Loch Ness Monsters and Raining Frogs The Worlds Most Puzzling Mysteries Solved Read Free

that the U.S. 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 railway 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, eighty 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 U.S. 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