In 1897, locals of Aurora, Texas reported a UFO had crashed in their town. They supposedly discovered the body of an extraterrestrial, buried it in the cemetery, and never spoke of it again. Decades later, an Aurora resident claims the whole thing was a hoax, which prompts several UFO investigations to set out to either dig up the body...or the truth Conspiracy Theories is on Instagram @theconspiracypod! Follow us to keep up with the show and get behind-the-scenes updates from Carter and the team. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What happened in Aurora, Texas in 1897?
Bill Case pulled up to the cemetery in Aurora, Texas in the spring of 1973. The UFO investigator had been here before. He just never found what he was looking for. Information could be hard to come by in Aurora, but recently one of Bill's contacts smuggled a message out of a hospital. Written by an 89-year-old patient, it began, you're looking at the wrong grave. It also included directions.
Bill stalked through the gates of the cemetery and made his way to the southern quadrant. His eyes were peeled for a gnarled 200-year-old oak tree. Finally, he found it in the oldest section of the cemetery. A roughly hewn triangular slab of stone sat underneath its branches. Etched into the stone's surface was an image, a long, thin oval surrounding three circles –
It almost looked like a submarine with three portholes running down the side. But Bill knew better. It was a UFO, and the stone marked the grave of the spaceship's alien pilot. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. New episodes come out every Wednesday. You can listen to the audio everywhere and watch the video only on Spotify.
And be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. Stay with us. Aurora, Texas has always been a small town, but when it was first established in 1882, it was part of a big vision. Surveyors made plans for a train line to stop in town on its way across Texas. The railroad promised to drive tourism, boost local businesses, and put Aurora on the map in more ways than one.
But before it could be finished, the town encountered one hardship after another. First, there were the crops. In the early 1890s, Aurora's farmers overplanted and overworked the land they used to grow cotton. a major source of income for the town. As the soil lost its potency and eroded away, harvests suffered, and so did the economy.
An infestation of weevils destroyed the few cotton plants they had. Watch out for weevils. Then there was the fire. On a gusty day in the mid 1890s, a blaze broke out that obliterated the entire western portion of the city. Businesses burned to the ground, destroying Aurora's economic center. Then, in 1889, spotted fever swept across town. As the outbreak spread, citizens fled.
Townspeople moved to nearby municipalities, and Aurora practically emptied out overnight. Those who remained clung to the hope that the incoming railroad would restore prosperity and a sense of normalcy to the town. Then, after a drawn-out intensive survey process, interest in the project mysteriously disappeared.
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Chapter 2: What were the events leading up to the UFO crash?
In the early 1890s, a new train station opened in the neighboring Rome, Texas instead. Without the railroad to bring in new visitors, the town felt forgotten. But in 1897, something changed. Aurora became a part of the national story in a way no one expected.
Legend has it, one night in mid-April around 6 a.m., the farmers of Aurora looked up from their fields to see a strange craft hovering through the sky. At first, it appeared to be one of the airships that had been spotted all across the country in recent months, and they kept reading about it in the papers. It looked like a giant silver flying cigar with a bright white light attached to it.
but there was something off. It wasn't the smooth gliding craft described in those other reports. Plumes of smoke billowed in its wake as the craft charted a route across the sky. Moving north, it flew over Jim Stevens' property, about three miles from the town center.
Jim had been bringing the cows out from the barn when he noticed the airship sputtering over his farm, heading toward Aurora's main square. the ship's altitude dropped suddenly and veered towards Judge J.S. Proctor's farm. Jim watched in horror as it struck Proctor's windmill and broke into pieces. Fiery shards of spaceship slammed to the ground all around the Proctor farm.
The windmill toppled in the collision, sending even more chunks of metal into the air as it fell. The judge's property was in shambles. His flower garden destroyed. Metal impaled trees across the backyard. Molten shards pierced the earth and embedded themselves in the nearby rocks. Word spread quickly across town. Citizens rushed over to the farm to see the crash for themselves.
Only then could residents start to reckon with what happened. The smoke cleared, the dust settled, and the citizens of Aurora moved in to pick through the wreckage. Tossing hot pieces of scrap metal aside, they searched for clues that might explain the disaster. And then they found something. The pilot.
It was small, about half the size of an average adult human, but what stood out most was even after the impact severed some of its limbs and scattered them across the area, it had more arms and legs than it should, if it was human. An army official examined the corpse and theorized that the body was extraterrestrial. Along with the body, citizens found a bizarre notebook in the wreckage.
It was filled with pages of strange hieroglyphics written in a language no one recognized. The ship's composition only further mystified locals. It was an aluminum alloy mixed with iron that likely weighed several tons. That combination should have been too heavy to fly without wings or propellers, but it had neither. Not to mention, it would have been extremely expensive to produce.
Everything seemed like definitive proof that alien life had visited Earth 50 years before the infamous Roswell incident. And yet, news of what happened in Aurora didn't travel very far. This was likely due to the fact that the incident was part of a larger trend sweeping the nation, the airship wave of 1897.
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Chapter 3: What evidence was found after the crash?
An unknown citizen placed a jagged rock featuring a drawing of the spaceship atop the spot where townspeople claimed the body was buried. But nobody knows when the stone was placed or whether it marks the real grave or any grave at all. For years, the rock stood as the only memorial to commemorate a piece of the town's history and the pilots allegedly buried below.
Then, in 1945, the Oates family purchased the Proctor's Farm, the original site of the airship crash, and the story got a second chapter. They just wanted some land, a place to settle down. That's why the Oates family bought a farm in Aurora. Brawley Oates, the father of the family, had grown up in the town, and he'd heard stories about the supposed UFO, but he wasn't sure they were true.
That is, until he started noticing some strange quirks about the farm. It started with a well. Years before the oats arrived, the well had fallen into disuse, but Brawley thought it would be nice if his family could use it as a water source, so he set out to restore it.
With the help of other townspeople, including the local town marshal, Brawley cleared debris from the old well and they found something strange down there. Over the course of their work, they pulled out large quantities of corroded metal. The town marshal suggested the shards might be from the windmill that once stood over the well.
It's unclear whether the marshal mentioned the spaceship made of heavy aluminum and iron alloy that members of the town supposedly threw down there. But at some point around the well's restoration, the Oates family learned the farmland they bought was unviable. Nothing would grow. Not even weeds. Then, a few years after moving in, the Oates family lost their daughter to a mysterious illness.
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Chapter 4: Why did the Aurora incident receive minimal media coverage?
Polio was running rampant in the area at the time, but doctors apparently couldn't diagnose what was wrong with her. And despite only being in their late 40s, both Brawley and his wife developed severe arthritis. In Brawley's case, the arthritis caused his hands to grow tumors. Within a few years, his hands were nearly unusable.
When he consulted doctors, they told him his condition may have been caused by radiation poisoning. Brawley was fed up. He felt like he could trace all of his misfortune of the past decade back to the well. His daughter's death, the arthritis, the barren lands. He was convinced that the water was irradiated. So he took decisive action.
He sealed up the old well with a cement block and built a chicken coop to cover it. Brawley Oates felt certain alien metal made him and his family sick. But others were more skeptical, perhaps none more so than town historian Etta Pegues. Etta was a child when the UFO reportedly crashed down in Aurora, but she didn't move to town until years later.
So while she couldn't offer a first-hand account, she still disputed some of the core tenets of the story. For one, she claimed the Proctor Farm never had a windmill. For books she wrote on the history of Aurora, she interviewed numerous residents of the area and none recalled there ever being one on Proctor's farm.
Since the windmill played such a big role in every account, that seemed to prove the stories could be false. Etta believed the whole event was made up by reporter S.E. Hayden to drum up business around town. Across Aurora, debate raged. But plenty of townspeople didn't want to get involved. Perhaps because they thought the story was so unbelievable, it wasn't worth entertaining.
Or maybe it was because they were so disturbed by their own memories of that day and feared that if they did speak up, they wouldn't be believed. But Brawley Oates felt comfortable openly disagreeing with Oedipa Gaze, and he went on to discover more evidence to support his case.
On his property, he found four L-shaped metal pieces around the old well that could have formed the foundation for a windmill. Now, it wasn't concrete proof, but it suggested some kind of structure once towered over the well. And that was good enough evidence for him. But while locals argued over the specifics, there seemed to be a few undisputed elements of the story.
Something crashed down from the sky that night in 1897 and wreaked havoc on the judge's property. As time passed, though, debates about what did and didn't happen became more and more theoretical. And by the late 1960s, there were only a few residents left in Aurora who were alive in 1897. History was disappearing fast.
As the story faded from popular imagination, Aurora continued its descent into obscurity. It didn't even appear on most maps. It became a ghost town. From time to time, Texas newspapers would refer to the UFO incident. They'd frame it as a bit of odd news from the past, a piece of fun trivia from a town that wasn't long for this world. So the case went ignored.
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Chapter 5: What theories emerged about the crash over time?
In 1973, Bill Case published several pieces on his investigation in the Dallas Times-Herald. Other newspapers across the country picked up the account. Before long, Aurora was overrun with reporters, scientists, and rubbernecking tourists. Brawley Oates' grandson began charging out-of-towners a dollar to tour the big sites, the family farm, the well, and the pilot's grave.
Some entrepreneurial townsfolk even sold scrap metal to tourists by the roadside. More than a few visitors snuck into the cemetery at night and tried to dig up evidence. Others simply broke off pieces of gravestones, any gravestones, to take home as souvenirs. Citizens grew frustrated with tourists swarming their home and desecrating their burial yards.
But other members of the community leaned into the excitement, even giving the spaceman a name. Ned. Ned. In April 1973, MUFON investigators sent out another unusual piece of shrapnel they found at the farm. This silvery, reflective piece was about the size and shape of an acorn. MUFON brought the piece to an aerospace laboratory that specialized in analyzing aircraft metals for flaws.
They ran it through a machine that used X-ray emissions to determine the composition of the material. The analyzer found the shrapnel was 95% ultra-pure aluminum and 5% iron. This mixture requires ultra-sophisticated refining techniques that didn't exist in 1897. In fact, this kind of metal wasn't produced in the United States until over a decade after the crash.
There were only two possibilities. The metal was created in 1907 at the earliest and therefore had nothing to do with the collision. Or, the explanation that was more alluring to the ufologists, the metal was produced by highly sophisticated creatures on another planet. Ned's planet. To be safe, MUFON sought a second opinion from Anastas Labs in Houston, Texas.
They studied the metal and came to the same conclusion. It was an aluminum-iron blend that was too advanced to have been made in 1897. And at some point, it had been hot enough to melt. This was exciting, of course, but still, nobody had studied the one piece of evidence that could prove whether a spacecraft had visited Aurora, the body of Ned the Alien. Bill Case still wanted to exhume the body.
He and other researchers appealed to the Aurora Cemetery Association again, and once more, they were rejected. The president of the board didn't believe in UFO crashes or visitors from outer space, and he wanted nothing to do with an apparent hoax. It didn't help that grave robbers and vandals were still breaking into Aurora cemeteries.
MUFON's research only seemed to encourage them, so the association secured a court-approved injunction against any and all UFO-based research on cemetery grounds. Now the investigators weren't just banned by cemetery policy, they could be arrested for entering.
Hughes considered defying the ban and digging anyway, but the Cemetery Association made it clear if he did, he'd be charged with criminal trespassing. This was enough to deter him. By the end of the summer, Case and Hughes' leads had dried up. Defeated, the investigators left the town, pursuing other UFO mysteries.
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Chapter 6: How did the Oates family contribute to the story decades later?
Weems was actually the town blacksmith, not a member of the U.S. military, and there's also no evidence he had any advanced knowledge of astronomy. The prank scenario feels more likely when you consider the eyewitnesses Hughes and Case interviewed. As a reminder, Mary Evans never saw the crash site, but she heard rumors about it afterward. And G.C.
Curley didn't even live in Aurora at the time of the UFO incident. He only remembered his neighbors discussing it later. Maybe Hughes and Case never found firsthand witnesses because there were none. The entire sighting was concocted by Hayden. He may not have meant any harm with the hoax. Given Aurora's many problems, Hayden might have thought his sense of humor could save the town.
Word of an alien visitor would certainly draw tourists. In the long term, Hayden was right. It took three quarters of a century, but his article did eventually generate massive interest in Aurora. On the other hand, some parts of Hayden's article were based on real news. He talked about the wave of airship sightings throughout the U.S., and that was a real nationwide phenomenon.
And the metal found around Judge Proctor's farm raises a lot of questions. It couldn't have been made in 1897. Well, that technology didn't exist on Earth. It all melted and then cooled in a way that was consistent with some kind of explosive crash. Plus, there was too much metal for it to have been planted. And according to Charlie Stevens, there was a windlass on Proctor's farm.
But this doesn't mean it was hit by an alien spaceship. It could have been destroyed by a tornado or an ordinary house fire. A local reporter may have decided to spin something fun out of the tragedy. If he stretched the truth a little, at least the locals might get a laugh out of it. And for the people of Aurora, the story meant something.
Over the decades, the incident became the town's identity. Driving into Aurora today, visitors pass a welcome sign accompanied by a big silver spaceship and windmill. Ned's grave is decorated in written notes, pennies, and trinkets. It's clear the locals have embraced their home's reputation as a UFO destination.
When Aurora, Texas stood at the brink of extinction, its citizens relied on a story for salvation. They overcame decades of misfortune, perhaps because of the tales the townspeople told. Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod.
If you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts or email us at conspiracystories at spotify.com. For more information on the Aurora UFO, amongst the many sources we used, we found the Mutual UFO Network's report extremely helpful to our research. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story. And the official story isn't always the truth.
This episode was written by Thomas Dolan Gavitt, edited by Chelsea Wood, researched by Bradley Klein, fact-checked by Cara Mackerlein, and video editing and sound design by Spencer Howard. I'm your host, Carter Roy.
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