Lawrence County's Contribution to the List of Airship Sightings of 1897.

The spate of late 1896 airship sightings was largely confined to California. In early 1897, the sighting reports came from the Midwest and Eastern U.S. The well-researched purported Aurora, Texas, airship crash is said to have occurred on April 17, 1897.

According to a local author and newspaper correspondent, an archived New Castle News article from April 23, 1897, reads that a fast moving aircraft was observed on a previous evening in the village which lay between Ellwood City and New Castle. The witnesses reported that the craft had a forward light which illuminated its direction of travel. The article states that a similar appearing craft was repeatedly spotted a few days prior in Mercer County and in states other than Pennsylvania.

Interestingly, in the wave of UFO reports from November 1973 (which I remember) a triangular UFO was spotted above Route 65 in the general location as the aforesaid 1897 sighting.