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HISTORY NOW Have a story? Please email Matt Elton at matt.elton@immediate.co.uk Flights of fancy There were hundreds of sightings of ‘German’ aircraft over Britain in 1912–13, leading to a frenzied debate about the state of the nation’s air defences ILLUSTRATION BY SUE GENT
Why the Edwardians were terrified of ‘phantom airships’
SUEGENT.COM
A forerunner of the UFO scare can tell us a great deal about Britons’ paranoia ahead of the First World War, a new study suggests. Matt Elton reports
BBC History Magazine
“T
he light seemed bright and was moving eastwards fairly fast… The night was dark but the light enabled her to have the impression of seeing a long, dark object. She heard the sound of an engine.” So naval investigators reported the experiences of an ironmonger’s employee on 14 October 1912, who believed that she had witnessed an airship in the night sky – when none was there. It was just one of a spate of apparent sightings of ‘phantom airships’ that was to grow into a panic over the coming months. The trend was such that, in just one three-month period in 1913, there were
more than 300 sightings around Britain, particularly in Yorkshire and south Wales, leading to fears of a new aerial threat posed by German forces in the run-up to the First World War. Sightings were widely reported in the press, and led to debate about what should be done to protect the nation’s skies. So what was really going on? “The airship panic was the Edwardian equivalent of a wave of UFO sightings, except instead of interpreting the strange lights in the sky as alien spacecraft, people instead tended to assume they were German zeppelins,” says Brett Holman from the University of New England in Australia, whose research on