Can a space alien rest in peace?[AURORA-Texas]

A barking dog runs up and down the length of the chain-link fence. His frenzied warning: Come any closer, I'll tear you to pieces.

I knock on the door. No answer. I knock again and hear a voice. I knock one more time and notice two eyes peeking from behind some blinds. Flashing my badge, I explain I'm doing a story about the alien.

"When people come here, I know they come to see him 'cause they go straight for that tree. The one over there that curves like an arm."

I turn around to face the cemetery and hear the door shut. The tree is a massive knotted oak with sinewy limbs that look like the long, arthritic fingers of a grandma.

The cemetery is the site of Texas' most famous UFO crash. On April 16, 1897, six years before the Wright brothers made history at Kitty Hawk, a cigar-shaped object crashed into a windmill here. Some say an alien inside the craft survived the crash. Others say it died and the townspeople here gave it a proper Christian burial.

But right there in the shade of the tree, there's just a bunch of dead grass, surrounded by headstones so old the wind and rain have worn the inscriptions.

"John Holt," one reads, "Born Oct. 13, 1821, Died Oct. 10, 1885." Other headstones mark births and deaths only five or six years apart.

The only sign of an alien is a historical marker that sits at the the cemetery's entrance: "This site is also well-known because of the legend that a spaceship crashed nearby in 1897."

Aurora is a one-stoplight town of 853 residents in Wise County, just north of Fort Worth. There's Tater Junction, a restaurant that looks like three double-wides cobbled together, and just down the road, Piddle & Play Gifts, Etc.

Pointing at a hill across the street, she said the alien crashed on the property of Judge Proctor.

Brawley Oates bought the property, and his grandson lives there now, she said. The grandson blames his arthritis on the left-over wreckage, which was thrown into a well.

In the 1970s, the International UFO Bureau found out about Aurora. Trying to get permission to exhume the body, the private group, led by Hayden Hewes of Oklahoma City, went to a judge, and the media descended on the small town. It was the first time Aurora had seen this type of attention.

"There was quite a mess," said Tedrow. "The residents had guns and everything, because they didn't want them to do it.

"And I understand, because my parents are buried there, and I don't want them digging around. Earthly body or not, they ought to let it rest in peace."

Tedrow sends me up the street to City Hall, a white brick building with a couple of offices and a big conference room.

Toni Kelly-Richardson, the city administrator, brings out a box full of documents and newspaper clippings. She hands me her business card, black with a silhouetted alien on it.

"Do I believe?" she asks. "Oh, why not? It'd be incredibly naive to think we're the only people in the universe."

In the box in her office there's a yellowed copy of a local newspaper with a picture of kids sitting near a headstone. Richardson says a stone engraved with a delta and a couple of circles used to be near the base of the oak tree. During the '70s, when the world found out about Aurora, the stone disappeared — stolen, some say.

There's one thing missing from the box: a contemporary newspaper article documenting the alien's crash. The article was written by E.E. Hayden, a Dallas Morning News reporter. He said the spaceship was the same one that had been traveling all over the country. In UFO circles, 1897 is known as the Year of the Great Airships because of sightings that were reported everywhere from Illinois to Texas.

The spaceship, Hayden wrote, "collided with the tower of Judge Proctor's windmill and went into 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. The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one aboard and, while his remains were badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world."

When talk turns to the alien, everyone in Aurora sort of smirks. It seems a joke, but not quite, because after 110 years the story has become legend.

Richardson smirks. Maybe because she didn't want to tell me what she was about to tell me. Or perhaps because she thought it was silly.

"My previous mayor," she says, "said the original gravestone is still there. It's out back by the fence line."

The Wise County Heritage Museum is a stone building, a former Baptist college in Decatur, the county seat, about 20 miles north of Aurora.

Inside are old typewriters and what appear to be printers, old and worn with large rollers and metal lettering.

Rosalie Gregg, executive director of the historical society, emerges from her office. A tall, fair-skinned woman with crystal-blue eyes, Gregg has lived in Wise County most of her life.

Next to the birth and death records, she keeps a box of papers pertaining to the Aurora alien. She says there's a flurry of alien questions every three or four years. She responds to every query.

In the box there are probably hundreds of typewritten letters that start the same way: "It didn't happen."

Hayden wasn't a staff writer, Gregg says, but a stringer who wrote the alien story to foist attention on Aurora, a dying town that had just lost a fight to route a railroad through it.

Either way, Gregg says she recorded a conversation with Oscar Lowrey, an Aurora resident who was 11 in 1897. Lowrey said nothing happened, that he would have heard about an event as earthshaking as a spaceship crash.

"Also, if it had happened, it would have been all over the Decatur newspapers," which it wasn't.

"Plus, we know who's buried there," she says. "But the family doesn't want anyone to know."

So what about all that fuss that went on in the '70s, when the townspeople didn't want the body exhumed? What was the big deal?

"Well, some folks say the boy who was buried there had yellow fever, and they didn't want another epidemic," she says.

"So why are you so hellbent on proving this didn't really happen?" I ask. "I mean, it's kind of fun to think that an alien crashed in a rural North Texas town, no?"

"I thought that at first," she says. Then the tourists came in droves, disturbing the cemetery's peace, stealing headstones and taking tapes Gregg had at the museum.

"I thought that at first," she says, "but once people started getting hurt, I didn't think so anymore."

I go back to cemetery to look for the headstone. Finding it might prove there's a little more to this tale than a well-produced prank.

I work my way past the vines, past the curtain of thorns and a barbed-wire fence and on to the creek that borders the cemetery, where the old mayor said the headstone was thrown. It looks like a forgotten valley, littered with empty vases and faded plastic flowers.

Trudging through the mud, I find a few stones, but none with a delta or the three circles that were described. I do find a small cross — made of two wooden planks put together with drywall screws — at the head of an unmarked grave.

Maybe that's where the alien is buried; or maybe water rose one spring and washed the stone away. It could be the stone never existed or it was placed there for a photo op the day the reporters came to town.

In Aurora, there used to be an alien shop. The town was touted as Area 114, spoofing Roswell, N.M., and incorporating the number of the two-lane highway that passes through Aurora.

But as the legend of the alien faded, those did, too. What's left is a bunch of suburban houses and a huge Baptist church.

"It would surely be a shame if the good Lord made just this one little planet," he says.

Some residents say the alien story was concocted by two drunks who wanted to cover up a fire they had set at Judge Proctor's windmill.

Someone else says the alien didn't die in the crash. It survived and drank whiskey and played poker with the locals — until the Texas Rangers got wind of it and shot it dead.

nope.....

The Big Bang Theory is the dominant scientific theory

http://www.crystalinks.com/bigbang.html

The Big Bang Theory is the dominant scientific theory about the origin of the universe. According to the big bang, the universe was created sometime between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago from a cosmic explosion that hurled matter and in all directions.
Fifteen billion years ago,the entirety of our universe was compressed into the confines of an atomic nucleus. Known as a singularity, this is the moment before creation when space and time did not exist. According to the prevailing cosmological models that explain our universe, an ineffable explosion, trillions of degrees in temperature on any measurement scale, that was infinitely dense, created not only fundamental subatomic particles and thus matter and energy but space and time itself. Cosmology theorists combined with the observations of their astronomy colleagues have been able to reconstruct the primordial chronology of events known as the big bang.
Quantum theory suggests that moments after the explosion at 10 -43 second, the four forces of nature; strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic and gravity were combined as a single "super force"(Wald). Elementary particles known as quarks begin to bond in trios, forming photons, positrons and netrinos and were created along with their antiparticles. There are minuscule amounts of protons and neutrons at this stage; approximately 1 for every one billion photons, neutrinos or electrons (Maffei). The density of the Universe in its first moment of life is thought to have been 1094g/cm3 with the majority of this being radiation. For each billion pairs of these heavy particles (hadrons) that were created, one was spared annihilation due to particle-antiparticle collisions. The remaining particles constitute the majority of our universe today (Novikov).
During this creation and annihilation of particles the universe was undergoing a rate of expansion many times the speed of light. Known as the inflationary epoch, the universe in less than one thousandth of a second doubled in size at least one hundred times, from an atomic nucleus to 1035 meters in width. An isotropic inflation of our Universe ends at 10-35second that was almost perfectly smooth. If it were not for a slight fluctuation in the density distribution of matter, theorists contend, galaxies would have been unable to form (Parker).

What is the Big Bang?
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sbleas/creative/entropy/#14
"Down with the Big Bang." Editorial title, Nature, 1989
At present, the big bang and its countless variations are the dominant theories in cosmology. For this reason, when examining entropy and the universe, the big bang theory is clearly the point to start. The 'standard model' is the simplest version.
According to the standard model, the universe was born in a massive explosion about 15 thousand million years ago. Time, space and matter were all created in an infinitely hot and dense fireball. Cosmologists still do not know what happened at the actual moment of the big bang. The closer to the big bang they investigate, the hotter and denser the matter is and the more tentative our knowledge of the particle physics involved at that stage becomes. What happens after the big bang is easier to work out.
As the universe expanded, the matter within it became cooler and less dense. The temperature dropped from 1011 °K at the time of one hundredth of a second after the big bang to 1010 °K one second later and then to 109 °K three minutes after the big bang. About 700,000 years later, temperatures had dropped enough to let stable atoms form. Fluctuations from place to place in the density or expansion rate of the smooth and featureless universe created slight matter imbalances, which gave rise to the first stars.
Although the universe has been expanding ever since the big bang, it will not necessarily always continue expanding, because gravity is pulling everything back together. The fate of the universe depends on how strong this retarding force is. There are three possibilities.
1. The universe may expand forever, because the gravitational force is not strong enough to halt the expansion. This is called an open universe and is judged the most likely possibility by observational evidence.
2. The universe may be balanced exactly between the two forces - the universe may just stop expanding in (infinite) time, but never contract. This is a flat universe.
3. Gravity may be strong enough to reverse the expansion and the universe will collapse back to a singularity. This is called a closed universe.
First, I will consider the nature of a big bang universe, then think about entropy and its effect in open, flat or closed universes.

MASS BOOM VERSUS BIG BANG:
EINSTEIN WAS RIGHT
Antonio Alfonso-Faus
E.U.I.T. Aeron´autica
Pl Cardenal Cisneros s/n 28040 Madrid, Spain
aalfonso@euita.upm.es

http://www.citebase.org/cgi-bin/fulltext?format=application/pdf&identifier=oai:arXiv.org:physics/0302058

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