I guess the main question is: what historical events, disasters, etc, may have followed each of these comets that might indicate something about them or "friends" of theirs. Perhaps some research into historical timelines is in order?
The run up to the 1882 comet - indeed all the early to mid 1880s - have stood out in my reading as a steady build up to 'a shift in reality'. There is something about the journey to the first great modern UFO wave of 1896/97 that makes the period worth revisiting.
Below are just some pointers to the fact that things were certainly moving in a certain direction. Others could add more oddities no doubt.
1878 - Around the year 1878, a dramatic shift in the climate occurred coincident with and perhaps triggered by an impulsive spike in temperature.
As a result, the climate moved from a cooling phase of about -.7 °C/century to a warming phase of about +.5°C/century, which has remained constant to the present. We see that this period of time was coincident with a large spike in solar activity.
1880
February 2 - The first electric streetlight is installed in Wabash, Indiana.
March 31 – Wabash, Indiana becomes the first electrically lit city in the world.
October –
The Blizzard of 1880 begins in North America.
November 4 – The first cash register is patented by James and John Ritty of Dayton, Ohio.
1881
January 24 – William Edward Forster, chief secretary for Ireland, introduces his Coercion Bill, which temporarily suspends habeas corpus so that those people suspected of committing an offence can be detained without trial; it goes through a long debate before it is accepted February 2.
January 25 – Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell form the Oriental Telephone Company.
February 16 – The Canadian Pacific Railway is incorporated.
March 13 – Alexander II of Russia is killed near his palace, when a bomb is thrown at him, an act falsely blamed upon Russian Jews. He is succeeded by his son, Alexander III.
April 15 – Anti-Semitic pogroms in Southern Russia begin.
August 27 – The fifth hurricane of the Atlantic season hits Florida and the Carolinas, killing about 700.
September 5 –
The Thumb Fire in the U.S. state of Michigan destroys over a million acres (4,000 km²) and kills 282 people.
September 26 – Godalming in England becomes the first town to have its streets illuminated by electric light (hydroelectrically generated).
October 13 – Determined to bring about the revival of the Hebrew language as a way of unifying Jews, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda has what is believed to be the first conversation in Modern Hebrew with friends living in Paris.
November 19 –
A meteorite strikes the Earth near the village of Großliebenthal, a few kilometers southwest of Odessa, Ukraine.
November - astronomer E. WI Maunder, a member of the Royal Observatory staff at Greenwich, noted “
a strange celestial visitor” in his observational report. Others also saw this object, which they described as torpedo or spindle-shaped. Years later Maunder said the object looked exactly like a zeppelin, except that there were no zeppelins in 1882.
December 25–27 – The Warsaw pogrom is carried out in Vistula Land, Russian Empire.
1882
January 2 -
The Standard Oil Trust is secretly created in the United States, to control multiple corporations set up by John D. Rockefeller and his associates.
March 29 – The
Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal service organization, is founded in New Haven, Connecticut.
May 20 – The Triple Alliance is formed between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy.
July 26 - Richard Wagner's opera
Parsifal debuts, at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in Bavaria.
August 20 – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's
1812 Overture debuts in Moscow.
September 4 – Thomas Edison flips the switch to the first commercial electrical power plant in the United States, lighting one square mile of lower Manhattan. This is considered by many as the day that begins the electrical age.
September 18 –
Great Comet of 1882: Her Majesty's Astronomer at the Cape, David Gill, reports watching the comet rise a few minutes before the Sun, describing it as "The nucleus was then undoubtedly single, and certainly rather under than over 4″ in diameter; in fact, as I have described it, it resembled very much a star of the 1st magnitude seen by daylight."
1883
January 4 –
Life magazine is founded in Los Angeles
July 29 - Benito Mussolini born
August 26–27 –
The volcanic island of Krakatoa erupts at 10:02 AM (local time); 163 villages are destroyed, 36,380 killed by tsunami.
Otto von Bismarck pushes the
first social security law through the Reichstag.
1884
January 4 –
The Fabian Society is founded in London.
April 20 – Pope Leo XIII publishes the encyclical
Humanum genus, denouncing Freemasonry and certain liberal beliefs which he considers to be associated with it.
April 22 - The Colchester earthquake, England, the
UK's most destructive, occurs.
July 3 – The Dow Jones Transportation Average, consisting of eleven transportation-related companies (nine railroads and two non-rail companies, Western Union and Pacific Mail), is created. The index is the oldest stock index still in use.
August 10 – An
earthquake measuring 5.5 Mfa affects a very large portion of the eastern United States. The shock has a maximum Mercalli intensity of VII (
Very strong). Chimneys are toppled in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. Property damage is severe in Jamaica, Queens and Amityville, New York.
October 6 – The United States Naval War College is established in Newport, Rhode Island.
An
economic depression hits the United States.
1885
February 16 – Charles Dow publishes the
first edition of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The index stood at a level of 62.76, and represented the dollar average of 14 stocks: 12 railroads and two leading American industries.
February 21 – United States President Chester A. Arthur dedicates the Washington Monument.
February 26 – The final act of the Berlin Conference regulates European colonization and trade, in the
scramble for Africa.
June 17 – The Statue of Liberty arrives in New York Harbor.
August 19 –
S Andromedae, the only supernova seen in the Andromeda Galaxy so far by astronomers, and the first ever noted outside the Milky Way, is discovered.
A
cholera outbreak occurs in Spain.
1886
June 10 – The
Mount Tarawera volcano erupts in New Zealand, resulting in the deaths of over 150 people and the destruction of the famous Pink and White Terraces.
June 13 – The
Great Vancouver Fire devastates much of Vancouver, British Columbia.
August 20 - A
massive hurricane demolishes the town of Indianola, Texas.
September 4 – American Indian Wars: After almost 30 years of fighting, Apache leader Geronimo surrenders, with his last band of warriors, to General Nelson Miles, at Skeleton Canyon in Arizona.
October 28 – In New York Harbor, U.S. President Grover Cleveland dedicates the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France. The ensuing spontaneous celebration in New York City leads to the first ticker tape parade.
November – The
extremely harsh winter of 1886–87 in the United States begins, killing tens of thousands of cattle on the Great Plains of North America.
1887
January 28 - In a snowstorm at Fort Keogh, Montana, the
largest snowflakes on record are reported. They are 15 inches (38 cm) wide and 8 inches (20 cm) thick.
September 28 – The 1887
Yellow River flood begins in China, killing 900,000 to 2,000,000 people.
November 13 – Bloody Sunday: Police in London clash with radical and Irish nationalist protesters.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is founded.
Mystery airships or
phantom airships are a class of unidentified flying objects best known from a series of newspaper reports originating in the western United States and spreading east during late 1896 and early 1897.
The New York Herald-Tribune described a sighting in Chicago on April 9, 1897, that lasted from 8 P.M. until 2 A.M.:
Thousands of amazed persons declared that the lights seen in the northwest were those of an airship, or some floating object, miles above the earth… Some declared that they could distinguish two cigar-shaped objects and great wings.
Two giant searchlights apparently illuminated the object. Other, far stranger, incidents occurred. Explanations included many of the standard culprits of later ages: mass hallucination and hysteria, experimental aircraft (private, not military), opium-induced dreams, hoaxes, or all of the above.
April 17 - Airship crashes in Aurora, Ft Worth, Texas - the
first reported modern era UFO crash (and suspected retrieval?)
