Most people in this Texan town of about 1,300 know the alien as Ned.
Ned was a spaceman who on April 17, 1897, crashed into a windmill near the home of a local judge in Aurora.
He had been riding a cigar‐shaped spaceship travelling north at only 10 or so miles per hour just before 4am, The Dallas Morning News reported.
‘It sailed directly over the public square and when it reached the north part of town and collided with the tower of Judge Protctor’s windmill,’ the Dallas-Fort Worth area newspaper said, adding that the ship ‘went to pieces with a terrific explosion’ scattering debris across the property.
‘Papers found on his on his person – evidently a record of his travels – are written in some unknown hieroglyphics, and cannot be deciphered.’
An Army official told the paper that the pilot was a ‘native of Mars’ who did not survive the crash.
Two witnesses, aged 15 and 10 at the time, would tell the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) nonprofit they saw the ship crash.
Some parts of the recovered ship were dumped into a well near the windmill, while others were buried with Ned.
Yes, buried. Ned’s remains were ‘disfigured’, as was his ship which was built of ‘unknown metals’, and Aurora locals arranged a funeral for him a few days later.
Records are said to show Ned was buried in the town’s cemetery ‘with Christian rites’.
Aurora, about 45 miles northwest of Dallas, is now known for all things UFOs, aliens and mysterious men in black. The cemetery even contains a Texas Historical Commission marker mentioning the sighting.
Graveyard workers, who very much want you to know there was no alien and it’s all a tall tale, have had to camp outside to stop people from exhuming Ned.
People also can’t dig up his corpse for legal reasons – you can’t do so without informing the next of kin. Cemetary officials even got a court injunction blocking people from doing so in 1972.
So, unless the UFO enthusiasts are up for flying to Mars, they won’t have much luck seeing Ned’s remains.
Brawley Oates, who purchased Judge Proctor’s land around 1935, took the alleged ship wreckage out of the well so he could use it as a water source.
After developing arthritis only a decade after buying the property, however, he had the well sealed up. He believed the metal ship had poisoned the water.
Toni Wheeler, a town official, told the North Texan outlet KERA News she came up with the name Ned for the extra-terrestrial pilot.
The Wheeler family have been in Aurora for generations, with Toni’s grandmother thinking it was all ‘hogwash’.
Toni herself thinks differently. She has organised alien conferences to celebrate the town’s history and spent her childhood listening to elders chat about it on their porches.
‘My uncles would discuss it,’ she said. ‘Especially my uncle Marvin. He loved to tell tall tales anyway, and he really got on telling all kinds of stories, and Ned’s story was one of them.’
Investigations over the years from local TV networks and UFO groups would come up short after countless flocked to the town from the late 1960s.
MUFON’s 2005 investigation with a Dallas Times Herald aviation writer for the TV show UFO Files found a grave marker depicting a flying saucer and the odd ding from metal detectors.
In a report, the group said researchers found evidence of an explosion. A piece of scrap metal of ‘unusual purity’ was found about 100 feet west of the well which appeared to have been ‘melted’.
But MUFON’s findings proved inconclusive, as did a 2008 probe for the TV series UFO Hunters. Dozens of unmarked graves could be where the supposed alien is buried, investigators say, and metal recovered at the crash site and graveyard haven’t quite screamed ‘UFO’ to experts.
‘Perhaps the people of Aurora were afraid their longstanding popularity would be diminished if the grave were opened and science proved the whole event was a hoax,’ MUFON added.
Etta Pegues, an elderly local and town historian, told Time magazine that the judge made the entire story up as a publicity stunt.
‘The railroad bypassed us,’ she said, ‘and the town was dying.’
The Aurora incident was one of many ‘strange airport’ sightings across the US that year, MUFON added.
The ‘airship wave’ saw a string of sightings across the Midwest. While not every incident involved little green men, many ranged from mysterious lights in the sky to shrinking airships, 5’8″ red creatures that stink and airships helmed by nude people.
Mark Christopher Lee, a British writer and UFO expert, told Metro.co.uk that the sighting in Aurora was at a time when people ‘didn’t have the language or reference points to describe them – hence the term, “airships”.’
Lee feels that what happened nearly 130 years ago has a simple explanation: A ‘newfangled’, very much human-made ship crash landing, leaving the pilot dismembered and creating a myth.
‘I am a scientist so I have to be rational as well,’ the UFO Encounters of the 5th Kind director said.
‘But it’s one of those cases that as it was a long time ago and there isn’t physical evidence here now it’s easy to dismiss as misidentification of an actual airship which crashed and which badly burned the pilot.
‘UFOlogists will believe because they have to – UFOs are their faith and like Fox Mulder said,’ referring to the X-Files character played by David Duchovny, ‘”I want to believe”.’
For locals, all this attention was never something they asked for. Most feel it’s a hoax that should be forgotten.
‘Everyone in the world’s come by,’ one resident in 2018 told The Dallas Morning News – which first reported the sighting all those decades ago.
‘We’ve had calls from California, Europe and Illinois about the little green man. Well, he ain’t here.’
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