AURORA 'AIRSHIP' TALE ENDURES

Internet UFO Group Media Archive

From:Bill.Ralls@f7.n1010.z9.FIDONET.ORG (Bill Ralls)
Title:AURORA 'AIRSHIP' TALE ENDURES
Source: Fort Worth Star Telegram
Date:April 19, 1996


by: Jo Virgil

AURORA - April nights in North Texas haven't changed much in 99 years.

Clear skies splattered with stars. The smells and the sounds of crikets.

But legend has it that one night, 99 years ago, the Texas sky contained

more than stars and pollen.

In the tiny Wise County town of Aurora, between Boyd and Rhome on Texas

114, the night of April 19, 1897, was marked by a mystery - or a hoax -

that lives on in the stories of old-timers.

Newspaper accounts from that week tell of an "airship" that crashed into

the windmill in Aurora in the middle of the night, exploding, spreading

metal debris accross several acres and destroying the windmill.

The remains of the body of the pilot were gathered, according to reports

from newspaper correspondent F.E. Hayden, and were buried in the town's

cemetery. Hayden's report assured readers that "enough remains were

gathered to determine it was not an inhabitant of this world."

Hayden's story describes papers that were found at the crash site with

hieroglyphic-looking writing, and scraps of metal that were unfamiliar

to town residents.

Although the tale may sound like an episode from the X-Files, this was

1897, six years before the Wright brothers made their airplane stay aloft

long enough to call it flying.

The only visible reminders of the incident still remaining in Aurora are

a small piece of the pilot's headstone (vandals made off with most of it)

and a historical marker at the cemetery that mentions the legend.

After the initial flurry of publicity in 1897, the legend was nearly

forgotten until the early 1970s, when UFO researchers heard the story and

came to investigate.

In 1973, the Mutual UFO Network in Seguin sought legal permission to

exhume the gravesite, but the Aurora Cemetery Association obtained a court

injuction prohibiting the exhumation.

The International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma sent investigators with metal

detectors to the site of the reported crash.

Brawley Oates, who in the 1970s owned the land where the windmill once

stood, told newspaper reporters that when he bought the property he

cleaned out a well and recovered large amounts of metal the size of a

man's fist. Although Oates had heard the airship stories, he said he

didn't think much about the metal and simply junked it before capping the

well.

Investigators found bits and pieces of metal at the site, however. Some

were pot lids or tack rings, but a few pieces were unidentifiable.

"The recovered metal puzzled our metallurgists," Walter H. Andrus Jr.,

international director of the Mutual UFO Network, said this week.

Tom Gray, a physicist during the 1970s at North Texas State University,

now the University of North Texas, examined some of the unusual, brownish

metal. Gray determined at the time that it was about 75 percent iron, but

said it lacked some of the properties common to iron, such as the ability

to be magnetized. Gray acknowledged that it was an unusual metal but

cautioned that he couldn't draw any conclusions about it's origins.

However, Gray, who now teaches at Kansas State University, said this

week that he eventually learned that the metal he examined was probably

roofing material.

"It turned out to be an iron-zinc alloy that, because of the way it was

processed, was not magnetic," he said. "Nothing necessarily extrater-

restrial about it."

All strange stories have more than one side, though. Many Aurora

residents today believe that the story was a hoax, a practical joke that

took on a life of its own.

The late Etta Pegues, a local writer and historian, wrote in a town

history book that the tale began as a publicity stunt by Hayden to draw

attention to the town, which had been declining in population in the mid-

1890s.

Tales of sightings of airships circulated throughout the Midwest in early

1897. Skeptics claim that 5the stories were started as a practical joke by

railroad telegraphers.

Joseph E. "Truthful" Scully, a Forth Worth railroad conductor at the

time, acted as a spokesman for the telegraphers and acknowledged to re-

porters that bogus reports of sightings had apparently touched off a rash

of imagined UFO sightings by people across North Texas.

Hayden, said some locals, grabbed the idea of a UFO and took off with it.

Others pointed out that, during the late 1890s, science fiction writers

H.G. Wells and Jules Verne were popular, firing imaginations.

"Probably 30 to 40 people a year come in looking for information about

the airship crash," said Ruth Hollinsworth of the Wise Ccounty Heritage

Museum in Decatur.