The Unmarked Mystery of Aurora, Texas: Unraveling the 1897 UFO Legend

10 June

Exploring the Enigmatic Burial and Crash Site of Aurora's Alleged 1897 UFO Incident

Aurora, Texas: This rural southwestern town covers an area of just over 3 square miles. Headstones at the local cemetery mark the final resting places of the area's hardworking ranchers and farmers. But one body allegedly buried here has no marker at all.

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Jim Marrs: The Aurora Cemetery was founded in 1861 right at the start of the war between states. Texas State Historical Commission has a marker here that states the cemetery is well known because of the legend of a spaceship crashed nearby in 1897 and the pilot killed in the crash was buried here.

Aurora Cemetery

50 years before the United States Army announced that a flying disk had crashed at Roswell, New Mexico. There was a notification of a peculiar unidentified item that collided on the estate of a nearby magistrate.

Jeff Danelek: On an April morning in 1897, an airship supposedly ran into a windmill on the property of a gentleman named Judge Proctor. The vessel detonated in flames and was incinerated, essentially.

Jim Marrs: There was an explosion. In those days, this was before television, before jet aircraft. Any big noise got your attention. Plus, the ground shook. So they knew something tremendous had happened.

Jeff Danelek: A local reporter arrived on the scene. He reported that there was a large debris field and also that there was the charred remains of what appeared to be to him, an alien from another planet.

Max Mccoy: The occupant described as unworldly by witnesses. Was given a Christian interment and placed in an unmarked tomb.

Jim Marrs: In 1897, this was six years before the Wright brothers actually made heavier than aircraft work. So this is why I consider the Aurora Spaceship crash, the smoking gun of the UFO controversy, because this occurred six years before there's anything man-made in the air.

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Observers asserted that wreckage from the collision was retrieved by local authorities and never seen again. Others claimed that Judge Proctor buried it at the bottom of a deep well. For decades, the incident remained largely forgotten until in 1945, a man named Brawley Oates, who had purchased Proctor's land, reportedly was cleaning out the debris from the well when he later developed an extremely severe case of arthritis, which he claimed to be the result of the contaminated water.

Jeff Danelek: He believed that the water from the well contained some sort of element to it that gave him a severe case of arthritis. It was bad enough case of arthritis, he'd eventually killed him. So a lot of people today wonder if the well wasn't contaminated with some sort of radioactive agents, which was the rationale behind his arthritis.

Philip Coppens: We find that people who are using that well actually get ill. And so what happens at a moment in time is that the descendants of these people actually decides to cement the well.

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The episode at Roswell in 1947 also began provoking debate about the aurora incident, this time regarding the peculiar cadaver, allegedly still lying in an unmarked tomb.

John Whalen: Researchers wanted to see the incident and the researchers wanted to assume the body, but the local cemetery association wouldn't let them.

Marshall Trimble: My first question is why not? What's it going to hurt? As a historian, it makes me wary when someone is attempting to conceal something from you. It tells you you can't do something.

Jim Marrs: I first got onto the aurora story back in 1973 and was there before the tombstone went missing and actually probably one of the few people around who still remember where the actual grave site was? Now the little grave is located right here. It was a short little grave. That of a child or very small person. And the teen little headstone, the marker, was right about there. A few years ago, researchers with ground-penetrating radar confirmed that there indeed had been a shallow burial here. Now back in 1973, Bill Case was the aviation writer for the Diles Times Herald. I was working for the Star Telegram. We met up here. He had a metal detector. And we found three readings of metal in the grave. A couple of months after the headstone went missing, Bill invited me to meet him up here. We went over the grave and there was no readings in the grave. You showed me three little holes that had been drilled in the grave. Someone extracted the middle of the grave.

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In recent decades, further investigation of the crash site has turned up inconclusive evidence, including unusually high traces of aluminum at the bottom of the now sealed well where Judge Proctor had supposedly disposed of the wreckage.