At 6:45, they gathered along Main St., 1,500 strong. Diners poured out of restaurants, while police stood slack-jawed. They thought, perhaps, it was the light of a bright star – as reasonable an explanation as any. It was, instead, a mystery craft hovering around 2,000 feet in the air, blasting a spotlight down on the growing crowds before vanishing. The people scrambled, seeking new vantage points in hopes of catching another glimpse of the phenomenon.
It appeared minutes later and disappeared again, only to remerge in another two hours, this time with its light pointed above. The witnesses described a long, black object of uncertain size, circling in the sky above Worcester. It eventually departed the city, before appearing over nearby Spencer and Marlborough.
The following night, a similar report arrived at roughly the same time. This time, it traveled between Lynn and Salem, before making its way to Boston. It appeared again in Marlborough, then South Framingham, Natick, Ashland, Grafton, North Grafton, Upton, Hopedale and Northborough. This time the sightings were considerably closer, around half the altitude of the night prior – though witnesses could no longer catch a clear view.
“It kept 1,000 feet or so above the earth and no distinct view of its construction or of its occupants could be had, even with field glasses, though some imaginative persons declared they could distinguish the throbbing of the engine,” a paper reported, rather unhelpfully.
The sightings reached their apex on Christmas Eve. “On the streets, the greeting wasn’t ‘Merry Christmas,’ ” explained another report, “it was ‘did you see it?’”
There are 23 separate incidents in all that night, ranging far beyond Massachusetts, into Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Maine and Vermont. A 19-year-old Howard Phillips Lovecraft was among those who spotted the aerial phenomenon in the skies above Providence.
“The general ignorance of the public as regards the science of astronomy has often been noted and deplored,” he wrote. The young writer was not alone in believing he’d simply seen the bright light of Venus in the evening skies. Other contemporary reports, however, went with a different explanation altogether.
“[P]eople who saw the airship took it for granted that Tillinghast was the aviator, and a Journal reporter, with others, at once made inquiries and learned that Mr. Tillinghast was away from home and that he telephoned his house at 4:00 in the afternoon that he would not be home tonight,” The Boston Journal noted. “At 11:00 tonight he had not returned to his home and he was not expected until morning. All this taken into consideration, together with the thin black form of the airship hovering about the city from almost every point leaves no doubt in the minds of all who witnessed it that Mr. Tillinghast was the operator and the airship his own invention.”
The following day, The Journal added this Wallace Tillinghast had returned, the worse for wear. His eyes were bloodshot and his face bore the unmistakable marks of a man battling the elements at extreme altitude. The Worcester-based inventor would not reveal where he had been or what he had been up to the prior evening.
It was a dramatic change from the cocky Tillinghast who had described his exploits to papers to the papers only a few weeks prior. On December 12, he’d recounted a September 8th test flight. The round trip flight from Boston to New York found him flying 4,000 feet in the air, at speeds of up to 120 miles an hour.
“Wallace E. Tillinghast, a well-to-do citizen and Vice President of a Worcester manufacturing company, declares he has secretly invented, built and tested an aeroplane capable of carrying three passengers,” The New York Times reported. “Mr. Tillinghast says the machine is a monoplane, weighing 1,500 pounds, with a spread of 72 feet, and equipped with a 120 horsepower gasoline engine of special construction.”
In New York, Tillinghast circled the Statue of Liberty, when the engines malfunctioned, causing on-board mechanics to perform an emergency repair as the plane glided, powerless for nearly an hour. His claims, while widely reported, had been greeted with skepticism by the burgeoning aviation community. Wilbur Wright, who, along with brother Orville, had completed the first heavier-than-air flight of 120 feet less than six years prior, noted glibly, that the reports were, “too palpably absurd from the first to take seriously."
After Christmas, the public, too, began to turn on Tillinghast. Reports faded over the next few weeks, as the inventor refused to reveal the plane to a now skeptical media. The Providence Journal explained that Worcester citizens, who were previously proud of having given rise to such a genius inventor, “have awakened to the fact that the weird stories of flying marvels are not simply local in their effect.”
Sightings largely died out by the second week January. The press demanded Tillinghast reveal his invention, but the inventor offered no proof.
Sources:
The Great New England Airship Hoax of 1909 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1559788?read-now=1&seq=9#metadata_info_tab_contents
Night Air Mystery May Be Aeroplane https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1909/12/24/101910692.html?pageNumber=2
Flew to New York and Back to Boston https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1909/12/13/101750000.html?auth=login-smartlock&pageNumber=2