Since time immemorial, the idea of flying like a bird through the sky has appealed to the imagination. That imagination has brought us to a landing on the moon in present times, with aspirations of travel to Mars and beyond.

Icarius may have started it all when he flew over the sea with the aid of metal wings held together with wax, but in flying too close to the sun, the wax melted and he fell to his death in the waters below.

A few thousand years later, Sept. 19, 1783, the Aerostat Reveillon launched by French scientist Pilatre De Rozier carried three passengers into the air. The passengers, a rooster, a duck and a sheep, defied gravity for a 15-minute ride before crashing to the ground in the first hot air balloon.

By 1793, President George Washington witnessed the launch of America’s first hot air balloon flight at Philadelphia, the nation’s capital at the time.

During the Civil War, hydrogen-filled balloons were used by both the Union and the Confederacy to spy on enemy lines. The hydrogen filled balloons of the Civil War represent the beginning of aerial warfare.

French author Jules Verne electrified the imagination in 1865 with “From the Earth to the Moon,” a revolutionary tale of traveling to the moon by “projectile.” A huge cannon was employed to launch the oversized “bullet” into the heavens, “victoriously cleaving the air in the midst of the fiery vapours!” The English translations of Verne’s book infuriated the author, but they kept coming. A new American translation published in 1890 was one of the most widely-read editions.

By the 1890s, inventors were designing innovative and often fanatical machines that were being called airships. There were bicycle airships, kite airships, trolley airships were lifted to wires in the air and even dynamite powered airships! But strange sightings put them all to shame in 1896 and 1897, leaving the whole world wondering.

The evening of Nov. 17, 1896, George Scott, assistant to the California Secretary of State, saw a bright light breaking through the murky darkness of the night sky. From an observation deck of the capitol dome, Scott and friends could see not one light, but three. Silhouetted against the cloudy background, the craft’s oblong body could barely be distinguished. According to newspapers of the time, hundreds of people witnessed the “wandering apparition.”

Wandering apparitions were something that had been seen since time immemorial. Most everyone knows the story of Ezekiel’s wheel, “way up there in the middle of the air.”

In the year 1290 A.D. at Byland Abby, Yorkshire, England, “a’ large round silver thing like a disk flew slowly over (the attendants to a feast) and excited the greatest terror.” In the 16th and 17th centuries, strange lights, luminous clouds, globes of light and flying balls of fire were seen in European skies. From that time to the present, sightings have been tracked all over the world.

In 1896, the wandering apparitions were making themselves known in America. The mysterious “airships” were seen all along the West Coast by thousands of people, including the mayor of San Francisco. A mysterious inventor was supposedly testing the contraption, but the identity of the inventor remained unknown. Then the skies went dark. For two months the mysterious lights went dim.

Halfway across the country, an airship appeared at Hastings, Neb., the evening of Feb. 2, 1897. Reports began to come in from across the state of Nebraska and into Kansas.