Hi there. A truly splendiferous day to you! Help yourself to a mug of fresh coffee and a treat. Say, I have to confess. I was bad yesterday. Paul and Neng were in from Tokyo (well Paul was…Neng was already here and Nong and I arrived at the mall about an hour or so ahead of them so we ventured into the Food Court.
Well, lo and behold, what was Carrefour (the French Mall Chain) had turned into Bic C (another local mall chain). Not only that but even more traumatic, the booth that sells my favourite raisin Danish was gone and in its place a…wait for it…doughnut booth. Well, being a daring individual, I thought I had better try one of their specialties, a chewy something or other kind of like a thin cruller, cream filled and a squirrily line of chocolate on top. Not bad. My fingers and I enjoyed it. It was on the bottom shelf though! What was I going to talk to you about today? Oh yeah…cowboys and aliens. I liberated this story from “Life’s Little Mysteries”…
The new film "Cowboys and Aliens," starring Harrison "Indiana Jones" Ford and Daniel "James Bond" Craig, opened this week and is likely to snatch the top spot at the box office this weekend. The anachronistic sci-fi thriller tells the story of extraterrestrials who attack a small New Mexico town in search of — well, I won't give away any spoilers.
But what about sightings and reports of aliens in the Old West? Surprisingly, there actually are a few reports of extraterrestrial encounters in the 1800s. In those days folks didn't use terms like "UFO" or "flying saucer" (that phrase didn't appear until 1947), but instead referred to spacecraft as "airships."
By far the most detailed (and most dramatic) encounter between cowboys and aliens occurred in 1897 Texas. This account ran in the April 19 Dallas Morning News: "About 6 o'clock this morning the early risers of Aurora [Texas] were astonished at the sudden appearance of the airship which has been sailing throughout the country. It was traveling due north and sailed over the public square and when it reached the northern part of town it collided with the tower of Judge Proctor's windmill and went to pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground."
This is remarkable enough, but the account takes on an even more modern twist: "The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one aboard, and while his remains were disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world. Mr. T.J. Weems [of] the U.S. Army... gives his opinion that the pilot was a native of the planet Mars. Papers found on his person — evidently the records of his travels — are written in some unknown hieroglyphics, and cannot be deciphered... The ship was built of an unknown metal, resembling somewhat a mixture of aluminum and silver, and must have weighed several tons. The town today is full of people who are viewing the wreckage and gathering specimens of strange metal from the debris."
This amazing UFO encounter, complete with a crashed spacecraft, dozens of witnesses, a recovered dead Martian, and metallic wreckage came not from a novelist but instead a credible witness and respected reporter for the newspaper, a Mr. E.E. Haydon. Fifty years later, a nearly identical story would circulate about another, very similar UFO crash in a neighboring state: Roswell, N.M.
The late UFO investigator Phil Klass researched this encounter between cowboys and aliens for his book “UFOs Explained." The accounts by witnesses fell apart under close scrutiny. No follow-up newspaper stories appeared about this amazing incident; no witnesses could be found to support Haydon's story, and nothing of the alien nor his "several tons" of mysterious metallic spacecraft wreckage was ever found. Plus, it was later revealed that Judge Proctor didn't even have a windmill for the alien to crash into! It turned out that Haydon had made the whole thing up as a publicity stunt to get people to come to the dying Texas town. Once a lively and bustling frontier town frequented by prospectors on their way to the Gold Rush, Aurora had fallen on hard times and needed a tourism boost.
It was a cracking good yarn while it lasted. Stories of cowboys and aliens have entertained us for well over a century, though hard evidence of extraterrestrials remains as elusive as ever.
They’re out there…somewhere…waiting… maybe for the rights to a Tim Horton’s or Krispy Kreme franchise on their home planet.
See ya…
Bob
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