The Alien Grave of Aurora, Texas

In 1897, 50 years before the Roswell Incident, where an alien spacecraft allegedly crashed near a ranch in Corona, New Mexico, a UFO accompanied by an alien passenger allegedly crashed in Aurora, in Texas.

Little is known about the incident except that during March and April of 1897 there were hundreds of UFO reports in the Texas area. There were also incidents of large numbers of unexplained airships flying around Texas, California, and the Great Lakes states around this time. The sky was indeed incredibly cloudy.

The original article

On April 17, 1897, the Dallas Morning News reported that two days earlier a UFO had collided with a windmill on the property of Judge J. S Proctor's ranch and crashed to the ground Consequently. The pilot did not survive the accident and was found dead inside the wreckage of his ship. After examination by the landowner, an Army Signals officer, and presumably half the population of Aurora, the pilot was deemed "not of this world" and even a "Martian," if the we believe the signal officer.

Instead of photographing the alien or alerting the authorities, the people of Aurora thought the best thing to do was to send the deceased pilot in due form. A traveling pastor called William Russell Taybor led the ceremony in which townspeople gathered to bury the stranger with "full Christian rites". The chosen burial site was at Aurora Cemetery, adjacent to the city's land graves, where it stands today, with the incident commemorated by a Texas Historical Commission marker. The grave appears to have changed considerably over the years, originally marked with a stone depicting a crude depiction of a cigar-shaped spacecraft. However, according to a blog post by Tui Snider, between 2012 and 2013 this tombstone was either stolen or deliberately removed, and has since been replaced with a large boulder and a wooden cross. "Ned", as he was nicknamed by locals, is regularly visited with flowers and trinkets frequently decorating his grave.

The original grave. Image by Marco Varhola.

But what happened to the spacecraft itself? Some of the wreckage was thrown into...