Post by Catsmate on Apr 9, 2014 11:41:12 GMT
Actually panics, there were a number of them.
The story starts, sort-of anyway, in November 1896 in the American Midwest with people seeing (and hearing) weird things in the sky, and broadens from there.
The "things" that were seen were often "cigar shaped", with red and green running lights and propellers. Sometimes they had wings, and other times they had searchlights, but the common term for them all was "airships". About one third of those sightings happened in Michigan, more down in Texas; very few over the US east coast (though there was one over Washington, D.C. on the fifteenth of April 1897. That same "airship" may have travelled over Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, South Dakota, and Texas the same day.
Some of the stories report the airships’ pilots landing; the majority of witnesses described these early UFOnauts as "bearded men", A report from Vernon, Kansas described the airship pilots as "six of the strangest beings I ever saw", and accuses them of cattle theft.
On the 17th of April 1897 an airship allegedly crashed into a windmill and exploded, in Aurora, Texas; the crash left strange metallic debris, "papers in unknown hieroglyphics" and the body of the pilot, described as "not an inhabitant of this world". Roswell fifty years early..............
So what was happening? Genius inventor with an actual dirigible airship? It's not impossible, Solomon Andrews flew his "Aeron" over New York thirty years earlier and Henri Giffard flew his airship a decade earlier still.
One possible candidate is Edward J. Pennington (1858-1911) an Indiana inventor whose fertile brain had developed many different devices. Early in 1896 he won an aeronautical race in England with a prototype airship based on one he'd patented in 1895. Pennington's habitual secrecy means that if he had developed an airship and abandoned it (his motorcycle factory was highly profitable) there'd probably be little known. Other candidates are Fred Marriot (a Briton who moved to San Francisco and tested an unmanned steam driven airship in 1869), Burrell Cannon (a preacher and blacksmith who supposedly built an 'Ezekiel Airship' in 1902, it was destroyed after after he sold stock in a company to build more) and Jacob Brodbeck from Texas; he began selling shares in an airship company in 1865, travelling and showing models until his plans were supposedly stolen.
Over the Atlantic Britain has it's own Airship Panic a few years later, starting around 1909. One of the first such incidents was on the night of the 23rd of March 1909 when a PC Kettle on patrol in Peterborough in Cambridgeshire observed, and noted, 'a strange, cigar-shaped craft passing over the city'. Two nights later a Mr. Banyard and Mrs. Day, of the nearby town of March, separately saw something similar.These occurrences were only the beginning of a series of several dozen such sightings throughout April and especially May, mostly in East Anglia and South Wales.
By May there were a number of national newspaper stories of the occurrences, the London Standard wrote in the May 17th edition of common features of the craft: With few exceptions they all speak of a torpedo-shaped object, possessing two powerful searchlights, which comes out early at night.
The press (metropolitan and provincial) assumed that the most likely explanation for these nocturnal events was an airship or airships, the 'scareships' as they became known. However who was behind it was the question; there were very few known airships operational in Britain at the time so naturally suspicion of some Foreign Plot became rife. Remember this was the nadir of pre-WW1 Angle-German relations, the Dreadnought race was in full swing and the press, when not reporting on Unidentified Aerial Ships, was obsessed with German spies, who were apparently everywhere. One of the most popular plays on the London stage in 1909 was Guy du Maurier's An Englishman's Home, which dramatised an invasion of Britain by a thinly-disguised Germany. Politics was also involved; the generally Conservative press used the supposed German aerial espionage to attack the Liberal government, for it's sloth in forming a military aviation branch.
Numerous further incidents were recorded in 1909 and another wave in 1912-13.
Russian, or at least Russian Poland, wasn't free of the mysterious airships either; on the 26th of March 1892 a 'large balloon coming from the German frontier appeared about the fortress of Kovno'. Russian troops fired on it but if departed safety, towards the border. Again on March 7th something similar had been seen near Dombrowa and on 22nd March a balloon was seen over a railway station at Pronshk near Warsaw, the fortress of Novogeorgievsk and the town of Kelets. The following day, people in Warsaw saw 'a balloon over the city casting rays of light from an electric apparatus'. It stayed visible in the same place until 1am, when it moved to the west.
So what were people seeing in the skies? Probably the usual mix of nothing really, natural phenomena such as stars, birds and possibly and occasional real aircraft. The waves of sightings often correspond with worsening in international tensions, war fears and stories about spies so psychological factors are probably important.
Certainly Germany wasn't actually conducting reconnaissance flights over Britain, France or Russia, the historical record is clear on that.
But in the Whoniverse we don't have to stick to mundane reality. There are so many possibilities:
If you don't have anti-gravity technology, then lighter-than-air could
be a good choice. Quiet, fuel efficient (especially if you combine
electric motors and photovoltaic cells), can hover.
Involving the PCs.
The simplest is to have them read of these strange occurrences and decide to look into things. Or they could witness actual Strange Goings On and them decide to investigate. Or receive a letter from someone who's aware of their interest in such events.
One possibility is to link a series of adventures, for example:
Feel free to involve the usual suspects, Edison and Tesla. Starting the PCs in the middle of the timeline of events can be fun, they may gain foreknowledge of prior events but later antagonists might be aware of their activities. For a twist have the original inventor be someone they accidentally bring back to the beginning of events.
And finally..........
In March 1896, before the airship flap really began, an impressive stranger visited the offices of a pair of San Francisco attorneys, George Collins and William Henry Harrison Hart. Ostensibly he sought patent advice for an airship of revolutionary design. Accompanied by three assistants (who never spoke), the nameless inventor was "of dark complexion, dark-eyed, and about 5 feet 7 inches in height and weighed about 140 pounds". Further described as intelligent, articulate, in his late 40s, well-dressed and projecting an aura of wealth and power.
Just what was the Master up to in San Francisco in 1896?
The story starts, sort-of anyway, in November 1896 in the American Midwest with people seeing (and hearing) weird things in the sky, and broadens from there.
The "things" that were seen were often "cigar shaped", with red and green running lights and propellers. Sometimes they had wings, and other times they had searchlights, but the common term for them all was "airships". About one third of those sightings happened in Michigan, more down in Texas; very few over the US east coast (though there was one over Washington, D.C. on the fifteenth of April 1897. That same "airship" may have travelled over Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, South Dakota, and Texas the same day.
Some of the stories report the airships’ pilots landing; the majority of witnesses described these early UFOnauts as "bearded men", A report from Vernon, Kansas described the airship pilots as "six of the strangest beings I ever saw", and accuses them of cattle theft.
On the 17th of April 1897 an airship allegedly crashed into a windmill and exploded, in Aurora, Texas; the crash left strange metallic debris, "papers in unknown hieroglyphics" and the body of the pilot, described as "not an inhabitant of this world". Roswell fifty years early..............
So what was happening? Genius inventor with an actual dirigible airship? It's not impossible, Solomon Andrews flew his "Aeron" over New York thirty years earlier and Henri Giffard flew his airship a decade earlier still.
- And there's an interesting idea for the US Civil War, what happens if actual airships are available?
One possible candidate is Edward J. Pennington (1858-1911) an Indiana inventor whose fertile brain had developed many different devices. Early in 1896 he won an aeronautical race in England with a prototype airship based on one he'd patented in 1895. Pennington's habitual secrecy means that if he had developed an airship and abandoned it (his motorcycle factory was highly profitable) there'd probably be little known. Other candidates are Fred Marriot (a Briton who moved to San Francisco and tested an unmanned steam driven airship in 1869), Burrell Cannon (a preacher and blacksmith who supposedly built an 'Ezekiel Airship' in 1902, it was destroyed after after he sold stock in a company to build more) and Jacob Brodbeck from Texas; he began selling shares in an airship company in 1865, travelling and showing models until his plans were supposedly stolen.
Over the Atlantic Britain has it's own Airship Panic a few years later, starting around 1909. One of the first such incidents was on the night of the 23rd of March 1909 when a PC Kettle on patrol in Peterborough in Cambridgeshire observed, and noted, 'a strange, cigar-shaped craft passing over the city'. Two nights later a Mr. Banyard and Mrs. Day, of the nearby town of March, separately saw something similar.These occurrences were only the beginning of a series of several dozen such sightings throughout April and especially May, mostly in East Anglia and South Wales.
By May there were a number of national newspaper stories of the occurrences, the London Standard wrote in the May 17th edition of common features of the craft: With few exceptions they all speak of a torpedo-shaped object, possessing two powerful searchlights, which comes out early at night.
The press (metropolitan and provincial) assumed that the most likely explanation for these nocturnal events was an airship or airships, the 'scareships' as they became known. However who was behind it was the question; there were very few known airships operational in Britain at the time so naturally suspicion of some Foreign Plot became rife. Remember this was the nadir of pre-WW1 Angle-German relations, the Dreadnought race was in full swing and the press, when not reporting on Unidentified Aerial Ships, was obsessed with German spies, who were apparently everywhere. One of the most popular plays on the London stage in 1909 was Guy du Maurier's An Englishman's Home, which dramatised an invasion of Britain by a thinly-disguised Germany. Politics was also involved; the generally Conservative press used the supposed German aerial espionage to attack the Liberal government, for it's sloth in forming a military aviation branch.
- The Wright brothers were then in London trying to sell their aeroplanes to an unenthusiastic War Office.
Numerous further incidents were recorded in 1909 and another wave in 1912-13.
Russian, or at least Russian Poland, wasn't free of the mysterious airships either; on the 26th of March 1892 a 'large balloon coming from the German frontier appeared about the fortress of Kovno'. Russian troops fired on it but if departed safety, towards the border. Again on March 7th something similar had been seen near Dombrowa and on 22nd March a balloon was seen over a railway station at Pronshk near Warsaw, the fortress of Novogeorgievsk and the town of Kelets. The following day, people in Warsaw saw 'a balloon over the city casting rays of light from an electric apparatus'. It stayed visible in the same place until 1am, when it moved to the west.
So what were people seeing in the skies? Probably the usual mix of nothing really, natural phenomena such as stars, birds and possibly and occasional real aircraft. The waves of sightings often correspond with worsening in international tensions, war fears and stories about spies so psychological factors are probably important.
Certainly Germany wasn't actually conducting reconnaissance flights over Britain, France or Russia, the historical record is clear on that.
But in the Whoniverse we don't have to stick to mundane reality. There are so many possibilities:
- Extraterrestrials. Alien scouts surveying the lie of the land for an invasion? In the Whoniverse, certainly possible.
- Time travel. An experimental time machine perhaps? Why not, especially a relatively low tech design.
- Parallel universe Explorers from a sideways in time? Also plausible
(for Whoniverse values of 'plausible' anyway), such an airship appeared
in Michael Kurland’s The Whenabouts of Burr. - Mad scientists. Again why not, give them the remains of a crashed alien
starship to inspire them and there could be all sorts of things flying
long before Flyer 1 lurched off the ground. A stranded time traveller could also be up to something. - Secret government project. A classic plotline; a project that was erased from the historical record,
again perhaps equipped with advanced technology or ideas from a crashed space craft. Maybe the airship is just part of it; just what did the Germans really need all those Zeppelin hangers for? - Several of these. Just picture multiple groups flying around the skies of Edwardian Earth.......
If you don't have anti-gravity technology, then lighter-than-air could
be a good choice. Quiet, fuel efficient (especially if you combine
electric motors and photovoltaic cells), can hover.
Involving the PCs.
The simplest is to have them read of these strange occurrences and decide to look into things. Or they could witness actual Strange Goings On and them decide to investigate. Or receive a letter from someone who's aware of their interest in such events.
One possibility is to link a series of adventures, for example:
- a spaceship crashes in the USA in 1894 and the crash discovered by a someone or a small group
- they use some scavenged technology to gain wealth and then, for some reason (Patriotism? Power grab?) decide to build a flying machine in 1896. It's test flights cause one round of stories.
- Perhaps the group splits, or an airship crashes and someone else, let's say the British government (there was a round of sightings in Canada) salvages some of it.
- You could have the airship involved in (say) the Spanish-American War in 1898, preferably crashing and killing off it's builders, ending one plot thread. Bonus points for involving Teddy Roosevelt.
- The British (perhaps involving Torchwood) test an airship in secluded Canada. But it's stolen. By the Germans.
- The Germans start their own project, using the Zeppelin 'Luftshiffen' as cover. They test fly their craft, which use shrouded propellers and scavenged anti-gravity generators they don't understand and can't really duplicate, and carry out reconnaissance flights over Britain.
- The British (at least a Shadowy Government Agency) build another couple of craft, using parts recovered from the spaceship that crashed on October 28th 1902 in the Gulf of Guinea and was clandestinely salvaged by the Royal Navy. However due to poor understanding of the technology, and strange effects on the crew, the project is abandoned. Or maybe the original owners reclaim their property. But not before the skies over Britain get busy.
- By 1913 the UK government is aware of, and worried by these aerial events. Perhaps someone's finally told Asquith about things, so he meets with Grahame White (the aviator) on February 25th and sends him to investigate the rash of sightings in Yorkshire. Don't forget Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, was a proponent of military aeronautics, did he know something?
- The denouement. German spies, sinister plots, flat caps, aliens, weird science, betrayals, trouble at t'mill............. Time for a Michael York double bill, Zeppelin and The Riddle of the Sands. Just eliminate all the anachronistic technology so World War One can happen as before.
Feel free to involve the usual suspects, Edison and Tesla. Starting the PCs in the middle of the timeline of events can be fun, they may gain foreknowledge of prior events but later antagonists might be aware of their activities. For a twist have the original inventor be someone they accidentally bring back to the beginning of events.
And finally..........
In March 1896, before the airship flap really began, an impressive stranger visited the offices of a pair of San Francisco attorneys, George Collins and William Henry Harrison Hart. Ostensibly he sought patent advice for an airship of revolutionary design. Accompanied by three assistants (who never spoke), the nameless inventor was "of dark complexion, dark-eyed, and about 5 feet 7 inches in height and weighed about 140 pounds". Further described as intelligent, articulate, in his late 40s, well-dressed and projecting an aura of wealth and power.
Just what was the Master up to in San Francisco in 1896?
