This post is inspired by >>>/mlpol/59382.
I have been researching UFOs and aliens for decades. I have found the best way to understand the phenomena is to time-line it and then see what else was happening around the same time. Time-lining it allows the evolution & origin of certain aspects to show up which means you can trace things back to origin points.
I don't concern myself with if each UFO/alien report is real or not real, but I look at it in a wide ranging meta-view and this shows a sensible evolution which implies it is real and therefore the reports are generally mostly real.
I am not sure what the best way is to do this data dump. I have decided to do a succinct 300 year history which can be expanded on by me asking questions. This allows me to keep my efforts in proportion to actual board interest levels.
This initial section is to show the development of human sky technology and also shows that nothing ET UFO like is happening yet.
1758 - Book:
Concerning Earths in the Solar System, in which Emanuel Swedenborg detailed his alleged journeys (spiritual) to the inhabited planets (up to Saturn + 5 exo-planets), solar system barrier, suns are black.
1783 - France: Manned balloons
1803 -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utsuro-bune1850 - and onwards triangular shapes are reported in the sky but when researched most of these can be associated with comets and comet fragments (comets tend to break up near Earth, Sun and Jupiter into sharp angular fragments).
1851 - Dr. William Bland sent design: steam engine driving twin propellers suspended under airship to Great Exhibition, London
1852 - Comet fragment dramatically crashes to Earth with sheets of rain (comet water) and dark ominous clouds with read streaks before the massive chunk crashes into the English channel. The other interesting part about this is that it happens near dawn, and the dawn side of the Earth is in the direction of the Earth's travel around the sun. So the Earth overran this comet fragment and sucked it down into it. This dramatically shows how astronomical phenomena can produce UFO reports. Pic #1 Attached.
1863 - “Aereon” by Solomon Andrews (inventor) flew, unpowered, controllable dirigible,Perth Amboy, New Jersey.
1871 - Mystery airship, Mt. Washington, New Hampshire (Solomon Andrews?) See Pic #2. This is one of the earliest UFO reports and we can see it is consistent with an airship. We have no reason to conclude it is ET yet.
1871 -
(Vril, the Power of) The Comming Race fiction novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. This book in Germany inspires the use of the term Vril for unknown magical/physical forces and leads to the nick name The Vril Society.
1881 - a comet was mistaken as an unusual object in the sky. See pic #3.
1886 - Book:
A Dweller on Two Planets, Atlantis, life on Venus, advanced technology, karma, Mt. Shasta. “No telescope will ever reveal human life on Venus; not that it is not there, but its forms are of the One Substance effected by a range of force rendering them imperceptible to earthly eyes." -- what we see here is the myth of sentient life on other planets in our solar system starting to form. There is no reason to reject this notion at that time.
1886 - cheap way to manufacture aluminium is discovered. At this point airships are flying around, some are secret projects. They use bamboo and cloth and ropes. Cheap aluminium allows them to be made of this metal. France is becoming a leader in airship design. You can think of these airships as the B2 bomber of the day, these are very serious military tech for spying and air to ground attack. Therefore there is secrecy around designs as well.
1891 - Contactee Thomas Blott (William Simpson, 1828-1910)
The Man from Mars is a book about a Martian explaining how Mars is great and Earth sux, basically. It is not clear if this was supposed to be fiction or a reported event.
1893 - In the article “Man of the Year Million”, H. G. Wells envisaged humanity transformed into a race of grey-skinned beings, stunted and with big heads. -- the greys!!
So with that look so far we can see many of the elements of aliens and UFOs exist but there are no reports yet of flying saucers or any meaningful reports of flying triangles under intelligent control. All of it, when it comes to ETs, is human imagination. We can reasonably say no ETs are showing up in this 1700s-1800s time period.
In 1893 science starts to speculate about gravity and if we can understand it better and control it.
1893 - Oliver Heaviside makes paper called A GRAVITATIONAL AND ELECTROMAGNETIC ANALOGY
http://sergf.ru/Heavisid.htm -- this will be very important as we continue the time lining.
1894 “Aug 26, British admiral reported sighting a large disk with a projection like a tail” – Keyhoe (1950) -- Airship? Science experiment? There are no good references for this report and so it can't be examined further.
1896 - Germany 11 Sep, Zagreb daily newspaper Obzor “The day before yesterday we received a telegram sent by an amateur journalist. He informed us that David Schwarz from Zagreb has invented an [aluminium] airship which he hopes he could direct on his own free will."
1896 -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_airship -- this is the UFO flap of 1896-97 but they were airships, not disks, triangles or spacecraft. We know that airships won't work in space so these are human-made. This shows that human advanced tech can be a unsolved mystery. See pics #4 and #5
(cont.)