The most famous example of a UFO crash landing story is the Roswell incident of 1947. This event helped give birth to the modern UFO subculture and the idea that intelligent beings regularly visit Earth. Much less known is a case that happened 50 years earlier in a small town in northern Texas. According to ancient-origins, it is referred to as the 1897 Aurora incident. And while most researchers consider it a hoax, some UFO enthusiasts still mark this incident as the earliest example of a UFO sighting and crash landing.
The Aurora Airship Incident
On April 19, 1897, an unusual airship was spotted in the small town of Aurora early in the morning. It was shaped like a cigar and moved at a speed of about 16 kilometers per hour. Observers in the city noted how the object slowly drifted through the city until it flew over one of the houses. It was here that the disaster occurred: the airship collided with a windmill, thereby causing an explosion. After everything calmed down, the townspeople examined the wreckage and found the pilot. Then the story gets especially strange.
The pilot was described as severely disfigured, but clearly inhuman. In addition, the pilot had papers written in unrecognizable hieroglyphs. Witnesses reported that the pilot "was not a resident of this world." A local liaison officer and a man described as an "authority on astronomy" suggested the man might have been from the planet Mars. The next day, a "Christian burial" was arranged for the pilot and a tombstone was placed over the grave.
On the gravestone was an approximate drawing of the pilot's car. This headstone was allegedly stolen in 1973, so there is no evidence of a headstone or information about where the pilot was buried. In 2008, the creators of an episode of the show called "UFO Hunters" discovered an unmarked grave, which, according to the producers, could be the grave of the pilot. However, they were not allowed to exhume the grave, so it is impossible to know if the unmarked grave contained the remains of any pilot, let alone an alien pilot.
Plausibility of the story
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Although the Aurora incident did not become widely known until the late 1960s and early 1970s, some enthusiasts regard the event as the original Roswell incident. The problem is that there is little evidence that the Aurora incident took place at all, let alone that it was related to the crashed alien spacecraft.
In the 1970s, investigators interviewed people who were alive at the time of the incident. They revealed noticeable inconsistencies in the narrative. One example of such inconsistencies is the suggestion that the airship crashed into a windmill on the farm of Judge J. S. Proctor. However, at the time the collision was suspected, there was no windmill on his farm at all. Moreover, there is no evidence of personal records associated with this event, as well as records of the pilot's body being placed in the Aurora cemetery. In addition, there are no museums, historical societies or private individuals who have any samples of debris or inscriptions that they allegedly found on the pilot's body containing alien hieroglyphs. On top of that, it was established that the alleged authority in astronomy was not a communications officer, but a city blacksmith. All of these apparent inconsistencies call into question the credibility of the story as a whole. Journalists and historians investigating the event concluded that the Aurora airship incident was likely fabricated to bring more attention and attention to the dying city.
Alternative explanations
Skeptics say this is a hoax, while UFO supporters are more likely to believe it happened. However, there is also a third possibility. Perhaps the story was based on a real event when an airship with a human pilot crashed near the city, and the pilot was so badly disfigured by the accident that the inhabitants of the city did not recognize him as a human.
The history of airships and balloons began a long time ago. The earliest example of a functional airship was probably the one used by Jean-Pierre Blanchard to cross the English Channel in 1784. He could control its flight with a hand-operated propeller. The first steam airship was built by Henri Gifford in 1852. By the 1870s, airships with an internal combustion engine had already been developed. By the 1890s, airships were no longer new to Western culture, but it is possible that people from remote rural areas were unfamiliar with airship technology. Therefore, it is entirely possible that the airship being tested in the area could have been mistakenly perceived by unusual locals as having an extraterrestrial origin.
Martian fever
Another interesting aspect of the story that connects it to the broader culture of the time is the fact that the first assumption of the "astronomy expert" in this story was that the pilot was from the planet Mars. At that time, many people, including more science-minded people, believed that there was life on Mars.
Back in the 18th century, astronomers confirmed that there are seasons on Mars. By the 1860s, astronomers attributed this seasonal difference in the appearance of Mars to differences in vegetation. This explanation, of course, turned out to be wrong. The apparent seasonal differences on Mars are due to global dust storms and seasonal sublimation of the Martian ice caps, not vegetation.
Another discovery that caused a stir about life on Mars was the discovery in 1877 of alleged "channels" on Mars. Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli used a state-of-the-art refractory telescope to look at the surface of Mars and saw what looked like a network of grooves or "trenches." Moreover, his original report did not suggest anything artificial or even concrete in what he saw on Mars. However, when his report was translated into English, his word "canali", meaning grooves or marks, was translated into the English word "channel," which means not only water and life, but mind and planning.
In 1894, just three years before the alleged incident with the Aurora airship, American businessman Percival Lowell founded an observatory named after him in Flagstaff, Arizona, specifically to study Mars. Percival Lowell was convinced that there was an ancient dying civilization on Mars. He theorized that the Martians built canals to bring water from the polar ice caps to arid lower latitudes.
Most professional astronomers at the time were immediately skeptical about these canals on Mars. The idea was finally debunked in the 1960s, when images from Mariner 4, the first interplanetary spacecraft to capture detailed images of the surface of Mars, showed the planet to be barren and completely devoid of existing bodies of liquid water on the surface, not to mention channels. However, in the 1890s, the idea of canals on Mars was still popular in some quarters and likely influenced the popular culture of the time. In light of this, it should come as no surprise that a disfigured pilot of an unusually visible aircraft was mistaken for a Martian in a small Texas town in 1897.
Broader context of the incident
The Aurora Airship incident occurred, or at least supposedly occurred, during a time of optimism about the progress of science and technology. Towards the end of the 19th century, inventions and discoveries such as steam locomotives, airships, vaccines, and electricity had created confidence that humanity could use science and technology to create a better future and do even more impressive things. The vision of continuous technological and scientific progress has probably been further confirmed by comparison with relatively recent discoveries in the geological and biological sciences.
By the 19th century, geologists such as James Hutton and Charles Lyell had shown that the natural environment is constantly changing over time as a result of regular geological processes. This demonstrated that the world has not always been the way it was and could change a lot in the future. Charles Darwin also showed how populations of organisms can change over time to adapt to their environment through natural selection. Not only the natural environment has changed, but also the organisms themselves.
While geologists and natural scientists were finding evidence for change and evolution in the natural world, economists and social philosophers began to look at how human societies changed over time. Darwinian ideas about biological evolution and Marxist ideas about social and economic progress probably contributed to the idea of technological progress. If organisms can biologically evolve into higher forms over time, and human societies can become more egalitarian over time through class struggle, why can't civilizations evolve technologically to more advanced levels over time?
The idea of extraterrestrial civilizations technologically advanced enough to travel between planets easily fit into this framework. If human civilization evolved towards ever higher levels of technological and social progress, space aliens that inhabited the same universe and obeyed the same laws of nature were probably the result of the same Darwinian and Marxist processes. They just moved a little further in this process, and their evolution took place on another planet.
The late 19th century was probably the first time in history that the idea of creatures traveling between planets was considered scientifically plausible. By the end of the 19th century, humans had already built some of the first flying machines. In addition, writers like Jules Verne and scientists like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky have already begun to speculate about realistic scenarios of how humans might travel in space.
Flying cars, as well as more realistic science fiction, have begun to make the idea that humans and other creatures can leave the Earth's surface more scientifically plausible. This fact, combined with widespread acceptance of the idea of life on other planets such as Mars, has created an intellectual and cultural environment in which a spaceship wreck on a Texas farm would be considered plausible and widely held. this was not possible in the past.
Whether the incident with Aurora was a deliberate hoax based on misidentifying an early airship, or something entirely different, the story fits into the cultural narrative of the 1890s and was probably believed because it fit with the narrative.
The Aurora Incident: Hoax, Misunderstanding, or Extraterrestrial Visit?
How well the story fits the cultural narrative of the time casts doubt on its veracity. If anyone from the 19th century tried to come up with a story about a wrecked alien spaceship, it has everything you'd expect. The aircraft is described as an airship, which was the most common advanced aircraft type at the time. The pilot was identified as likely from Mars when it was extremely popular to believe that there was a canal-building civilization on the red planet.
This also happened in a remote area where the evidence would be difficult to verify. If this were not an obvious hoax, it is easy to argue that the observers of the incident misidentified the ground airship. Since they were unfamiliar with airships, the strangeness of the situation might have led some to believe that the disfigured pilot was not even human.
On the other hand, it is also true that if this were a real encounter with an alien spacecraft, people would probably also call it an "airship" because of its similarities. They would also likely assume the pilot was a Martian based on cultural and scientific beliefs about extraterrestrial life at the time.
As a result, we can say that the available evidence is too ambiguous to be used as reliable evidence of both an extraterrestrial visit and any other version. This evidence does not seem extraordinary enough. However, it is possible that this could have been based on a real event involving the crash of an airship in a small town, misidentified as a visit from another world.