Aurora’s 1897 UFO Crash — A Texas Tale That Won’t Stay Buried

  by Tom Goodman

These days, stories about strange objects in the sky are no longer confined to the fringes. Military pilots testify before Congress. Intelligence officials brief lawmakers behind closed doors. The Pentagon has an office devoted to tracking what it now calls unidentified anomalous phenomena. Whatever these things are—or aren’t—the claims are being explored with new soberness.

Which makes this a fine moment to revisit one of Texas’s oldest sky stories.

On the morning of April 19, 1897, readers of the Dallas Morning News woke to a small headline: “A Windmill Demolishes It.” The article claimed that an unknown “airship” had drifted low over Aurora, Texas, a small town about 45 miles northwest of Fort Worth. The airship struck "Judge Proctor’s windmill," and exploded in a shower of debris. The lone occupant, described as the pilot, was said to be “not an inhabitant of this world.”

Local color filled out the account. A U.S. Signal Service officer opined that the pilot hailed from Mars. Papers found on the body were written in undecipherable symbols. The wreckage, fashioned from a strange silvery metal, defied identification. The pilot, mangled beyond recognition, received a Christian burial in the Aurora Cemetery.

At the time, few took it seriously. Newspapers of the era trafficked freely in hoaxes and high imagination, and the Aurora story was only one of hundreds of airship sightings reported across the country during 1896 and 1897. 

The story went quiet for nearly seventy years.

It resurfaced in the 1960s and roared back to life in the 1970s, when reporters and UFO enthusiasts descended on Aurora. Metal detectors swept the alleged crash site. Investigators fixated on a grave beneath a large oak tree, marked by a curious symbol said to resemble a flying craft. A handful of odd metal fragments fueled headlines. When talk turned to exhuming the supposed alien pilot, local residents and cemetery trustees drew a firm line. A court injunction ended the digging, and the mystery retreated underground once more.

Later embellishments followed, as they always do. One version had the alien surviving the crash, blending into town life, developing an enthusiasm for whiskey and gambling, and eventually meeting an untimely end at the hands of Texas Rangers.

With official eyes trained skyward again, Aurora’s airship still hovers mysteriously over the imagination.

This story appeared in my monthly author newsletter yesterday. Want to relive the grit and charm of turn-of-the-century Texas? My newsletter focuses on that time and place, with nuggets of history, recommended books and films, and behind-the-scenes looks at my own novels. Sign up for my monthly newsletter here. You'll receive a complimentary book featuring photos of the real characters and places that inspired my award-winning debut novel, The Last Man: A Novel of the 1927 Santa Claus Bank Robbery.