Recently, 110 years have passed since the very old incident, in its mystery is quite comparable to the world famous UFO crash in Roswell. We are talking about the disaster in 1897 in the small American town of Aurora, a mysterious airship, controlled by a pilot who does not look like an inhabitant of the Earth.
Mysterious ships in the sky of America
In 1896 and 1897, mysterious air ships were repeatedly observed over US territory. They were first seen in California. On a rainy evening on November 17, 1896, in Sacramento, about a hundred townspeople watched a bright light moving purposefully across the sky at an altitude of about 1,000 feet. Many of the residents climbed onto the building of the state legislature under construction to get a better look, as one of the newspapers wrote, such a "striking vision."
Later, one of the townspeople said that he was able to see in the sky a cigar-shaped object with a suspended gondola and a pair of wheels with blades on the sides. Two people on a suspension frame similar to a bicycle pedal furiously, setting the wheels in motion, which pushed the aircraft forward. Such an observant eyewitness allegedly even managed to hear the conversation of the mysterious pilots. One of them said to the other: "We will reach San Francisco about half past twelve."
Five days later, the mysterious ship reappeared in the Sacramento sky, but this time several thousand people, including the sheriff and the local lawyer, were watching him. A strange apparatus slowly flew over the amazed townspeople who poured out into the streets to gaze at the curiosity. This went on for about half an hour. On the same night, an unknown object in the sky was observed in San Francisco.
As the mysterious airship crossed the entire country from west to east, more and more articles about the "flying Dutchman of the clouds" appeared in the newspapers, as one of the journalists dubbed the mysterious apparatus. It was a silvery cigar-shaped ship about 20 meters long. He moved slowly and silently across the sky, illuminating his path with a powerful searchlight.
In April, as the airship approached Chicago, passions flared up more and more around it. At this time, it was possible to take a single photograph of the device, however, as far as we know, no one has ever verified its authenticity.
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Of course, a variety of hypotheses have appeared about the origin of the mysterious ship. Some considered it the brainchild of an unknown genius inventor, others assumed that there were Spanish spies on the ship, because just at that time the Spanish-American War was flaring up.
Newspaper articles about the ship often cited eyewitness accounts of the mysterious pilots. For example, residents of the city of Harrisburg (Arkansas) said that the ship's crew consisted of a woman, two young men and a venerable inventor-captain with piercing black eyes and sideburns. The Missouri native swore by oath that he had been abducted by "stunted two-legged creatures," they allegedly hypnotized him and kept him prisoner for three weeks on their ship.
They even began to find letters from the airship. One of them was tied to a cane in the vicinity of Astoria, Illinois. It was addressed to the inventor Thomas A. Edison, the text was written in cipher, and the message was signed by K. L. Harris, an electrician of Airship No. 3. Edison called this letter "pure fraud" and did not even try to decipher it.
The most sensational testimony came from the farmer Alexander Hamilton. He said that on April 23, 1897, a huge airship 300 feet long landed on his field near Yates Center, Kansas. Through the glass wall of the apparatus, the farmer and two of his neighbors saw "six creatures, the strangest they have ever seen, talking among themselves." On takeoff, the pilots of the ship grabbed one of Hamilton's heifers. The next day, the farmer's neighbor discovered the skin, head and hooves of a stolen heifer … At the conclusion of his gruesome story, Hamilton said: “Since then, falling asleep, I see this damned flying thing with big lights and terrible creatures in it. I don't know who they are: devils, angels or someone else, but my family and all the neighbors saw this ship, and none of us would like to have anything to do with them."
Of course, Hamilton's story interested most ufologists investigating this whole mysterious story of air ships. After all, Hamilton was a respected person and even a former senator, in addition, his story was confirmed by 12 more people with their signatures. However, the value of this testimony was immediately reduced to zero when it was revealed that Hamilton and his witnesses were members of the local liars' club …
Aurora disaster
In the second half of April 1897, it was reported that a flying ship had exploded in the small town of Aurora in northern Texas. The Dallas Morning News reported that the airship appeared over Aurora in the early morning of April 19. He was moving north and, according to eyewitnesses, it was clearly not all right with him. The mysterious ship flew at a speed of 15-20 km per hour and "seemed to sink to the ground." It floated over the main square of the town, crashed into Judge Proctor's windmill and "crumbled to pieces with a terrible explosion."
The badly mutilated body of the pilot was removed from the wreckage. From the appearance of the corpse, it was quite obvious that it was not an inhabitant of the Earth. After a short survey of the scene, the town's officials decided to "bury the pilot's remains at noon the next day." An account of the crash, written by Aurora resident S. Haydon, was published in the Dallas Morning News.
The pilot's body was buried under a large spreading oak tree in the southern part of the city cemetery. According to some testimonies, a wreck of a ship was put on the grave, according to others, a small tombstone was installed on it.
This publication, despite all its sensationalism, seems to have passed almost unnoticed, in any case, almost 70 years no one remembered either the disaster or the buried pilot.
Strange letter and its consequences
On January 4, 1967, the Dallas Morning News columnist Frank Tolbert, while sorting through his editorial mail, discovered a strange letter.
Someone, who wished to remain anonymous, sent a clipping to the newspaper with the publication of the same newspaper, but 70 years ago. In a clipping that had turned yellow with time, Tolbert read with amazement about the airship crash in Aurora in 1897. Of course, the journalist could not disregard such sensational material, because he not only studied the history of Texas, but was also interested in the UFO problem. Tolbert took up the investigation of this long-standing incident and devoted several publications to it.
In 1973, journalist Bill Case, specializing in aviation and astronautics, became interested in Talbert's articles. Keyes immediately contacted Talbert and began his investigation of the Aurora disaster.
The journalist managed to find three living witnesses to the disaster, who confirmed everything that Haydon wrote at the time. Thus, it turned out that the alien pilot actually existed and mankind had a unique opportunity to get real evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Keyes managed to draw public attention to this case and soon journalists and ufologists flooded into Ororu.
British and Italian TV journalists filmed documentaries about the disaster in Aurora, and representatives of two American ufological organizations began looking for material evidence of the death of an extraterrestrial ship.
The inhabitants of the town were not enthusiastic about the intrusion of strangers. Ufologists with metal detectors literally ransacked the entire city, carrying out excavations in those places where their instruments indicated the presence of metal in the ground. All suspicious metal debris was immediately sent to various scientific laboratories in the country.
Alas, there was little interesting among the collected samples; many of them were identified as the most common earthly metal junk. So, one of the most mysterious details turned out to be the impeller from the water pump …
However, one unique metal fragment was also found. Analysis of it in the aerospace laboratory revealed a very unusual nature of the sample. It turned out that it contained 95% pure aluminum and 5% iron. Such an alloy simply does not exist! Usually the iron content is not more than 1%, and where there is iron, zinc and other elements are usually present, but there were no impurities in this sample. The results were checked at the NASA laboratory in Houston and they came to the same conclusions.
In the NASA laboratory, it was possible to establish that the object, a fragment of which the sample was found, exploded in the air, during the explosion the metal melted, and, colliding with the ground, solidified. The data obtained confirmed the well-known picture of an airship crash.
What eyewitnesses told about
Ufologists managed to find eyewitnesses who lived in Orora back in 1897. Mary Evans remembered about the collapse of the mysterious object, her parents were at the crash site, but did not allow her to go with them. Although Mary did not personally see anything, she confirmed that the airship had crashed in the city.
But the story of Charlie Stevens, who was then 10 years old, turned out to be much more interesting. That distant morning, he was helping his parents in the yard and saw a huge cigar-shaped ship flying across the sky. A plume of smoke stretched behind him and there was a feeling that the ship was about to explode. Stevenson saw the ship disappear near Aurora, then he heard an explosion and saw a cloud of smoke. The boy wanted to run into the city and see what happened there, but his father forbade him. The next day, my father visited the city, and when he returned, he told about the plane crash.
However, there was also evidence that puzzled ufologists. Robie Hanson said that no crash happened, it was just made up. Although she was not a direct witness to the events, her father told her about it, he always laughed boldly, recalling this incident, and said that all this was not true.
The mystery of the old well
Ufologists were also very interested in the story of the inhabitant of Aurora Brawley Oates, who settled in the town in 1945. Then he acquired the former Proctor's farm, on the territory of which the airship crash allegedly occurred. While cleaning an old well, Oates stumbled upon curious objects. He found four rusty iron struts, with which windmills are usually fortified, along with them were many pieces of some kind of silvery metal. Unfortunately, the farmer took it all to the landfill.
After clearing the well, the farmer began to use water from it and his health deteriorated sharply. He began to suffer from a chronic form of arthritis, his fingers were terribly swollen, it seemed that they were simply torn from the inside. The farmer also developed other diseases that are still unknown to medicine.
Oates was sure that all his illnesses were related to the water, which was spoiled by the wreckage of the airship, which after his disaster had been thrown into the well by the inhabitants of the town. In the end, the farmer filled the well and placed an imposing 3x3m concrete slab on top of it.
Who robbed the alien's grave?
Of course, the ufologists paid the main attention to the city cemetery, where they hoped to find the alien's grave. One of the residents suggested that this grave is under a large, century-old twisted tree. It was in this place that the researchers discovered a small tombstone with a strange image on it.
Ufologists were sure that they had found the grave of the extraterrestrial pilot. Their confidence was supported by the fact that when examining the grave with a metal detector, he showed that there was metal in it. As the ufologist Walter Andrews suggested: "The metal found in the grave confirmed that the wreckage of the spacecraft from the crash site was also buried with the body."
It was necessary to open the grave. Researchers handed over official letters to each board member of the Aurora cemetery asking for permission to exhume the pilot's body. However, the administration of the cemetery was very negative towards ufologists and forbade the opening of the grave. All attempts to persuade members of the board on their part were fiercely suppressed. Not only that, the board asked the county sheriff to send police officers to Aurora to guard the cemetery.
The cemetery was in fact started to be patrolled by policemen and access to it for ufologists was closed. When the patrolling of the cemetery was stopped two weeks later, the researchers were literally shocked by the fact that the metal from the alien's grave disappeared … It was no longer recorded by a metal detector. Someone unknown stuck a 3-inch pipe into the ground and probably managed to extract all the metal from the grave through it.
Who could, in spite of the patrolling of the police, carry out such painstaking work? One conclusion suggests itself - under the cover of the police, the artifacts were removed from the grave by the military. Ufologists, who believed that unlike Roswell, Aurora would be able to get to the bottom of the truth, again faced a sophisticated cover-up operation.
How did this story end? The tombstone from the alien's grave disappeared somewhere (they say that it was stolen) and now the place of the pilot's burial is difficult to establish. Ufologists still hoped that some physical evidence could be found in the Oates well, but the town authorities surrounded it with barbed wire and forbade anyone to approach it. While some ufologists are 85% confident that a UFO crash occurred in Aurora, local officials say Haydon made up the whole airship crash story to draw attention to his small town, which was going through a very difficult time in the late 19th century.
As in the case of Roswell, the airship crash in Aurora has become a myth, only it is much less often mentioned in the media.