Word: airships
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Best story is Rudolph Umland's fantastic folk tale, Phantom Airships of the Nineties, about the great airship illusion in the corn belt. Airships were rarer than passenger pigeons when in 1890 Nebraskans first began to see mysterious lights in the night sky. Soon they saw airships flying "with the velocity of an eagle." One airship was 2,000 feet long, carried tons of dynamite to drop on the Spaniards in Cuba. Another (according to the Wilsonville Review), powered by a windmill, swept low enough for one of its crew to shout to fascinated Nebraskans a tantalizing summons: "Weiver...
Thomas Alva Edison denied that there were any airships over Nebraska, but there were plenty of loyal Nebraskans to testify that the pilot of one low-flying craft leaned out, snatched up a farmer's chicken and dropped a note. It read: "This dodgasted airship business is not what some people crack it up to be. My vehicle is out of order and will not come down. . . . Excuse haste and poor writing, and search for my remains...
Above them the two Navy airships had collided and one had collapsed. Farther out, where no shore watcher could see, her control car and bag had tumbled crazily into the water. Only one enlisted man of her crew was rescued. The other airship, only superficially damaged, got safely back to the Lakehurst base...
...Brigadier General Frank O'D. ("Monk") Hunter, was boosted to deputy commander of the Eighth. Short, broad-chested, Bill Kepner won a Distinguished Service Cross for capturing a German machine gun singlehanded in World War I. In the 1920s he was one of the Army's top airship pilots. Nine years ago he and Captain Albert W. Stevens took an Army-National Geographic Society balloon to 60,613 ft. over South Dakota before the bag ripped and they had to leave their airtight gondola (roared Bill Kepner into his radio mike: "This damned thing has gone nuts...
Since the glider program has been under way, a touch of Tom Swift and His Wonderful Airship has crept into the shoptalk of Army airmen. As of Jan. 1, Army glider pilots, like Army gliders, were rare as four-leaf clovers. Few air experts knew what gliders could do (except for what they had read about Crete). As far as the U.S. public was concerned, gliding was still a game for a few nutty newsreel daredevils around Elmira...