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THE AURORA AIRSHIP CRASH OF 1897 by Jo Virgil  Sometimes, the draw of a legend is simply that we wish it were true. And sometimes that wishing muddies the water so thoroughly that it’s hard to separate fact from, well, from An Enticing Legend. But even a tale as bizarre as the Aurora Airship Crash of 1897 needs nuggets of truth to keep it alive for more than a century. The more deeply that historians and researchers dig into the story, the more evidence they unearth, both for proving the story to be a hoax, and for confirming that something very odd did happen that night. As the story goes, the night sky of April 17, 1897, in the tiny Wise County, Texas, town of Aurora was filled with stars and the sound of crickets. While nearby Fort Worth had a booming population of almost 25,000 residents, the tiny town of Aurora had almost ceased to exist. The town’s peak population of somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000 residents had begun to dwindle to just a handful of families after an epidemic of spotted fever, unrealized plans of a railroad through town, a boll weevil infestation, and a major fire that destroyed several buildings. The post office was about to shut down, businesses had closed doors, and people had moved on. That spring night in the tiny, barely surviving community was quiet and dark. Until, that is, sometime just before dawn, when a tremendous explosion startled the nearby residents. According to the Dallas Morning News story by S. E. Haydon, a slow-moving, cigar-shaped aircraft crashed into a windmill on the property of Judge J. S. Proctor , bursting into pieces “with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wrecking the windmill and water tank and destroying the judge’s flower garden.”1 Haydon tells readers that apparently the pilot of the ship was the only one on board, and 255 “while his remains were badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world.”2 And so the story begins. This was 1897, six-and-a-half years before the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk and made headlines as the first heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled flight with a pilot. And while at this point in the Aurora story many people roll their eyes and quit listening, the plot thickens. During the months leading up to the spring of 1897, newspapers across the country, including North Texas, were full of accounts of mysterious moving lights in the night sky. In fact, the original story of the Aurora Airship Crash was just one of many that ran in the April 17 Dallas Morning News, although the other stories tended to be simply reports of moving lights. Some of the more dramatic (but also more outlandish) stories during that time appeared in newspaper articles across the country. In a Dallas Morning News posting called “Tolbert’s Texas,” Frank X. Tolbert, in an October 1970 column, tells these tongue-in-cheek stories from the era: Judge Samuel Foster was entertaining 7 guests on his front porch in Corsicana. The news story didn’t mention what the judge was serving, but he and all his guests declared they saw “the flying machine roar over like a railway passenger coach at a rather fast speed against the firmament.” In Dallas, M. E. Griffin , described as “a church man and a non-drinker,” said he borrowed a powerful glass, climbed up to the top of the courthouse and the airship conveniently flew over to his “great delight” and he called it “a sublime sight.” Fort Worth’s leading witness was Joseph E. (Truthful) Scully, a railroad conductor who “never told a lie in his life.”3 The Aurora story, though, allegedly had multiple witnesses, left physical debris, and involved the dead body of the pilot. 256 Everything But the Kitchen Sink The story about the Aurora Airship Crash languished for a while, as was typical of that era, when people lived without the same fast and widespread communications as we have now. However , the story gained momentum in the mid-1970s with a story distributed by UPI, and then shortly thereafter by the Associated Press. As the tale gained momentum, the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) picked up on the story and began an investigation that continues to this day. Various research, investigations, and interviews...

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