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.

great, I'm interested.....

A close asssociate sent me this........I haven't read it completely yet....but, I'll go ahead and include it here, and the article in case the link doesn't work.

Was There a 'Before' the Big Bang?
By Leonardo Vintiñi
Epoch Times Argentina Staff Mar 04, 2007

http://en.epochtimes.com/news/7-3-4/52287.html

(Gary S Chapman/Getty Images)"The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability." —Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)

Every mountain, river, and valley; all the birds and human beings, the Sahara desert… all that was, that is, and will be, was at one time united in a single tiny and fiery point. So infinitely dense and fiery that our mortal imagination will perhaps never be able to comprehend it all. Millions of billions of tons of matter together with all the energy of the great universe, beginning to expand and break apart in an enormous explosion about 20 000 million years ago.

Compared with this big "Bang", the noise of our most powerful atomic bombs would be, at most, equal to a mosquito falling to the ground on the other side of the Earth. From that point on, the history of the cosmos took an even richer and more curious turn. The constant expansion of all that exists made the universe turn into a state of plasmic soup, gradually transforming towards a state more and more similar to what we know today. The matter slowly cooled down, and then formed the first quarks, electrons and protons. 300 000 years passed, electrons and nucleuses combined to form atoms, and later formed quasars, stars, groups of galaxies, and all that is our now familiar, though still in great part unknown, universe.

Despite all the information obtained through years of scientific investigation, the phases of the universe during the first moments after the great explosion are still the subject of heated debate. The diverse theories that circulate in scientific circles seem to unravel when trying to explain the particular quantum state of matter in the primitive phases—the very first moments of the "Big Badaboom." There still does not exist a single convincing physical model to explain the first 10 -33 seconds of the universe.

Trying to understand the origin of the big explosion is even more complex. The more we understand the first cause of each thing, and come to realise more and more that all things follow from prior causes, the reason the universe was created seems to transform itself into an even greater enigma; the ultimate truth to unveil.

The Big Bang, Big Crunch, and the Infinite Cycle
A theory being reconsidered nowadays to explain the ultimate origin is the Oscillating Universe. Many scientists estimate that the matter contained in the universe is sufficient to achieve a gravitational force great enough to stop further expansion and begin, at a determinate time in history, reversing the process.

According to reason, this constant contraction of the whole universe would culminate at a single, primordial point—a phenomenon named the "Big Crunch." From this moment on (of course, theoretically) the universe would literally continue on in same way, with a "Big Bounce;" that is to say, a new Big Bang. This theory leads us to question whether this extraordinary chain of events (generation-degeneration-destruction) is repeated eternally, and whether it has already been repeating infinitely into the distant past.

In spite of the Oscillating Universe at one time being strongly rejected in place of other models of the universe, recent studies have appeared which argue in favour of this theory. Investigators of Penn State University have speculated about the possible history of the universe before the Big Bang using quantum gravitational calculations.

According to these calculations, before the Big Bang there existed a state of space-time similar to ours, though in the stage of contraction. It is thought that the gravitational forces pulling the universe inward reached a certain point such that the quantum properties of space-time caused gravity to become repulsive, rather than attractive, producing the Big Bang from which we now suppose ourselves to have come.

The variation of the cosmological constant alpha, a strange fact that was considered revealing to scientists in recent years, could also be related to the matter of previous universes. This abstract value (alpha)—taken as a parameter of the universal laws that permit atoms to be maintained in unity, also underlying the laws of chemistry as we understand them—does not coincide with that we would expect from a universe with an age such as ours.

Wikimedia Commons.According to the current value of alpha, the universe should be some 14 thousand million years older than it is, and matter should be much more dispersed than it now is. The scientists Paul Steinhardt from the University of Princeton, U.S. and Neil Turok from the University of Cambridge in the U.K. give their opinion with regard to the cyclical theory which could well explain this anomaly of the alpha constant—that there would have been time enough for the measured value to be such as it is if it had existed prior to our universe, perhaps in a previous universe.

The Great Origin and the Limit of Science
Even were the theory of the cyclical universe to be proven, and supposing that we came from a prior Big Crunch, the cause of the explosion that gave origin to the cycle of indefinite expansions and contractions remains a mystery. The model of cosmic cycles proposed in the Big Bounce could not have an endpoint, but, it may be posited, must have a beginning. Does this origin become the frontier between science and religion? Do "divine" factors underlie the origin of space and time, or will we some day be able to explain everything, and the cause of the Big Bang, in a completely scientific way?

Contemporary science has guided us toward calculations that approach (though with increasing difficultly) the principle elements of the Big Bang, notwithstanding the possibility that it will never be permitted for us humans to know the final truth. And even though many scientists theorize that the universe that we inhabit does not contain anything beyond the horizon of science, nor a time "before" its time, we must surely agree that no human being can escape the temptation of asking themselves, sometimes, just what it was which caused "all that exists." Whatever the case, through reason or through science, the return to the origin has already begun.

The original article in Spanish can be found here.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.