PHANTOM AIRSHIPS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9531, 1 July 1909, Page 3

PHANTOM AIRSHIPS.

THE GERMAN WAR CARE,

SOME AMAZING STORIES.

If we are to believe the 'press nowadays, the English people are in a deplorable condition of nervous prostration, writes a London correspondent under date ay 21st. Last week Sir George Doughty asked Mr McKenna in mystic accents if he had heard of two German tramp steamers, full of troops, entering the Humber. To-day, Sir J. A. Barlow asked if the Government was aware that there were 80,000 trained German soldiers in England, and that within a mile of Charing Cross was a cellar contaning about as many Mauser rifles and ammunition. Eighty thousand is probably well within the mark for the number of trained Germans in England. AIRSHIP NIGHTMARES. These questions are of daily occurrence in Parliament and out. But the most grotesque development of Teutonphobia is the all-prevailing fear of airships floating about over England. Every day a new and amazing story is told. Half of them are known to be hoaxes, but the other half are more or less circumstantial "ghost" stories. The other evening a gentleman in Essex saw an airship floating off the coast, and afterwards anchor to the cliffs. When we searched the following morning, he found a long steel cylinder, with buffer-ends, encased as to its centre in a net-protected balloon. And upon the balloon material—perfidious Sinon "—the words, "Muller Fabrik, Bremen." Of course all the Mullers of Bremen repudiated at once. They did not make such things. ! Next day two .men hit on the head the sentry at a coastguard station in Yorkshire, and it took three days for the public to hear, above the din of recrimination, that the evildoers, were. English tramps, ' and not German spies. Then, one night in the fateful North Sea a weird, imperceptible object was seen a-high, burning two lights and descending, rudely curious, to observe more closely the quaking seamen on a Norwegian vessel. This story .was bruited abroad, and ever since dozens of people in the Eastern counties have been tumbling into the newspaper offices to corroborate it. Several heard the" familiar whizzing sound which an ariship makes. A Lowestoft smack skipper was bold enough to exchange signals with the airship. APPEARANCE IN WALES. !' But, suddenly, and with lightning rapidity, the venua of the spectral sh'p was shifted from the east coast across to Wales. On Tuesday night a man who is a dock labourer in the winter and a showman in th? summer was walking over Caperhilly Mountain, about 11 p.m., pushing a ittle cart, when he suddenly came upon a long tube-shaped affair lying on the grass at the roadside. Near it .•were two men busily engaged with something. "They attracted my close attention because of their peculiar get up: they appeared to have big, heavy fur coats, and fur caps fitting tightly over their heads. I was rather frightened, but I continued to go on until 1 was within20yds of them, and then my idea as to their clothing was confirmed. The noise of. my little spring .cart seemed to attract them, and when tney saw rne they jumped up and jabbered furiously to each other in a strange lingo—Welsh, or something else; it wa3 certainly not English. They hurriedly collected something from the ground, and tiitn I was really frightened. "The long thing on the ground rose slowly. I was standing still at the time, quite amazed, and when it was hanging a few feet off the ground the men jumped into a kind of little carriage suspended from it, and gradually the whole affair and the men rose in the air in a zigzag fashion. When they had cleared the telegraph wires that passed over the mountain two lights like electric lamps shone out, and the thing went higher into the air, and sailed away towards Cardiff." When the man got to Cardiff he had regained his composure, and he told the story, describing the aeronauts as two tall, smart young men. , CORROBORATIVE EVIDENCE. A newspaper man who went to the spot the following day discovered a red label attached to a chain and small plug, and bearing an inscription in French, which read "Important notice. This pin is intended to push back the shell from the valve when it is held on its Bet; detach the pin, and fix it near the tube of the pump at the extremity which fits on the valve." By way of corroboration, a signalman at the Queen Alexandra Dock, Cardiff, tells what he saw, about the same hours:—"While attending to my duty singalling trains, I was star tied by a weird object flying in the air. In appearance it resembled a boat of cigar shape. A whirring noise came from it. It was lit up by two lights, which could be plainly seen. It wasjtravelling at a great rate, and was elevated at a distance of half a mile, making from the eastward." This vision is well corroborated by men- working on vessels in the vicinity. A RIDICULOUS POSITION. Lord Northcliffe, whose papers are generally to the fore in patriotic movements, and generally, alas, in these panics which are the outcome of tiltra-partiotism, is just now in Berlin, and he has discovered a few things that ought to make puople think. He whes to-day:—"lt is not too much to say that accounts* of pban- , torn German ariships freely telef graphed here each day ar<3 placing I England and Englishmen in a ridic- | ulouß and humiliating light before ] the German people. At first they regarded it as a joke, but to-day, responsible leaders of German opinion, including writers well-known to be friendly to England, are expressing disgust, astonishment, impatience; and some little alarm. The belief which prevails here is that some practical jokers are sending up balloons |_with lights attached, and that these, seen through the frightened spectacles of a nation which has given itself over to panic, take the form of Zeppelins, Grosses, and Persevals."