by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
In the annals of UFOlogy, there are many cases that, like zombies, refuse to stay buried even in the midst of convincing arguments and evidence debunking them. The case of the reported crash of an airship and recovery of its unearthly pilot in Aurora, Texas, in 1897 is a prime example of this.
In the March 2012, Vol. 34, No. 2, issue of the International UFO Reporter there is the article (page 7 of the pdf) by Thomas E. Bullard headlined “Defending UFOs.” The article begins with Bullard’s expression of regret regarding the resignation of James Carrion in 2010 as the international director of the Mutual UFO Network. He sums up the reason in the following paragraph:
AuroraWhat he found was that ufologists obscured understanding of UFOs with beliefs and agendas, falling prey to their own egos and the allurements of con artists as long as the lies, errors, and misinformation confirmed cherished expectations. Poor standards of evidence and delusions of ufologists corrupted even basic investigations, he concluded, so that existing files consist more of UFO mythology than UFO fact, while the myths are so firmly entrenched, so satisfying to believers’ needs, that ufologists resist any change to better the situation.
It should be noted that just before Carrion’s resignation, MUFON had made a controversial deal with Robert Bigelow, that involved Bigelow funding MUFON’s “STAR Team Rapid Response UFO Investigation Unit” (with funds from the contract between the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program and his company, Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, LLC.) and being granted access to MUFON’s case files. Carrion began to have doubts about the relationship (without knowing Bigelow was working under contract with the DIA) and expressed his concerns in an email to MUFON’s board of directors.
After a discussion of good UFOlogy vs bad UFOlogy, Bullard looks at three cases, the first of which is the Aurora case, which he says “exemplifies the zombie case, where a report duly discredited rises from the dead again and again.”
The sole source of the report is the article by S. E. Hayden headlined “A Windmill Demolishes It” published in the April 19, 1897, Dallas Morning News in the midst of mystery airship reports all across the United States that began in 1896. According to Hayden, at around 6:00 a.m. on April 17, 1897, “early risers of Aurora were astonished at the sudden appearance of the airship.” He says its “machinery” seemed to be “out of order” as it travelled north at a speed of only 12 mph, went over the town square, and then hit a windmill on the property of Judge Proctor. The remains of the “pilot” are said to have been recovered, “and while his remains are badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world.” According to Hayden, a funeral for the pilot was to be held the next day.
According to Bullard, the story “became widely known in 1966, when Frank Masquelette wrote about it for the Houston Post. J. Allen Hynek, then a consultant for Project Blue Book, is said to have become interested in the case and to have asked Dallas resident William H. Driskill to look into it. According to him, Driskill talked to Oskar Lowry, who was a boy at the time of the reported event, and he explained that the story was, in Bullard’s words, “a hoax by Hayden to bring a little publicity to the town, struggling to survive for several years since the railroad bypassed it.” Bullard explains that the “yarn was riddled with errors,” which included a Mr. T. J. Weems being identified as a signal officer when he was actually a blacksmith and Judge Proctor’s property being described as having a windmill.
According to Bullard, an investigator went over the property with a metal detector and found “no scraps of a spaceship.” He also says that Etta Peques “confirmed the story was a hoax.” Bullard says “All these nails in its coffin should have buried the story once and for all, but it rose again bigger than life in 1973.”
According to Bullard, a reporter for the Dallas Times-Herald “publicized the story along with additions and errors.” He says the story “suddenly became big news again,” and that UFO investigators came into Aurora prepared to dig up what they believed was an alien body and were met by shotgun-armed residents with objections.
Despite the lack of support for the story by many Aurora residents, some came forward to back it up, and specifically mentioned by Bullard is Brawley Oates, the then-owner of the property formerly owned by Proctor. According to Bullard, Brawley “became an outspoken advocate, attributing his severe rheumatoid arthritis to drinking water contaminated by the crash.”
Bullard says that Kevin Randle and Michael H. Simmons, a graduate student of folklore studies, went to Aurora to investigate and found that, while the younger residents “embraced” the idea of a crash in their hometown “as an exciting and fashionable belief,” the old-timers knew nothing of it “and had no faith in it.”
Bullard explains this resurrection of the Aurora crash story came to an end when a court order was issued that forbid the digging up of graves, which seems to be quite an appropriate development in a story about a zombie UFO case.
According to Bullard, it was the attention focused on crash retrieval cases prompted by Roswell that caused the Aurora case to rise from the dead a third time, dug up this time by Jim Maars, who Bullard explains, became involved with the case “when he accompanied Bill Case to Aurora in 1973 and interviewed the three remaining residents who were born before 1897,” one of whom claimed to have seen the airship just before it crashed. According to Bullard, Maars concluded that an “alien spaceship” had crashed in Aurora, that crash-enthusiasts agreed, and that “Aurora holds a favored spot in their literature, the story repeated at conferences and in TV documentaries with enough nods and dramatizations to take on a convincing illusion of reality.”