Harrisburg, AR And Homan, AR / 20 April And Mckinney Sprs / 23 April being encounter — April 21, 1897

This catalogue entry compresses several Arkansas airship stories from April 1897 into one record. They should not be read as three verified landings of a single machine. The witnesses, locations, and alleged conversations belong to separate newspaper narratives circulating during the wider airship excitement. At Homan, dated April 20 in Vallée-derived catalogues, Captain James Hooton reportedly heard machinery while hunting and found a pointed cylindrical vessel in a clearing. Its unusual equipment included side wheels and blades overhead. He described three or four occupants and spoke with a man wearing dark glasses. The man allegedly called the machine the airship and said it used compressed air; the wheels turned as it rose and departed. A Harrisburg story, dated April 21 at about one in the morning, attributes a different conversation to “ex-Senator Harris.” Two young men, a woman, and an elderly man supposedly took water from his well. The bearded older man claimed an inherited secret for overcoming gravity. A further McKinney Bayou report on April 23 concerns Judge Lawrence Byrne encountering a grounded vessel and three men speaking a language he did not understand. A newspaper-based chronology instead dates Homan broadly to mid-April. The machinery and extraordinary explanations remain claims, not established technology. Newspaper storytelling, rumours, and hoaxes shaped the 1897 wave, and no recovered vehicle substantiates these accounts. The plate selects the Homan episode, explicitly identifying it as one component of this combined entry rather than bringing all three groups together in a fabricated meeting.