They Lied Before Roswell The 1897 UFO Crash That Started It All

For decades most people believed the UFO mystery began in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. But what if the pattern started 50 years earlier in a small Texas town?

In Aurora, Texas on April 17, 1897, a newspaper reported a strange cigar shaped airship crashing into a windmill on Judge J.S. Proctor’s property. According to the article written by S. E. Hayden in the Dallas Morning News, townspeople discovered wreckage, strange metal fragments, and a pilot described as “not an inhabitant of this world.”

The story claimed the body was buried in the local cemetery while debris from the craft was dumped into a nearby well. Historians debate whether the story was a hoax meant to attract attention to a struggling town, yet the legend never disappeared.

Fifty years later, Roswell shocked the world with reports of a recovered flying disc and a sudden reversal to the weather balloon explanation. Decades after that, in 2023, former intelligence officer David Grusch testified under oath before Congress claiming the U.S. government possesses recovered non human craft and biologics.

Are these events connected through a repeating pattern of crash, recovery, and denial? Or are they simply a century of folklore and speculation?

This episode of WTF examines the Aurora legend, the Roswell incident, and modern whistleblower claims to ask a simple question.

Have UFO crash stories been repeating for more than 100 years?