When a back-country mystery of the 19th century attracts modern-day attention from two exploitation-film producers, a bestselling conspiracy researcher, credentialed journalists, and an avant-garde playwright — in addition to a predictable onslaught of UFO-chasing zealots — then you can bet your Buck Rogers’ jet-propelled rocket pack that it is a case to be reckoned with.
Mysterious, I reckon. Mysterious enough, anyhow, that the incident still inspires flights of imagination from journalists and fabulists, usually likening the matter to an outer space scare of 1947 at Roswell, New Mexico. The Aurora Cemetery, located in Wise County, northwest of Fort Worth, remains a focus of such interest, whether as a burial site for a space-alien aviator or as a legendary humbug.
The Dallas Morning News triggered the interest in 1897 with a report that “according to locals,” a flying vessel had crashed two days prior on a farm near Aurora. The situation was called fatal to the pilot, who or which was described as “not of this world.” A ceremonial burial at the Aurora Cemetery came complete with gravestone. The marker seems to have gone missing in times more recent.
The nearest approximation of surviving evidence is a Texas Historical Commission marker outside the cemetery. The vessel was reported to have struck a windmill on the property of Judge J.S. Proctor at around 6 a.m. on April 17, 1897. The speculation of an alien origin came from an Army Signal Service officer named T.J. Weems from Fort Worth.
I learned as a child of the Aurora episode. My father, the Texas-New Mexico industrialist John A. Price, had been summoned to Roswell in 1947 to examine metallic fragments from that crash-landing. The military had hoped that he might identify a source of the shards, whether earthly or otherworldly.
Dad found the fragments unlike any metal he had encountered in his line of construction and mechanical engineering. “Looks like you boys have got another Aurora on your hands,” he told the brass, summoning memories of a fabled mystery from before his time. He would recall an engraved surface, like runic symbols, and a texture that varied from rigidity to malleability, along with a luminous aspect. At length, Dad would clam up altogether — no doubt leery of the 1950s paranoid atmosphere of military-industrial complexity.
The Aurora legend of two generations earlier has many variations and contradictions, but a constant element holds that wreckage was crammed into a well beneath the damaged windmill. Complications arose during the 1940s when Brawley Oates, who had purchased the Proctor property, hauled debris from the well and then found himself besieged with an extreme case of arthritis — presumably caused by contaminated water. Oates abandoned the well and sealed it.
Then in 1980, Time magazine complicated matters with an assertion of a hoax in an interview with Etta Pegues, an 86-year-old resident of Aurora. She claimed that S.E. Haydon, the reporter whose byline had graced the 1897 Morning News story, had “[written] it as a joke ... to bring interest to Aurora. The railroad bypassed us, and the town was dying.”
Pegues also told Time that Judge Proctor had never operated a windmill. A televised “UFO Hunters” episode would refute that claim, having unearthed a water-pump base around the well. The argument persisted into 2020, when a “Monster Talk” podcast episode maintained that the well was of 20th-century origin — not the type designed for a windmill.
The Time report proved an inspiration to Louisiana-based filmmaker Jim McCullough, who commissioned a screenplay called “The Aurora Encounter” — a title calculated to suggest Stephen Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” — and produced the picture during the early 1980s, enlisting the Fort Worth violinist/composer Carroll Hubbard to develop an evocative score.
And “The Aurora Encounter” (released in 1986) treats an alien visitation as a literal occurrence, imagining a benevolent presence confronted by distrustful authorities. No pretense of documentary fact is suggested. McCullough erred on the side of exploitation by casting a remarkable child, Mickey Hays of Gregg County, as the spaceman. Hays (1972-1992) experienced a genetic syndrome called progeria, which caused him to appear as if 80 years old at the age of 10. In an interview on behalf of the film, Hays told me the role was “my dream-come-true — to star in a Hollywood movie.” Never mind that McCullough Productions was as far off-Hollywood as filmmaking comes.
Another low-budget filmmaker, Al Adamson, investigated the Aurora scene from a more nearly documentary angle for “Beyond This Earth,” in 1993, enlisting Arlington filmmaker Tom Rainone and me as production assistants. Location shooting near the Aurora Cemetery involved representatives of the Mutual UFO Network (alias MUFON), whose Texas chief, aviation writer Bill Case of the Dallas Times Herald, had conducted an Aurora investigation in 1973. Adamson, the director responsible for such drive-in movie shockers of the 1960s as “Horror of the Blood Monsters” and “Blood of Ghastly Horror,” had drawn the new inspiration from an Aurora-related satire by the comedy troupe known as Firesign Theatre.
In 1998, KDFW-TV aired a lengthy report about the Aurora incident, with former Star-Telegram reporter Jim Marrs, of Wise County. Marrs (1943-2017) had long since become a bestselling author, dealing in political and economic conspiracies and general-purpose weirdness. Here, Marrs stated a case for extraterrestrial conclusions. KDFW narrator Richard Ray hewed more to the notion of a legend.
Marrs, in 1997, already had declared something akin to the proverbial last word on Aurora, with a bestselling whopper of a book called Alien Agenda, from HarperCollins Publishers. Publishers Weekly, the trade journal, challenged the book’s emphasis on “dubious phenomena” and railed against Marrs’ lack of “rigorous analysis” but termed Alien Agenda “the most entertaining and complete overview of flying saucers...”
Yes, and Jim Marrs was first to arrive in 2007 when playwright Johnny Simons and I premiered an experimental stage production, “Aurora Ephemerala,” at the Simons family’s Hip Pocket Theatre, north of Fort Worth. Marrs donated $1,000 worth of Alien Agenda hardcover copies to the box office. Simons’ script would imagine a landing with the survival of a benevolent spaceman, who bonds with the friendlier locals and develops an appetite for down-home cooking. My accompanying orchestral score combined eerie science-fictional melodies with comically playful passages, geared to Simons’ narrative tone of melancholy humor.
Two years before the Hip Pocket production, a broadcast of “UFO Files” had revisited the Mutual UFO Network investigation of 1973 while presenting purported witnesses, old-timers from Aurora, who told of how their parents had explored the 1897 crash site. Here, too, MUFON uncovered a grave marker that appeared to show a flying object. The cemetery’s stewards denied permission to exhume the site.
Further exploration in 2008, in a “UFO Hunters” television documentary, allowed for an examination of that mysterious well. The water therein was reported to contain concentrations of aluminum, and the remains of a windmill were unearthed nearby. A radar scan of an unmarked grave from the 1890s turned up nothing conclusive.
Nothing conclusive, that is, except the perpetual fascination of an unsolvable quandary. “Seekers after mystery haunt strange places,” as the Texas-bred historian George E. Turner once wrote, paraphrasing author H.P. Lovecraft. Turner added: “The cattle country has spawned its share of mysteries... Some have been solved, so far as possible, but others must remain enigmatic.”
Hence Aurora, Texas, and the enduring forbidden allure of its spaceman legend.
