The Tillinghast Airship: New England's Phantom Searchlight

December 1909. Worcester businessman Wallace E. Tillinghast told the press he had secretly built and flown a "marvelous aeroplane." His monoplane, he said, had a 72 ft span and a 120 hp engine of his own design. It carried three passengers at 120 mph. He claimed more than 100 flights, "always under cover of darkness," including one that circled the Statue of Liberty. No one had seen any of them.

Around 12 December the story reached the papers. Then New England looked up.

The evening of 22 December. Over Worcester, the New York Times reported, a "mysterious craft made its appearance over the city about 6:45 o'clock tonight, sailed about in circles and was seen by more than 1500 people." Shoppers and diners came out onto Main Street. Police looked on.

It hung "hawk-like over the city." A searchlight swept the ground, its beam lighting the falling snow. One witness saw the "frame quite plainly." Another saw "two men sitting in the airship." It circled downtown at about 2,000 ft, left to the northwest, and came back at about 8:40 pm to circle four more times. Then it went east. Nobody heard an engine.

On the evening of 23 December, several hundred people filled the streets of Willimantic, Connecticut. A bright light hung over the American Thread mill. "It remained stationery for a few minutes and then seemed to shoot upwards, then circle around as though the person manipulating it was trying to get his bearings." Mayor Dunn "would not swear it was an airship but it certainly did look like one."

Christmas Eve. Reports came from Boston, Providence and towns in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Maine and Vermont. In Providence, a 19-year-old H.P. Lovecraft looked at the light the crowd took for Tillinghast's craft. He said it was the planet Venus.

No government agency investigated. The press did. Wilbur Wright called the claims "too palpably absurd from the first to take seriously." J. Walter Flagg, director of the New England Aero Club, said: "I believe this man is a faker." Tillinghast refused to show his machine and promised a public demonstration by February 1910. It never came. Popular Mechanics treated the story as a hoax in March 1910.

Lovecraft's Venus fit much of what was seen, a bright light hanging still in the evening sky. Fire balloons were another common suggestion. A man named C.D. Rawson claimed lanterns and reflectors had been tied to owls. The Providence Journal wrote of an "epidemic of infected vision." In 2002, Stephen Whalen and Robert E. Bartholomew described the episode in The New England Quarterly as mass belief turning into mass delusion, fed by a sensational press. The podcast New England Legends leaves the 22 December Worcester sighting open.

The Tillinghast airship belongs to a line of phantom airship scares. It followed the American mystery airship wave of 1896 and 1897, and came the same year as the British and New Zealand scares. Tillinghast's machine was never seen on the ground. The light in the sky was seen by thousands, and the newspapers of the day recorded them in detail.