Roswell of Texas: The Aurora UFO
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Bill Case pulled up to the cemetery in Aurora, Texas in the spring of 1973. The UFO investigator had been here before, he just never found what he was looking for. Information could be hard to come by in Aurora, but recently one of Bill's contacts smuggled a message out of a hospital. Written by an 89-year-old patient, it began, "'You are looking at the wrong grave.'" It also included directions."

Bill stalked through the gates of the cemetery and made his way to the southern quadrant. His eyes were peeled for a gnarled 200-year-old oak tree. Finally, he found it in the oldest section of the cemetery. A roughly hewn triangular slab of stone sat underneath its branches. Etched into the stone's surface was an image, a long, thin oval surrounding three circles that

It almost looked like a submarine with three portholes running down the side. But Bill knew better. It was a UFO, and the stone marked the grave of the spaceship's alien pilot.

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You can find the Underworld podcast on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Aurora, Texas has always been a small town. But when it was first established in 1882, it was part of a big vision. Surveyors made plans for a train line to stop in town on its way across Texas. The railroad promised to drive tourism, boost local businesses, and put Aurora on the map in more ways than one.

But before it could be finished, the town encountered one hardship after another. First, there were the crops. In the early 1890s, Aurora's farmers overplanted and overworked the land they used to grow cotton, a major source of income for the town.

As the soil lost its potency and eroded away, harvests suffered and so did the economy. An infestation of weevils destroyed the few cotton plants they had. Watch out for weevils. Then there was the fire. On a gusty day in the mid 1890s, a blaze broke out that obliterated the entire western portion of the city. Businesses burned to the ground, destroying Aurora's economic center.

Then, in 1889, spotted fever swept across town. As the outbreak spread, citizens fled. Townspeople moved to nearby municipalities, and Aurora practically emptied out overnight. Those who remained clung to the hope that the incoming railroad would restore prosperity and a sense of normalcy to the town.

Then, after a drawn-out intensive survey process, interest in the project mysteriously disappeared. In the early 1890s, a new train station opened in the neighboring Rome, Texas instead. Without the railroad to bring in new visitors, the town felt forgotten. But in 1897, something changed. Aurora became a part of the national story in a way no one expected.

Legend has it, one night in mid-April around 6 a.m., the farmers of Aurora looked up from their fields to see a strange craft hovering through the sky. At first, it appeared to be one of the airships that had been spotted all across the country in recent months, and they kept reading about it in the papers. It looked like a giant silver flying cigar with a bright white light attached to it. But there was something...

off. It wasn't the smooth gliding craft described in those other reports. Plumes of smoke billowed in its wake as the craft charted a route across the sky. Moving north, it flew over Jim Stevens' property, about three miles from the town center. Jim had been bringing the cows out from the barn when he noticed the airship sputtering over his farm, heading toward Aurora's main square. The

The ship's altitude dropped suddenly and veered towards Judge J.S. Proctor's farm. Jim watched in horror as it struck Proctor's windmill and broke into pieces. Fiery shards of spaceship slammed to the ground all around the Proctor farm. The windmill toppled into collision, sending even more chunks of metal into the air as it fell.

The judge's property was in shambles. His flower garden destroyed. Metal impaled trees across the backyard. Molten shards pierced the earth and embedded themselves in the nearby rocks. Word spread quickly across town. Citizens rushed over to the farm to see the crash for themselves. Only then could residents start to reckon with what happened. The smoke cleared. The dust settled.

And the citizens of Aurora moved in to pick through the wreckage. Tossing hot pieces of scrap metal aside, they searched for clues that might explain the disaster. And then they found something. The pilot. It was small, about half the size of an average adult human. But what stood out most was even after the impact severed some of its limbs and scattered them across the area, it had more arms and legs than it should have.

if it was human. An army official examined the corpse and theorized that the body was extraterrestrial. Along with the body, citizens found a bizarre notebook in the wreckage. It was filled with pages of strange hieroglyphics written in a language no one recognized. The ship's composition only further mystified locals. It was an aluminum alloy mixed with iron that likely weighed several tons.

That combination should have been too heavy to fly without wings or propellers, but it had neither. Not to mention, it would have been extremely expensive to produce. Everything seemed like definitive proof that alien life had visited Earth 50 years before the infamous Roswell incident. And yet, news of what happened in Aurora didn't travel very far.

This was likely due to the fact that the incident was part of a larger trend sweeping the nation, the airship wave of 1897. As we mentioned, reports of strange flying crafts had been streaming in from concerned Americans for months,

The stories varied. Some saw strange lights passing overhead. Others described silvery aircraft with wings. And still others reported a flying cylindrical object in the shape of a cigar. Sort of a classic alien spacecraft.

No one was sure if it was the same ship or many different ones. Reports started in California, but by spring of 1897, the sightings had spread across the Midwest and into the Plains states like Illinois, Missouri, and Nebraska. In such a saturated news cycle, it was hard for one event to stand out, even though Aurora wasn't like the other sightings.

Where other towns and cities allegedly witnessed mysterious ships floating overhead before disappearing, Aurora had an actual event. Something exploded in the skies and crashed down to Earth, and there was reportedly evidence to prove it. And yet, the crash barely made headlines in Texas.

All the information we have comes from one reporter, S.E. Hayden, who wrote about the incident in the Dallas Morning News. The article appeared on page five, buried in the middle of a massive spread on other airship sightings in the U.S. And some of the other accounts weren't the most reliable. For example, a man in a nearby town claimed he met the crew of an aircraft.

They touched down and introduced themselves as visitors from a secret nation in the North Pole. Sitting beside a half-dozen unbelievable stories like this, the paper subtly suggested that the Aurora crash was equally far-fetched. And this is where the story gets complicated. Because rather than present the papers with the evidence they had, the townspeople threw it all away.

They apparently cleaned up all the metal from the spaceship and threw most of the debris into Judge Proctor's well, located underneath where the windmill used to be. As for the notebook with pages of writing in an unknown language, that never gets mentioned in any reliable report after Hayden's initial article. It's as if it vanished from the collective memory.

That left only the body of the purported alien pilot, the proof that an extraterrestrial visited Aurora. And Hayden's article ended with a simple explanation for what happened to it. He wrote, quote, The pilot's funeral will take place at noon tomorrow. The alien was apparently given a Christian burial somewhere in Aurora's cemetery.

With the apparent disposal of those key pieces of evidence, the town of Aurora sowed the seeds for a legend that would come to define their city.

Though the story was initially buried under other alien fanfare, many in the area got curious about the incident. And for a few days following the reported crash, people around Texas contacted Aurora's nearest newspaper, the Dallas Morning News, with theories and explanations as to what happened. One theorist suggested the airships were real and that wealthy titans of industry, like the Rockefellers, built them.

In their opinion, it was part of a plan to flee to Mexico in top-secret millionaire technology to avoid being prosecuted for their business monopolies. Another reporter proposed a similar theory. He called the airship witnesses liars and said they were drunk and stumbling home from the tavern late at night. He suggested they saw nothing more than the sputtering of the stars and confused them for spaceship lights. Been there, done that.

A Texas stamp company even tried to take credit for the incident. They claimed it was a real airship, one they commissioned to advertise their products. Of course, when they wrote in to say they were the masterminds, they included their company address in case anyone wanted to place an order.

These explanations were entertaining, but they again showed how local news didn't take the report seriously. It seemed like the paper would print any theory, however unfounded or ridiculous. And these theories didn't remotely begin to explain the stories coming out of Aurora. For one, they didn't account for the sheer number of eyewitnesses who saw something explode over Judge Proctor's farm.

Or that most of the witnesses were farmers working in the fields at dawn, not drunks stumbling home at night. And their description of the pilot didn't sound like any Rockefeller or a stamp salesman.

With no adequate explanation and no new developments to keep people interested, the Aurora incident left the news in a matter of days. Even the larger phenomenon, the airship sightings across America, sputtered out by May of 1897, a few weeks after the Aurora crash.

The world moved on, perhaps because within a few years, the sight of a low-flying craft became unexceptional. On December 17th, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright successfully flew the first powered airplane. There's little information out there about what life was like in Aurora in the decades after the crash. The town was too small to appear in census records, making its dwindling population hard to track.

But in 1901, its post office apparently closed, suggesting there weren't even enough people in Aurora to justify mail delivery. And yet, the story of Aurora's UFO experience lived on. An unknown citizen placed a jagged rock featuring a drawing of the spaceship atop the spot where townspeople claimed the body was buried. But nobody knows when the stone was placed or whether it marks the real grave or any grave at all.

For years, the rock stood as the only memorial to commemorate a piece of the town's history and the pilots allegedly buried below. Then, in 1945, the Oates family purchased the Proctor's Farm, the original site of the airship crash. And the story got a second chapter. They just wanted some land, a place to settle down. That's why the Oates family bought a farm in Aurora.

Brawley Oates, the father of the family, had grown up in the town and he'd heard stories about the supposed UFO, but he wasn't sure they were true. That is, until he started noticing some strange quirks about the farm. It started with a well. Years before the Oates arrived, the well had fallen into disuse, but Brawley thought it would be nice if his family could use it as a water source, so he set out to restore it.

With the help of other townspeople, including the local town marshal, Brawley cleared debris from the old well and they found something strange down there. Over the course of their work, they pulled out large quantities of corroded metal. The town marshal suggested the shards might be from the windmill that once stood over the well. It's unclear whether the marshal mentioned the spaceship made of heavy aluminum and iron alloy that members of the town supposedly threw down there,

But at some point around the well's restoration, the Oates family learned the farmland they bought was unviable. Nothing would grow, not even weeds. Then, a few years after moving in, the Oates family lost their daughter to a mysterious illness. Polio was running rampant in the area at the time, but doctors apparently couldn't diagnose what was wrong with her.

And despite only being in their late 40s, both Brawley and his wife developed severe arthritis. In Brawley's case, the arthritis caused his hands to grow tumors. Within a few years, his hands were nearly unusable. When he consulted doctors, they told him his condition may have been caused by radiation poisoning.

Brawley was fed up. He felt like he could trace all of his misfortune of the past decade back to the well. His daughter's death, the arthritis, the barren lands. He was convinced that the water was irradiated. So he took decisive action. He sealed up the old well with a cement block and built a chicken coop to cover it. Brawley Oates felt certain alien metal made him and his family sick.

But others were more skeptical, perhaps none more so than town historian Etta Pegues. Etta was a child when the UFO reportedly crashed down in Aurora, but she didn't move to town until years later. So while she couldn't offer a first-hand account, she still disputed some of the core tenets of the story. For one, she claimed the Proctor Farm never had a windmill.

For books she wrote on the history of Aurora, she interviewed numerous residents of the area and none recalled there ever being one on Proctor's Farm. Since the windmill played such a big role in every account, that seemed to prove the stories could be false. Etta believed the whole event was made up by reporter S.E. Hayden to drum up business around town. Across Aurora, debate raged, but plenty of townspeople didn't want to get involved.

Perhaps because they thought the story was so unbelievable, it wasn't worth entertaining. Or maybe it was because they were so disturbed by their own memories of that day and feared that if they did speak up, they wouldn't be believed.

But Brawley Oates felt comfortable openly disagreeing with Oedipa Gaze, and he went on to discover more evidence to support his case. On his property, he found four L-shaped metal pieces around the old well that could have formed the foundation for a windmill. Now, it wasn't concrete proof, but it suggested some kind of structure once towered over the well, and that was good enough evidence for him.

But while locals argued over the specifics, there seemed to be a few undisputed elements of the story. Something crashed down from the sky that night in 1897 and wreaked havoc on the judge's property. As time passed, though, debates about what did and didn't happen became more and more theoretical.

And by the late 1960s, there were only a few residents left in Aurora who were alive in 1897. History was disappearing fast. As the story faded from popular imagination, Aurora continued its descent into obscurity. It didn't even appear on most maps. It became a ghost town.

From time to time, Texas newspapers would refer to the UFO incident. They'd frame it as a bit of odd news from the past, a piece of fun trivia from a town that wasn't long for this world. So the case went ignored until the spring of 1973, when a pair of UFO enthusiasts caught wind of the story.

At the time, Hayden Hughes was the director of the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma City, an organization he founded in high school. While searching through old news clippings one day, he stumbled upon S.E. Hayden's original article about the crash. Hughes and a group of his peers descended on Aurora in search of evidence.

And their presence drew the attention of Bill Case, an aviation reporter from the Dallas Times-Herald and Texas State Director of the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON. As a Dallas reporter, Bill Case had access to newspaper archives in town. And within a few days of hearing about Hayden Hughes' interest in the subject, he uncovered the original article for himself. That March, Bill took his first drive down to Aurora...

He said he was determined to prove once and for all whether it is a hoax or the real thing. Alongside Hayden Hughes and a slew of other investigators, he searched for witnesses and physical evidence to back up the story. Their first stop was the old Proctor Farm, now owned by Brawley Oats. It was ground zero, the site of the original crash. The case had major implications for extraterrestrial researchers like Hughes and Case.

It happened in the days before spy planes and experimental government craft, before weather balloons and drones. Even airplanes didn't exist yet. Usually, UFO skeptics chalk sightings up to these phenomena, but the usual suspects couldn't be used to discredit the Aurora sightings. But Hughes and Case still faced a major challenge. They had to prove the crash actually happened.

As soon as they reached the Proctor farm, they met the current owner, Brawley Oates. He was elated. He believed a radiated metal in the well had contributed to family health problems over the years. If the investigators found a real alien vessel on his land, it would support his suspicions. Oates opened the gates and directed the investigators to the well.

but it was a lost cause. Even working together, the three couldn't remove the concrete barrier from the top. With Brawley's permission, Case and Hughes turned their attention to the rest of the farm, searching for evidence. Using metal detectors, they walked slowly across the property. Much of what they discovered was junk. Shotgun casings, silver dollars from the 1850s, and old cookware,

But they discovered a few lightweight scraps that defied easy explanation. Some pieces of metal were wrapped around rocks and other objects. The investigators inferred they must have been very hot if it warped this much on impact.

Hughes and Case suspected these metal pieces had flown off a craft during an explosion, but they still didn't know what the vessel was or where it had come from. To determine that, they'd need to examine its lone passenger. With help from an Aurora Town elder, Case located the alien's supposed grave.

Under a gnarled oak tree at the south end of the town cemetery, he found an unremarkable rock that reportedly marked the burial site. When they ran their metal detector over the plot, it gave the same readings it had with the strange metal pieces at the Proctor farm. It seemed there was metal here, specifically the same metal that had come from the wreck.

Not sure what they were dealing with, Case brought his findings to Tom Gray, a physics professor at North Texas State University. Gray agreed to look at the samples. His test showed the metal had some zinc in it, but it was 75% iron. And it was unlike any iron he'd ever encountered. When Gray placed the pieces next to a magnet...

They didn't move an inch, even though iron was supposed to be drawn to the poles. He called the finding puzzling. Additionally, the metal was soft and glossy, in contrast with iron's typical brittle, dull texture. It was shaped like a droplet of splattered liquid. Gray theorized the metal had melted at intense heat, say it was part of a spaceship that had plummeted through the atmosphere.

When he released his findings, the media drew the obvious conclusion. This metal may have come from another world. But then Gray issued a follow-up that failed to generate as much public excitement. He'd visited a metallurgist at a nearby lab who explained iron alloys could be non-magnetic, depending on how they were forged and cooled. This sample was pretty typical. Nothing exciting.

Even though Gray's findings weren't out of this world, Hughes and Case still believed they were dealing with something that was. So they turned their attention back to the supposed alien body. Case and Hughes needed approval from the Aurora Cemetery Association to exhume the body, but they immediately denied the request.

The investigators were hitting a dead end, and their investigation was about to take a turn for the strange. Soon after the Aurora Cemetery Association turned them down, all the shards they'd gathered at Proctor's farm went missing, as did the headstone that marked the pilots' alleged grave. Hughes and Case never managed to recover the materials, suggesting something more sinister was afoot.

It seems someone was interfering with their investigation. This apparently spooked the Aurora Cemetery Association. They told the investigators to stay away from the graveyard. They reportedly hired overnight guards to ensure the team didn't sneak in after dark. So, Case and Hughes were worse off than when they'd started. They had no physical evidence and were banned from the graveyard.

But there was still one avenue available to them. They could contact eyewitnesses, and a few town elders were willing to share their stories. 92-year-old Mary Evans was just a teenager when the ship is said to have crashed. When Case questioned her, she admitted she never saw the collision site. Her parents wouldn't let her go, but she heard about it through the grapevine.

GC Curley was 22 when the crash occurred, and he had a similar story. He didn't live in Aurora, but friends told him about the incident. He heard onlookers had gathered bits of debris made of some mysterious compound nobody could identify. It wasn't like any metal produced in America back then. Both these accounts lined up with S.E. Hayden's original article, the primary source for what happened that day.

And history was about to repeat itself. In 1973, Bill Case published several pieces on his investigation in the Dallas Times-Herald. Other newspapers across the country picked up the account.

Before long, Aurora was overrun with reporters, scientists, and rubbernecking tourists. Brawley Oates' grandson began charging out-of-towners a dollar to tour the big sites, the family farm, the well, and the pilot's grave. Some entrepreneurial townsfolk even sold scrap metal to tourists by the roadside. More than a few visitors snuck into the cemetery at night and tried to dig up evidence, but

Others simply broke off pieces of gravestones, any gravestones, to take home as souvenirs. Citizens grew frustrated with tourists swarming their home and desecrating their burial yards. But other members of the community leaned into the excitement, even giving the spaceman a name, Ned. In April 1973, MUFON investigators sent out another unusual piece of shrapnel they found at the farm.

This silvery reflective piece was about the size and shape of an acorn. MUFON brought the piece to an aerospace laboratory that specialized in analyzing aircraft metals for flaws. They ran it through a machine that used X-ray emissions to determine the composition of the material. The analyzer found the shrapnel was 95% ultra-pure aluminum and 5% iron.

This mixture requires ultra-sophisticated refining techniques that didn't exist in 1897. In fact, this kind of metal wasn't produced in the United States until over a decade after the crash. There were only two possibilities. The metal was created in 1907 at the earliest and therefore had nothing to do with the collision, or...

The explanation that was more alluring to the ufologists, the metal was produced by highly sophisticated creatures on another planet. Ned's planet. To be safe, MUFON sought a second opinion from Anastas Labs in Houston, Texas.

They studied the metal and came to the same conclusion. It was an aluminum-iron blend that was too advanced to have been made in 1897. And at some point, it had been hot enough to melt. This was exciting, of course. But still, nobody had studied the one piece of evidence that could prove whether a spacecraft had visited Aurora, the body of Ned the Alien. Bill Case still wanted to exhume the body.

He and other researchers appealed to the Aurora Cemetery Association again, and once more they were rejected. The president of the board didn't believe in UFO crashes or visitors from outer space, and he wanted nothing to do with an apparent hoax. It didn't help that grave robbers and vandals were still breaking into Aurora cemeteries.

MUFON's research only seemed to encourage them, so the association secured a court-approved injunction against any and all UFO-based research on cemetery grounds. Now the investigators weren't just banned by cemetery policy, they could be arrested for entering. Hughes considered defying the ban and digging anyway, but the cemetery association made it clear if he did, he'd be charged with criminal trespassing.

This was enough to deter him. By the end of the summer, Case and Hughes' leads had dried up. Defeated, the investigators left the town pursuing other UFO mysteries. Then, in 2008, a team from the History Channel's UFO Hunters TV show became interested in the story and

And unlike other investigators, they had the technology and the resources to unseal Brawley Oates' well and examine the wreckage inside. The crew began by digging around the foundation of the brick structure around the old well. Then they used a forklift to completely lift it off the ground. As it rose and swung out of their way, investigators finally had access. They just had to go down in it.

Investigator Patrick Uskert put on a chemical protection suit. His team didn't know for sure whether the water was contaminated, so the investigators took as many precautions as possible. Secured by a rope and pulley, Uskert descended into the well.

When he reached the bottom, he stood almost waist-deep, scraping together samples. This was no easy feat. His helmet visor obstructed his view, and the dark water made it impossible to see exactly what he was gathering. After a few minutes of collecting, the team hoisted Patrick back to the surface and looked through his findings. Soil samples, rocks, and a small container of water to inspect for toxins.

Patrick hadn't found any metal pieces, but the water contained unusually high levels of aluminum. This suggested there had once been metal pieces in the well, which were possibly removed later. Even though it was high in aluminum, the water was still safe to drink. Whatever had afflicted Brawley, Oates, and his family, it probably didn't come from the well water.

By the time UFO hunters had left Aurora, they still hadn't found any irrefutable evidence of alien visitors. More than 125 years have passed since the Aurora UFO crash. Today, the eyewitnesses are all dead, and any physical evidence that remains has been stolen or contaminated. Even if the Aurora Cemetery Association permitted excavation of the gravesite now, the

It's unlikely the search would yield anything useful. The body is likely too decomposed to produce any scientific data today. We're left with what was reported by S.E. Hayden, Bill Case, and Hayden Hughes. And without any definitive hard evidence, many believe the UFO crash was merely a hoax.

That's what Aurora's town historian, Etta Pegues, believed. She literally wrote the book on the UFO incident titled The Town That Might Have Been. And the arguments she published all debunked the 1897 crash. Pegues claimed Judge Proctor had no windmill on his property. That's a key point since the airship supposedly crashed into the windmill before disintegrating.

But a local man named Charlie Stevens disputed Pegues' account. He said that his father, Jim, was a rancher outside of Aurora back in 1897 and claimed to have seen the airship pass overhead before it crashed. Charlie heard his father recount that tale a lot as a kid. According to Charlie, his dad told him that he rode into town on horseback the day after the incident.

He never saw a body of any kind. His father also claimed that Judge Proctor didn't have a windmill on his property, but rather a windlass, an old piece of technology used to lift heavy objects, usually out of a well. Etta's other arguments were harder to refute. She learned S.E. Hayden, who wrote the first article on the UFO incident, was only a part-time journalist. He earned most of his income from cotton trading.

And Hayden had a big personality. Apparently, he loved practical jokes. There are clues in the article that indicate the whole incident was a prank. For example, one of Hayden's key sources was T.J. Weems, a signal service officer in the Army who is described as an astronomy expert.

But T.J. Weems was actually the town blacksmith, not a member of the U.S. military. And there's also no evidence he had any advanced knowledge of astronomy. The prank scenario feels more likely when you consider the eyewitnesses Hughes and Case interviewed.

As a reminder, Mary Evans never saw the crash site, but she heard rumors about it afterward. And G.C. Curley didn't even live in Aurora at the time of the UFO incident. He only remembered his neighbors discussing it later. Maybe Hughes and Case never found firsthand witnesses because there were none. The entire sighting was concocted by Hayden.

He may not have meant any harm with the hoax. Given Aurora's many problems, Hayden might have thought his sense of humor could save the town. Word of an alien visitor would certainly draw tourists. In the long term, Hayden was right. It took three quarters of a century, but his article did eventually generate massive interest in Aurora.

On the other hand, some parts of Hayden's article were based on real news. He talked about the wave of airship sightings throughout the U.S., and that was a real nationwide phenomenon. And the metal found around Judge Proctor's farm raises a lot of questions. It couldn't have been made in 1897. Well, that technology didn't exist on Earth. It all melted and then cooled in a way that was consistent with some kind of explosive crash.

Plus, there was too much metal for it to have been planted. And according to Charlie Stevens, there was a windlass on Proctor's farm, but this doesn't mean it was hit by an alien spaceship. It could have been destroyed by a tornado or an ordinary house fire. A local reporter may have decided to spin something fun out of the tragedy. If he stretched the truth a little, at least the locals might get a laugh out of it. And for the people of Aurora...

the story meant something. Over the decades, the incident became the town's identity. Driving into Aurora today, visitors pass a welcome sign accompanied by a big silver spaceship and windmill. Ned's grave is decorated in written notes, pennies, and trinkets. It's clear the locals have embraced their home's reputation as a UFO destination. When Aurora, Texas stood at the brink of extinction,

Its citizens relied on a story for salvation. They overcame decades of misfortune, perhaps because of the tales the townspeople told.

Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. If you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts or email us at conspiracystories at spotify.com. For more information on the Aurora UFO, amongst the many sources we used, we found the Mutual UFO Network's report extremely helpful to our research. Until next time, remember...

The truth isn't always the best story. And the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written by Thomas Dolan Gavitt, edited by Chelsea Wood, researched by Bradley Klein, fact-checked by Cara Macerlene, and video editing and sound design by Spencer Howard. I'm your host, Carter Roy.