Aurora Texas UFO Crash
The Aurora, Texas UFO Crash is the earliest claimed UFO crash retrieval on record in the United States. On April 17, 1897, according to an article published in the Dallas Morning News on April 19, 1897, an unidentified flying object crashed into a windmill on a farm near the small town of Aurora, Texas. The craft's sole occupant was killed in the crash; the paper described the pilot as "not an inhabitant of this world." The incident is set against the backdrop of the Mystery Airship Craze of 1896–1897, during which thousands of similar aerial object reports were filed across the country.
| Date | 1897-04-17 |
|---|
The Dallas Morning News Account
The April 19, 1897 Dallas Morning News article, attributed to local correspondent S.E. Haydon, reported:
- The craft struck a windmill, destroying it and the spaceship.
- The wreckage was described as being built from an unknown mixture resembling aluminum and silver and weighing several tons.
- The craft was too badly damaged to determine its construction or power source.
- The sole occupant was found, badly disfigured but recognizable as non-human.
- The town planned a burial of the pilot at noon the following day.
- The wreckage was thrown into a nearby well on the property.
- The being was buried with a stone slab marker resembling pieces of the craft.
The 1973 MUFON Investigation
In 1973, Bill Case led a MUFON investigation into the Aurora crash that identified new witnesses and physical anomalies:
- Mary Evans told investigators that her parents — who had forbidden her from visiting the crash site — went themselves and discovered an alien body.
- Charlie Stevens, who was approximately 10 years old at the time, said he had seen an Airship trailing smoke heading north toward Aurora, and that his father went into town the next day to see the wreckage.
- MUFON examined the Aurora Cemetery, where the supposed pilot had been buried. Investigators found a grave marker that appeared to depict a flying saucer, and metal detector readings at the gravesite produced anomalous results, suggesting metallic material had been buried with the remain.
- MUFON requested permission to exhume the burial site; the cemetery declined.
- After the investigation, the grave marker disappeared from the cemetery, and a 3-inch pipe was inserted into the ground at the gravesite. Subsequent metal detector readings at the site produced no anomalous results, suggesting the material under the grave may have been removed.
- MUFON's final assessment was inconclusive but did not rule out the possibility of a hoax.
Authenticity Dispute
In a 1980 interview with Time Magazine, Etna Pegue, an 86-year-old Aurora resident at the time, stated that the story had been fabricated to draw attention to the dying town after a railroad bypass left it economically isolated. Her account is the most direct first-person claim that the Aurora crash was a hoax.
Counterarguments include the independent eyewitness accounts uncovered by MUFON, the physical anomalies at the burial site, and the suspicious disappearance of the grave marker after investigators expressed interest in exhumation.
Context
The Aurora crash occurred during the height of the Mystery Airship Craze — a wave of thousands of airship sightings across the United States between 1896 and 1897. Whether the Aurora incident was an extraordinary case embedded in a real phenomenon, an opportunistic hoax during a period of widespread aerial activity reports, or something else entirely remains unresolved.