What happened
On 19 April 1897, at the height of the airship wave, the Dallas Morning News printed a short dispatch from Aurora, a fading town in Wise County, signed by local cotton buyer S. E. Haydon. It said that two mornings earlier the airship had sailed over the town, struck a windmill on Judge J. S. Proctor's property and exploded, scattering wreckage. The mangled pilot was said to be 'not of this world', and T. J. Weems, described as a Signal Service officer and astronomer, supposedly judged him a native of Mars. Papers found on the body bore unknown hieroglyphics, the debris looked like aluminium and silver, and the pilot was to be given a Christian burial. The story drew little notice and no follow-up at the time. It was rediscovered in the 1960s, and since 1973 investigators have searched the cemetery, the well and the site with metal detectors and radar. Today a state historical marker at the cemetery mentions the legend.
The official explanation
The Handbook of Texas (Texas State Historical Association) calls Haydon's piece 'fictional' and an apparent attempt to draw attention to a town that had been gutted by spotted fever in the late 1880s and bypassed by the railroad. In 1979 Etta Pegues, an elderly Aurora resident and local historian, told Time magazine that Haydon wrote it as a joke to bring interest to the dying town. Researcher Bill Potterfield found that T. J. Weems was the town blacksmith, not a scientist. Metal recovered in 1973 was later identified by physicist Tom Gray as ordinary iron-zinc roofing material. The piece also ran on an inside page among many similar airship yarns. No contemporary witness, death record or other newspaper corroborated the crash.
The anomalous case
Those who keep the case open point to physical leads that have never been fully closed. In 1973 MUFON's Texas director Bill Case reported a grave marker scratched with a craft-like design and metal-detector readings at a plot in the 1890s section of the cemetery; the cemetery association refused exhumation and the marker later disappeared. Two elderly residents interviewed then gave accounts: Mary Evans said her parents had visited the crash site, and Charlie Stephens said he saw the airship trailing smoke and that his father saw wreckage the next day. Etta Pegues claimed Proctor never had a windmill, yet a 2008 television investigation reported finding the base of one near the old well, and ground-penetrating radar found an unmarked grave near other 1890s burials. Former Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter Jim Marrs argued the story deserved investigation. The Aurora claim of crash debris and a body anticipates Roswell by fifty years.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- Aurora, TX (Wise County) by David Minor Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association
- Micah Hanks, Jim Marrs and the 1897 Aurora UFO Crash Jason Colavito
- Aurora, Texas, UFO incident Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
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