Happy Halloween, Dallas! In honor of spooky season, we want to take the opportunity to tap into to our inner X-Files, and relate an unearthly tale that occurred in North Texas over 100 years or so ago.
Predating the infamous incident in Roswell by half a century, the small, unassuming North Texas town of Aurora became the site of inexplicable phenomenon. Go down this wormhole of a tale, one that involves an extraterrestrial burial, UFOs, and a literal cover-up, at our story below.
The year was 1897. Aurora, Texas was then a simple farming and ranching town nestled in the plains of North Texas, populated by some 300 residents. Early morning on April 17, the townspeople witnessed something never before seen: a flying aircraft – in the shape of a cigar – traveling north above the town. Mind you, this was six years before the invention of the airplane.
Onlookers watched as the low-flying craft crashed into a windmill, resulting in an explosion and raining debris over several acres. Approaching the wreckage, what witnesses would find would trouble us to this day – not just unknown metals resembling that of silver and aluminum – but a pilot not of this world.
The Dallas Morning News reported the incident two days after the crash. Penned by Aurora resident, S.E. Haydon, Haydon claimed that that the pilot was “badly disfigured” though could discern with certainty that “enough of the original [had] been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world“.
In the aftermath, the townspeople allegedly buried the extraterrestrial pilot with Christian rites in the Aurora Cemetery. At the time of burial, the site had a small grave marker. Over the years, amid controversy, the tombstone disappeared leaving the corpse in an unmarked grave.
As for the wreckage, the people reportedly disposed of the aircraft debris in a well on the property of the crash.
The well was believed to be contaminated following the disposal. Reported to leave consumers of its water with strange outward side effects. In 1945, Brawley Oats, the subsequent property owner, sealed the well.
Skeptics claim the Aurora UFO crash is a hoax. Over the years, Aurora residents sought to dispel the story, accusing Haydon of fabricating the story so as to put Aurora on the map. The time of the crash also coincided with a wave of “Mystery Airship” sighting across the state in 1896 and 1897.
That said, it is still a mystery. The Aurora Cemetery Association has repeatedly denied requests of experts to exhume the corpse, and determine its content’s origins, leaving us all to wonder: who was this pilot – or rather – what was this pilot?
What do you believe?