AURORA, Texas – This small community north of Fort Worth may be named for the glimmering light show seen in the sky, but it’s something that fell from the wild blue yonder that’s legendary in this little town.
Dan McEntire is the town’s historic preservation officer, an interesting title for a place that’s only got about 1200 people – but it used to be much bigger.
“Aurora has a considerable amount of history,” said McEntire. “At one time, it was targeted to be the county seat of Wise County. Used to have a population, as I understand, of over 5000 here, and there were some problems. They had an epidemic that went through and kind of wiped a lot of the population out. They also, the railroad bypassed the town. There was a pamphlet out called, ‘The Town that Almost Was.’”
During the continuous downtrodden times of the late 1800’s, something out of this world is said to have happened here.
“Well, there’s a rumor about the spaceship that hit one of the windmills,” McEntire said.
File this one under strange and unusual, because this story is just getting started.
“As I understand it, the spaceship hits Judge Proctor’s windmill out there and crashes,” said McEntire. “They took the alien’s body and they buried him at the cemetery and gave him a Christian burial. Several of the people in the area, they went out and looked at the crash scene. They went back, they kept their children away from it. I understand they threw parts of the spacecraft down in a well. Other people just took, you know, carried off what they could of it, you know, which the people would do, I suspect, back in those days particularly.”
The alleged crash even made the Dallas Morning News on April 19th 1897. Submitted to the paper by Aurora resident S.E. Haydon, a local cotton buyer, the alien news wasn’t front page by any means, but it did make page 5. While skepticism was high back in the day, some still believe that something happened here. All you have to do is go to the cemetery where the alien is said to have been buried.
A large stone serves as the marker to the foreign body that has apparently been moved to keep curious kleptos from digging up whatever could be resting in the Aurora cemetery.
“The sad part about it is, you know, a lot of people don’t have a lot of respect for the cemeteries and things and they just come out here, and there’s a lot of destruction that’s going on, so they kind of just kind of moved him off, buried him somewhere,” McEntire said. “The people, this is my understanding that he was moved and buried elsewhere so that people couldn’t go out and dig him up. And that would make sense, because the people that did that are all dead. I don’t know if they passed it on to anyone else – I’m not aware of anybody that knows the actual burial site, but you know, again, going back to that good ole’ Texas law, you have to get permission of the next of kin to dig them up anyway.”
That is, unless you’re the people redigging him somewhere to keep his body safe. Despite being a far-out story with no real physical proof, people still stop by to pay their respects to Ned, the resident out-of-this-world alien corpse that may or may not be buried here.
Ricky Lee, wife Kristi, and family happened to be paying their respects to a lost loved from this Earth when they decided to see what the cosmic commotion was all about.
“It’s just part of our background to come up here and when we have a funeral, a family funeral, we come and pay our respects to the alien also,” said Kristi Lee.
So the story of the alien ship that crashed in the windmill of one Judge Proctor lives on, perhaps for light years. But it does bring a smile, some when they need it most, and keeps that tingling question of our existence hovering in our heads.
“I am a strong believer in, the dear Lord is powerful enough that if He wanted to create another universe and other people, He could have done it and He didn’t have to tell us about it,” McEntire said. “And that’s what I believe strongly.”