Many of the lesser known accounts in this thread, including the objects like the Strange Crown and the cigar airship seen in daylight by the farmers with no gondola etc. Or the sphere with streams of smoke, or the apparition etc. etc. ever have had a lot of notice and happened at same time. The lights flying around the steamer (many light flying in formation were called "airships" --not connected to any body)..
Some individuals were so traumatized by them that they refused to be interviewed about them!
Mystery airship - Wikipedia
"...with a single unsatisfactory exception, no eyewitness was ever interviewed even in the 1950s, when some were presumably still living."
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The "single unsatisfactory exception" Clark cites is a former
San Francisco Chronicle employee interviewed via telephone by
Edward J. Ruppelt in 1952. Ruppelt wrote that the man "had been a copy boy…and remembered the incident, but time had cancelled out the details. He did tell me that he, the editor of the paper, and the news staff had seen 'the ship', as he referred to the UFO.
His story, even though it was fifty-six years old, smacked of others I'd heard when he said that no one at the newspaper ever told anyone what they had seen; they didn't want people to think they were 'crazy'."
Jacobs notes, "Most arguments against the airship idea came from individuals who assumed that the witnesses did not see what they claimed to see. This is the crucial link between the 1896–97 phenomenon and the modern unidentified flying object phenomenon beginning in 1947. It also was central to the debate over whether unidentified flying objects constituted a unique phenomenon."
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