Up, Up and Away!
Would you like to ride in
my beautiful balloon?
Way up in the sky in
my beautiful balloon?
We could float among the stars together
you and I
For we can fly, we can fly!
Since discovering the Hidden History of Old World Maps, I’ve been wondering if lighter-than-air travel played a larger part in our heritage than we’ve been taught.
We are assured the first successful hot air balloon was made by the Montgolfier brothers in France in 1783.
They say the first aeronauts were a sheep, a duck and a rooster — although the reason why they were chosen is kinda weird:
The sheep was believed to have a reasonable approximation of human physiology. The duck was expected to be unharmed by being lifted aloft. It was included as a control for effects created by the aircraft rather than the altitude. The rooster was included as a further control as it was a bird that did not fly at high altitudes.
Anyway, the era of Balloonomania had begun and within a year professional and amateur balloonists were lifting off over major cities and landing wherever the winds carried them.
In fact, the public was so enchanted with the spectacles that there were balloon riots when aeronauts failed to launch!
Did you know Edgar Alan Poe was responsible for the Balloon Hoax of 1884 which was published in the New York Sun, the very same paper who pulled off the great Moon Hoax of 1835?
He claims he made it all up because, ya know, he just wanted to sell papers. Although wildly popular, the story was quickly retracted.
The Atlantic has been actually crossed in a Balloon; and this too without difficulty — without any great apparent danger — with thorough control of the machine — and in the inconceivably brief period of seventy-five hours from shore to shore!
Mister Monck Mason’s Flying Machine
Poe used a plan of having real people do the things that they would like to do. The balloon hoax, however, lasted for only a day.
The Sun itself said on April 15, 1844: “Balloon — the mails from the south … not having brought confirmation of the balloon from England … we are inclined to believe that the intelligence is erroneous.”
The Great Balloon Hoax
I won’t bore you with the textbook history of ballooning that I’ve endured in my research except to say it gets pretty fishy and involves a lot of tragedy.
Balloons weren’t the only man-made objects floating around in the Gilded Age skies, soon dirigibles were the rage and made the first trans-Atlantic flight by 1902.
Of course, we all know the Age of the Passenger Blimp ended abruptly in 1937 with the well-publicized crash of the Hindenburg, another dodgy story.
Hmmm…
I wonder if these clumsy balloons and ugly airships are just pale imitations of elegant floating craft employed by those lost (but not entirely erased) world-wide empires like Hyperborea and Tartaria?
Let’s consider the theory that many of those turn-of-the-century Expositions and Electric Parks were held to confuse the public by presenting actual remnants of these forgotten cultures amid cheap plaster imitations.
Do any of the buildings at these events suggest our ancestors had aerial docking towers and airship hangers?
Hmmm…
Yep, we find most of the Expos were chock full of buildings big enough to manufacture and house all kinds of airships!
Could those Crystal Palace designs actually be re-purposed blimp-ports of yesteryear?
Would that explain why certain cities in the New World were laid out with broad avenues, massive towers and fancy rooftop fiddly bits which no one on the ground can possibly see?
If such city centers were originally designed to accommodate floating airships, it might explain why you don’t see street traffic controls in the early city photos — just pedestrian malls and trolleys.
I even speculate about why we find those huge reflecting pools in most Old Empire complexes… they are certainly easy to spot from the air and could indicate blimp landing facilities!
It would also help explain weird artifacts like this “street furniture” traffic light.
Another thing to consider is why so many Old Empire buildings had elaborate weather vanes on top.
Have you ever needed to check the weather vane?
Yeah, me neither.
As this (no longer available) discussion at Stolen History explained, weather vanes (or flags) would make perfect sense if they were used by aeronauts to calculate wind speed and direction.
Who knows, maybe they even emitted homing signals?
Next, there are all those documented eyewitness accounts of the Mystery Airships in the late 1900’s reported by reputable sources.
Starting in 1886 in California, American newspapers ran first hand accounts of encounters with spectacular aerial craft (some with nude passengers) either flying low or landing in their midst of towns.
The reports tracked their progress all the way to the East Coast.
This is one of my favorites…
An article in the Albion Weekly News reported that two witnesses saw an airship crash just inches from where they were standing. The airship suddenly disappeared, with a man standing where the vessel had been. The airship pilot showed the men a small device that supposedly enabled him to shrink the airship small enough to store the vessel in his pocket.
Man, could we use those shrinking devices! No more parking woes!
Anyway, what is really interesting is how quickly the public forgot about this aerial sensation and passed it off as whimsy.
“One curious feature of the post-1887 airship waves was the failure of each to stick in historical memory. Although 1909, for example, brought a flood of sightings worldwide and attendant discussion and speculation, contemporary accounts do not allude to the hugely publicized events of little more than a decade earlier.”
Then we have this strange story of the Sonora Aero Club as discovered from the almost lost volumes of Charles Dellschau, originally from Prussia, who wound up in Texas in the late 1900’s.
In the fall of 1899, Charles A.A. Dellschau (1830-1923), a retired butcher from Houston, embarked on a project that would occupy him for more than 20 years. What began as an illustrated manuscript recounting his experiences in the California Gold Rush became an obsessive project resulting in 12 large, hand-bound books with more than 2,500 drawings related to airships and the development of flight. Dellschau’s designs resemble traditional hot air balloons augmented with fantastic visual details, collage and text.
His work was not found until 1960 when it was retrieved from a trash heap, so we’ll never know his true motivation since most of it is written in code.
Dellschau never seems to explain why the club worked so hard to protect its secrecy, but he shows the members going to great lengths to do so. By day, the Aero Goeit was disguised as a gypsy wagon, so it could travel open roads undetected.
Dellschau writes that a club member was banned from developing a machine because he’d talked to outsiders. And of course, even years after the club disbanded, many of Dellschau’s own comments are rendered in code. Apparently, whatever it was that he had to say was too private even for his own notebooks.
Seeking Sonoro
His notebooks contained actual newspaper clippings about UFO activity, but strangely no stories about the Airship flap that happened during the same period.
Hmmm…
The notebooks do name some of the Sonaro Aero Club’s members and evidence has turned up of their subsequent activities.
Their connections have lead to speculation that Charles may have cataloged the work of a secret society of mainly German engineers (maybe part of NYMZA?) who lived in Northern California during the Gold Rush Era.
According to the notebooks, the club designed aeronautical vehicles using a special anti-gravity fluid they referred to as NB Gas (weight nullifying gas) also known as Lifting Fuel and Suppa.
Instead of crafting traditional lighter-than-air ships, the Sonoro Aero Club designers were dealing with floating machines that had to be maneuvered with conventional motors, paddles and wheels.
Here is how it is described in Dellschau’s notebooks:
1. A secret powder was added to water
2. The resulting solution was dripped onto a ‘special drum’
3. The liquid was converted to “NB Gas”
4. A chemical reaction causes the drum to spin
5. This then powers an ‘air compressor’, and apparatus for lift and propulsion (Crenshaw, 2009).
Unfortunately, the formula for NB Gas was known only by one of their members, Peter Minnis, who died shortly after refusing to cooperate with the military.
The secret “floating gas” was believed lost with his passing and the club disbanded.
But contemporary researchers speculate that the Sonoro Aero Club may have been co-opted by a Black Ops project that involves players like Nikola Tesla, Mark Twain, Butch Cassidy and the Trump Family!
I kid you not!
Then there are the Dark Journalist’s investigations which continue to expose seriously nefarious programs emanating from the Aerospace industry.
Interesting update, in a recent broadcast, DJ speculated (based on some pretty solid evidence) that the renowned explorer of the US Southwest, John Wesley Powell, actually used an aircraft to create those great maps of the region. He even considers that he also saw the remnants of Egyptian civilizations in the Grand Canyon! Considering Powell formed the nefarious Cosmo Club, I think he might be onto something!
I also wonder if these stories of airships may be fleeting glimpses of the breakaway civilizations I speculate about in my Lost Civilizations of America blog.
After considering what a nightmare air travel has become (all in the name of our safety — and the almighty buck) I can’t help but wonder why we abandoned the gentle thrill of blimp travel.
Maybe it was that step onto the loading ramp, eh?
Of course, Hollywood has concocted a typically glamorized action-packed version of the life of balloonist Sophie Blanchard (at least they don’t use her real name) to make bank off our lingering desire for unfettered flight.
But never fear, a new private aerospace business, Space Perspective, has announced plans to launch a balloon to provide sightseeing jaunts to the outer reaches of Earth’s atmosphere in a pressurized capsule that will also feature a refreshments bar and lavatory.
Really.
FYI, the original Neptune Balloon was used by the French Military to spread propaganda behind enemy lines.
Interesting that the balloon in The Aeronauts was also the Neptune.
Plus the Neptune was also the name of a tethered balloon used by photography pioneer Felix Nadar that was shredded in a windstorm in 1878!
Kinda interesting to note when artists in 1900 drew their vision of the year 2000, they figured we’d all have our own flying machines by then.
Weewarrior's Weblog 
Great post! Funny how the tram system and airships allegedly emerged at the same time then both dismantled and replaced in the late 30s. I wonder if the Empire State Building was erected specifically to facilitate airships?
That is such a good point, Aly! I have yet to dig into the trolley system, but I got a feeling its just as twisted a history as these other topics we decide to question.
I do believe I read that the Empire State Building had a specific blimp docking station on top, but it was only used a few times before the big “disaster” and we decided blimps were out.
Of course, we can trace the construction of the Empire State building so we know it wasn’t pre-existing, but maybe blimps were still so prevalent in our cultural norm that they didn’t dare build something that high without a blimp dock!
Blimps were very prevalent, all western industrialised countries were manufacturing them and using them as I commented on autodidactic. Russian, UK, USA, German and France all flew them for many decades.
I want to know where all the footage is they must have shot on their travels.
They are still making them, look at this baby https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNAzkAuXsJg
Good point about the footage from blimps, you know someone up there had a camera! I agree that blimps were (and are) much more prevalent than we have been led to believe. My investigations revealed that commercial blimps were literally erased from public arena after the Hindenburg crash scared the public away from lighter-than-air travel. The military (and Goodyear!) have utilized these craft for all kinds of tasks ever since. We’ve been duped.
Reading MP, PM says Japanese had quite a fleet back when. Roswell supposedly one of theirs actually. And “battle of L.A.”. Plus late 1800 airship scare as one crossed U.S…. Then there was SF 1906 and other bombed out cities that might have an explanation in them.
There’s a good airship website… Views of interiors, etc. AD didn’t even know they HAD interiors…
I liked the Aeoronauts movie, even though it was mainly adventure fluff.
What’s with that faked Brooklyn Bridge 1895 photo up there? All of the balloons are the SAME ONE. Is it supposed to be legit?
I really wanted to like the Aeronaut movie but alas, the fluff was too much and the characters too shallow. Really a shame because the true history of Sophia Blanchard is fascinating, but that wasn’t enough for Hollyweird, they had to mush it all up.
And yes, the Brooklyn Bridge photo is a total fake, there is a series with them with fake balloons over the Statue of Liberty too. I just chose it for aesthetic value to set the mood.
I have been wondering about that elaborate statuary on the tops of buildings, so high off the ground that they can’t be seen by anyone at ground level. What’s the point of decorating something that nobody will ever see? But if the tops of buildings were used as landing pads, the decoration makes sense.
Thanks for the comments!
Delighted you are following my logic here! It’s just so obvious when you start looking at this kind of stuff with a new perspective. It’s like everything kinda snaps into focus. I’m also noticing all those little balconies and cupolas along the side and on top of Old Empire buildings, they would be perfect places to drop off airborne packages and mail!
What’s with Swissy Germans always popping up in the strangest of things? Whenever there’s very strange paranormal accounts that have links to the Third Reich, it just so happens there they are. Hmm Either a diversion or they really do have some Thule-like societies that have been around for over a 100 years. I’m not entirely convinced by the Thule etc stories, too many pictures being manipulated to prove its point. Do they have a higher prevalence of mysterious disappearances per group type in the Missing 411 cases, as well?
The stationed blimp picture, is that an original? The close up one, not the other. Where it’s connected, looks almost like either a rundown oscillator or maybe an old generator. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable with that can chime in, because it’s a strangely built contraption to have up there just a blimpy parkway.