It's 1897 and a cigar shaped craft crashes into a windmill in Aurora Texas. The pilot is killed and buried in the Aurora Cemetery. Or is it all a hoax perpetrated in an attempt to save the town?
It's 1897 and a cigar shaped craft crashes into a windmill in Aurora Texas. The pilot is killed and buried in the Aurora Cemetery. Or is it all a hoax perpetrated in an attempt to save the town?
Ep 34 Aurora Texas
Hello and welcome back to the UFO and Aliens Podcast. I’m your host Rick Black. Thank you all for listening, I have been really enjoying putting together this podcast. I could use a little help, though. If you would like to help support this podcast, you can go to the show’s website and click on support. If you can help me out with three dollars, I’ll send you a beautiful UFO and Aliens Podcast sticker that you can proudly display. Or not display. Maybe you want to stick it to your garbage can. Put it on your Stanley Cup. Those things are hot right now. I’ll also give you a shout out on the next episode.
Man, the weather has been crazy this last week. It has actually disrupted the mail. I ordered something from a little manufacturer in northern Missippi and he called to tell me it would be delayed because he couldn’t get to the post office. It’s gotta be pretty bad to do that. Down in the south, if it snows more than a couple of inches, most of these towns just shut down. I hope the weather is good wherever you are.
Today I will be looking into the Aurora UFO incident. But before I do, I need to give you a little background. This incident occurred in the late 19th century. During this time, between 1896 and 1897, people were reporting seeing what they called mystery airships or phantom ships. Thousands of people were seeing these things. Typical airship reports involved nighttime sightings of unidentified lights, but more detailed accounts reported ships comparable to a dirigible. These mystery airship reports are seen as a cultural predecessor to modern claims of extraterrestrial-piloted flying saucer-style UFOs. These airships were reported from California all the way to the east coast. Sacramento California, Tacoma Washington, Hastings Nebraska, Chicago Illinois, Springfield Missouri, Decatur Michigan, Waterloo Iowa. Hundreds of sightings were claimed throughout multiple states and 108 were reported in Texas alone. Six years before the invention of the airplane, Americans are seeing something in their skies.
Reports of the alleged crewmen and pilots usually described them as human-looking, although sometimes the crew claimed to be from Mars. It was popularly believed that the mystery airships were the product of some inventor or genius who was not ready to make knowledge of his creation public.
Well, that’s a real possibility. The first hot-air balloon was demonstrated before King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette by Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier in September of 1783. That was more than 100 years before these sightings. But the hot-air balloon could only go up and down. You can’t steer it. So, in the hundred years since the invention of the hot-air balloon there is the possibility that people were trying to improve on the balloon by making a lighter than air craft controllable. That makes total sense and there could have been people in this country doing just that. They were definitely doing that in France. The first effectively controlled aerial flight took place on August 9, 1884 in an airship named La France. This dirigible was built by 2 French military officers in Corpes of Engineering-Arthur C. Krebs and Charles Renard. That’s 12 years before all of these sightings took place. Predating that, Henri Giffard built a 144 foot cigar shaped, steam powered airship in 1852. But it wouldn’t have been able to fly across the country.
Dirigibles were not at all common and there could have been some inventor out there flying around in one during 1896 and 97. But some of these were witnessed at night. Lights in the sky. Would someone test fly a dirigible at night? And what would they use for light. An open flame would be extremely dangerous. They really didn’t have any other way to produce light. It is very unlikely that someone was flying around in a dirigible at night.
It has been frequently argued that mystery airships are unlikely to represent test flights of real human-manufactured dirigibles as no record of successful sustained or long-range airship flights are known from the period and “it would have been impossible, not to mention irrational, to keep such a thing secret.” But then there were in fact several functional airships manufactured before the 1896-97 reports. For example, Solomon Andrews make successful test flights of his “Aereon” in 1863., but their capabilities were far more limited than the mystery airships. During this time, there was this thing called “yellow journalism”. That is where newspapers were more likely to print manufactured stories and hoaxes than are modern sources, and editors of the late 1800s often would have expected the reader to understand that such stories were false.
Most journalists of the period did not seem to take the airship reports very seriously, as after the major 1896-97 wave concluded, the subject quickly fell from public consciousness. The airship stories received further attention only after the 1896-97 newspaper reports were largely rediscovered in the mid 1960s and UFO investigators suggested the airships might represent earlier precursors to post-World War II UFO sightings.
The airship sightings were a big deal back then, but there were also a lot of science fiction writers writing stories about airships. So airships were probably on the minds of a lot of people. It was definitely an interesting time.
Keep in mind that this is all happening before the invention of the airplane, which was 1903. It puts things into perspective. Even though Edison brought electric light to parts of Manhattan in 1882. Most Americans were still lighting their homes with gas light and candles in 1897.
On April 17,1897 we have the largest event. A UFO crashed on a farm near Aurora Texas. At 6:00 a.m. people reported seeing a cigar shaped craft flying above the town heading due north. It had portholes along the sides, it was streaming sparks from the rear and it had green and yellow pulsating lights. Now this is 6 years before the invention of the airplane. We look up today and we see contrails all over the place. But back in 1897, seeing something flying above you is really freaky. According to witnesses, the craft appears to be in trouble. It slams into Judge Proctors windmill that sits on a high bluff. It hits the windmill and explodes flinging flaming debris over several acres of land. At the site curious onlookers discover debris that looks like a mixture of aluminum and silver. And in the twisted wreckage they find a diminutive and unearthly body. A local military man claims the dead pilot is a Martian. The newspaper runs the story in the local edition and reports that authorities are planning on burying the body in the local cemetery. So, the story goes that an alien was buried at the Aurora Cemetery back in 1897. There are some people that say there’s a grave there and another group say that there isn’t.
According to lore, the crash debris is cleared from the land, but a small portion is dumped in a well. Nearly fifty years later, people drinking from the well are stricken with a strange illness. A man named Brawley Oates bought the land from the Judge. He drank the water from the well and got a really bad case of arthritis. He had most gnarly looking hands. His arthritis was so bad that it disfigured him. Some sources say that the water was the cause of his arthritis. The well was sealed in the 1957. UFO investigators, reporters and enthusiasts tried to get access to the well for years, but they were denied. Then, in 2008, UFO Hunters were allowed to investigate the well. They also were interested in finding evidence from the Aurora Cemetery.
According to locals, the alien was buried in the Aurora Cemetery and a marker was placed in that spot, but then the UFO enthusiasts started showing up. They wanted to exhume the grave to see if there really was an alien buried there. But the locals didn’t want anyone opening up graves, they put a police car there to deter folks, a couple of weeks went by and the excitement calmed down. The very night that they pulled the police car, the little headstone went missing and has not been seen since. So apparently, nobody knows where the alien body is. UFO Hunters combs the cemetery with ground penetrating radar. But they need to get close to where the marker used to be. There are some pictures of people next to the marker taken in the 1970s when it was still there and a video of a man kneeling where the marker used to be from the 90s, so UFO Hunters uses these pictures to line up where the burial is.
They find a spot that they think the marker was and it fits in with the dates of the other markers. Also, there are no other gravesites near the spot. All of this seems to confirm that they have indeed found the location of the alien’s grave.
Pat Uskert from UFO Hunters was lowered down into the well to look for evidence of the crashed UFO. As they are digging around the well, they find these metal spikes driven into the ground. They are windmill support rods that hold up a windmill. So, the windmill was directly over the well. There are some articles that claim that all of this was a hoax and that there never was a windmill on the property. So finding the windmill supports kind of debunked the debunkers. Also, they found square nails while they were searching the property with metal detectors. The skeptics claim that there was never any structure on Judge Proctors land. Square nails were used before the turn of the century, so it proves that there WAS something built on the land. Another point for the UFOlogists. There was a well house built over the well that they are trying to get into, so they had to bring a team in with heavy equipment to move the well house. When they did, they discovered that the well was in good shape and they could get into it. Skeptics also claimed that the well wasn’t even there in 1897, but the historian on site said that the construction of the well is consistent with well construction in 1897, so three points for the ufologists. After going down into the well, they found no debris. They did take soil samples, and water samples. They tested that and found that it had normal elements that you would find in ground water and soil, but they found unusually high levels of aluminum.
The owner of the property that the well is on brought the investigators some pieces of metal that his son found on the property. Dr. Ted Acworth took the metal to the lab at the University of North Texas. His initial observation was a shiny metallic object that looked like it had been melted and then rehardened. There were a lot of contaminants on the outside. Evidence that it had been in the elements for a long time. After further analysis, they find that it is mostly aluminum and some other trace elements. But there was an element in the material that they couldn’t identify. So, they do more advanced tests to find out what the unknown material is. They discover that the object is mostly aluminum, it also has iron, but it is more iron than is usual in aluminum alloys.
MUFON began to investigate the Aurora crash site in the 1970s. They found unexplained traces of metal that appeared to have been melted. In 1973, there was a disbursement pattern of metals from a central point including where a tree was. They found the metal in the tree.
They didn’t find any metallic objects in the bottom of the well because the owner, Brawley Oates had the well cleaned out so they could use it. His son confirmed that when they cleaned it out, they brought up pieces of metal. So, there was metal in the well, that confirms what was originally reported, that some pieces of the crashed UFO were thrown down the well.
According to the Dallas Morning News Brawley Oates purchased Judge Procter’s property around 1945. He had the debris cleaned out of the well so he could use it at a water source, but later developed an extremely severe case of arthritis, which he claimed to be the result of contaminated water from the wreckage dumped into the well. As a result, Oates sealed up the well with a concrete slab and place an outbuilding atop the slab in 1957.
According to Brawley Oates’s son, the well was not sealed because it was contaminated. The pipes were all iron and they rusted through, so the family thought that the well had run dry and they just sealed it and dug another well.
The hoax theory is primarily based on a 1980 Time magazine interview with Etta Pegues, an 86 year old Aurora resident who claimed that Haydon (who wore the original story in the Dallas Morning News on April 19th, 1897) had fabricated the entire story, stating that Haydon “wrote it as a joke and to bring interest to Aurora. The railroad bypassed us, and the town was dying.” Pegues further claimed that Judge Proctor never operated a windmill on his property.
Like I mentioned earlier, there were some people in town that believed the story and there were others who didn’t. Etta was clearly one who didn’t believe it.
UFO Hunters found evidence that there was a windmill over the well.
Paranormal researcher Jerry Drake on the April 12th, 2020 episode of the Monster Talk Live podcast claimed that the well was clearly a bucket well of modern construction (estimated to be built sometime after 1940) and not a well designed for use with a windmill.
He would be correct about that. A windmill to pump water just uses a pipe that driven down to the water table. The water is pumped into a storage tank. The well at the property doesn’t resemble that at all. So, did the team on UFO Hunters plant the windmill supports? I doubt that but its possible.
There is an article titled ‘Fake News’ from Wise County brought UFO believers to Aurora-eventually. I love the title. It is in the Dallas Morning News April 16th 2018. I think this article sums up how some of the locals feel about this whole UFO crash thing.
“Fake News” may seem like a modern concern, but people have been printing tall tales since the early days of newspapers. On April 17th, 1897, Wise County resident S.E. Haydon reported in The Dallas Morning News that an airship had crashed in the small town of Aurora, a full six years before the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk.
The story was fake, of course, but as Haydon told it, an unknown man was killed when his “airship” collided with Judge Proctor’s windmill. The windmill, as well as the judge’s flower garden, were reportedly destroyed. The resulting “fake news” made the pages of the paper: The pilot was supposedly buried in the Aurora Cemetery, thought all that remains to remember him is a historical marker commemorating the “legend.”
Many believed fervently in the story of the martian, however. Why would S.E. Hayden risk his own reputation as a frequent contributor to local papers by telling such a tale?
Many believe his story was a last-ditch effort to revive a town decimated by an outbreak of “spotted fever,” which not only took lives but triggered an exodus of Aurora’s healthy citizens. One story in The Dallas Morning News described a town so plagued by illness, people were afraid to patronize its businesses.
Haydon himself lost his wife and two of his sons to the epidemic. Another son was blinded. The illness devastated the town-along with soil problems, fires and the bankruptcy of the much anticipated railroad. Haydon, many suspect, wove the tale in an attempt to drum up interest in tiny Aurora an save his town. This theory is backed up by the work of Etta Pegues, town historian, who was 10 years old in 1897.
To Haydon’s credie, the story did help put Aurora on the map – it just didn’t happen as quickly as he may have hoped. By the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, film crews and UFO enthusiasts from across the world flocked to Aurora to find the ship and the remains of the martian pilot. One particular incident involved a piece of rare metal, which excited UFO fans and others until it was determined that the specific alloy was used in the 1920s for cooking pot lids.
The attention was a mixed bag. While some shrewd townspeople sold tourists “rusted cans and other aged alloys,” others found themselves the target of unwanted visitors of the decidedly human variety. Older residents, many of whom lived in retirement communities, were hounded for statements by reporters and authors.
“Everyone in the world’s come by,” said one disgruntled resident. “We’ve had calls from California, Europe and Illinois about the little green man. Well, he ain’t here.”
That was a great article by Jen Graffunder.
I think it’s probably about 50/50 those who believe versus those who don’t and it’s probably going to change over time.
The UFO Hunters used ground penetrating radar to find the location of the grave and they did a great job of that. They found a spot that corresponded with what their pictures showed. And it lined up with other plots. The area that they found was six feet long, two and a half feet wide and was lined up perfectly in orientation with other plots. The grave had collapsed so they couldn’t get really good details of what was there. But, there was definitely an unmarked grave there, but was it for an alien pilot? Who knows. Most cemeteries have unmarked graves. Pauper and indigent burials are not usually marked at the time of burial and this practice continues today.
But like most shows like this one, they stop one step short of giving the definite answers. Of course, they could clear all of this up if they just dug up the grave, but they didn’t have the authority and were not given permission by the cemetery.
And I always think, regarding shows like this or big foot shows or the Curse of Oak Island. If something really happened, if they really did find big foot or the treasure at Oak Island, wouldn’t it be on the news before it’s in episode 12 of season 4? Those shows are strictly for entertainment purposes in my opinion.
What do you think. There is a lot here. I usually tell a story and then tell the other side. Most of these are debunked, some are not. This story seemed to debunk the debunkers. It was really interesting. There is a ton of stuff out there about this case. KDFW report, UFO Files investigation, UFO Hunters investigation, the MUFON report and the list goes on.
Remember, Believe none of what you hear and half of what you read.
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