extraordinary%20encounters

plosion, scattering debris over several acres of
ground, wrecking the windmill and tower and
destroying [windmill owner Judge J. S. Proctor’s]
flower garden,” correspondent S. E.
Haydon wrote. Haydon went on to report
that citizens who rushed to the scene found
the body of a “badly disfigured” being whom
one observer identified as a Martian. The
story concluded with the news that the funeral
would occur the next day.
The story appeared in the midst of a wave
of what today would be called UFO sightings,
which had begun in northern California in
November 1896 and moved eastward by the
following spring, when newspapers all over
America were full of strange and often fanciful
stories. The Morning News carried no followup,
suggesting it did not take the tale seriously
enough to dispatch one of its own reporters to
the site. In any event, it wasn’t the only wild
airship yarn the paper was carrying. The day
before it printed the Aurora story, it recounted
a Kaufman County sighting of a “Chinese flying
dragon. . . . The legs were the propellers.”
At Farmersville, the paper stated, the occupants
of an airship sang “Nearer My God to
Thee” and distributed temperance tracts.
The episode of the Aurora Martian was forgotten
until the 1960s, when public fascination
with UFOs led to research into the phenomenon’s
early history. In 1966 a Houston
Post writer revived the Aurora story, which he
apparently took at face value. Investigators
went to the tiny town and spoke with elderly
residents. Most, if they remembered the
episode at all, dismissed it as a joke. One said
that Haydon had concocted the tale to draw
attention to the town, which in the 1890s was
suffering a serious decline in its fortunes.
Still, rumors persisted that a grave in the
Aurora cemetery housed an unknown occupant,
perhaps the Martian. As late as 1973,
ufologist Hayden Hewes was trying to persuade
local people to let him exhume the
grave, a notion that Aurora’s residents vehemently
rejected. Confusing matters further,
two elderly residents were now claiming that
they had known persons who saw the wreck-
Ausso 35
age. Analysis of metal samples allegedly of the
airship, however, proved it was an aluminum
alloy of fairly recent vintage.
There is no reason to believe that a Martian
died in Aurora, Texas, late in the nineteenth
century. Still, the legend inspired the 1985
film Aurora Encounter, a low-budget ET set in
the Old West, and it remains one of Texas’s
more exotic folktales.
See Also: Allingham’s Martian; Brown’s Martians;
Dead extraterrestrials; Dentons’s Martians and
Venusians; Hopkins’s Martians; Khauga; Martian
bees; Mince-Pie Martians; Monka; Muller’s Martians;
Shaw’s Martians; Smead’s Martians;
Wilcox’s Martians
Further Reading
Chariton, Wallace O., 1991. The Great Texas Airship
Mystery. Plano, TX: Wordware Publishing.
Cohen, Daniel, 1981. The Great Airship Mystery: A
UFO of the 1890s. New York: Dodd, Mead and
Company.
Masquelette, Frank, 1966. “Claims Made of UFO
Evidence.” Houston Post (June 13).
Randle, Kevin D., 1995. A History of UFO Crashes.
New York: Avon Books.
Simmons, H. Michael, 1985. “Once upon a Time in
the West.” Magonia 43 (July): 3–11.
Ausso
Ausso is an extraterrestrial allegedly encountered
by Wyoming elk hunter E. Carl Higdon,
Jr., on October 25, 1974. Five hours
after he called for help, authorities found Higdon
inside his pickup in an area inaccessible
to all but four-wheel-drive vehicles. Taken to a
nearby hospital, the shaken and disoriented
Higdon claimed to have encountered a
strange being named Ausso who flew him in a
spaceship to another world where he was
taken to a mushroom-shaped tower. While inside
the tower, Higdon saw what looked like
normal human beings, who paid no attention
to him. Ausso explained that he was a
hunter/explorer, and he and his people were
visiting Earth to collect animals for breeding
purposes and for food. Soon Higdon was
flown back to Earth and put back in his truck.
Polygraph tests given Higdon in 1975 and
1976 produced ambiguous results, but psychological
inventories suggested that he did