This undertaking thereafter turned into a seemingly endless series of drawings, paintings, and collages on butcher paper. Not long after these incredible sightings of flying ships, Charles Dellschau, who seems to have spent most of his time in his step-daughter’s attic, began to write his illustrated memoirs. He retired right around when the airship flaps began. In the mid-1890s, his son-in-law also passed away, and Dellschau moved in with his widowed step-daughter and her several children. Decades later, after losing his wife and most of the children he had fathered with her, he moved from Richmond to Houston to work as a clerk for his step-daughter’s husband, a saddler maker. In 1861, he married a widow with a 5 year old girl. He lived much of his life in Texas, working in Richmond as a butcher, as had been his father’s trade. The artist was then a man of around 70 years, a Prussian immigrant by the name of Charles Albert August Dellschau who had arrived at Galveston in 1849 at the age of 19. The work began around the turn of the 20th century. But is this a work of history or a work of art? Does it impart fact or simply weave an intriguing fiction? In all, it comprises some 2000 pages, with watercolor paintings and handmade collages as well as handwritten passages that purport to reveal the existence of an organization of airship inventors who made great advances in aviation in the 1850s, but did so entirely in secret. And there does exist a body of work that claims to answer these questions. In the last edition, I surveyed the history of innovation in ballooning before telling the tale of the mysterious sightings that occurred in 1896 and ’97, but is it possible that there is a further history of aviation pioneering that didn’t make it into the historical record? Could some inventors have made great strides in the design and building of airships? If fleets of flying machines really were seen in 18, then it would seem someone must have.
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