Loch Ness Monsters and Raining Frogs The Worlds Most Puzzling Mysteries Solved (2 page)

When it comes to spaceships and little green men from Mars, most people's thoughts turn to the notorious events at Roswell, New Mexico, where in 1947 the U.S. government apparently captured an alien who had crashed his flying saucer. U.S. military personnel are then said to have quickly sealed off the area, removed all evidence, and engaged in a complete cover-up.

After a thorough debriefing, presumably in sign language, the little green man sadly died. Much later, the film of the top-secret autopsy supposedly carried out on him was sold on the black market, ending up nearly fifty years later, in 1995, on a prime-time TV documentary broadcast around the world. This program,
Alien Autopsy
, caused a sensation and “Martian gate” was back on the agenda with a vengeance. As is often the case, those who wanted to believe such a story inevitably did, while those of us really living on planet Earth could smell a rat. In fact, there were rats everywhere.

But it took eleven years before the program maker, Ray Santilli, admitted that the autopsy had been staged, for the most part, in a flat in Camden Town, London. Strangely enough, he owned up to this two days before a humorous parody of his subject was due to be aired on television. He confirmed that his props had included sheep brains set in jelly and knuckle joints and chicken entrails bought from Smith field meat market.

That should have knocked the Roswell mystery on the head for good, and all those UFO enthusiasts who had been obsessing about the whole affair for years should now be quietly licking their wounds in their garden sheds, or wherever it is they go to study their favorite subject.

But Roswell wasn't the first time: aliens had been captured before. In 1897, Aurora, a small, unremarkable town near Dallas, Texas, became the site of an astonishing event.

On April 17 that year, ten-year-old Charlie Stevens was sweeping his backyard when he looked up to see smoke trailing from a large silver airship flying overhead toward Aurora. Soon after it had flown out of sight, he heard an explosion and saw a thick plume of smoke rise into the air. He was about to rush off to see what had happened when he was stopped by his father, who told him he had to finish his chores first. Just imagine that something truly momentous has just happened right in your sleepy little town: a strange airborne vehicle—something you have never seen before, maybe even a craft from another planet—crashes just a few hundred yards away from your own back gate and you are told: “Nope. You finish sweeping that there yard first, boy and then come inside and help your ma with the breakfast.”

In fact Charlie wasn't allowed to go at all. According to him, it was his father who went into town and saw the wreckage scattered about the place. Mary Evans, aged fifteen at the time, also claimed to have witnessed the crash, but stated that her parents wouldn't allow her to visit the scene either.

As S. E. Haydon reported in
The Dallas Morning News:

Curiously, this story did not make even the front page. Instead it was buried on page five along with several other reports of UFO sightings. It would appear the flying saucer crash at Aurora was not particularly shocking in 1897 —run-of-the-mill, you might say (in more senses than one)—even if it did destroy Judge Proctor's flower garden.

The story then told by the people of the town is that the Martian pilot, as he was termed, was given a decent Christian burial in the town cemetery and his grave marked with a single stone. The remains of the spaceship were taken away to an unknown location by the authorities and the smaller pieces were thrown into Judge Proctor's well. No other newspaper covered the story and, amazingly, the alien's resting place in the Aurora cemetery went unremarked for nearly eighty years, the small town settling back into obscurity.

That was until 1973, when the founder of the International UFO Bureau, Hayden Hewes, announced to United Press International that a grave in a small north Texan cemetery contained the body of an 1897 “astronaut” whom the report at the time had identified as being “not … of this world.”

Newspapers all over America took up the story, and interest in the alien grave rapidly gathered pace. Curiously, as the press hounds sniffed around Aurora, they found very few residents willing to discuss the events of 1897, but despite their reticence the town soon became a hive of activity as alien hunters from around the world descended en masse.

The International UFO Bureau claimed to have found traces of radiation at both the crash site and the grave, on top of which, they said, the grass glowed red. But they were soon barred from the graveyard by local administrators, who adamantly refused to allow them to start digging around. When the investigators attempted to obtain a court order to exhume the body, the small headstone marking the grave was removed and state troopers were placed at the gates of the cemetery to prevent unauthorized access.

Hayden Hewes, interviewed for a television documentary on the subject, condemned these actions as irresponsible, stating that there was now no way of locating the grave—a site, he claimed, that was of national importance. Interestingly, Bureau representatives have never explained why they didn't just walk around looking for the red patch they had found only weeks earlier. Abandoning the grave, they turned their attention instead to Judge Proctor's farm, now under different ownership.

In 1945, Rollie Oats (yes, his real name) had bought the place. He had removed the pieces of spaceship and cleaned out the well so that his family could drink the water. Twelve years later he developed severe arthritis in his hands and, convinced the well water was responsible, had it sealed over with a six-ton slab of concrete.

During the 1973 investigation, metal found on the farm was analyzed at a laboratory, its name never disclosed, and found to be of a unique composition that could only have been produced by a very sophisticated refining process far in advance of what was possible in the 1970s, let alone the 1890s. This was held up as hard evidence of spaceship material, and the UFO community howled for the government to reveal any information they had. In response the government ridiculed the amateur investigation, describing the Aurora spaceship story as a hoax. But of course they would say that, eh, UFO fans?

Today, amid renewed calls for a full inquiry and a thorough search of Aurora using the latest technology, some town elders now claim that the U.S. military returned many years ago, back in the 1940s, and removed all trace of the spacecraft and its pilot. Others enigmatically refuse to talk about the incident at all. One elderly resident was interviewed for the television documentary in 1973 and clearly stated on camera that the whole affair had been true. (I saw it myself, and she said it all right— there's no doubt about that, at least.) Her parents, she insisted, went to check the wreckage of the spacecraft and then told her all about it. But later, her great-granddaughter revealed she had been told the whole thing was a hoax and was puzzled why her great-grandmother would appear on camera to claim the accident had really taken place. The lure of the dollar, possibly?

But if it was all a hoax, why play such an elaborate prank in the first place, let alone keep it up for over a century? There is one very good reason—to do with the town of Aurora itself. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Aurora had been a busy, bustling trade center with a growing population and two schools. During the early 1890s, the Burlington Northern Railroad had been planning to build a route through Aurora to join the Western Railroad, when disaster struck the town in the shape of spotted fever (a form of meningitis). As the new cemetery began to take in more and more residents, the town was sealed off and people were confined to their homes.

As a consequence, the railway abruptly stopped twenty-seven miles short of the town, construction never to be resumed, and Aurora's business was devastated. Things became even worse when its major crop, cotton, was ruined by boll weevil infestation. Its fate was finally sealed by a fire that destroyed a major part of the town. All this, within the space of a few short years, left Aurora facing ruin—that is, of course, until the spaceship conveniently flew into town. The resulting (albeit somewhat delayed) publicity led to Aurora, eighty years on, being declared a place of special interest and becoming one of the most famous towns in Texas, with legendary status among the worldwide UFO community. Even today it is rumored that any unusual pieces of metal found locally are quickly confiscated by the authorities and mysteriously lost or accidentally destroyed.

One of the things that have always struck me about UFO sightings is how they always reflect the era they are reported in. For example, today we have gray aliens with oversize heads who communicate telepathically, like the alien constructed for the Roswell hoax. During the 1970s all spacemen looked like the cast of
Star Trek
, and prior to that they dressed like Buck Rogers, complete with laser guns, and got in and out of their flying saucers by ladder.

So call me cynical, but when we hear of an interred alien whose cigar-shaped spacecraft crashed into a windmill in 1897, we don't need to look too far to find out that cigar-shaped airships were first conceived in the 1890s and by 1897 were flying all over America, to the astonishment of country folk, some of whom hadn't even seen a train before.

And Aurora was far from the only location for such sightings, as soon afterward alien encounters were reported all over the U.S. Some people even ludicrously claimed they had been paid by aliens, in dollars, for spare parts for their space machines.

So imagine the scene with me. In 1897, old Farmer Gilly is standing out in his field raking the soil when a being from outer space strolls up. “Greetings, Earthling,” he intones in that robotic style favored by aliens the universe over. “The satellite navigation control system on my intergalactic hyperspace craft is up the spout. Do you have anything to repair it?” Farmer Gilly looks him up and down, takes off his hat and wipes the sweat from his forehead with a shirtsleeve. “Sure thing, buddy,” he replies. “Cosmic navigation broken down, has it? Probably explains why you're in Arkansas, son. Can't think of no darned good reason why else you'd be all the way out here. Let's go and see what we've got for you in that chicken shed over there.” Presumably the alien pays in dollars for a roll of rusty hog wire and is on his way back to Mars by sundown. Perhaps he even takes an old hoe with him too—as a souvenir. Now, you can believe that if you want to …

But why jump to the conclusion that it was a spaceship that had crashed? Even back in 1897, before planes were invented (or at least ones that could fly very far), there could have been an alternative, rather more plausible explanation. Flying over Texas, an early airship, not unlike a zeppelin—or, for younger readers, the Good year blimp—might have sprung a leak and lost altitude. It might then have crashed into Judge Proctor's windmill and destroyed his flower bed. The resulting explosion would have melted the metal framework, which would then have re-formed into new and unrecognizable shapes when it cooled. The poor pilot might have lost his limbs in the explosion and ended up burned to a crisp, so that he didn't look human anymore. But no one in the UFO community would have bought this rather more down-to-earth explanation. Hayden Hewes can still now be seen on several television documentaries standing wistfully outside the cemetery or pictured pointing forlornly at the well, no doubt wondering how he is going to remove the six tons of concrete slab that stands between himself and his place in history.

The final word on the Aurora spaceship crash should go to the man who had the very first word, journalist S. E. Haydon. Years later Haydon, a notorious practical joker, admitted he had simply made up the story in an attempt to draw attention to the plight of his hometown and to help the dying community. He certainly did that—even if publicity took some decades to arrive—as Aurora, the town we would otherwise never have heard of, is still talked about throughout the UFO-hunting community as one of the most famous sightings of all time. They should put up a statue of him in the town square in Aurora, if there is a town square, that is.