X-Zone Broadcast Network - Jerry Clark

This week I discussed the UFO Encyclopedia, 3^rd Edition, with the author, Jerome (Jerry) Clark. Before we began our discussion, I mentioned that it was the 50^th anniversary of my destroying a UH-1H helicopter by triggering a land mine in South Vietnam. Knowing full well that there are many people who claim Vietnam service who were never there, and knowing some might be not believe the story, you can read it in the unit history of the 187^th Assault Helicopter Company here:

http://www.187thahc.net/Incidents/incident_69.htm

Just scroll down to May 16, and you’ll find it… and yes, this has nothing to do with UFOs and I mentioned it only because it was fifty years ago today that it happened.

But on to the UFO stuff and Jerry Clark.

Naturally, given the timing of the show, we had to mention the passing of Stan Friedman a few days earlier. I thought it important to acknowledge his passing and

Jerry Clark

we devoted the first segment of the show to that.

We did get around to talking about his UFO Encyclopedia, which is a massive resource, that is a must for anyone who is serious about UFO research. To me, one of the most important aspects of the Encyclopedia, is the list of sources at the end of each of the articles. That allows the reader to find additional information, some of it providing an opposing view or giving an alternative solution. You can listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/17940170

Although I wanted to cover the questions that readers had sent, we did run out of time. I tried to ask at least one question from each of those who supplied them. One of them concerned the airship wave of 1897. I had thought that Jerry believed there was a core of good reports that began in late 1896, but that many of the sightings in 1897 were, shall we say, imaginative. Jerry quickly corrected me.

I did go back and look at the entry from the 2^nd Edition of his Encyclopedia so that I could compare it with the latest version. The entry had evolved, and covered sightings that began in other parts of the world some fifty years earlier. It seems that the sightings involve some sort real experiences but when we reach April, 1897, it is clear that the majority of those reports are faked. I asked specifically about the Aurora, Texas, crash, which, given what we know today, is laughable, when you read the original report. I am astonished that there are those who still believe this was a real event. You can find more information about it, and the Alexander Hamilton calf-napping here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/04/aurora-texas-again.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/09/ufo-crashes-fifty-years-before-roswell.html

Jerry tells me, "The point I was trying to make about airship reports was that they were real experiences, not "real events" as you have it.  I try to make clear that radars/visuals and CE2s exemplify event anomaliess, i.e., strange things that occur within the boundaries of consensus reality, and high-strange phenomena exemplify experience anomalies, which take place in liminal space between the real and the imagined, with characteristics of each mixed together."

We also talked, briefly about contactees and abductions. Time prevented us from going into depth about these topics. I think you get a feel for where Jerry is on the topics and I do mention that George Adamski’s tales of Venus failed to account for the surface temperature that is hot enough to melt lead… not the tropic environment that so many envisioned in the 1950s.

Next up is Dr. Dan Farcas and his theory about Hyper-civilization. It is an interesting take on a number of questions about UFOs and other topics. For those who have questions, as always, append them here in the comments section and I’ll try to get them asked.

Jefferson Airship vs. Aurora Crash

As I was working on the articles about the Jefferson Airship crash, I wondered what was the difference between that event and the Aurora, Texas, crash. Both were reported in the newspaper which was supposed to add some credibility to the stories. But Aurora has been splashed all over the media since the 1960s including documentaries, magazine articles and mentions in books, and even a movie about the disaster. Jefferson is rarely mentioned and often relegated to a mere couple of sentences in obscure books or buried in the detail of more popular ones.

Aurora, Texas. Photo only important to show that I was
there. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle.

Here’s the thing. I have found more evidence for the Jefferson crash than for the Aurora crash. True, I interviewed several people who had lived in Aurora and Wise County, Texas, in 1897 but know of none who are alive today who would have seen the Jefferson crash. I was in Aurora, Texas, in the early 1970s, but knew virtually nothing about the Jefferson event until the last few days.

Now, we have great detail about Jefferson, Iowa. We have good descriptions of the craft, we have letters to the newspaper that describe the crash, and we even have illustrations that match those descriptions. For Aurora, we have none of that, other than the original newspaper article. There is no follow up on it, the descriptions are vague and the debris that had apparently been scattered all over the streets of Aurora has vanished into thin air.

If we are to look just at the documentation from 1897, then the Jefferson crash is the better tale. Again, I point to the letters printed in the newspaper written by witnesses who were there. In Aurora there is no such documentation. That, of course, gives the nod to Jefferson.

Even more important is the illustration that appeared in the Cedar Rapids newspaper three days later. It does set up something of a conundrum. How was

The airship from the Cedar Rapids Gazette and
as description in the Jefferson Bee.

the letter writer able to describe the object days before the illustration appeared? It is a match and suggests a bit of reality… or a level of coordination between the writer of the letter and those who were talking about the landed craft in Waterloo.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are two books written about the history of Wise County, Texas, within a decade of the crash. Neither of those books mentions the Aurora crash, which, given the timing of it, should have had a prominent place in both those books. That it was not even mentioned is suggestive of a hoax rather than a real event.

I could mention that we do have names of real people in the Aurora case. T.J. Weems, however, was not a signal corps officer as reported but was the local blacksmith. That certainly does nothing for the veracity of the tale. Others who were identified turned out not to be what they were said to have been.

The names associated with the Jefferson crash are not identifiable as real people living in the area. George Washington was mentioned, but I thought this had more to do with Washington’s reputation for truthfulness than it did the name of the person who wrote the letter. George could not tell a lie, but it seemed the letter was full of them. Sort of ironic, I would say. In fact, that seems to be the very definition of irony.

Both events suggest that there was wreckage. In Jefferson, it was at the bottom of a huge crater created by the crash. In Aurora, the debris was dumped down a well, which is a good way to get rid of it, although not a very smart way. Searches of the well have produced no evidence that could be confirmed as having come from an advanced technology.

The real point here, however, is that there are many more details from the Jefferson crash than there are from Aurora. Had Jefferson been found by researchers in the 1960s, we might have seen all those documentaries, magazine articles, books, and the film made about Jefferson rather than Aurora. The Jefferson story is much more interesting.

In the 21^st century, none of that is important. We know, today, that the Jefferson tale is a hoax, and the letters were written by people who might have been inspired by the newspaper… or the original article was inspired by those letters, which in turn, were inspired by the tales of the Great Airship. In fact, it seems that several tales from Iowa were linked and that might have given a note of credibility to the Jefferson story had we not already found those tales from Cedar Rapids and Waterloo to be hoaxes. That tales are all linked is important and everything resulting from that linkage collapses under dispassionate scrutiny.

I have said for decades that the Aurora crash is a hoax. Most accept that once they examine the evidence or the lack thereof. True, there are some hardcore believers, but for them, all the evidence of a hoax is just a CIA or Air Force plot to keep the truth hidden. In the case of these two crashes, the only truth is that sometimes newspapers get caught up in the moment. Sometimes their reporting is more with tongue in cheek than in the reality of a situation. And, sometimes, they just want to have some fun

Chasing More Footnotes

I have complained in the past that I am becoming less than thrilled with the UFO community. The reasons for this are varied but come down to a couple of basic ideas. One of those is that no matter how often a case is proven to be a hoax, a misidentification, a misinterpretation, or an inability to recognize the mundane, there are those who will argue the point forever. A recent post was partially inspired by this. How many times do we have to delve into the Oliver Lerch tale when everything that can be found points to an invention of the tale rather than a real event?

The point here, however, is that part of the problem is that some people who claim to be researchers or investigators just don’t follow the path to its end. This is what lead to the chasing of footnotes because sometimes the footnote is simply inadequate. Sometimes the information is not complete.

Not to pick on Richard Dolan, but just the other day as I was looking for something else, I noticed a couple of problems. These sorts of things are not restricted to Richard because we all have

Richard Dolan. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

fallen into the trap. On page 16 of his UFOs and the National Security State, he reported on a sighting by railroad engineer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who saw ten shiny disks on June 23. His footnote leads us to a number of sources, which cover a number of sightings in that same paragraph. Unfortunately, the information about the Cedar Rapids sighting is wrong, as I have noted in an earlier posting. The report was not made until after the Arnold sighting, was apparently for the afternoon of June 24 rather than the 23, and the railroad man was not in Iowa, but in Joliet, Illinois. Among those who reported this information as Dolan had, were Dick Hall and Frank Edwards. I believe Hall got it from Edwards, who must have seen something in the Cedar Rapids Gazette about the sighting a couple of days after Arnold. Edwards, or those others, had not followed the story to the source, or they would have found the discrepancies.

As I say, not to pick on Dolan, but later, on page 25, he wrote about Bill Brazel and the finding of the metal debris from the Roswell crash. The footnote takes us to Stan Friedman’s Crash at Corona in which he quotes from an interview with Bill Brazel. The quotes are accurate, for the most part, but there is no footnote to explain how the information was gathered because Friedman supplies no information about that. The trail ends there.

However, I know how that interview was conducted because I had

Stan Friedman. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

arranged it, and Don Schmitt and I were there. I recorded it. The more accurate footnote would have taken us not to Friedman’s book, but to UFO Crash at Roswell, where the footnote explained the circumstances of the interview. In other words, the original source was that interview that Don and I conducted and not the information printed in Friedman’s book.

A side problem with this is that Friedman altered one portion of the interview without justification. Those who follow Dolan’s footnote to Friedman will get the inaccurate information… Friedman inserted the word “black” into the interview to describe one the sergeants who came to the Brazel ranch to collect the bits of debris Bill had found. Brazel made no reference to the racial identity of those four men but Friedman inserted the word to bolster the Gerald Anderson fairy tale. You can read the whole story here (if you are so inclined):

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2008/09/black-sergeants-and-stan-friedman.html

This problem is not confined to UFO research. I was looking for information for a post on the new version of the Treasure Quest show and found a couple of sites that provided what seemed to be accurate information. Reference was made to someone named C. H. Prodgers and in this day of the Internet, I thought I would find out what he had said about the treasure.

Twenty-five years ago, I couldn’t have gathered the information. True, one of the articles referred to Prodgers, but in the world today, I was able to find a copy of Prodgers’s book online. I didn’t have to rely on what others had written about it. I could read it for myself. And, I found that much of the information published, that referenced Prodgers, was incorrect. After all, they were quoting Prodgers as the source, but what Prodgers had written did not match what they were reporting. Could Prodgers have been making up the tale of the treasure? Sure. But that didn’t matter because he was the original source. He was writing from the point of view of having been there, lived the adventure, and there wasn’t much documentation that preceded him. The others were quoting him as their source.

That is, I chased the references to the ultimate source. I corrected the errors made by others who had used the same source, and came away unimpressed with the information. It reads more like fiction than fact and there really is nothing to back up the story. And now that the first season is over, we have seen a large number of problems with this treasure hunting quest.

So, now you’re wondering how all this relates to Ufology. It is about getting to the original source. In the past, the only way to do it was go to the location or find a library that had the proper resources in its collections. You had to read the microfilms and search endlessly for the articles. That is what I had done with the Cedar Rapids story. I could search the microfilm of the Cedar Rapids Gazette and I found the original article about the railroad man and his UFOs. Took about an hour. Had I lived elsewhere, I might not have found it… until I could make an Internet search.

Here’s another example. As I point out in another post, Don Keyhoe, in writing about the 1948 Mantell case, got some bad information and therefore some of his conclusions wrong. He didn’t have access to the documents available to us online today. He assumed that the timing of the events fit into a specific sequence. He assumed that the times given in various reports was when the object was seen over that specific town. What this means that the sighting of the object from Madisonville, Kentucky, wasn’t of an object overhead as Keyhoe believed, but of one to the northwest. The claim that the object was over the Godman Army Airfield tower as Keyhoe believed, is not true. The documents in the Blue Book files proved that the men in the tower saw the UFO somewhere to the southwest at the very limits of human ability to see it. Given those two facts, Keyhoe’s estimate of the speed was way off. That’s not Keyhoe’s fault. He was relying on information that had been reported to him orally rather than seeing what the documents said. He couldn’t have reviewed those documents easily until 1976.

Those who cite Keyhoe’s estimate of the speed have not followed up on the information which was published in the early 1950s. Had they done so, they would have realized that his claim the object was moving at 180 miles an hour was badly flawed. Information available today gives us a much clearer picture. This isn’t to fault Keyhoe because he was relying on the information he had, but to fault those who haven’t bothered to update the information when they began their research.

What all this means is that in the world today, we can look much deeper into the past. We have access to nearly all human knowledge through the Internet. We can study newspaper files in cities hundreds or thousands of miles away (though some services require a subscription). The files of Project Blue Book are on line for all to review… and there are other sources of information about Blue Book that we have today that Keyhoe and others in the 1950s and 1960s didn’t have.

There is then, no real excuse for continuing to report information that is out of date or inaccurate. We can clear up these things by taking our research to the next level, which has always been the real point of chasing footnotes. This isn’t about “gotcha” but about cleaning up the information so that we can come to the proper conclusion. It isn’t about making someone look bad, but about searching for the answers to the mystery, whatever that mystery might be.

While I find chasing footnotes to be fun, I guess there are those who can’t be bothered with following the trail. They already know the truth so there is no need to search any further for it. Why clutter up a good UFO report with a lot of facts that provide us with an identification? Sometimes, however, we do learn something important about a case, which is why I do what I do. I just wish that there wasn’t a constant fight inside Ufology, protecting the sacred cows, when the facts take us somewhere else. 

I can cite examples here. Tales that are told and retold by those who are enthusiastic about their favorite cases. They ignore facts that don’t fit into their view of the world. They know the “truth,” and the facts be damned.

The airship crash in Aurora, Texas, in 1897 proves the point. The evidence and documentation shows that the story was invented by a stringer for a Dallas newspaper. Other documentation, in the form of histories of Aurora or Wise County where Aurora is located, that were published within a couple of years of the alleged crash mention nothing about it. Had such an event taken place, even if it didn’t involve a craft from another world, these histories would have contained some information about it. There is none. But we still have to listen to tales of the Aurora, Texas, UFO crash and put up with television documentaries in which they are digging “for the truth.” Of course, when they’re done, they have not advanced our knowledge. They have just added another level of nonsense to the tale.

Fake News and La Madera

The UFO community has had to put up with fake news for much more than a century. In 1897 there were a number of Great Airship stories that were printed by newspapers. The reporters and editors had to know that some of them were fake, but the interest was there, the stories were there and the bottom line is that newspapers need to make money. Hype a story that doesn’t deserve it, add details that the reporters invent and a few quotes to make the story better or just make it up completely.

Aurora, Texas in the early 1970s. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle.

I am convinced, by the evidence, or the lack there of, that the Aurora UFO crash of April, 1897, is a hoax begun by a newspaper stringer who wanted to do something for his town. Beyond the story printed in 1897, there isn’t much evidence of the airship crash, until UFO researchers became involved in the 1970s. The point here, however, is that in today’s world, this would be labeled as fake news.

To bring this closer to us, here in 2018, and keeping with the theme of the last few posts, I looked at the La Madera UFO landing. This was a sighting that took place in the hours after the Zamora sighting, and by hours, I mean something like 30 hours after the landing in Socorro. Orlando Gallegos said that just after 12:30 a.m. on April 26, 1964, he had gone outside and about 200 yards away, saw something he told Sheriff Martin Vigil, looked to be as long as a telephone pole and as big a round as a car. He said there was a bluish-white flame all around it and as Gallegos watched, the flames went out. I provided a long report on this sighting in Encounter in the Desert, for those who wish to learn more about the case.

The point here is not to talk about the sighting, but about one of the newspaper reports that appeared in the Santa Fe New Mexican on December 28, 1969, some five years after the sighting. At the end of the story written by Ron Longto, Vigil is quoted as saying, “I’m not going to speculate on just what was at La Madera that night… but I hope it never comes back.”

Dr. James McDonald

Dr. James McDonald had seen the story and wanted to check on the veracity of it, meaning the quotes attributed to Vigil, not to mention some of the facts of the case. He couldn’t get Gallegos on the telephone but he could find Vigil. In a March 12, 1970, letter, McDonald wrote:

Upon explaining the purpose of my call and citing the press story, I got a laughing but emphatic statement from Vigil, “They absolutely misquoted me.” I presumed from that he was about to disclaim everything in the story but that was not the case at all. Instead, his strong initial reaction was sensitivity to the closing sentence of the story, in which the reporter took the liberty of inventing the quote that Vigil “hopes [sic] it never comes back.” The one other disclaimer was to the effect that he had said nothing to reporter Longo to suggest that “they really put the heat on Gallegos to keep his mouth shut about that sighting in La Madera.”

There is one other thing to say about all this. I have been accused of misquoting people on a number of occasions, but those allegations were untrue. I had taped the interviews and the transcripts reflected what I had said they said. J. Bond Johnson, the man who took most of the photographs in General Ramey’s office after the Roswell story broke in 1947, said that I had misquoted him on a number of points. When I read the transcripts to him over the telephone, he said that he hadn’t said those things because they weren’t true. He was convinced that I had misquoted him and he wanted to hear the tapes so he could prove it.

I sent him an edited version so that he wouldn’t have to sit through the whole four hours of interviews, but that had the quotes on them. His response was to say that I had admitted to editing the tapes and he couldn’t find all the quotes. So, I sent him all four hours, plus the transcripts, twice, and the best he could do was show that I had left an unimportant conjunction out of the transcripts. That, of course, didn’t satisfy him and even though he had the tapes, he continued to say that I had misquoted him. He had gone from telling the truth in the interviews I conducted to an assault on me, even when he knew he was wrong.

The point is that sometimes, when people don’t like the direction of the quotes, they claim to have been misquoted. Here, with Vigil, I see no reason he would claim to have been misquoted on something as innocuous as the last line in the story unless that was something that he hadn’t said. The quote is a nice wrap up for the story, a good final line, and the impression of the reporter might have been that Vigil felt that way, but Vigil said he didn’t say it. At least he said he hadn’t said it.

Is this overly important to the overall story? Not really, other than give us a look at something that in the world today would be called fake news. Vigil didn’t seem overly upset by the quote given his reaction to it. But it also demonstrates that we, as investigators, researchers, writers, and proponents of a point of view must get this stuff right even when it is something as inconsequential as that last line. E must be careful or we can damage all the work we have done.

And, besides all that, I thought it was kind of an interesting anecdote…

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Dr. Thomas "Eddie" Bullard

Dr. Thomas Eddie Bullard

This week I had the chance to interview Dr. Thomas “Eddie” Bullard. I had thought that we could talk about his academic study of alien abductions but we began with questions about the Great Airship of 1897. We did get to abductions eventually. You can listen to the whole interview here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/13408421

I had heard, a couple of weeks ago, about the Alexander Hamilton calf-knapping, which might be the first recorded case of an animal mutilation. Well, I mean that I knew about the case and thought that it had been explained years ago by a letter that Hamilton had sent to a local newspaper. I had heard that the newspaper article might not exist explaining the case but Eddie had some interesting insights into that.

From there we switched over to the Aurora, Texas, UFO crash which is also part of the 1897 airship wave. I have been to Aurora, Texas, interviewed some of the people who said they were alive at the time, given I was there in the early 1970s, which meant those I interviewed were in their early 80’s, so it could have been true. I have reported on that, including pictures from the Aurora cemetery, which you can find here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2005/03/aurora-texas-story-that-wont-die.html

and here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/09/ufo-crashes-fifty-years-before-

roswell.html

and here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/06/ufos-youngsters-and-geezers.html

The last part of the show dealt with Eddie’s study of alien abduction, based on his analysis of those stories. He provided some interesting comments on abductions, and we did get into a few specifics. I think that the conclusions we draw will surprise a few people.

Next week’s show: Adam Dew (Yes, that Adam Dew).

Topic: The Roswell Slides

UFO Crashes Fifty Years Before Roswell

Zoamchomsky, in response to a comment in the last posting, suggested that there had been stories of UFO crashes for more than fifty years prior to the Roswell case. He was asked to provide sources but that isn’t really necessary. There is plenty of evidence that this is true and for those who would like to see a long listing of them, including a story or two that are centuries old, take a look at Crash: When UFOs Fall from the Sky.

In 1897 the Great Airship was being seen all over the Midwest and Southern states, with occasional excursions into the West. A report from San Angelo, Texas, for example, mentioned that the airship had flown into a flock of birds and exploded. In Waterloo, Iowa, the airship was found on the fairgrounds, and while not a crash, was certainly a landing, complete with crew members who described their flight.

The big story, and the one that nearly everyone has heard about, is the crash in Aurora, Texas on April 17, 1897. I have believed since I investigated the case in the early 1970s that it was a hoax. I talked to longtime residents, some who had been alive in 1897, to the Wise County historian (Aurora being in Wise County) and searched what records were available. I could find no follow up investigation, and nothing about it was mentioned in the Wise County histories, one published within ten years of the event. In other words, there simply wasn’t any evidence that there had been a crash with the exception of the original story in a Dallas newspaper in 1897.

Why mention this now, after having already posted about it a long time ago (See Aurora, Texas - A Story that Won’t Die, March 27, 2005)? Well, in the process of consolidating files and clearing out duplications and other clutter, I found a strip of black and white photographic negatives. I had not seen them in decades. I knew that I had them I just couldn’t put my hands on them.

When I held them up to the light to see what they were, I saw a picture that had a sign that said, “Aurora” and taken at what had been an Arco gas station on the outskirts of Aurora. There were a couple of other pictures of that, and knew that it was an old habit of taking three pictures at different exposures to ensure that one would be usable.

The prize, however, were the last three pictures. They were taken in the Aurora Cemetery at time I was there. They look as if they were taken in a rainstorm with a dense cloud cover. Given today’s technology, I was able to clean them up slightly so they are better than they were.

There is nothing startling on these pictures. The headstone with the three balls on it is not visible. When I was there, walking the graveyard, I didn’t see that stone and now it has disappeared. It was supposedly the marker of the “Martian’s” grave.

I print the pictures here for the little historical value they have. There is nothing on the negatives to prove when I was there or when I took them and too the real cynic, there is nothing on them to prove that I was actually there. However, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I did live in Texas, not all that far by Texas standards, from Aurora, so I took some time to explore the sighting. I will say, one last time so that it is clear, I do not believe that an alien craft crashed at Aurora and, in fact, don’t believe that anything crashed there on April 17, 1897.

UFOs, Youngsters and Geezers

There has been another call for we geezers to retire from the UFO field so that the younger, more energetic, more enlightened, and better equipped to investigate can move to the front. I say, speaking from my position as a geezer, "Nonsense."

This idea that the youth will be able to move forward without we rearward looking geezers in the way doesn’t float... not just because they’re young and not just because they’re more enlightened but because we’ll end up fighting the same battles again and again.

There are any number of reports that I thought we’d driven the stake through so that we wouldn’t be forced to study them again, but such is not the case. Take the Allende Letters. Here is a case in which there is no evidence beyond the demented musings of a man who didn’t seem to have a firm grasp on reality and who admitted that the whole thing was hoax more than thirty years ago. That’s right, Carlos Allende, or as he was born, Carl Allen, admitted, in a written statement to Jim Lorenzen, then the international director of APRO, that he had made up the whole tale.

And today we have to fight through those who still accept the Philadelphia Experiment, which is part of the whole Allende Letter episode again. Not to mention those who claim their identities were changed so that they can say they were part of the original experiment without having to explain why their names don’t surface anywhere in the case until much later or why they aren’t old enough to have participated. They time travel... There are some who actually believe this nonsense.

Oh, and we have to explain, again, that the Office of Naval Research didn’t take the letters and the annotated book seriously. That much of what was suggested in the book and the letters has been proven to be in error. And that Allende annotated everything he got from birthday cards to traffic citations.

Finally, I received, just a couple of days ago an email from someone who had new information about the Philadelphia experiment. He seemed to be unaware of the history of the case.

Or we can look at the Aurora, Texas UFO crash from 1897. Here was a story that appeared in the newspapers of the time but seemed to have no follow up written about it and a case that disappeared until the 1960s.

So, there I was, living not all that far from Aurora, Texas. It seemed that it might be a good idea for me to drive up there and see if I could learn anything about the crash. Now, remember, this was the early 1970s, and while 1897 was seventy or seventy-five years earlier, there were still people living who had been in the town in 1897. I talked to some of those same longtime residents who told me that nothing had happened in 1897.

There was one old fellow, his hands all twisted and disfigured who had been there in 1897 and who would later appear in some of the documentaries about the crash. He told me, when I was there, that nothing had happened. Had it been as big a deal as had been reported in the newspaper, he surely would remember something about it.

Later, as the story grew and many others arrived, he told them a different tale. Now he was suggesting that there had been a crash. He described some of what he saw, but I just couldn’t accept these new and better tales. I’d talked to him before it became a way to find some local fame. I’d talked to him before the people showed up with the television cameras and bright lights.

I also talked to the historians at the Wise County Historical Society (Aurora is in Wise County) who told me that it hadn’t happened, though they wished it had. I learned that T.J. Weems, the famed Signal Corps officer was, in fact, the local blacksmith. I learned that Judge Proctor didn’t have a windmill, or rather that was what was said then. Now they suggest that he had two windmills. I wandered the grave yard, which isn’t all that large (something just over 800 graves) and found no marker with strange symbols carved on it, though there are those who suggest a crude headstone with a rough airship on it had been there at the time. I found nothing to support the tale and went away believing, based on my own research and interviews, this to be another of the airship hoaxes.

A large number of people, including Hayden Hewes of the now defunct International UFO Bureau, Jim Marrs, who has suggested the story was real, and even Walt Andrus, the former International Director of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) at various times journeyed to Aurora in search of the truth. They all reported they found a strange grave marker in the Aurora cemetery, they found strange metal with metal detectors, and they gathered reports from long time Aurora residents who remembered the story, remembered seeing the airship, or remembered parents talking about the crash. There was also discussion of government attempts to suppress the data. To them, that made the story of the crash seem even more real.

Isn’t interesting that the strange grave marker has since disappeared and there is no real photographic record of it. There should be for all the research that has been done and the single picture that has turned up showed not an airship but a coarse triangle with circles in the center. And isn’t interesting that there were never any follow up reports from Aurora. First the big splash with the crash in 1897 and then nothing for more than sixty years.

The final, fatal blow for the airship and Aurora crash comes from the original reporter. H.E. Hayden, a stringer for the Dallas Morning News, who claimed to have invented the story in a vain attempt to put his dying community back on the map. He hoped to draw attention, and people, to Aurora, Texas. He was successful. The problem was that he succeeded sixty years too late and those who arrived only wanted to learn about the airship, not settle down to rebuild the community as he had hoped.

The point, however, is that we revisit cases that have been solved. These youngsters, the alleged new blood with their fresh ideas might have new blood, but their ideas are not fresh. We can expect them to get excited over the old cases that we geezers have eliminated and will now have to disprove once again.

In Ufology, there is a cycle that used to run about every five years, though it has expanded in recent times. New people enter into the study of UFOs, find these old cases and are excited by them and begin to push them. Eventually, they reach the same conclusions as we geezers, but only after a lot debate about the value of the cases and a lot of wasted time, effort and money.

So bring in the new blood but please don’t be surprised when I am unimpressed with their new methods and their new insights. They aren’t advancing the study at all. They are retreating into a past that we could warn them about, but they are too smart to listen to we geezers. We need to just get out of the way so they can follow the old, overgrown paths because they’re just too smart to listen. We need to get out of the way so they can waste their time doing what we’ve already done. They’re too smart to think we have anything more to contribute.