Really Old UFO Reports

According to information discovered by Mark Murphy and Noe Torres and reported on their website:

(http://www.ufodigest.com/news/0408north-texas.html)

It was late on a Saturday afternoon, that residents of Dublin, Texas were startled by a bright, oblong-shaped object about 300 feet above them. They reported a loud sound, like a bomb going off, and they saw the object disintegrate, hurling metal and debris over the town, near the Wasson & Miller flour mill and cotton gin.

On June 20, 1891, the Dublin Progress, the local newspaper published an article about the event on page four. They reported:

A Meteor Explodes in the City

An Eye Witness Describes the Scene to a Progress Reporter
Scared.

Quite a little excitement was created last Saturday night by the bursting of what is supposed by those who were present to have been a meteor, near Wasson & Miller’s gin. Quite a number witnessed the explosion and nearly everyone in that portion of the city heard the report eminating [sic] therefrom, which is said to have sounded somewhat like the report of a bomb-shell. Our informant (who, though a little nervous at times, is a gentleman who usually tells the truth, but did not give us this statement with a view to its publication) says he observed the meteor when it was more than three hundred feet in the air, before bursting, and that it bore a striking resemblance to a bale of cotton suspended in the air after having been saturated in kerosene oil and ignited, except that it created a much brighter light, almost dazzling those who percieved [sic] it. The gentleman in question seems to have been so badly frightened that it was utterly impossible to obtain an accurate account of the dimensions and general appearance of this rare phenomenon, but we are convinced from his statements that his position at the time must have been very embarrassing and that very little time was spent in scientific investigations. However, on the following morning he returned to the scene so hastily left the previous night, to find the weeds, grass, bushes and vegetation of every description for many yards around the scene of the explosion burned to a crisp, also discovering a number of peculiar stones and pieces of metal, all of a leaden color, presenting much the appearance of the lava thrown out by volcanic eruptions. He also picked up some small fragments of manuscript and a scrap, supposed to be part of a newspaper, but the language in both was entirely foreign to him, and, in fact, no one has yet been found who has ever seen such a language before, hence no information could be gained from their examination. At this juncture your reporter requested that he be shown these wonderful fragments of such a miraculous whole, but the narrator had worked himself up to such a pitch of excitement that it was impossible to get him to grasp the significance of our request, and were compelled to leave him a victim to his own bewildered fancy and to ruminate the seemingly miraculous story he had just related. Thus was a repotorial [sic] zealot denied the boon of seeing fragments of the most remarkable substance ever known to explode near Wasson & Miller’s gin.

P.S. Since the above was put in type we learn that our reporter was given the above information by a contributor to the Dublin Telephone, but the information came too late too late to prevent its insertion in this paper.

The description of the object sounds like a bolide, that is, an extremely bright meteor. They are so bright that they can easily be seen in the daytime, and they are often accompanied by sonic booms, which, the people of Dublin in 1891 wouldn’t have known. The only problem is this description of it hovering above the mill. That could have been an optical illusion if the meteor had left a smoke trail, something else bolides do. In this case, I suspect that the description in the article, that a meteor exploded over the city, is the proper solution here, though it is an interesting article.

I will note here that Noe Torres (along with Ruben Uriate) is one of the authors of The Other Roswell: UFO Crash on the Texas-Mexico Border. He has been studying UFOs for more than twenty years and is a member of Texas MUFON. If you get the change, take a look at his books which span more than just UFOs.