Each era has its own inexplicable phenomena and superstitions. As during the crusades in every second village, the descent of saints from heaven was observed, and during the great geographical discoveries, people saw ghost ships everywhere, just as in the 20th century, tens of thousands of UFO sightings are recorded.
This is understandable, while the ability to fly in the air was not available to a person, few people were bothered by this air and these flights generally bothered. But as soon as such an opportunity appeared, the accompanying superstitions and phenomena immediately arose. This, of course, does not mean that all cases of sightings of unidentified aircraft are fiction or hoax. However, the number of real UFO encounters is significantly less than the number of recorded "observations".
Surprisingly, no evidence of UFO sightings was recorded until the 19th century. More precisely, it was not recorded in any "official" sources. In mythical literature, like the Mahabharata or the Bible, of course, there are descriptions of flights, ascents, vehicles and other things, but this is information of a slightly different kind.
Here it must immediately be said that humanity has actually been engaged in launching aircraft for a long time. Already in the 14th century, the first "balloons" appeared in China - paper products filled with hot air or smoke, capable of rising to a height of 200 m. The invention, by the way, thanks to the Golden Horde, very quickly penetrated Europe and the Middle East. Analogs of what is now called "Chinese lanterns" were launched in France, and in Palestine, and even in the Moscow principality. But what can I say, if the flight of a man in a balloon, first carried out in 1783, did not leave a trace in ufology.
All the more interesting are the facts of UFO sightings recorded before the invention of the first flying vehicles. Moreover, aircraft of a modern type, which are heavier than air and are capable of active controlled flight.
One of the first such events occurred in April 1897 in the city of Aurora, Texas. Moreover, even six months before him, even representatives of the official authorities of the southern United States, sheriffs and rangers, repeatedly mentioned the appearance of cigar-shaped objects in the sky, rapidly moving and changing height. Moreover, this, most likely, was not in the nature of fiction, if only because before the invention of the first aircraft by the Wright brothers was about six years, and Wells's book "War of the Worlds" was published only a year later! That is, in the minds of the masses there were still no aliens, no flights.
According to reports from local residents, on April 17, 1897, at about 6 am, an unknown object flew over the city and, crashing into a mill located on its outskirts, crashed to the ground. Among the wreckage of the aircraft, local residents found the body of the pilot, which is clearly unearthly in origin. The aircraft itself was small in size, and most likely represented some kind of "escape capsule" used in an accident.
It was decided to bury the newcomer at the local cemetery, and destroy the aircraft so as not to attract public attention. A local priest, John Stanford, performed the necessary ritual over the body of the pilot, he was buried in a cemetery in one of the unmarked graves, which were more than a century old. The wreckage of the aircraft was thrown into a dry well and filled it up.
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The story might have been forgotten if not for Samuel Haydon, a journalist from Houston who was at that time in the vicinity of Aurora on the instructions of the editorial board. Haydon heard a strange explosion nearby and wanted to figure out what had happened, however, at first, his idea was not crowned with success.
Only almost a month later he managed to "talk" to one of the local residents and he revealed to Haydon some of the details of the April 17 incident. Haydon went to Aurora, but could not find there any traces of a well, nor the place of the alien's burial. However, a burnt-out mill with typical explosion damage was present.
Returning to his place of work, he immediately published a note about the incident in the local newspaper. This drew attention to Aurora, but alas, not for long. A few years later, the city was practically deserted and everyone forgot about the incident.
Confirmation of Haydon's words suddenly came to light almost 60 years later, after life returned to the town in connection with the construction of a large chemical plant in its vicinity.
Someone Brouley Otis bought the site where the UFO crash happened, naturally, not even suspecting about it and decided what is called to bring it "to mind." Imagine Otis's surprise when he found a filled well on his site. Determined to restore it, Otis began to dig the earth from the well. After going about 10 meters in depth, he came across fragments of metal that looked like aluminum. After a couple of days, after taking out all the metal from the well, Otis felt extremely ill and consulted a local doctor.
The doctor was very surprised to see a patient with symptoms of radiation sickness, albeit at a very early stage. After asking Otis what he had been doing recently, he immediately contacted the civil defense service, they arrived at the site and took the mysterious material to the nearest military base. And after a couple of days, completely different people took over Otis and his site.
They set up guards around his site, carefully dug it up, and removed the debris from the well in an unknown direction. A couple of days later, the remains were exhumed from all the graves in the Aurora cemetery. The contents of two of them were also taken away somewhere.
Two months later, Otis was discharged from the hospital and suddenly disappeared without a trace. Shortly before his disappearance, he sold his plot to the city municipality of Aurora for 130 thousand dollars - a huge, almost unrealistic amount at that time. The site is still fenced in with a lattice and a plaque describing all these events hangs above the entrance to it.
All of this happened in 1945, two years before the legendary Roswell incident. Perhaps that is why the first chief of the mysterious Site-51, Colonel Hugh Blanchard, says in his memoirs that the US has been researching anomalous phenomena not since the Roswell incident, but two years earlier.