Tag: Texas

Texas’ History of UFO Sightings

Article by Bartee Haile                                October 28, 2020                                  (haysfreepress.com)

  • Texas’ history is full of UFO sightings. In 1873, stupefied farmworkers in Bonham, Texas, northeast of Dallas, reported that they an enormous “serpentine object” float overheard in broad daylight.
  • This event was followed twenty years later by the first nationwide commotion concerning UFOs known as the ‘Great Airship Mystery’ in1896-97 when Americans saw giant propeller-powered flying machines slowly travel from the West Coast to the East over a six-month period. This was prior to the invention of the Wright Brothers’ first airplane. On Nov. 19, 1896, as an oblong craft flew over Oakland, California, witnesses said that they heard voices, laughter and Christmas carols emanating from the craft. In the weeks that followed, flying cigars and cylinders were spotted over Omaha, Kansas City, St. Louis and countless other communities. In April 1897, an entire fleet of UFO’s caused a high-altitude traffic jam over metropolitan Chicago.
  • A former Kansas Congressman reported an encounter when an airship hovered 30 feet off the ground and he could see six odd-looking creatures were plainly visible inside a transparent undercarriage. The shaken ex-lawmaker said, “I don’t know whether they were angels, devils or what.”
  • Popular speculation hinted that the flying contraptions were the secret creations of Thomas Edison, proof of the public’s boundless confidence in the inventive genius. But Edison indignantly denied any involvement and dismissed the strange phenomena as an elaborate fraud.
  • Meanwhile, a Dallas newspaper reported the crash of a spaceship in the town of Aurora, Texas near Fort Worth. According to a local correspondent named S.E. Hayden, the craft collided with a windmill and exploded killing the lone alien occupant. The blast “scattered debris over several acres of ground” but enough remained of the intergalactic guest “to show he was not an inhabitant of this world.” A local ‘authority’ on astronomy determined that the strange looking pilot of the craft “was a native of the planet Mars.” The deceased was given a Christian burial in Aurora.
  • November 1951 saw the “Lubbock Lights” media frenzy when blue lights were observed and photographed by numerous eyewitnesses streaking across the sky on a crystal clear night over the Texas panhandle. Unable to dismiss four Texas Tech professors and an Atomic Energy Commission representative as crackpots, the Air Force blamed the light show on migratory birds.
  • In 1957, glowing “eggs” materialized on highways outside Levelland, Texas, near Lubbock. Folks driving on the highway near the glowing orbs had their car engines suddenly die. Government investigators blamed them on ‘ball lightning’. But in 1973, the incident renewed the public’s interest in UFOs. Some of them went to the site of the old Aurora UFO incident but failed to find a single fragment of the shattered spacecraft. A team of Oklahoma UFO hunters requested to exhume the ‘Martian’ body in the Aurora cemetery, but were flatly denied. A guard was posted at the burial ground. Later on, the entire April 1897 Aurora incident was completely debunked as fiction, made up by the townspeople.
  • Still, hoaxes, birds and ball lightning cannot explain the thousands of sightings in Texas and elsewhere for over a century. To borrow the tag line from a popular television show of the 1990’s, the truth may still be out there.

 

A torpedo-shaped sphere cruised the night sky over the West Texas town of Levelland on Nov. 2, 1957, while on the ground mysterious “eggs of light” blocked the roads.

illustration of 19th century airship above Denton County, Texas

The reexamination of the so-called “Roswell Incident” in the 1990’s revived interest in Unidentified Flying Objects. Although nothing in the Lone Star past can compete with the controversial claim that a flying saucer crashed in the New Mexico desert 73 years ago, Texas history is full of out-of-this-world sightings.

Farmworkers at Bonham filed one of the earliest reports on record in 1873. Stupefied laborers swore they saw an enormous “serpentine object” float overheard in broad daylight.

This obscure episode preceded by a generation the Great Airship Mystery, the first nationwide commotion concerning UFO’s. Starting on the Pacific coast in November 1896 and slowly moving eastward for six sensational months, thousands of Americans insisted they gazed upon giant flying machines two decades before the Wright brothers mastered heavier-than-air flight.

An oblong, propeller-powered craft supposedly churned against the wind over Sacramento on Nov. 19, 1896. The next day a similar airship mystified

                     “Lubbock Lights”

Oakland, where onlookers said they heard voices, laughter and Christmas carols.

During the wacky weeks that followed, flying cigars and cylinders were spotted over Omaha, Kansas City, St. Louis and countless other communities. In April 1897, an entire fleet of UFO’s caused a high-altitude traffic jam over metropolitan Chicago.

A former congressman had a Kansas encounter of the much-too-close kind. As an airship hovered 30 feet off the ground, six odd-looking creatures were plainly visible inside a transparent undercarriage. The shaken ex-lawmaker said, “I don’t know whether they were angels, devils or what.”

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North Texas UFO Sightings Date Back 140 Years

by Donna Hunt             April 3, 2018              (heralddemocrat.com)

• In January 1878, the Denison Daily News (Denison, Texas) ran an article on a farmer living some six miles north of Dallas named John Martin who saw a dark object high in the sky while out hunting one morning. It was the size of an orange and as it moved toward him it continued to grow in size until it was nearly over his head. Martin was quoted as saying, “[it] had increased considerably in size as it went through space at what he called ‘a wonderful speed’.” When it was directly over him, it was about the size of a large ‘saucer’. It the sped away as quickly as it had come. This may have been the first published account of a UFO sighting.

• Five years earlier, in June 1873 in Bonham, Texas (also north of Dallas), a farmer looked up from his work to see what looked like an enormous flying snake, banded with brilliant yellow swipes, writhing and twisting in the sky above him in broad daylight. It then disappeared quickly to the east. Many townspeople saw the UFO with most of them running indoors or diving under their wagons. The object circled Bonham twice then vanished out of sight. Twenty-four hours later, a UFO of the same description was sighted over Fort Scott, Kansas.

• On the morning of April 17, 1897 in Aurora, Texas (northwest of Dallas), a spaceship was seen approaching from the southwest. It crashed into a windmill and broke into pieces. It was said that the sole occupant of the spaceship perished in the crash. Aurora citizens saw for themselves what was described as a “small being, not of this world”, badly disfigured. The “Martian pilot”, or “Ned the Martian”, was buried in the local cemetery with a headstone that became the target of pranksters and souvenir hunters.

• In May of 1981, Denison, Texas resident, Jim Shelton saw a “cigar-like shaped” UFO with green and yellow pulsating lights and fire streaming from the rear.

• In 1953, a long-range, early warning radar technician at Perrin Air Force Base (in northern Texas on the Oklahoma border) saw a huge blip in the New York area. Air Force bases in Denver and Salt Lake City confirmed the anomaly. F-86 fighters were ordered to intercept and destroy the UFO. The UFO was traveling south from Oklahoma toward Dallas as fighter jets zeroed in on the object. Suddenly the object stopped, turned northwest and sped away at a terrific speed.

• Afterward, a group of about eight men in civilian suits and fourteen uniformed armed guards came into the Perrin AFB radar hut, separated the radar technicians and took each of them at gunpoint to a hangar on the back side of the field where they were interrogated for four hours. They each drew diagrams of what they saw and wrote a narrative of everything that took place. They had to sign a document that threatened them with a $10,000 fine and 10 years in prison for violating the Official Secrets Act. The former technician (who would be in his 90’s or older now, if living) said the “fear of God” was put into them to never talk about it to anyone.

 

Back in 2005 when I told my husband I was going to write a column on unidentified flying objects, he told me not to do it because it would open a real can of worms. He was so smart. Today when I pulled my UFO file out of the cabinet, it is at least an inch thick.

But here goes again. This morning, I read an article by Dana Branham in The Dallas Morning News about a Dallas lawyer looking for a gravestone for a Martian named Ned that had been stolen from a cemetery in Aurora, Texas. It rang a bell.

Sure enough, about half the articles in my file contain information, not about a gravestone, but about a sighting in January 1878 in the Denison Daily News. That’s pretty close to the April 1897 date that Ned, the Martian is supposed to have crashed his spaceship in Aurora, northwest of Dallas.

An early day article in The Denison Herald questioned whether the 1878 sighting could have been the first printed report of a UFO sighting that took place, quoting John Martin, a farmer living some six miles north of Dallas, who said on a Tuesday morning, while he was out hunting, his attention was directed to a dark object high up in the northern sky.

He said the peculiar shape and the velocity with which the object seemed to approach riveted his attention and he trained his eyes to discover its character. He said it was about the size of an orange and continued to grow in size. After watching it for some time he said he became blind from long-looking and left off viewing it for a time to rest his eyes. When he resumed looking, the object was almost overhead, he said, and had increased considerably in size as it went through space at what he called “a wonderful speed.”

When it was directly over him, it was about the size of a large saucer or as he could judge at such a distance, a balloon that seemed to him to be the most reasonable solution of the strange phenomenon. It left as quickly as it had appeared and he soon lost sight in the southern sky Martin said.

This “saucer” hadn’t yet been associated with UFOs and wouldn’t become a part of the UFO craze for almost 75 years. But unexplained objects high up in the sky have been around a lot longer that that, at least in the North Texas sky.

Bonham in Fannin County had a sighting even before the 1878 one in Denison. According to an Internet timetable of the “unexplained.” In 1873, it is said that a huge cigar-shaped object swooped low over Bonham on two occasions in broad daylight then disappeared quickly to the east.

A Bonham farmer in June of that year said he looked up from his work and was astonished by what looked like an enormous flying snake, banded with brilliant yellow swipes, writhing and twisting in the sky above him.

Another Internet article titled “Serpents in the Sky,” went into greater detail about the “sighting.” It related that in broad daylight a fast moving object appeared in the sky southwest of Bonham. The people there first stared at it, not believing their eyes. It is believed that they may have seen drifting balloons before, but this was so large and traveling so fast that it was almost a blur, according to the article.

The story goes that farmers were so scared that they dived under their wagons and towns people ran inside. Only a few of the braver were said to have stood their ground and watched as the object circled Bonham twice then vanished. Some said the object was round and others said oval to cigar shaped. Twenty-four hours later, a device of the same description was sighted over Fort Scott, Kansas.

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