The Aurora, Texas airship crash

An 1897 Dallas Morning News story by S. E. Haydon told of an airship crashing at Aurora, Texas, and its pilot being buried in the town cemetery. The Texas State Historical Association calls the story fiction.

On 17 April 1897, the Dallas Morning News printed an article by S. E. Haydon describing a crash at Aurora, in Wise County. As Wikipedia summarises it, the craft struck a windmill on Judge J. S. Proctor's property two days before, around 6 a.m., and came down. The article said the pilot came from another world, that T. J. Weems, an officer of the Army Signal Service from Fort Worth, thought he was from Mars, and that he died and was given a Christian burial in Aurora Cemetery. The City of Aurora's history page dates the crash itself to 17 April.

The Texas State Historical Association describes Haydon as a cotton buyer in Aurora who released a made-up news story. It sets out the town's situation: the town dates from the late 1850s and grew through the mid-1880s, but spotted fever broke out in 1888 and fear of it had driven many people away by 1889. In 1980, Fort Worth Magazine reports, Time quoted Aurora resident Etta Pegues, then 86, who said Haydon meant it as a joke, written to draw interest to a dying town that the railroad had passed by.

The town has kept the story. The City of Aurora calls it a tall tale in which the airship crashed into the windmill of Judge Proctor and caught fire, and residents found the damaged remains of an alien in the wreckage. The city now calls the alien Ned. A 1976 Texas Historical Commission marker at Aurora Cemetery notes the crash story alongside the graves there, among them the grave of Nellie Burris, an infant who died in 1893.