Based on eyewitness accounts of speed, maneuvering and flight capability, though, what people were seeing over England in 1909 seems clearly beyond the technology of the time.
The last word on the scareships should go to the one person who might have held the key to the mystery. During the 1909 scare, a British newspaperman managed to ask Count Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin himself what he thought the scareships were.
His response was: “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
For the British, tales of strange things in the sky did not end when World War I finally started in 1914.
Scareship sightings continued over England even as real zeppelins began bombing British cities. Accounts of airships doing bizarre things above the trenches of France were also reported even while the fighting raged below.
But probably the oddest aerial phenomena story to come out of that great conflict, at least on the British side, was that of the “Angels of Mons.”
It begins on August 22, 1914, at the very start of the war. The German army was moving west through Belgium, seeking to overwhelm France. Standing in its way was the British Expeditionary Force.
The looming battle was not evenly matched. Though better trained and equipped, the British force numbered only about 80,000 men, while the Germans had fielded an army of more than 160,000.
The two sides collided near Mons, a village in western Belgium. It was the first clash between England and Germany in what would be a long and bloody war. After two days of brutal fighting, though, the outnumbered British managed to stop the German advance. The Germans had taken so many casualties, in fact, that they declared a temporary cease-fire, allowing the British force to withdraw.
News of this British “victory” sentreverberations throughout England. Recruitment soared and patriotic fever swept the nation. But with it came a strange account that the British army had had otherworldly assistance in “defeating” the Germans at Mons that day. And this help, depending on which account one believes, was either transported forward in time or came directly from heaven.
The story went that just as the Germans were about to crush the British force at Mons, to the astonishment of both sides, an army of ghostly archers appeared. These bowmen fired their arrows at the Germans, cutting down enough of them that the overwhelmed British army was able to declare victory. It was even said that many of the German soldiers killed during the battle had died of arrow wounds.
The story seems to have begun when a Welsh writer named Arthur Machen provided an article to a British newspaper based on accounts he’d read about the Battle of Mons. This narrative was the first to tell of the mysterious bowmen coming to the aid of the British and slaying thousands of Germans. But the newspaper didn’t make it clear if the article was fiction or nonfiction, so many of its readers took it as fact. When a priest published a reprint of the article several months later, the story took on another life, reaching even more readers. Then, in April 1915, a magazine called the Spiritualist printed an account of the strange goings-on at Mons, and that’s when the story of the ethereal archers spread throughout all Great Britain.
At the time, mid-spring 1915, the war wasn’t going well for the British. Again, zeppelins, real ones, were bombing English cities, the Lusitania had just been sunk and the bloody meat grinder of trench warfare was running full bore along the western front. The First Battle of the Marne had cost more than 80,000 French and English lives. The first and second battles of Ypres, in which poison gas was used for the first time, cost Great Britain more than 300,000 casualties alone. The British population needed a propaganda boost. The “miracle” at Mons provided just the tonic.
The story’s details changed throughout the many retell-ings. In one, the army of medieval-style bowmen suddenly appears, as if transported to the scene of the battle from an earlier time. But by other, more popular accounts, these warriors were actually angels — or the weirdest UFOs ever seen — appearing out of the sky to cut down the Germans. Some versions even included a mysterious luminous mist that also helped the British overwhelm their enemy. Mysterious fogs are not unknown to UFO sightings.
Such variations led to even more published accounts of battlefield visions occurring over the western front, including some that claimed Joan of Arc herself had appeared and aided the Allies in battle.
These newer stories became rampant in the latter half of 1915, with many being attributed to anonymous British officers whose names had to be withheld as a matter of security. For this reason, some saw the hand of British military intelligence at work, trying to lift the nation’s spirits during a difficult time.
But while several investigations after the war found little firsthand evidence that anything extraordinary occurred during the opening battle of the Great War, the story of the heavenly warriors persists, suggesting it may never be clear what happened that bloody day at the village of Mons.
In March 1916, the formerly neutral country of Portugal was pulled into World War I.
Like almost all the participants in the Great War, longstanding treaties and secret deals had dragged the reluctant Portuguese into the conflict, in this case almost two years after it began. Though the Iberian country was a close trading ally of Great Britain, Portugal’s more immediate reason for joining the war was to thwart German designs on its colonies in Africa. Portuguese politicians felt the only way they could have a say at any future peace talks was to literally fight for a seat at the negotiating table.
Still, when Germany and Portugal finally declared war on each other, it was a very reluctant Portuguese military that formed the 30,000-man Corpo Expedicionário Portu-guês. Many in this expeditionary force were destined for the bloody trenches of France.
By the time the war was over two and a half years later, more than 2,000 of these Portuguese soldiers had been killed, 5,000 had been wounded and another 6,000 had been taken prisoner.
Coincidentally — or not — shortly after Portugal grudgingly went to war, three children from a small rural village about 60 miles north of Lisbon claimed to be visited by an angel.
This heavenly body appeared to them three times just outside the village of Fátima, telling them he was the Guardian Angel of Portugal. He urged them to pray for peace and prepare themselves for an even more fantastic vision sometime in the future.
About a year later, on May 13, 1917, the same three children were tending sheep in a small grove near their village when they claimed they saw a vision of the Virgin Mary. This apparition also urged them to pray for peace and an end to all war, promising to appear to them on the thirteenth of every month for the next six months.
Though the children had agreed among themselves to keep the incident a secret, word soon leaked out. A month later, on the thirteenth of June, about seventy people were in attendance in the small grove — but only the three children claimed to see the apparition. The number of spectators tripled for the July visitation, during which the apparition gave the three children a gloomy prediction of a world endlessly wracked with war and suffering.
The August visitation was delayed a bit when a local civil administrator, part of Portugal’s solidly antireligious government, had the three children put in jail. Threats to the children to recant didn’t work, though. They stood by their story, which only served to spread word of their visions even farther.
Though the August visitation took place six days later than prophesied and only in front of the children, there were 30,000 people on hand in the grove on September 13. As historians point out, this was an enormous crowd for rural Portugal.