The 1897 Spaceman

By Alex Troup

“We were standing outside of a little restaurant, I believe, a high school lunchroom, and a kind of green light appeared in the western sky. This was right after sundown. It got brighter and brighter. And then eventually disappeared. It didn’t have any solid substance to it, it was just very peculiar looking light. None of us could understand what it was.”

-Jimmy Carter

https://www.politico.com/staff/andrew-glass

Have you or anyone you know ever seen an unknown object in the sky that you just didn’t understand? President Jimmy Carter did. He saw something the air that he couldn’t identify in Leary, Georgia in 1969. The following story is about a spacecraft in Texas, 72 years before Jimmy Carter witnessed the sighting of a UFO.

Editor’s Note: This story by Alex Troup isn’t exactly a personal story, but a tale of how he discovered and learned about something that happened in the pages of history; it is a story of the past in Texas. However it is still relevant in today’s world as there are still UFO’s or UAP’s (unidentified aerial phenomena) as they are often called. Read on to find out about a mysterious spacecraft that appeared and crashed in1897…

Over the past 40 years one of the most amazing stories I have been made aware of is the story of the 1897 Spaceman. I have had access to the original microfilm that was made from the old news print of The Dallas Morning New.

The story takes place in several places in Texas. One of the areas that the spaceship was sighted is Oak Cliff, a town outside of Dallas. Apparently this UFO operated at a speed that no one could understand in 1897. There was humming sound, some witness had said, with a light shining from the ship’s front nose as it moved about 300 feet in the air and appeared to be searching for something.

The sightings in Texas were well relayed by telegraph and in early edition newspapers. To calm the public, as word got out, organized evening events took place to help see if the craft passed by or stopped in some field of a farmer or rancher. Although communication of the 1897 event was good back in the day, news articles from the era are very rare. Finding descriptions of the spaceship are also scarce.

I ran across the story in the 1970s, when the local paper ran a story on the gravesite of the spaceman. After being sighted in Oak Cliff in 1897, the UFO journeyed to other areas that April. Late in the month that the phenomenon took place, the Spaceman died on impact when the spaceship crashed into a windmill in Aurora, Texas. The farmer found a dead alien spaceman, who would have had a height of about 4 feet. He was wearing a metallic suit, and was in a state of massive decomposition outside his crumpled craft. The spaceship was later thrown down the farm’s water well, near the windmill where the impact took place. The space traveler was later buried with a casket and a tombstone which was rather crudely cut from river rock limestone; someone had drawn with chalk, two round circles that lasted many years in the Aurora cemetery. Frank Tolbert, the reporter from The Dallas Morning News, even did some investigating on this Texas event.

Roswell has dominated the history of alien spaceships, or UFOs, for decades; because of this, the sensation of the 1897 spaceship has been lost. It is a unique story, since there were many sightings that went on to the pages of history on the spaceship’s movement. Decades later, as the story resurfaced, both the gravestone and gravesite of the alien was tampered with. There were numerous searches on the land where the farmer had his water well. Items were found. Some of the things that surfaced and were identified as a metallic; those items disappeared. People kept silent or were paid to remain quiet about the disappearance of the objects. The discovery was so amazing it was compared to the second coming.

The Roswell incident also had mysterious items recovered; they were placed on a silver bomber airplane and shipped to Fort Worth,Texas. A news article told of a large amount of debris that was recovered and gone over. Later the items from the Roswell incident were shipped to Washington DC.

The purity of finding the spaceship at that time is quite amazing. Movies, TV, and other publications made an event such as the sighting of the airship of 1897, a burnt out and mundane theme by 2005. I found the illustrations of the crafts eyewitness view in a primitive folk art composition; it was quite amusing and unique, in terms of imagination on how the spaceship was seen and drawn up. However, people would deny they even saw the craft at the time.

This was an era of flying machine speculation. The term interplanetary travel came to exist in 1895. A series of stories came out in a weekly journal in the year 1898 on how Edison had conquered Mars. The Aurora crash of April 19, 1897 showed how these fragile, vulnerable crafts could be easily brought down by crashing into a windmill. Once they fell off course in their search of a safe place to possibly land, and begin a colony. Perhaps they wanted to observe what monsters may exist that would not be friendly to them once they found a safe place to land.

There were some humane people back then who did not analyze or bomb or even burn spaceman up in a fire…. for the poor 4 foot Spaceman met his Jesus on his way down to 19th century earth, when he crashed into a Texas weather vane.

Sources

• Dallas Morning News 1897
• Post Magazine 1947 Roswell
• Fort Worth Star Telegram 1947 Plane Lands From Roswell
• Frank Tolbert Dallas Morning News The Little Green Man
• Jim Wheat Aliens From Mars