AURORA, Texas (AP) - Toni Wheeler holds fond memories of growing up in the rural town of Aurora, sitting on the porch of an elderly resident named Mr. Mayfield and listening to him tell about the time a UFO crashed into a windmill, killing a spaceman.
“He would tell us it did in fact happen,” Wheeler, now the city administrator, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (https://bit.ly/1Ss3o1r), recounting one of the highlights of her Wise County childhood in the late 1970s. “He said tons of people went rushing up there to the (crash) site, but they made all the kids stay back underneath the hill, because they feared it might have a disease.”
The legend of the 1897 crash of an alien spacecraft 27 miles northwest of downtown Fort Worth certainly put Aurora on the map - having been retold in books, movies and TV shows - although many residents would just as soon their community not be known for such a tale.
But many others - Wheeler among them - are ready to embrace the extraterrestrial adventure. Last weekend, they marked the occasion with the first of what they hope will become an annual event known as the Aurora Alien Encounter.
The festivities included a day of talks with UFO researchers and authors, an alien laser tag competition and shuttle tours of both the residential area where the crash reportedly happened and the cemetery where the alien - nicknamed “Ned” by the City Council - was buried.
On April 17, 1897, a story attributed to Aurora cotton buyer S.E. Haydon appeared in The Dallas Morning News: “About 6 o’clock this morning the early risers of Aurora were astonished at the sudden appearance of the airship which has been sailing through the country.”
The story went on to explain that an aircraft smacked into a windmill just a few hundred feet north of what is now Texas 114 and crashed into a field.
Supposedly, the pilot was buried in the town cemetery.
The incident occurred six years before the Wright brothers’ first human flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and nearly 50 years before the much more famous unidentified flying object reportedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico.
Today, the roughly 1,400 residents of Aurora are left to decide for themselves whether they believe the story. And it appears that they may never reach a consensus. “Some of the older residents of this community, you could never change their mind about things,” said Dan McEntire, the city’s historic preservation officer.
Several components of the Aurora incident make it a compelling, mysterious tale. The plot in the Aurora Cemetery where the alien was supposedly buried was later dug up, and the body (if there was one) removed. An original stone marker with a UFO carved into it disappeared years ago, although today the site is marked with a nondescript, cigar-shaped boulder.
Folks working on a History Channel show about the Aurora crash in 2008 opened the water well for the first time in about 70 years in search of wreckage that supposedly had been thrown inside. They found bits of metal, but tests on the material were inconclusive. Chunks of metal hieroglyphics were reportedly found at the crash site, but their whereabouts are unknown.
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Information from: Fort Worth Star-Telegram, https://www.star-telegram.com
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