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From: Stig_Agermose@online.pol.dk (Stig Agermose)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 1997 02:46:16 +0200
Fwd Date: Thu, 31 Jul 1997 09:01:39 -0400
Subject: Aurora-Roswell Anniversary

This one is a month old, but it is very interesting and I haven't seen
it elsewhere. It was found at:=20

http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=3D000239087618192&rtmo=3D33df905c&atmo=
=3D3
3df905c&pg=3D/et/97/6/28/tlufo28.html

The links are in brackets.



Electronic Telegraph   Saturday 28 June 1997    Issue 764 =20
=20

Seeing the light



One hundred years since the first sighting, UFO mania is becoming
almost a religion for Americans, reports James Langton


THE WAY Charlie Stephens would tell it, the flying machine, airship -
call it what you will - came right over his head just after dawn. It
was moving kinda slow and disappeared towards the ridge of hills a few
miles north. Then there was an explosion and a real bright light.

Young Charlie was 10 at the time and driving the cattle to pasture with
his Daddy. Curiosity got the better of the youngster and he wanted to
rush off and see what all the fuss was about. "But Daddy said we had to
finish our chores."

The next day, though, Mr Stephens snr saddled up his horse and rode off
to town. He came back with a story of burnt wreckage and torn metal.
And if he heard talk about the body, he never told, not being the sort
to speak of what he hadn't seen with his own eyes.

Two days after the crash, the Dallas Times Herald carried a fuller
version of the story. According to its correspondent, the inhabitants
of the small north Texas town of Aurora "were astonished at the sudden
appearance of the airship which has been travelling over much of the
country.

"It was travelling due north and much nearer the earth than before.
Evidently some of the machinery was out of order, for it was making a
speed of only 10 or 12 miles an hour and gradually settling towards the
earth.

"It sailed over the public square and when it reached the northern part
of town collided with the tower of Judge Proctor's windmill and went to
pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres
of ground, wrecking the windmill and water tank and destroying the
judge's flower garden.

"The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one aboard,
and while his remains are badly disfigured, enough of the original has
been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world."

The report was dated April 19, 1897, and by then the remains had been
examined by T. J. Weems, a US Signal Service officer in the area and an
enthusiastic amateur astronomer. From the body, and papers "written in
some unknown hieroglyphics", Weems deduced the pilot "was a native of
the planet Mars".

The next day, a similar account in The Fort Worth Register noted that
"the pilot, who was not of this world, was given Christian burial in
Aurora cemetery".

The past 100 years have not been kind to Aurora, a scattering of ranch
houses about 20 miles north-west of Fort Worth. There is not much more
than the two signs on Highway 114 to show you have entered the town,
and one of those is for the cemetery. A dead dog rots by the roadside,
just below the scrub-covered bluff where Judge Proctor's windmill once
stood. Somewhere between a low brick bungalow and the rutted track to
the town baseball park is the crash site of the Aurora UFO, now covered
by wild cactus, coarse grass and the fading blooms of Texas blue
bonnets.

Jim Marrs guns his pick-up truck down the cemetery road. He is looking
for the grave of the Aurora alien, a task made difficult after the
headstone was stolen in mysterious circumstances 25 years ago, when
Marrs first investigated the long-forgotten crash with Bill Case, a
local journalist.

Photographs of the grave show a crumbling fragment of sandstone. Half
seems to be missing, but the remaining fragment has a roughly carved
"V" turned on its side and three or four little circles inside. If the
missing half matched, you would have the crude approximation of a
flying saucer.

Case, now dead, ran a metal detector over the grave and found three
large lumps of something. That was when the local folk began to worry,
in Marrs' words, "That we might be going to dig up grandma." So Town
Marshal H R "Pig" Idell rode shotgun on the grave with his deputies for
a couple of weeks. When the fuss died down, the Marshal ended his
patrols and the next night the tombstone was stolen.

Marrs suspects an official cover-up. Perhaps by the same people who
drilled three neat holes into the turf and removed the metal underneath.

*******

With his white beard and an accent that twangs like a steel guitar,
Marrs looks more than a little like Texas' answer to Dickie
Attenborough. He lives a few miles down the road, at the end of an
unmarked track in a rambling house he built himself. It was here that
he wrote Crossfire, the best-selling conspiracist account of the
Kennedy assassination. The director Oliver Stone optioned Crossfire as
the basis for his film JFK.

Now Marrs has written Alien Agenda, a definitive history of UFO
sightings down the years. According to Marrs, the great UFO debate is
over; for him the question is not "Are they here?" but "Who are they
and what do they want?".=20

In 1973 Marrs interviewed the only three people then alive who
remembered the Aurora crash. Charlie Stephens, then 86 and in failing
health was one. Mary Evans, then 92, was 15 at the time of the crash.
Her parents had gone into town to see the crash site and returned with
stories of an exploding airship and a pilot "torn up and killed. The
men of the town who gathered up his remains said he was a 'small man'
," she told Marrs.

There was also Robbie Hanson, 12 years old when a man rode by with the
story. According to Robbie, the crash was a hoax; Judge Proctor never
even had a windmill. Jim Marrs says you can take your choice. Whether
you believe the evidence of the Aurora incident depends on what he
calls "your mindset".

Public interest in unidentified flying objects has never been greater.
Alien Agenda is no exercise in vanity publishing, but a heavily
promoted hardback from HarperCollins. The current Hollywood love affair
with UFOs, which began with Independence Day last year, continues this
summer with Men in Black (a Government cover-up, aliens as bad guys)
and Contact (a Government cover-up, aliens as good guys).=20

By one of those neat arithmetical coincidences (coincidence? Hah!) the
centenary of Aurora is followed next week by the 50th anniversary of
the flying saucer; that is, the afternoon of June 24, 1947 when Kenneth
Arnold, a businessman and private pilot from Boise, Idaho found himself
trailing a formation of high-speed objects and later, struggling to
describe them to a local newspaper reporter, said that they "flew like
a saucer". Arnold estimated their speed at 1,300 mph - twice the speed
of any conventional aircraft in 1947.

In fact, pilots had been reporting mysterious flying objects for some
years. RAF and USAF pilots had seen glowing balls following their
planes on missions over Germany which they dubbed "foo-fighters". They
were thought to be Nazi secret weapons until after the war, when it was
discovered that Luftwaffe pilots had also seen them and thought they
were the Allies'.

But Arnold's UFOs that "flew like a saucer" caught the public's
imagination. When, 10 days later, the information officer for the 509th
Bomb Group announced that the authorities had recovered a "flying disc"
that had crashed in the desert outside Roswell, New Mexico, mania
became hysteria.

The military authorities at Roswell reacted quickly, replacing the
"flying disc" story with one about the wreckage of a crashed weather
balloon (the US Government admitted three years ago that this was also
a lie: the "real" Roswell crash concerned a top-secret chain of "spy"
balloons).

Reports of flying saucers continued undiminished. Project Blue Book,
the official US air force monitoring programme begun in the summer of
1947, recorded several thousand sightings by the time it was disbanded
in 1969, of which nearly a quarter could not be explained.=20

*******

The UFO scare of 1897 has an innocence missing from those which begin
half a century ago. The machines in the sky are objects of curiosity in
a West that was opening up a world of wonders, both natural and
technological.

The UFO mythology of recent years is something else. A popular
sociological explanation links the stories of the threat from the
skies, of abductions and cattle mutilations, to the paranoia of the
Cold War. What is particularly interesting is that the current
obsession dates not from 1947, but 1972, the 25th anniversary of
Roswell.

Why should Roswell strike such a chord after so long? The American
media this week has been full of another quarter-century anniversary,
that of the Watergate break-in, which taught the American public that
it could not trust its leaders. If the reaction to Nixon's frailties
was disbelief and disillusion, then Clinton produces a weary cynicism.
How easy, these days, to conceal almost anything.

So why should the US Government come clean about the fleet of crashed
UFOs it has stored in secret military installations? Jim Marrs claims
that the Moon might be an alien base, much like the Star Wars Death
Star. He has an official NASA video taken on a 1993 shuttle mission
which shows distant lights rising though the Earth's atmosphere and
manoeuvering into formation.

Several accelerate into deep space after a bright flash off camera.
Marrs says we may have been routinely firing at UFO intruders using ray
guns placed in orbit during the Reagan "Star wars" programme. NASA says
they are ice crystals.

Ready for the next instalment? Colonel Philip Corso is a retired senior
officer with a distinguished service record. He served both President
Eisenhower and in the Pentagon under Kennedy. Col Corso has just
published an account of those years in which he claims to have secretly
"seeded" technological marvels recovered from the crashed UFO at
Roswell to American industry. Lasers, fibre optics and integrated
circuit chips are said to be some of the results.

*******

Some might say Col Corso is either a fantasist or simply barking.
Others readily believe him, like the estimated 100,000 UFO enthusiasts
preparing to gather in New Mexico on the weekend of July 4, an event
dubbed "Weirdstock" by the same American media that happily reprints
the latest flying saucer sightings.

Somehow these are never conclusive. The most recent have several
thousand apparently sober Americans watching a huge and mysterious
craft passing over Arizona on the night of March 13.

Yet there are no photos, nothing more than a few fuzzy video images.
Perhaps it is, after all, a question of belief. In an age of religious
uncertainty, the arrival of space ships from the stars offers a
spiritual alternative for the age of science.=20

No wonder those who most vociferously condemn the new cult of the UFO
are church leaders. At least the aliens of 100 years ago were given a
Christian burial.



(25 January 1997: Eight-inch 'man' in Israeli UFO mystery)

(20 April 1997: When green children fell to planet Earth)

(3 April 1997: UFOs brought to earth with a bump)
=20



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