There are maybe 25 people in the auditorium. That's OK. I had not anticipated a big turnout at this Thursday night speaking event at a public library in suburban Dallas. I'm an ex-journalist of basically no repute, and my two co-presenters are not exactly household names either. Tonight's topic, while compelling, seems to me an acquired taste. So this is decent turnout as far as I'm concerned. I'd had some misgivings about taking part in the program tonight, but I am feeling upbeat in the moments before the presentation begins.
That feeling turns to unease not long after I sit onstage and things get underway. I listen with growing concern as my co-presenters, followed eventually by a string of audience members, raise alarming questions about the influence of extraterrestrial species on the course of human history, about the disclosure of United States government secrets pertaining to impossible, reality-warping technologies. These are not my areas of expertise.
In the room there's a sense, which I do not share, that we are privy to some dangerous, forbidden knowledge. I get the impression that people are not interested in anything I have to say.
After the show, a man in the audience comes up and tells us about the time he was abducted and possibly experimented on by strange creatures. Even in the moment, his story washes over me, but I can tell that something violent and unexplainable has happened to this man. He's been subject to a horrible revelation. His eyes are wide. Not like someone raving on the bus, more like someone unburdened, relieved to deliver a closely held confession. He is vulnerable, eager to talk to people who understand where he's coming from and where he's been. His wife stands behind him, nodding.
I am surprised and embarrassed by this scene. Then I am embarrassed about being embarrassed. I don't doubt that this man believes something happened to him — I don't doubt that something did happen to him — but I don't believe the version of the story he has chosen as truth. Considering the tenor of the room, my disbelief feels rude.
I realize too late that I don't belong here, that I am an agnostic in a church of genuine believers. I don't know what I expected. The acronym "UFO" was extremely prominent in the advertising for this event.
I should start in the spring of 1897, when The Dallas Morning News was filled with reports of "a great aerial wanderer" spotted soaring above North Texas, variously compared to a meteor, a cigar with wings, and a "Chinese flying dragon." Most people just called it an airship, echoing descriptions of an unidentified flying object seen elsewhere in the country more than six years before the Wright brothers took off at Kitty Hawk.
The most spectacular report detailed how, on April 17, the airship was over the small town of Aurora when it hit a windmill "and went to pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wrecking the windmill and water tank and destroying the judge's flower garden," reports S.E. Haydon, a stringer for the newspaper. "The pilot of this ship is supposed to have been the only one on board," Haydon continues, "and while his remains are badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world."
The pilot, who much later would come to be called Ned, was buried in the Aurora Cemetery. A heavy stone depicting the airship and marking the supposed grave was stolen years ago, but you'll know the site today by a low boulder covered in UFO trinkets and washed-out Polaroids left behind by visitors.
Over the years the saga of the Aurora airship has been told and retold with different levels of credulity. I took a stab at it in 2021, following in the footsteps of a great many bored Dallas writers who had copy to file and figured some local lore would be good for eight hundred words or so in a slow week. I visited Ned's gravesite and later talked to an old-timer who — to the great disappointment of the UFO investigators I spoke with outside of Aurora — said that his grandmother, a girl at the time of the crash, had remembered the whole airship thing as a hoax. It had been cooked up by locals worried about their small town declining even further after Aurora was hit hard by an epidemic of "spotted fever" and ignored by railroad expansion, he said. (The locals' fears turned out to be justified.)
I didn't break any new ground with my article. I did, however, connect with a Dallas lawyer who was offering a reward for the return of the extraterrestrial pilot's missing gravestone. I liked him. I admired his enthusiasm and shared his earnest wonder at the sheer scale of the universe with all its unknowns. He was also self-aware enough to get how many people viewed a grown adult with a greater than passing interest in UFOs.
The gravestone never turned up and, as far as I know, the offer of a reward for its safe return is still standing. I moved on from the North Texas UFO beat, left journalism, and didn't give another thought to the Martian buried in the Aurora Cemetery for the next two years.
Then one day I received an email from the lawyer. He was putting on a presentation at a local library, something about UFOs and Aurora. He planned to invite one of the state's premier ufologists to join him. Would I be interested in taking part as well, as a local writer with a published interest in the area's most legendary encounter with beings from another planet?
I lingered over the email. I'm not a confident public speaker. I'm barely a writer, not anymore. And my previous research of Aurora had left me thinking that social contagion, media hype, and maybe a few outright bullshitters were likelier culprits behind the 19th century airship phenomenon than any men from Mars. However, I enjoyed the folklore and figured I could focus on that aspect of the story, unearthing some interesting tidbits about how local legends evolve over the years.
Sure, I eventually decided to tell the lawyer. I'll do it. Why not?
We have slides, projected on a big screen in the library's auditorium. Mine reflect the reading I'd done in advance. There is Wallace O. Chariton's The Great Texas Airship Mystery (1991), the most comprehensive and even-keeled account I could find on the spate of UFO sightings that gripped the state in 1897. There is Leslie Kean's UFOs (2011), sharing military pilots and government officials' sober accounts of mysterious craft defying the laws of physics.
There is Jacques Vallee, an unconventional and very fun thinker whose 1969 Passport to Magonia chronicles thousands of years of human encounters with mysterious aerial wanderers. Vallee, always high-brow under his tinfoil hat, contends that the phenomenon is much stranger than skeptics or most ufologists allow, likely inter-dimensional rather than extra-terrestrial in nature, perhaps acting as a sort of "control system" shaping human consciousness throughout time.
In the presentation I also quote Jung, who a decade after Roswell wrote about the "modern myth" of flying saucers, describing the UFO as a "technological angel" updating our ancient belief in heavenly interventions to embody Cold War anxieties. For Jung, the disc shape of the UFO of the mid-20th century is a mandala projected by our collective unconscious, symbolizing the wholeness and order we desire in a jittery world.
I'm especially enamored of a more recent book, D.W. Pasulka's American Cosmic, which explores how contemporary belief in UFOs and extraterrestrial visitors can be understood as an emerging religious system. God is out. Technology is in. We interpret our encounters with the ineffable through the culture at hand, so of course the closest thing we have to a mystical experience in the 21st century resembles The X-Files or something half-remembered from the Joe Rogan podcast more than it does the Old Testament.
This is what I say to the 25-plus people in the auditorium. The Aurora crash? Didn't happen, but we could always use more vibrant local folklore. The airship phenomenon? The 19th century version of the angels we saw in the first century, or the flying saucers we saw in the 20th century, or the drones we see today. UFOs? Potent symbols with some relevance for us here in Texas today. I think this is all more interesting than talking about out-of-this-world visitors.
I am not sure that my co-presenters agree. The esteemed ufologist breaks down the history of UFO sightings in Texas and across the U.S., roaming far outside the realm of local folklore. The lawyer reveals, clicking through a slideshow of vacation photos, that he has visited Central American pyramids, Machu Picchu in Peru, other historical archeological sites that, he suggests, may have been built with extraterrestrial assistance. I recognize this line of thought from the television show Ancient Aliens.
The Q&A portion of the evening revolves around extraterrestrial encounters and interstellar travelers, and at this point I understand these people must think I'm an asshole. It's only after the show that I start to agree with them. I'd spoken about folklore, abstractions, a bunch of postmodern philosophical hooey that has never helped anyone ever live a better life. A man with a job and a wife is explaining to me that his physical body, not a mental projection or symbolic representation of his spirit, was taken by supernatural beings. This crowd is more invested in the real world than I ever will be.
There's a story the Catholic author Flannery O'Connor told about an exchange she had with Mary McCarthy, a writer and critic who had left the Church. They were discussing the Eucharist, the sacrament during which Catholics believe the presence of Jesus Christ is made real in the consecrated bread and wine served at mass. McCarthy considered it to be a pretty good symbol. "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it," O'Connor replied.
People don't believe in symbols. We believe in what we can touch or see or otherwise know through direct experience. If it's not real, in the way that things can only be real in the physical world, then what's the point? "That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me," O'Connor later said about the Eucharist. "All the rest of life is expendable."
This is the kind of conviction that separates true religious feeling from any other strongly held belief. It's a feeling that can send people on pilgrimages, including to Machu Picchu to look for signs of nonhuman intelligence, and that can sustain a daily life with the conviction that there is much more to this world than we know. You have to choose this leap of faith. You have to "want to believe," as The X-Files poster had it.
You also just have to believe. And I feel the same way in this library auditorium that I often feel at mass, and that I have felt at Protestant churches and Buddhist temples. I've read all the books and I've observed all the rituals. I see the beauty in things seen and unseen and find the intellectual case compelling. I want to believe. But I don't. Not really, not in the same way that I believe in the tips of my fingers hitting this keyboard, in the glass of melting ice sitting on the table next to me, in the solidity of the tree outside my window.
I say something inconsequential to the man who was abducted by aliens and his wife. I shake hands with the esteemed ufologist and with the lawyer who invited me here. I go home, slightly ashamed of myself. Some time later, the lawyer sends me another email to ask if I want to repeat the presentation at another Dallas suburb's library. He sees potential to take this thing on the road across North Texas, possibly beyond. I don't respond.
Every now and then, I search "Aurora UFO" on the internet to check if there have been any breaks with the missing gravestone. And whenever there's a new video, some grainy footage from a Navy test flight showing an oddly shaped drone, a strange light recorded above the desert, I watch every second of it, hoping I see something I've never seen before.