On the evening of November 17, 1896, people on the streets of Sacramento, California, looked up and saw a light moving through the overcast.

It wasn't a star—the sky was covered. It crossed slowly from east to west, at what witnesses guessed was about a thousand feet. Hundreds of people saw it. Most saw only the light. A few said they could make out a dark shape behind it.

The next day it was in the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Call. Headlines asked, "What Was It?"

Nobody in the world had yet flown a practical powered aircraft. The Wright brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk was seven years away.

The wave

Four days later, on November 21, the light came back over Sacramento. This time, the witnesses included a deputy sheriff and the district attorney. They said it was twice as bright as an arc lamp. That night, it was reported over Folsom, San Francisco, Oakland and other towns around the Bay.

By December, California newspapers were full of airship stories. A San Francisco lawyer named George D. Collins told reporters he represented the inventor—a man building "the world's first practical airship" at a secret site near Oroville. Within days he was being lampooned in cartoons, and the Chronicle was calling him "Airship" Collins. He backed away from the story.

The California sightings faded in early 1897. Then, in February, they started again—in Nebraska.

On the night of March 29, 1897, hundreds of people in Omaha watched a bright light fly over the city, seem to hover, and disappear to the northwest. On April 2, thousands in Kansas City reported "a mysterious black object casting before it a penetrating light." On April 9, the Evanston Index said five hundred "reputable citizens" outside Chicago had watched a light low in the west with the brightness of fifty streetlamps.

Through April and into May, reports came in from Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, Texas and beyond.

The stories got better

As the sightings spread, the stories grew—and many of them were clearly made up.

In Sacramento, one witness claimed he'd heard a voice from the craft ordering it higher to avoid a church steeple, and that it was powered by two men pedaling bicycles. He added, with what reads like a wink, that there were no churches nearby.

On April 23, 1897, a Kansas newspaper printed the story of a rancher named Alexander Hamilton of Le Roy, backed by an affidavit from local worthies vouching for his honesty. He said an airship had hovered over his cattle pen, lassoed a heifer with a red cable, and risen into the sky, "cow and all." Eighty years later, in 1977, UFO researcher Jerome Clark confirmed that Hamilton had invented the story for a local liars' club.

And in Texas, a correspondent named S. E. Haydon wrote in The Dallas Morning News that an airship had crashed into Judge J. S. Proctor's windmill at Aurora at around six in the morning. The pilot was dead, he wrote—"not an inhabitant of this world"—and was given a Christian burial in the town cemetery. In 1980, an elderly Aurora resident told Time magazine that Haydon had made it all up to draw attention to a dying town the railroad had bypassed.

Newspapers at the time accused each other of inventing airship stories. Some of them were right.

What people actually saw

Stars and planets. The astronomer G. W. Hough of the Dearborn Observatory insisted people were looking at the bright star Betelgeuse. Other astronomers pointed to Venus, Jupiter and Mars.

Hoaxes and pranks. Lighted balloons and kites, newspaper fabrications, and tall tales like Hamilton's. More than a century later, the Morristown hoax showed how a few lights on balloons could still fool a town.

Real experimental aircraft. Inventors in the 1890s were building and testing airships, and some writers have argued a secret, working craft is behind the sightings. No documented test flight from the period matches them, and it would have been very hard to hide a machine flying over cities for months.

Mass expectation. Sociologist Robert Bartholomew calls it an airship hysteria: a public primed by newspapers and science fiction to expect a flying machine, and finding one in any light in the sky.

What's left

Documented: A light seen over Sacramento by hundreds of people on November 17, 1896; a wave of reports across California and then the Midwest in 1897; extensive newspaper coverage.

Debunked: The Hamilton cow-napping. Very likely, the Aurora crash.

Unexplained: A handful of sightings by multiple witnesses that no one has convincingly matched to a planet or a prank.

Investigators who've worked the case usually reach the same conclusion: most sightings were planets and stars, many of the elaborate ones were hoaxes, and a small number still don't have an answer.

Watch the Short below, then tell us: would you have believed the newspapers in 1897?