Today, I share the closing three cantos from On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery. These concern themselves with the rising tensions and paranoia before the outbreak of The Great War, the aerial bombardment of London by German zeppelins, and the myth of Hill 60 from 1915.
Orthoteny: from a work in progress: from On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery: closing cantos
Skunkworks 
Interesting. Thanks for sharing these, Bryan!
The destruction wrought in ‘Zeppelin’, though very much realistic, reminded me of the pre-War popular obsession with ‘aerial attacks’ in the UK, specifically two groundbreaking early silent films: The Airship Destroyer (1909) and Aerial Anarchists (1911). There’s also this gem from 1910, about amphibious ‘aerial pirates’ looting cruise ships and fighting the Royal Navy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEDnQLeCktE&t=4s.
Wells was also writing about this kind of stuff around the same time, I believe.
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Oh, yeah! Airships and war (_The War of the Words_) were all very much in the air in the years leading up to the Great War, a sociocultural fact long fingered by the proponents of the Psychosocial Hypothesis (which explains at least UFO sightings as a form of cultural contagion…). THIS Sunday, we arrive in the Middle Ages!
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