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