April 17. At about 6 a.m. that morning, according to contemporaneous Dallas Morning News account, citizens of the small town of Aurora were awakened by the appearance of what the writer referred to as an “airship.” The craft reportedly malfunctioned and stalled, and crashed into a windmill on the property of a local judge, scattering debris over several acres.

Skeptics long have dismissed the account as a hoax but several sources confirm that during the 1896–1897 timeframe, numerous sightings of a cigar-shaped mystery airship were reported across the United States.

According to the Morning News account “the pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one aboard and, while his remains were badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world,”

In 1973, a United Press International reporter located a 91-year-old resident, Mary Evans, who recalled her parents visiting the crash site, and telling her that the body of the UFO pilot had been buried in the town cemetery. Many asked for permission to exhume the site, but the cemetery association always declined permission.