The Famous Aurora Spaceship Mystery

Technorati Tags: UFO,alien,autopsy,flying saucer

 

When it comes to spaceships and little green men from Mars, most people’s thoughts turn to the notorious events as Roswell, New Mexico, where in 1947, the US government apparently captured an alien who had crashed his flying saucer. US military personnel are then said to have quickly sealed off the area, removed all evidence, and engaged in a complete cover-up.

After a thorough debriefing, presumably in sign language, the little green men sadly died. Much later, the film of the top-secret autopsy supposedly carried out on him was sold on the black market, ending up nearly fifty years later, in 1995, on a prime-time TV documentary broadcast around the world. This program, Alien Autopsy, caused a sensation and “Martian gate” was back on the agenda with a vengeance. As is often the case, those who wanted to believe such a story inevitably did, while those of us really living on planet Earth could smell a rat. In fact, there were rats everywhere.

But it took eleven years before the program maker, Ray Santilli, admitted that the autopsy had been staged, for the most part, in a flat in Camden Town, London. Strangely enough, he owned up to this two days before a humorous parody of his subject was due to be aired on television. He confirmed that his props had included sheep brains set in jelly and knuckle joints and chicken entrails bought from Smithfield meat market.

That should have knocked the Roswell mystery on the head for good, and all those UFO enthusiasts who had been obsessing about the whole affair for years should now be quietly licking their wounds in their garden sheds, or wherever it is they go to study their favorite subjects.

But Roswell wasn’t the first time aliens had been captured before. In 1897, Aurora, a small unremarkable town near Dallas, Texas, became the site of an astonishing event.

On April 17 that year, ten-year-old Charlie Stevens was sweeping his backyard when he looked up to see smoke trailing from a large silver airship flying overhead toward Aurora. Soon after it had flown out of sight, he heard an explosion and saw a thick plume of smoke rise into the air. He was about to rush off to see what had happened when he was stopped by his father who told him he had to finish his chores first. Just imagine that something truly momentous has just happened right in your sleepy little town: a strange airborne vehicle – something you have never seen before, maybe even a raft from another planet – crashes just a few hundred yards away from your own back gate and you are told: “Nope. You finish sweeping that there yard first, boy, and then come inside and help your ma with the breakfast.”

In fact Charlie wasn’t allowed to go at all. According to him it was his father who went into town and saw the wreckage scattered about the place. Mary Evans, aged fifteen at the time, also claimed to have witnessed the crash, but stated that her parents wouldn’t allow her to visit the scene either.

 

About 6 o’clock this morning the early risers of Aurora were astonished at the sudden appearance of the airship which had been sailing around the country.

It was traveling due north and much nearer the earth than before. Evidently some of the machinery was out of order, for it was making a speed of only ten or twelve miles per hour and gradually settling toward the earth. It sailed over the public square, and when it reached the north part of town it collided with the tower of Judge Proctor’s windmill and went to pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wrecking the windmill and water tank and destroying the judge’s flower garden.

The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one aboard, and while his remains were badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world.

 

Curiously, this story did not make even the front page. Instead it was buried on page five along with several other reports of UFO sightings. It would appear they flying saucer crash at Aurora was not particularly shocking in 1897 – run-of-the-mill, you might say (in more senses than one) – even if it did destroy Judge Proctor’s flower garden.

The story then told by the people of the town is that the Martian pilot, as he was termed, was given a decent Christian burial in the town cemetery and his grave marked with a single stone. The remains of the spaceship were taken away to an unknown location by the authorities and the smaller pieces were thrown into Judge Proctor’s well. No other newspaper covered the story, and amazingly, the alien’s resting place in the Aurora cemetery went unremarked for nearly eighty years, the small town settling back into obscurity.

That was until 1973, when the founder of the International UFO Bureau, Hayden Hewes, announced to United Press International that a grave in a small north Texan cemetery contained the body of an 1897 “astronaut” whom the report at the time had identified as being “not . . . of this world.”

Newspapers all over America took up the story, and interest in the alien grave rapidly gathered pace. Curiously, as the press hounds sniffed around Aurora, they found very few residents willing to discuss the events of 1897, but despite their silence the town soon became a hive of activity as alien hunters from around the world descended en masse.

The International UFO Bureau claimed to have found traces of radiation at both the crash site and the grave, on top of which, they said, the grass glowed red. But they were soon barred from the graveyard by local administrators, who adamantly refused to allow them to start digging around. When the investigators attempted to obtain a court order to exhume the body, the small headstone marking the grave was removed and state troopers were placed at the gates of the cemetery to prevent unauthorized access.

Hayden Hewes, interviewed for a television documentary on the subject, condemned these actions as irresponsible, stating that there was now no way of locating the grave – a site, he claimed, that was of national importance. Interestingly, Bureau representatives have never explained why they didn’t just walk around looking for the red patch they had found only weeks earlier. Abandoning the grave, they turned their intention instead to Judge Proctor’s farm, now under different ownership.

In 1943, Rollie Oats (yes, his real name) had bought the place. He had removed the pieces of spaceship and cleaned out the well so that his family could drink the water. Twelve years later de developed severe arthritis in his hands and, convinced the well water was responsible, had it sealed over with a six-ton slab of concrete.

During the 1973 investigation, metal found on the farm was analyzed at a laboratory, its name never disclosed, and found to be a unique composition that could only have been produced by a very sophisticated refining process far in advance of what was possible in the 1970s, let along the 1890s. This was held up as hard evidence of spaceship material, and the UFO community howled for the government to reveal any information they had. In response the government ridiculed the amateur investigation, describing the Aurora spaceship story as a hoax. But of course they would say that, eh, UFO fans.

Today, amid renewed calls for a full inquiry and a thorough search of Aurora using the latest technology, some town elders now claim that the US military returned many years ago, back in the 1940s, and removed all trace of the spacecraft and its pilot. Others enigmatically refuse to talk about the incident at all. One elderly resident was interviewed for the television documentary in 1973 and clearly stated on camera that the whole affair had been true. (I saw it myself, and she said it all right – there’s no doubt about that, at least.) Her parents, she insisted, went to check the wreckage of the spacecraft and then told her all about it. But later, her great-granddaughter revealed she had been told the whole thing was a hoax and was puzzled why her great-grandmother would appear on camera to claim the accident had really taken place. The lure of the dollar, possibly?

But if it was all a hoax, why play such an elaborate prank in the first place, let alone keep it up for over a century? There is one very good reason – to do with the town of Aurora itself. In the middle of the nineteenth century Aurora had been a busy, bustling trade center with a growing population and two schools. During the early 1890s, the Burlington Northern Railroad had been planning to build a route through Aurora to join the Western Railroad, when disaster struck the town in the shape of spotted fever (a form of meningitis). As the new cemetery began to take in more and more residents, the town was sealed off and people were confined to their homes.

As a consequence, the railroad abruptly stopped twenty-seven miles short of the town, construction never to be resumed, and Aurora’s business was devastated. Things became even worse when its major crop, cotton, was ruined by boll weevil infestation. Its fate was finally sealed by a fire that destroyed a major part of the town. All this, within the space of a few short years, left Aurora facing ruin – that is, of course, until the spaceship conveniently flew into town. The resulting (albeit somewhat delayed) publicity led to Aurora, eight years on, being declared a place of special interest and becoming one of the most famous towns in Texas, with legendary status among the worldwide UFO community. Even today it is rumored that any unusual pieces of metal found locally are quickly confiscated by the authorities and mysteriously lost or accidentally destroyed.

One of the things that have always struck me about UFO sightings is how they always reflect the era they are reported in. For example, today we have gray aliens with oversize heads who communicate telepathically, like the alien constructed for the Roswell hoax. During the 1970s all spacemen looked like the cast of Star Trek, and prior to that they dressed like Buck Rogers, complete with laser guns, and got in and out of their flying saucers by ladder.

So call me cynical, but when we hear of an interred alien whose cigar-shaped spacecraft crashed into a windmill in 1897, we don’t need to look too far to find out that cigar-shaped airships were first conceived in the 1890s and by 1897 were flying all over America, to the astonishment of country folk, some of whom hadn’t even seen a train before.

And Aurora was far from the only location for such sightings, as soon afterward alien encounters were reported all over the US. Some people even ludicrously claimed they had been paid by aliens, in dollars, for spare parts for their space machines.

So imagine the scene with me. In 1897, old Farmer Gilly is standing out in his field raking the soil when a being from outer space strolls up. “Greetings, Earthling,” he intones in that robotic style favored by aliens the universe over. “The satellite navigation control system on my intergalactic hyperspace craft is up the spout. Do you have anything to repair it?” Farmer Gilly looks him up and down, takes off his hat and wipes the sweat from his forehead with a shirtsleeve. “Sure thing, buddy,” he replies. “Cosmic navigation broken down, has it? Probably explains why you’re in Arkansas, son. Can’t think of no darned good reason why else you’d be all the way out here. Let’s go and see what we’ve got for you in that chicken shed over there.” Presumably the alien pays in dollars for a roll of rusty hog wire and is on his way back to Mars by sundown. Perhaps he even takes an old hoe with him too – as a souvenir. Now, you can believe that if you want to . . .

But why jump to the conclusion that it was a spaceship that had crashed? Even back in 1897, before planes were invented (or at least ones that could fly very far), there could have been an alternative, rather more plausible explanation. Flying over Texas, an early airship, not unlike a zeppelin – or, for younger readers, the Goodyear blimp – might have sprung a leak and lost altitude. It might then have crashed into Judge Proctor’s windmill and destroyed his flower bed. The resulting explosion would have melted the metal framework, which would then have re-formed into new and unrecognizable shapes when it cooled. The poor pilot might have lost his limbs in the explosion and ended up burned to a crisp, so that he didn’t look human anymore. But no one in the UFO community would have bought this rather more down-to-earth explanation. Hayden Hewes can still now be seen on several television documentaries standing wistfully outside the cemetery or pictured pointing forlornly at the well, no doubt wondering how he is going to remove the six tons of concrete slab that stands between himself and his place in history.

The final word on the Aurora spaceship crash should go to the man who had the very first word, journalist S.E. Haydon. Years later Haydon, a notorious practical joker, admitted he had simply made up the story in an attempt to draw attention to the plight of his hometown and to help the dying community. He certainly did that – even if publicity took some decades to arrive – as Aurora, the town we would otherwise never have heard of, is still talked about throughout the UFO-hunting community as one of the most famous sightings of all time. They should put up a statue of him in the town square in Aurora, if there is a town square, that is.

Most UFO encounters can be explained as optical illusions, natural phenomena, meteors, or hoaxes, but a good many remain unexplained. In cases of alien abduction, it is interesting to read reports of victims who have been hypnotized and who describe their ordeals in great detail while under hypnosis. Yet when we compare these reports with those of volunteers who do not claim alien abduction, but instead are asked simply to imagine it, their recollections under hypnosis are almost exactly the same. I think this says more for the power of imagination than it does for likelihood of alien encounters, but then again, ours is a big universe. Infinite, in fact. Only a fool would completely rule out the idea of life on other planets in other solar systems, the closest of which are so far away they would take us seventy-five thousand years to get to in the fastest craft we currently have, which means unless aliens visit us (and possibly they do), then you and I will never know if there is life out there. Maybe, just maybe, we are not alone after all . . .

 

 

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Visitors From The Clouds

Technorati Tags: UFO,sitings,creatures,contact,spacemen

 

Signs of extraterrestrial activity on earth have been documented for centuries. While many of the stories about ancient alien visitors seem dubious, some are certainly tantalizing enough to provoke speculation. In about AD 820 Archbishop Agobard of Lyon, France, wrote an intriguing account of beings who supposedly “fell to earth.” His book, De Grandine et Tonitruis (About Hail and Thunder), describes how a mob of superstitious citizens, driven by a widespread belief in airborne sorcerers called “the Aerials,” held three men and a woman in chains for several days. The locals claimed the four had descended from ships that were sailing in the clouds to steal their crops. But the prisoners insisted they were innocent country-folk carried away earlier by miraculous men who had shown them unknown marvels. The mob brought them before Agobard, who ruled that both sides were in the wrong, and the prisoners were released.

Was thus an extraordinary bout of mass hysteria or could it be evidence that aliens were visiting Earth? In ancient times the commonest visions in the sky were of burning torches, shields, swords, and monsters. Many might have been due to natural causes, such as comets, meteors or the weather. Yet some reports of unexplained and strange things in the sky have led to the belief that “ancient astronauts” existed.

Even biblical stories have been linked to extraterrestrial visits. In The Bible and Flying Saucers (1968), theologian Dr Barry Downing describes the complex visions of the prophet Ezekiel in about 600 BC. Ezekiel’s bizarre account of a fiery cloud with wheels an human-like beings who took him up to another world is remarkably similar to modern-day tales of abduction by aliens. And India’s Sanskrit texts, known as the Vedas, tell of flying machines called vimanas piloted by human-like races armed with powerful weapons.

In the first century AD the Greek writer Plutarch quoted a contemporary account of a battle at Aegospotami in September 405 BC, when Lysander, the Spartan commander, defeated the Athenian fleet: “For 75 days continually, there was seen in the heavens a vast fiery body, as if it had been a flaming loud, not resting, but carried about with several intricate and broken movements.” Perhaps the fiery cloud was a comet, but its intricate and broken movements make this unlikely. Centuries later in AD 776, Saxons were storming a castle at Syburg, on the River Ruhr in Germany, when they were terrified by images of two shields red with flame wheeling over the church.

The idea that early extraterrestrials left artifacts on earth was first put forward in 1954 by British writer Harold T. Wilkins in Flying Saucers From The Moon. Wilkins suggested that the famous Nazca lines of Peru, mysterious markings etched into the desert, were a landing guide for aliens. Later the Egyptian pyramids, the Easter Island statues, a Mayan sarcophagus lid at Palenque, and cave paintings of “spacemen” at sites in France, Spain, Italy, China and Australia were claimed by other authors to be the result of extraterrestrial activity. Books about the ancient astronaut theory had little impact until the 1969 publication in English of the best-selling Chariots of the Gods? By Erich von Daniken, who believed that ancient aliens came to earth to mate with humans, thus giving them advanced wisdom.

Von Daniken’s ideas were attacked by both theologians and scientists, who argued that his evidence was either non-existent or poor. Yet some curious circumstances are hard to dismiss. In 1976 Robert Temple’s book The Sirius Mystery described the primitive Dogon tribe of Mali in Africa, who have extraordinarily accurate knowledge about the star Sirius. Temple connects this knowledge to a Dogon myth about amphibious creatures who once landed in an “ark,” which produced a whirlwind of dust and “spurted blood,” interpreted as rocket exhaust. The Dogon believe that their civilization was founded by travelers from Sirius. Critics like astronomer Carl Sagan argue that the Dogon knowledge is not as precise as advocates of ancient astronauts believe and that it could have been acquired relatively recently from European travelers.

Author Samuel Rosenberg and others suspect that some tales of ancient aliens are hoaxes. The story about an old manuscript found in Yorkshire describing “a large round silver thing like a disc” flying over terrified monks at Byland Abbey in 1290 was said to have been invented by two schoolboys. Another story supposedly came from an Egyptian papyrus scroll dating from around 1500 BC. A huge circle of fire was said to have crossed the sky, followed by other apparitions brighter than the sun. This too is now thought to be no more than a hoax.

 

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The Men In Black

Technorati Tags: UFO,incidents,coverup,government,legends,urban,men in black

 

Albert K. Bender, director of the International Flying Saucer Bureau, was prepared to tell the world an amazing secret . . . until the Men in Black paid him a visit.

Bender’s grandly titled IFSB was actually a one-man operation – but a well-accepted one during the 1950s flying saucer craze. In 1953 Bender was confident that he would soon be able to divulge the truth about the saucers. Then one day in July, while lying down after a bout of dizziness, Bender saw three shadowy figures standing in his bedroom wearing conservative dark suits and Homburg hats that shaded their faces. Communicating with Bender telepathically, they confirmed that he had stumbled upon part of the saucers’ secret, but he was told to conceal the truth. He swore to do so, and they revealed the rest of the secret. He wrote a book about the incident yet never passed on what he supposedly knew.

Bender is one of many UFO spotters who claim to have been visited by the Men in Black. Typically they arrive in old but immaculate cars. After a UFO sighting in July 1967, Robert Richardson was visited by two Men in Black in a 1953 Cadillac. He noted the number plate, checked it and found that that number had never been issued. The men are said to walk like robots and move awkwardly, handling familiar everyday objects as if doing so for the first time. They speak in quaint phrases reminiscent of B-grade movies. Their faces are expressionless, but slightly sinister.

Are the Men in Black secret service or security officers, or even agents of some bizarre international conspiracy? Are they aliens who are masquerading as humans? Are they flesh-and-blood or hallucinations? Those who meet them relate the incidents in such matter-of-fact terms, it seems that they must be more than fantasy. Reports of their physical appearance and vaguely menacing behavior are intriguingly consistent. Whatever they are, they symbolize our age-old fear of the unknown in a strikingly contemporary way.

 

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