American Balloon Hoaxes: A Quick Overview

Last Thursday, as the nation was riveted by the saga of "Balloon Boy" Falcon Heene, I was reminded of the nation's first balloon hoax, perpetrated in 1844 by none other than America's first man of letters, Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe presented a news article in the New York Sun in which he chronicled the first crossing of the Atlantic via balloon by world famous balloonist Monck Mason.

Accompanying the article was a detailed description of the craft, the route, and the time (79 hours) that it took. Two days later, the Sun ran a weak retraction.

Today the story is reprinted under the title "The Balloon Hoax."




Poe, of course, was delighted. Back then journalism didn't have the same sense of integrity and forthrightness we expect of our media today. (I kid, the media today is a cesspool of lies that would shock even the drunken rascal Poe.) Hoaxes were common then, and Poe himself is responsible for at least five others, including articles on life after death and alien visitation.

Jules Verne was inspired by Poe's story to write Five Weeks in a Balloon, the public had an insatiable appetite for stories of ballooning: It was dangerous, unpredictable, and literally the only way to fly. Daredevil balloonists would launch from festivals and fairs worldwide to great acclaim, some, like the eponymous Wizard of Oz, would be lost forever, never to be found.

In fact, the Wizard is an excellent example of the kind of humbug and hoaxer that populated the early days of ballooning. The man who L. Frank Baum based the character of the Wizard on was W. H. Donaldson, perhaps the craziest daredevil balloonist who ever lived, (as opposed to dying a terrible death.) He would launch into the air and do a mini-trapeze act hanging from the basket. In 1875, Donaldson took off across Lake Michigan, and disappeared forever. Maybe. Maybe he just fooled the world. Another hoax?

In 1886 Jules Verne wrote Robur the Conqueror, about a mad inventor building a steerable, lighter than air dirigible. In 1887 came a wave of report of something in the air, all along the US east coast. A second wave of UFO dirigible sightings occurred in 1896-97, in which weirdly uniformed crew could now be identified, sometimes leaking information about being part of a secret weapons program by the United States government. It sounds like a steampunk X-Files episode, and many of the reports are obviously journalistic hoaxes, but many ring as true as any contemporary UFO sighting. A third wave of dirigible sightings took place from 1909 to 1912.

A balloon hoax is played for laughs in Bertrand R Brinley's "The Unidentified Flying Man of Mammoth Falls," first published in Boy's Life (November 1962). Fans of juvenile literature might remember The Mad Scientists' Club, a series of novels about a group of teenagers who use science to create hoaxes and solve mysteries. In the story I just mentioned, they install a radio transmitter into a dummy, tie it to a bunch of balloons, and fly it across town, making the dummy cry out for help. Rescue crews chase the man across the sky, an the Mad Scientists suddenly realize that they have to move fast and recovery the dummy before their hoax is revealed, and they get in real trouble.

So the Wife Swap alumni Heene family might have made the world alternately astonished and angry at them, but they are in good company historically speaking. Hoaxes like this fill the world with drama and excitement, shaking up the establishment, and teaching us not to blindly trust the media, eyewitnesses, or the authorities. However, as Richard Heene might be soon learning, if you shake people's belief in authority the authorities might decide to shake you.