In 1897, locals of Aurora, Texas reported a UFO had crashed in their town. They supposedly discovered the body of an extraterrestrial, buried it in the cemetery, and never spoke of it again. Decades later, an Aurora resident claims the whole thing was a hoax, which prompts several UFO investigations to set out to either dig up the body...or the truth Conspiracy Theories is on Instagram @theconspiracypod! Follow us to keep up with the show and get behind-the-scenes updates from Carter and the team. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Bill Case pulled up to the cemetery in Aurora, Texas in the spring of 1973. The UFO investigator had been here before. He just never found what he was looking for. Information could be hard to come by in Aurora, but recently one of Bill's contacts smuggled a message out of a hospital. Written by an 89-year-old patient, it began, you're looking at the wrong grave. It also included directions.
Bill stalked through the gates of the cemetery and made his way to the southern quadrant. His eyes were peeled for a gnarled 200-year-old oak tree. Finally, he found it in the oldest section of the cemetery. A roughly hewn triangular slab of stone sat underneath its branches. Etched into the stone's surface was an image, a long, thin oval surrounding three circles –
It almost looked like a submarine with three portholes running down the side. But Bill knew better. It was a UFO, and the stone marked the grave of the spaceship's alien pilot. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. New episodes come out every Wednesday. You can listen to the audio everywhere and watch the video only on Spotify.
And be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. Stay with us. Aurora, Texas has always been a small town, but when it was first established in 1882, it was part of a big vision. Surveyors made plans for a train line to stop in town on its way across Texas. The railroad promised to drive tourism, boost local businesses, and put Aurora on the map in more ways than one.
But before it could be finished, the town encountered one hardship after another. First, there were the crops. In the early 1890s, Aurora's farmers overplanted and overworked the land they used to grow cotton. a major source of income for the town. As the soil lost its potency and eroded away, harvests suffered, and so did the economy.
An infestation of weevils destroyed the few cotton plants they had. Watch out for weevils. Then there was the fire. On a gusty day in the mid 1890s, a blaze broke out that obliterated the entire western portion of the city. Businesses burned to the ground, destroying Aurora's economic center. Then, in 1889, spotted fever swept across town. As the outbreak spread, citizens fled.
Townspeople moved to nearby municipalities, and Aurora practically emptied out overnight. Those who remained clung to the hope that the incoming railroad would restore prosperity and a sense of normalcy to the town. Then, after a drawn-out intensive survey process, interest in the project mysteriously disappeared.
In the early 1890s, a new train station opened in the neighboring Rome, Texas instead. Without the railroad to bring in new visitors, the town felt forgotten. But in 1897, something changed. Aurora became a part of the national story in a way no one expected.
Legend has it, one night in mid-April around 6 a.m., the farmers of Aurora looked up from their fields to see a strange craft hovering through the sky. At first, it appeared to be one of the airships that had been spotted all across the country in recent months, and they kept reading about it in the papers. It looked like a giant silver flying cigar with a bright white light attached to it.
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