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Illustration from Cyrano De Bergeracs "Historie comique des états et empires du soleil" from 1662. In the previous "Historie comique des états et empire de la Lune" Begerac describes how a man went to the Moon by filling a number of bottles, hanging around his waist, with morning dew (dew attracts sunlight...) and off he goes! |
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Illustration from Jonathan Swift's book "Gullivers Travels" from 1726. An airborne town occupied by scientists who all were into strange research and all half-mad. |
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Illustration from George Chesney's book "The Battle of Dorking" from 1871.
35 years before the first Airship appeared openly you could find them in SF-novels. The first claimed abduction case by aliens came in 1896, during the first big UFO flap over Sacramento, California (and the rest of the US), as two men claimed to have met three strange creatures that appearantly tried to kidnapp the two men from a country-road followed by their escape in a cigarr-shaped vehicle of "airship-model" . During the same period several farmers described how "airships" had landed on their fields and 3-8 men had asked to borrow water. The men from the strange vehicle said that 5 vehicles were buildt at the moment, on the border of Iowa and Illinois, financed by a New York-company. Different crews described the same number of buildt "airships" and were they were buildt, which strongly points to, if not prove, that it was eartly vehicles. And as Massachusets had most of the reports we could also find MIT (Massachusets Instute of Technology) in the area, where, at the time, advanced experiments with flying vehicles were conducted. |
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Illustration by T Roux for André Lauries novel "Les exiles de la Terre" from 1889. Note the Moon-station and the austronaut, complete with spacesuite, the sunpower-facility and the observation-building. |
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"Le Voyage dans la Lune" (A Trip To The Moon). Were a 21 minute long silent film from 1902 by the Frenchman George Méléis. Based on H.G. Wells book. |
