ether ship n.

We, Aleriel, Arauniel, and Ezariel, come in the ether ship from the beautiful planet near the sun.

The reason I do not give a more minute description of my ether ship is that there is pending in several countries of the earth international patent laws; and in common with all scientists I wish to reap the fruits of my genius.

A Proposed Ether Ship Booked for the Unknown. For Travel Between the Planets[.] Possibility of Having Friends Living at Mars.

And in a flash there swept within our sight the fleet of prismatic ether-ships, like rainbows in the light of another sun. They stopped and hovered above the atmosphere.

The ether-ship that had made the journey to and from the earth drew nearer and nearer to Mars and at last it alighted.

Perhaps the men of Furos had learned to traverse space in some such way as he mentioned, such as our scientists have speculated on; and that perhaps, to protect their discovery in their traffic with other worlds, they fashioned an ether-ship to resemble a great bird.

Stentor would not appear, so disturbed was he by the sight of the Venusians, but in the morning, he talked to them by radio and explained the very natural antipathy we experienced in seeing them or in having them see us. Now they no longer urge us to construct ether[-]ships and go to help then dispose of their ‘insects.’ I think they are afraid of us, and their very fear has aroused in mankind an unholy desire to conquer them.

It did not take the Fifth Men many centuries to devise a tolerable means of voyaging in interplanetary space…. The task of rendering the ‘ether ship’ properly manageable and decently habitable proved difficult, but not insurmountable.

The stowaway knew that the ethership was many millions of miles from its starting point, and his mind pictured the vast distance as a bottomless abyss into which we must inevitably be plunged headlong.

There, somewhere, was the mysterious Black Hole that had sucked a score of ether ships into oblivion since men first found this God-forsaken planet.

Saucerians, according to these informants, are not interplanetary visitors, as we would ordinarily consider that principle, but rather superior entities who exist in other dimensions of matter—a fourth dimension, if you choose to call it that. The BSRA prefers to call these entities ‘etherians’€™ and their saucers ‘ether ships’€™.

He was fascinated, for example, by the Michelson-Morley experiment to detect the aether wind, which was predicted on the basis of the idea of the earth’s motion through a stationary medium. When this detection failed, Reilly wrote a letter to a scientific journal (supplied to me by one of my intellectual operatives in London) insisting that the aether was too subtle a substance to register on current instruments. One day, he claimed, aether ships would move between the worlds.

Then affinity took hold of him—or, more accurately, the rising ether-ship slammed into his back, while the affinity that bound him to the Earth fought against the force of the rocket’s explosive levitation, trying with all its might to hold him down.