AI Summary
5 min readOn April 17, 1897, a 10-year-old boy named Charlie Stevens was doing chores on his family farm outside Aurora, Texas, when he saw a cigar-shaped vessel with a blinding light drift overhead, trailing black smoke. Moments later, a deafening crash and a pillar of smoke rose from the direction of town. That morning, a 15-year-old girl named Mary Evans watched the same craft collide with a windmill on Judge J.S. Proctor’s property, sending wreckage across acres of farmland. When townspeople arrived, they found debris made of an unfamiliar metal—what they guessed was aluminum mixed with silver—and among the rubble, a body that everyone agreed was not from Earth. The local doctor treated the creature for hours, but it never regained consciousness. A U.S. Army Signal Corps man named T.J. Weims, who followed astronomy, declared the pilot a Martian. The town gave the being a Christian burial in the local cemetery three days later, and the Dallas newspaper ran a short article quoting Weims: the pilot was “a native of the planet Mars.”
The airship wave and a town in crisis
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What you'll learn
- 1 (04:30) **The Setting: Aurora, Texas, 1897** - The hosts introduce the small frontier town of Aurora, Texas, and set the stage for a bizarre event that occurred during a nationwide wave of mysterious airship sightings.
- 2 (07:26) **The Crash: Eyewitness Accounts** - Two young witnesses, Charlie Stevens and Mary Evans, describe seeing a slow-moving, smoking cigar-shaped craft crash into Judge Proctor's windmill at dawn on April 17, 1897.
- 3 (10:51) **The Discovery of the Body** - Local townspeople gathered at the crash site and found a non-human body among the wreckage, which the town doctor later declared dead.
- 4 (17:09) **The Burial and Initial Report** - The townspeople gave the pilot a proper Christian burial in the local cemetery, and a brief newspaper article by reporter S.E. Hayden announced the crash and the pilot's Martian origin.
- 5 (19:50) **The Aftermath and Lost Evidence** - With no federal investigation, the townspeople disposed of the wreckage themselves, with much of it reportedly dumped down Judge Proctor's well, and the story faded from memory for decades.
- 6 (22:14) **MUFON's Investigation in the 1970s** - The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) re-investigated the case in 1973, interviewing elderly eyewitnesses and finding physical evidence that suggested an advanced technology.
- 7 (24:43) **The Quest to Exhume the Pilot's Grave** - MUFON investigators located a possible unmarked grave in the cemetery, but city officials refused their request to exhume the body, citing legal and health concerns.
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Show Notes
On April 17, 1897, the small town of Aurora, Texas woke up to the sound of a mysterious airship crashing nearby. It supposedly destroyed a local judge's windmill, scattering debris across the property, leaving behind a pilot described as "not of this world." The remains of the unknown visitor were said to have been buried in the town cemetery. Over a century of unanswered questions has kept the legend alive — leaving many to wonder if the truth is six feet underground.
For a full list of sources, please visit: https://sosupernaturalpodcast.com/alien-the-aurora-texas-ufo-incident
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