The Aurora Texas UFO Incident
A newspaper report of April 1897 claimed that an airship had crashed into a windmill at Aurora, Texas, killing a pilot said to be from Mars.
- Region
- Texas
- Country
- USA
- Category
- UFO
- Date
- 17 April 1897
- Continent
- North America
The report
The Dallas Morning News of 17 April 1897 carried a report by S. E. Haydon that an airship had struck a windmill on Judge J. S. Proctor's land at Aurora, Wise County, and broken apart. The pilot, described as 'not of this world' and said by a Signal Service officer to be a Martian, was reportedly buried in Aurora Cemetery, with wreckage said to have been thrown into a well. In 1979 an elderly resident said the story had been written as a joke to draw interest to the town, and later investigations, including a 2008 radar survey of the cemetery, found nothing conclusive. A Texas Historical Commission marker refers to the tale as a legend.
Sources and further reading
Location
33.0506, -97.5042