History Channel Researching 1897 Texas UFO Incident

This weekend, the search for flying saucers goes back where it all began in Texas 111 years ago: Wise County, grave site of the Aurora Spaceman. A half-century before Roswell, Texans were talking about the silver "airship" that supposedly crashed into a windmill in 1897 and whether the pilot inside might have been a Martian. A crew from the History Channel show UFO Hunters will try to dig up at least half of the real story. On Saturday July 5, workers are scheduled to unseal a long-covered water well where the windmill’s owner supposedly dumped crash debris. On Tuesday, crews plan to use radar imaging to examine the pilot’s Aurora Cemetery grave. On April 17, 1897, the following appeared in the Dallas Morning News: "AURORA, Wise Co., Tex., April 17 — About 6 o’clock this morning the early risers of Aurora were astonished at the sudden appearance of the airship which has been sailing through the country." The aluminum airship weighed "several tons," Haydon wrote. Maybe that explains why it crashed into a windmill north of what today is Texas 114. Supposedly, the pilot was carrying papers written in an unknown language. He was buried in the town cemetery.

Producers from UFO Hunters are trying to keep the Aurora dig and cemetery examination a secret, said Kenneth Cherry of Keller, state director of the nonprofit Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a hobbyists’ club. Cherry said producers don’t want to draw attention to the crash site on private property or to the cemetery, where a grave was marked with a spacecraft tombstone until somebody removed it in 1971. The legend of the Aurora Spaceman has been the subject of one movie, The Aurora Encounter, and previous TV specials. It’s "one of the most enduring legends in UFOlogy," Cherry said Friday. "There are a number of very knowledgeable, bright people who have discussed this and come away with different conclusions." A 1973 MUFON investigation found "reasonable doubt" of a hoax. Cherry said the TV crew hopes hope to find proof in the well.

"We are the first people in 70 years to open that well," he said. "We hope something in there will help us determine whether this is fact. It’s hard to me to imagine that if this really happened, the people in Aurora wouldn’t have been written letters to relatives all over the country about it. But there is some evidence that something happened there." One metal fragment found near the well was analyzed Friday. Physics students at the University of North Texas found that it was mostly aluminum, physics professor Floyd McDaniel said. UNT scientists will examine more debris Monday, using the electron microscope at the Center for Advanced Research and Technology.