From: Pete.Porro@f414.n154.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Pete Porro)
Subject: GREAT AIRSHIP HOAX
Date: 31 Dec 93 17:12:32 GMT


For those who have asked about the Airship Wave of 1896-97, and the mysterious sighting, including a classic cattle abduction by the craft. I think you will find the "rest of the story" interesting. This is the part that gets forgotten or ignored.

"UFO's and the Limits of Science" Ronald D. Story 1981, Pages 39-40

Forty-six years later, the tale was finally revealed as a hoax. The expose' appeared in a small Kansas weekly, the Buffalo Enterprise, in it's January 28, 1943, issue. The obscure article was discovered later by UFO writer-researcher Jerome Clark, who told the full story in the February,1977, issue of Fate magazine. The first breakthrough came when the Buffalo Enterprise reprinted Hamilton's tale, which brought a letter from Ed F. Hudson, who in 1897 was an editor for the Yates Center Farmer's Advocate. Hudson wrote: "I had just bought and installed a little gasoline engine, the first I believe to come to Yates Center, using it to run my machinery replacing the hand-power on the old Country Campbell press and kicking the job presses. I invited many of my friends into the back shop to see the engine work. Hamilton was one of them. He Exclaimed, 'Now they can fly', hence the airship story was made up. After we had published it, the story was copied in many of the largest newspapers in the country, England, France and Germany, some illustraing it with pen-drawn (images by) their staff artists. There were also hundreds of inquiries from every part of the globe. Soon afterwards there came the various experiments in flight, but I have always maintained that Alex Hamilton was the real inventor of human flight."

(Ethel L. Shaw, who claims to have been present when Mr. Hamilton came home and told them the airship story.) "It seems there were a few men round about who had formed a club which the called 'Ananias" (Liar's Club). They would get together once in a while to see which one could tell the biggest story they'd concocted since their last meeting. Well, to my knowledge, the club soon broke up after the 'airship and cow' story. I guess that one had topped them all and the Hamilton family went down in history."
And so they did, at least among the classics of UFO hoaxdom.