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I think this was my very favorite of all the UFO stories I’ve ever researched and written about. Why? Because it was a profoundly human story.
There’s a small cemetery in the town of Aurora, Texas. Local legend is that an alien — the pilot of a spacecraft that crashed here in 1897 — is buried somewhere. Due to novelty hunters, legend trippers, and eager UFOlogists not respecting the cemetery, the grave is believed to be unmarked and possibly to have been moved. Supposedly, nobody knows where in the cemetery it’s buried.
But this would be the most important find in the history of science! Surely it’s worth it to dig up the entire cemetery. Right?
Well, I couldn’t find much beyond “the usual sources” — at first — when I researched the episode. The story dates back to an 1897 newspaper article. In the 1970s, investigators from MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network) learned about it and came to town. They interviewed people, they scanned the cemetery with a metal detector, they sifted all the soil from where the crash is said to have happened. They produced a 199-page report. And, of course, all the UFO shows on TV have given an episode or two to it. And that’s pretty much the extent of the story as it’s popularly told and retold.
My breakthrough in the research came from an unlikely source. It turns out that during the 1970s while the MUFON guys were making themselves ridiculous in Aurora, someone else was on hand. This was author Bill Porterfield, a professional writer and professional Texan, who loved finding great stories (he passed away in 2014). Porterfield knew about Texas journalism, and he knew a better way to regard the 1897 article. He also knew who in town was better to interview, and how to do it. The result is a chapter in his 1978 book A Loose Herd of Texans, a collection of wonderful human stories from around the state, that only Porterfield could put together.