Captain Jim Hooton's airship landing near Homan, Arkansas

In the spring of 1897, an airship wave swept the United States. Strange lights and machines were reported from town to town, and newspapers printed the accounts. Arkansas had its share. In Texarkana, J. F. Floyd's children described "a huge ball of fire traveling with fearful velocity." In May, Hot Springs would have its own sightings.

Captain Jim Hooton was a conductor on the Iron Mountain Railroad. The Arkansas Gazette called him "the well-known Iron Mountain railroad conductor." He had come to Texarkana to collect a locomotive and take it back to Little Rock. While he waited, he went hunting in the woods near Homan, in Miller County.

April 20, 1897. About 6 p.m. Hooton was in the underbrush when he heard something out of place. The familiar sound of a locomotive air pump. He followed it. In a clearing, he saw an airship land in a field a few acres from where he stood.

He described it closely. The keel was divided into two parts and ended in a sharp, knife-edged point at the front. "The side of the ship bulged gradually toward the middle, and then receded." On each side were three large wheels of flexible metal, which turned concave as they moved forward. He looked for a bell and a bell rope. There were none. That surprised him, because he thought "every well-regulated air locomotive should have one."

As he approached, the crew came out. The pilot was "a medium-size looking man." "I noticed that he was wearing smoked glasses," Hooton said. Three or four other men were with him. By every account they were men like any other, and they answered his questions politely and briefly.

"Is this the air ship?" Hooton asked. "Yes, sir." He remarked that the noise sounded a good deal like a Westinghouse air brake. The pilot answered. "Perhaps it does … We are using compressed air and aeroplanes, but you will know more later on." Then one of the crew said the ship was ready.

Just in front of each wheel, "a two-inch tube began to spurt air on the wheels." The "aeroplanes suddenly sprang forward, turning their sharp end skyward." The ship rose with a hissing sound. Its rudders swung to one side. The wheels spun so fast they blurred. Within moments it was out of sight. Two days later Hooton gave the Arkansas Gazette an interview and an extremely detailed sketch of the machine. The story ran as "Saw the Airship."

There was no formal investigation of Hooton's report. The only official response to the Arkansas airships came from the legislature. The Arkansas Senate passed a resolution saying airships should pay taxes on the freight they carried.

Explanations pull in different directions. Some maintain the sightings were a hoax perpetrated by citizens or newspaper reporters, and Arkansas papers of the day did print airship jokes, among them a mock affidavit in the Malvern Times-Journal. Nobody has shown that Hooton's story was one of them. Michael Busby argued that the airships were real, a secret project funded by George Hearst. Thomas E. Bullard was blunt: "There are no genuine UFOs among the 1897 airships." Jerome Clark thought "many, perhaps most, sightings were of Venus, meteors and kites." Robert Bartholomew treated the whole wave as mass hysteria.

Every detail of Hooton's machine speaks the language of his trade. The air pump. The brake. The missing bell rope. To some, that is a conductor describing the unknown in the only words he had. To others, it is the mark of a good newspaper yarn. The story survived either way. Jacques Vallee retold it in Passport to Magonia. In 2015 Brian Irby of the Arkansas History Commission brought it to the Old State House Museum. It should not be confused with the Aurora crash tale from Texas, reported the day before. The original Gazette page, and Hooton's sketch, remain the heart of the case.