follows: “Twinkle Twinkle little star, How I wonder what you are; Comet on your nightly trip, Or some stray aerial ship. When the evening sun is gone, Like an overcoat in pawn, Then it is your brilliant speck causes men to rubberneck. And the traveler in the dark sees your eighteen-karat spark; Tells of it next morning- then Listeners mutter, ‘drunk again’.”

The narrative of the airship drama drastically shifted, however, on May 1, 1897, with residents of St. Joseph County getting a potential explanation in The South Bend Tribune with an article titled, “Air Ship Fake Explodes: Small Rubber Balloon Used to Deceive the Public.”  The article reports on the findings from a farmer in Warren Township who lived near Chamberlain Lake (originally called Fish Lake): “Mr. Alvin Simcox, who resides five miles west of this city on the Division Street road, has solved the airship mystery by finding in one of his fields a rubber balloon to which a spring was attached. The balloon was about 18 inches in diameter when inflated and was undoubtedly used by some practical joker to float a light across the country and cause the public to crane its neck and swear it could see the outlines of an airship. The string attached to the balloon became entangled in some stubble and held it captive until it lost its buoyancy.”

After the May 1st South Bend Tribune article, coverage of the airships in St. Joseph County mostly ceased. Most if not all of the alleged sightings of airships in Mishawaka were probably the work of pranksters who had taken small balloons or kites with a light source tied to them, sending them up into the sky. This would explain how citizens such as H.G. Niles swore that he saw a light in the sky, because he and other reputable citizens were hoodwinked into believing the hoax. Despite the May 1 article, some felt that while the later sightings of airships were the work of pranksters, there were still truly unexplained sightings. While the advanced mysterious airships described across the United States did not exist anywhere in the world in 1897, three years later, the first practical rigid airship, called Zeppelin LZ 1, would make its first flight in Germany.

The mysterious airship phenomenon captured the imaginations of Americans over 128 years ago in a world that was so foreign to today’s. Yet the concept of mysterious objects in the skies is still relevant to this day. The airship hysteria of 1896-1897 became the UFO “invasion” of the 1950s, which became the New Jersey drones of 2024. During World War II, fear of a Japanese invasion led to the “Battle of Los Angeles,” where U.S. defense forces claimed to have seen Japanese planes in the air at night, leading to an hours long “battle” of anti-aircraft guns shooting into the night sky over the city. It was later determined that not only were there no Japanese planes near Los Angeles, but that it was all started because an anti-aircraft crew spotted a single weather balloon and opened fire. This convinced the other anti-aircraft crews stationed in L.A. that they were under attack, and they decided to blindly open fire into the sky. All other planes allegedly seen in the sky that night were concluded to be nothing more than imagined manifestations.

The fear of the unknown is a primal feeling, especially in an age where the wealth of all human knowledge is at our fingertips. What people see when dealing with unknowns is inherently based on what they want it to be and what they know already. It is no coincidence that the “airships” in 1897 had a description almost identical to the airships described in 1890s science fiction novels, nor is it a coincidence that almost every UFO sighting of the 1950s looked just like the flying saucers used in science fiction movies at the time. Following this logic, it makes total sense that in the 2020s, drones are the new objects in the sky. We are not immune to propaganda, and when everyone seems to see the same thing in the sky, it makes one more likely to see it, too. Will we truly ever know the answer behind every airship sighting in 1897? No. Were most cases of these “airships” either pranks or stunts to trick people? Probably. What we do know for certain is that at least one of the sightings of the mysterious airships in Mishawaka and South Bend during April 1897, was definitely a prank done by unknown culprits. Regardless of the cause of the airship sightings, this largely forgotten piece of history gives insight into these types of phenomena.

Fictional Airship from an 1893 novel