Aurora, Texas

Aurora is a small town in the northwestern corner of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.

It gained some fame from a purported UFO incident: on April 17, 1897 a cigar-shaped "mystery airship" (one of several such reported sightings across the United States at that time) purportedly crashed into a windmill north of the city. The legend states that the pilot (reported as an "alien" and "not of this world") was reportedly given a Christian burial in the local cemetery (the incident is noted on a state historical marker outside the cemetery).

Notwithstanding numerous investigations attempting to prove the story, it is widely believed the event was a hoax portrayed by a local resident (who wrote the original article for the Dallas newspaper). The hoax theory stems from two points:

• The town had undergone a series of tragedies (boll weevil infestation destroying local cotton crops, a fire destroying a good part of the town, a spotted fever epidemic placing the town under quarantine, and finally the failure of a railroad to reach the town) and it was believed that the resident wrote the story as a last-ditch effort to save the town from extinction.
• Notably, the writer never did any follow-up report on the story, not even to report on the "burial".

The legend persists, however, due to the fact that the local cemetery association has refused all requests to exhume the "body" of the supposed alien.