AURORA 1897

Opening

On 19 April 1897 the Dallas Morning News printed a letter from S. E. Haydon of Aurora, Texas: an airship had struck Judge Proctor's windmill at dawn, exploded, scattered debris, and killed a pilot who was not built like the men of Wise County. The town, Haydon wrote, had given the pilot a Christian burial. Papers already full of great-airship stories that spring ran the item.

Aurora was a small place hit by drought and passed over by the railroad it had hoped for. The windmill story gave it a grave. No 1897 photograph of the wreck survives in a reliable chain, no inquest names the dead pilot, and the metal later found on Proctor's ground has been argued as aluminium and as old farm junk.

Timeline

April 1897The great airship wave is already filling the Texas papers with lights, cigar-shaped craft and inventors from New York or from Mars, depending on the paper.

17 April 1897The date of the crash in some tellings.

19 April 1897Haydon's letter runs in the Dallas Morning News.

Later yearsLocal memory splits. Some old residents said they remembered a fuss. Others said Haydon was known for a joke. The cemetery acquired a marker in the twentieth century that tourists could find.

1970sInvestigators dig, test metal and argue. Nothing turns up that could be identified as the remains of an 1897 pilot.

Key figures

S. E. Haydon wrote the letter. He was a local writer with a town he wanted talked about.

Judge Proctor owned the windmill named in the story. Whether it was ever struck by anything is the whole dispute.

The pilot has a grave in the story but no name in any 1897 record.

The later metal-detector searches found scrap and raised hopes. They did not find anything that dates to the morning in the letter.

Physical and documentary trail

What exists:

One: Haydon's letter in the Dallas Morning News describing a crash and a burial.

Two: the airship-wave stories already in Texas papers that month.

Three: a later cemetery marker and local memories that do not agree.

Four: twentieth-century metal tests.

There is no 1897 photograph of wreckage. There is no burial register entry that everyone accepts. There is no record of who the pilot was.

The pilot, who was not an inhabitant of this world, was given a Christian burial.

Things you might not know

• A signal officer blamed Mars. Haydon's letter quoted T. J. Weems, a US Signal Service officer, giving his opinion that the pilot was a native of Mars.
• A later owner blamed the well. Brawley Oates, who bought the Proctor property in the 1940s, cleaned the wreckage out of a well, developed severe arthritis, blamed the water and sealed it under concrete.
• The town historian called it a joke. In 1980 Etta Pegues, then 86, told Time that Haydon made it up "as a joke and to bring interest to Aurora," because the railroad had bypassed the town.
• The grave marker vanished. A small headstone said to mark the pilot's grave disappeared in 1973, around the time a searcher with a metal detector found three spots of metal there.
• The state put up a sign. A Texas Historical Commission marker at the cemetery mentions the story.

Competing explanations

A real crash and a real grave. This is the version visitors come for. It rests on one letter, with no 1897 county record behind it.

A newspaper hoax. The airship wave already rewarded this kind of story, and a struggling town had reason to want attention. This fits what some residents later said about Haydon's sense of humour.

A balloon or a homemade airship, later dressed as a Martian. Possible, but it would still need remains, and none have been found.

Later life of the case

Aurora became a roadside legend: a Texas Historical Commission marker, a cemetery that draws visitors and metal detectors, and television crews returning every few years to the well and the graves. The town historian's verdict, that Haydon wrote it to bring attention to a town the railroad had bypassed, is still the best-supported explanation. For the wave of airship reports Haydon was writing into, see the airship wave of 1896.

Finding

Aurora entered the record on 19 April 1897 as the town that buried an airship pilot after a dawn crash into a windmill. The letter is a fact. The body is not on any record.

What still will not resolve: an 1897 burial entry in a county record, or a piece of the machine with a documented chain back to Proctor's yard.