Aurora Cemetery Alien Grave: Texas’ Roswell of 1897

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated September 21, 2026 · How we verify

A single unmarked plot in a small country burying ground north of Fort Worth has done more for the reputation of this part of Texas than any monument in it. The Aurora Cemetery alien grave is said to hold the pilot of an airship that struck a windmill and came apart over a judge’s farm in the spring of 1897. There is a newspaper story behind it, a state historical marker near it, and two televised investigations that dug at it without settling anything. There is no body on record, and no exhumation has ever been allowed.

Quick Facts on the Aurora Grave

• Where: Aurora Cemetery, Aurora, Texas, northwest of Fort Worth
• Date of the reported crash: April 17, 1897, per the newspaper account, describing an event two days earlier
• The source: an article in the Dallas Morning News written by S. E. Haydon
• Official recognition: the cemetery contains a Texas Historical Commission marker mentioning the incident; the state plaque in town labels the tale a “legend”
• The marker: a grave marker that appeared to show a flying saucer was documented in 1973 and later disappeared
• Exhumation: requested twice, refused both times by the cemetery association

What S. E. Haydon Printed on April 17, 1897

The whole affair rests on one piece of small-town correspondence. On April 17, 1897, the Dallas Morning News carried an article by S. E. Haydon describing a UFO crash near Aurora. According to that account the craft had struck a windmill on the property of a Judge J. S. Proctor two days earlier, at around six o’clock in the morning, and broke up. The pilot did not survive.

Haydon’s piece described the pilot as “not of this world.” A reported Army Signal Service officer from nearby Fort Worth, named in the story as T. J. Weems, was quoted speculating that the dead man was a native of Mars. The body was buried “with Christian rites” at the Aurora Cemetery, and a stone was set as a marker for the grave. That stone is no longer there.

It is worth being plain about what this is. The 1897 crash is a newspaper report, not a documented event. No wreckage has ever been produced that anyone could identify as a flying machine, and the only named witness in the original telling is the officer quoted secondhand.

The Sealed Well Under Judge Proctor’s Windmill

One thread of the story runs away from the cemetery and toward the farm. Wreckage from the crash site was reportedly dumped into a nearby well beneath the damaged windmill, with some of it said to have gone into the grave alongside the pilot.

Around 1935, a man named Brawley Oates bought the old Proctor property. He cleaned the debris out of the well so he could use it for water, and afterward developed an extremely severe case of arthritis, which he blamed on water contaminated by whatever had been thrown down the shaft. Oates capped the well with a concrete slab and put an outbuilding on top of it. Writing on the slab dates the work to 1945. Whether the arthritis had anything at all to do with the well is Oates’s own claim and nothing more, but the sealed slab kept the legend physically anchored to a spot on the ground for six decades.

Etta Pegues and the Town the Railroad Missed

The most economical explanation has a name attached to it too. In a 1980 Time magazine interview, an 86-year-old Aurora resident named Etta Pegues said that Haydon had made the entire thing up. Her reasoning was commercial rather than cosmic: she stated that Haydon “wrote it as a joke and to bring interest to Aurora. The railroad bypassed us, and the town was dying.”

That single quotation is the backbone of the hoax theory, and it is a strong one. A dying railroad town with a stringer who had a nose for a story is a tidy account of how a Martian ends up in a Texas graveyard. Pegues also asserted that Judge Proctor never had a windmill on his property, a detail that later investigators disputed.

Bill Case, MUFON and the Marker That Vanished

In 1973 an investigation was led by Bill Case, an aviation writer for the Dallas Times Herald and the Texas state director of the Mutual UFO Network. The work was later featured in the UFO Files episode “Texas’ Roswell,” which first aired on December 19, 2005.

MUFON turned up two people who said they remembered the day. Mary Evans, who was 15 at the time, described her parents visiting the crash site and recounted that a body said to be an alien was found there; she had been forbidden to go. Charlie Stephens, who was 10, said he watched the airship trailing smoke as it headed north toward Aurora, wanted to follow it, and was made to finish his chores instead. He said his father went into town the next day and saw wreckage.

At the cemetery, the investigators located a grave marker that appeared to show a flying saucer of some kind, and their metal detector returned positive readings from the plot. They asked the cemetery association for permission to exhume. The association declined. Afterward the marker disappeared from the cemetery, a three-inch pipe was set into the ground in its place, and the metal detector no longer registered anything at the grave. The presumption was that the metal had been removed. MUFON’s report concluded that the evidence was inconclusive and did not rule out a hoax.

Ground-Penetrating Radar and the Unsealing of the Well

A second television investigation, the UFO Hunters documentary “First Contact,” premiered on November 19, 2008, and got further than the first one in at least one respect. Tim Oates, grandson of Brawley Oates and by then the owner of the property with the sealed well, allowed the investigators to open it.

The water tested with a significant concentration of aluminum but was otherwise normal, and the shaft held no sign of substantial debris; the episode stated that a previous owner had already pulled any large pieces of metal out of it. The team also found the remains of a windmill base near the well, which they presented as a refutation of Etta Pegues’s claim that Proctor had never owned one. Pieces of metal handed over by the landowner tested as mostly aluminum along with an unknown element.

Back at the cemetery, the association again refused exhumation. Using ground-penetrating radar together with photographs from earlier visits, the team identified an unmarked grave in the section that holds other 1890s burials. The grave was badly deteriorated and the radar could not establish what kind of remains, if any, were in it. That is where the physical evidence stops.

What Visitors Report at the Aurora Cemetery Alien Grave

The paranormal reports attached to the plot are anecdotal and have never been verified by anyone. They circulate among visitors and ghost hunting groups rather than appearing in any investigative record, and readers should weigh them accordingly:

• A glow said to come from the ground in the area where the pilot is supposed to lie, which is equally consistent with moonlight on wet stone
• Equipment trouble, with cameras and phones reported to fail or drain near the plot
• Whispers, untraceable humming and sudden cold spots in the older section of the cemetery
• Apparitions and moving lights reported at night, the thinnest and least documented category of all

None of this has been recorded under controlled conditions. What the 1973 and 2008 teams actually measured was metal in the soil that later stopped registering, and a deteriorated unmarked grave of indeterminate contents.

Visiting Aurora Cemetery

This is a working community burial ground, not an attraction, and the people buried around the famous plot have families who still visit them. A Texas Historical Commission marker at the cemetery mentions the incident, and the state plaque in town lays out the story while calling it a legend, which is the most honest signage any UFO site in the country has. There is no marked alien grave to photograph: the stone with the airship on it went missing after 1973 and only a small pipe was left behind.

Come in daylight, stay on the paths, take nothing, and do not dig or probe. Requests to excavate have been turned down twice by the cemetery association, and the sealed well sits on private land.

The Aurora Incident on Film and Record

The story has had a long second life away from the graveyard. A Dallas television station, KDFW, aired a lengthy report in 1998 in which reporter Richard Ray interviewed former Fort Worth Star Telegram reporter Jim Marrs along with local residents who maintained that something crashed at Aurora; the report found no conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial life or technology. The incident was dramatized in the 1986 film The Aurora Encounter, discussed in the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens third-season premiere “Aliens and the Old West,” and retold in an independent short film, Aurora, co-written and co-directed by Thomas Negovan and Aaron Shaps, which folds it together with the Die Glocke conspiracy theory. It was also satirized on The Firesign Theatre’s 1974 comedy album Everything You Know Is Wrong.

Fifty years before Roswell, a Texas farm town got the first version of the story, and it has outlived everyone who could have confirmed or killed it.

Sources

• Aurora Texas Crash Part 1
• The 1897 Aurora, Texas, UFO Crash & the 'Alien' Buried in the Cemetery
• Space Alien Buried Here
• Close Encounters of a Kind
• Aliens: a conspiracy out of this world
• Wikipedia: Aurora, Texas, UFO incident

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