1884 - UFO CRASHES IN NEBRASKA

A terrifying noise in the sky drew their attention to a bright object diving towards the ground before it crashed, out of sight from where the cowboys were. They had then rushed over to it and discovered numerous burning hot "machinery parts" spread out all along a track left by the mysterious flying object. The heat was so unbearable that one of the witnesses, Alf Williamson, had even fainted. At one point of the track, the sand had melted over a surface area of about 6x22yards.

The next morning, a group goes back to the site. Certain pieces are now cool enough to get close to. According to The Nebraska Nugget, the metal they are made up of resembles copper but is extremely light and resistant. As for the spaceship, of cylindrical form, the men estimate its length to be about twenty meters long by about 3.5 yards wide. It is in Lincoln's Daily State Journal of June 8 that an machine of extra-terrestial origin is seen for the first time.

"Unless the facts put forward are greatly exagerated or misrepresented, this amazing strange object must be a spaceship which comes from another a planet and had gotten too far away from it and so wandered throughout space before being pulled in by Earth's gravitation and crashing into the ground."

However, two days later, the same newspapaer publishes another article which puts an end to the hopes of the amateurs in mystery : under a sudden and driving rain, the object's diverse elements having survived the crash, had literally dissolved in the presence of a dozen of witnesses, kind of like a spoon of salt in water...

Forgotten about afterwards, the story is rediscovered by accident in 1964. However, various investigations do not manage to find, among the region's oldest inhabitants, someone who remembers what happened or had simply heard about it when he was young. Therefore, we will probably never know if this story has an element of truth (a manipulation of the UFO phenomenon like the one that is going to take place on a very large scale in the US in 1896/97) or if it was made up on a boring day at the office of a local newspaper.
Nevertheless, two points must be insisted on, in case the story would be more or less true : the "spaceship" was of rather modest size and its "dissolving" could be compared, in proportions a thousand times smaller, to the complete disappearance of debris left by the one that struck down in Siberia in 1908.