The mid-1890s were a period of economic depression, political instability, and general cultural unease. The first dirigibles—“airships”—had flown in Europe, and Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian Institution flew his crude aircraft from a houseboat on the Potomac River in May 1896 and garnered widespread publicity. The invention of the airplane seemed imminent.
The height of the craze came in April 1897. One report, in the Dallas Morning Times, on April 19, came from the small town of Aurora, Texas. Aurora was then a dusty little town, and having an airship sighting meant being up to date; an account of another sighting in Denton, Texas, had suggested to the local newspaper editor proof that Denton “was not behind” other towns. The Morning Times told of a craft crashing into a windmill, of wreckage and a pilot’s log. There was speculation that it was from Mars and even word that one of the crewmen was killed in the crash and buried in Aurora.
The Dallas newspaper’s report made startling claims:
About 6 o’clock this morning the early risers of Aurora were astonished at the sudden appearance of the airship which has been sailing throughout the country. It was travelling due north, and much nearer the earth than before. Evidently some of the machinery was out of order, for it was making a speed of only ten or twelve miles an hour, and gradually settling toward the earth. It sailed over the public square and when it reached the north part of town [it] collided with the tower of judge Proctor’s windmill and went to 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. The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one aboard, and while his remains are badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world.
Mr. T. J. Weems, the U.S. [Army] Signal Service officer at this place and an authority on astronomy, gives it as his opinion that he [the pilot] was a native of the planet Mars. Papers found on his person — evidently the records of his travels — are written in some unknown hieroglyphics, and cannot be deciphered. This ship was too badly wrecked to form any conclusion as to its construction or motive power. It was built of an unknown metal, resembling somewhat a mixture of aluminum and silver, and it must have weighed several tons. The town today is full of people who are viewing the wreckage and gathering specimens of strange metal from the debris. The pilot’s funeral will take place at noon tomorrow.
Signed: E. E. Haydon.
No one at the Morning News picked up on the dispatch’s dramatic suggestions. None of the strange metal ever showed up; the “papers” were not shown. And no one inquired about the pilot’s grave. But the account was a foreshadowing of a Roswell-style crash — the hieroglyphics, the widely scattered debris, the strange materials, the recovered body, were all standard elements of twentieth-century saucer crashes.
The story was not taken up again until 1967, in an account in a British UFO publication by Jacques Vallee and Donald B. Hanlon called “Airships over Texas.” After that story appeared, a UFO investigator visited Aurora. He found that the Proctor farm where the crash had been reported was now a gas station run by a man named Brawley Oates. Oates referred the investigator to another man, Oscar Lowry, who had been eleven at the time of the incident.
Lowry and other surviving witnesses strongly suggested that the whole thing had been a hoax. There was no Army Signal officer in the town — T. J. Weems was the town blacksmith. Proctor’s farm didn’t even have a windmill.
E. E. Haydon, the stringer for the Dallas paper who wrote the story, was the local cotton buyer. He had noted the decline of Aurora since a new railroad had bypassed the town. The story was almost certainly a prank, in the spirit of Rachel’s efforts to cash in on local UFOs.
In 1973, with the country sitting through the Watergate hearings and, perhaps not incidentally, finding itself in the grip of one of its periodic waves of UFO sightings, reporters from U.P.I. picked up on the old Aurora tale. A report that appeared in many newspapers on May 24, 1973, quoted Hayden Hewes, director of an organization called the International UFO Bureau, who had gone to Aurora to investigate. Hewes claimed to have discovered the spaceman’s grave and threatened to go to court to have it opened. He found a strange rock marked with an arrow and three circles in the cemetery and reported that the spaceman had been buried under it.
Reuters and the Associated Press joined the chase. The A.P. reported that samples of strange metal had been found near the gas station. When analyzed, they turned out to be mundanely terrestrial pot metal. Reuters interviewed a ninety-one-year-old woman who claimed to recall that the pilot had been buried in the cemetery, which was run by the local Masonic order and an organization called the Aurora Cemetery Association. But the association’s map of the cemetery plots revealed no sign of the spaceman’s grave or of any unidentified graves. The group blocked attempts to dig up the place, and on the night of June 14, 1973, the strange rock disappeared as mysteriously as it had arrived.
The name Aurora returned in the 1980s linked to the most mysterious of mystery airplanes. What the Lazar story was for UFO watchers, Aurora was for black-plane buffs. In the late eighties and early nineties, Aurora became the focus of speculation among the watchers — the pinup goddess of the Interceptors. The name evoked high-flying associations: Aurora, goddess of the dawn, or aurora borealis, the northern lights that sometimes so enraptured pilots they would fly toward them to their deaths.
The word Aurora entered the lore of black aircraft when it popped up in a P-1, or procurement budget document, near line items for the U-2 and the SR-71, and attached to the phrase “air-breathing reconnaissance.” Its inclusion appeared to be a mistake, but the stealthies and Skunkers noticed it. And they noticed the next year when the size of the requested appropriation for Aurora for fiscal 1987 rose from $8 million in fiscal 1986 to $2.3 billion. The next year the item vanished. They assumed it was a successor to the Blackbird and the legendary U-2. The Skunk Works must be at it again.
The first reports came in the aviation press. And in 1988 The New York Times ran a story on the plane that claimed it could fly as fast as Mach 6.
In 1989 an oil-drilling engineer named Chris Gibson spotted what may have been Aurora refueling with two F-111s. Gibson, perhaps a bit too conveniently, skeptics noted, was a member of the Royal Observer Corps, trained in recognizing aircraft. In August 1989, Gibson told me, he was working on a petroleum drilling rig called the Galveston Key in the Indefatigable oil field in the North Sea. He was below decks when his coworker Graeme Winton came down and told him to hurry above.
“Have a look at this,” Winton said, pointing out a group of planes flying overhead: a large one, two smaller ones, and a strange triangular one.
After a while, Gibson explained to Winton, aircraft observers count on an almost subliminal feel for the shape or gestalt of an aircraft, called the “sit,” similar to what bird-watchers refer to as “jizz.” But no “sit” seemed right for the triangle.
“The big one is a KC-135 Stratotanker,” he told Winton. “The two on the left are F-111s, and I don’t know what the fourth is.”
“I thought you were an expert,” Winton commented.
“I am.”
“Some expert.”
At first Gibson thought the triangle might be another F-111, but there were no gaps in its wings and it was too long. The F-117 had just been made public, but the triangle was too big for one of those. Nor was it a French Mirage IV fighter. Gibson was stumped.