While Evans was not allowed by her parents to go to the crash site, they told her about the alien pilot who was found and its burial. That was years before we had any regular airplanes or other kind of airships.”
“That crash certainly caused a lot of excitement,” she said. In 1973, Mary Evans, who lived in Aurora at the time of the crash, shared her memories with a reporter. According to a story published in 1979, the townspeople went to the site of the crash and found the body of the pilot, which was “not of this world.” Being good neighbors, they gave the being a proper burial. Then, one of these crafts crash-landed outside Aurora, Texas. Shaw’s description of the craft in Lodi) flying over the state. Shaw, at the Callahan UFO Report.Ī year later, Texas residents reported a strange sight: Cigar-shaped airships (oddly similar to Col. He shares some of his research, including the original news story by Col. Lodi resident John Callahan, who is writing a book about the encounter, has tracked down later incidents of UFO sightings in the area. “I have a theory, which of course, is only a theory, that those we beheld were inhabitants of Mars, who have been sent to the earth for the purpose of securing one of its inhabitants,” Shaw wrote in an account he published in the Evening Mail, a Stockton newspaper at the time. Their attempt was foiled, and the three beings leapt back into their spaceship and left. They were reportedly seven feet tall and very slender.Īccording to Shaw, the aliens tried to abduct the two men, but Shaw and Spooner were much too heavy to kidnap. Shaw and Camille Spooner were traveling from the small town of Lodi to the Fresno Citrus Fair when, they said, they came across three beings that were, well, not human. Long before close encounters with off-planet visitors offered relief from the tensions of the Cold War, two men from Lodi, California reported an attempted abduction by three alien strangers in 1896.
Aliens” has its roots in Wild West pop culture. It was later reported to be a weather balloon (and even later a nuclear spying apparatus), but by then the concept of flying saucers and government conspiracy theories were well-entrenched in the American imagination.Įxcept Roswell wasn’t the first UFO incident in U.S. In July of 1947, an Army Air Forces press release reported that airmen had collected a “flying disk” that fell from the sky. Shaw, as caricatured in the San Francisco Call, Wikimedia Commons// Public DomainĪsk many people about the first major modern UFO incident, and they’ll think back to Roswell, New Mexico. SMALL TOWNS IN CALIFORNIA AND TEXAS REPORTED CLOSE ENCOUNTERS 50 YEARS BEFORE ROSWELL.Ĭol. Were it not for a clumsy prop crew member, who knows where he'd be today. McCurdy was finally laid to rest on Boot Hill in Guthrie, Oklahoma, 66 years after he was killed. (Carnivals did a brisk trade in outlaw corpses to attract crowds in the early days of the 20th century.) McCurdy's body also spent time as repayment for a bad debt, playing a mummy in a freak show, and collecting dust in a wax museum storage space before he became a funhouse prop. It seems that after being shot, someone had gone to the funeral home and identified themselves as McCurdy’s long-lost brother in order to take the body. McCurdy, specifically, as an autopsy later revealed. As one of the crew members moved a dummy, its arm fell off-revealing that the dummy was actually a mummy. That’s when the crew of The Six Million Dollar Man borrowed an amusement park funhouse to shoot an episode. No, Elmer McCurdy gained his fame more than 60 years after his death, in 1976, when memories of those wild days on the frontier were dying with the last people who’d lived them. Neither did his status as one of the last real Wild West outlaws, killed in a shootout with the law. Unlike Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Jesse and Frank James, or Billy the Kid, his exploits as a train and bank robber never gained him much infamy. ELMER MCCURDY’S AFTERLIFE WAS STRANGER THAN HIS LIFE AS AN OUTLAW.Įlmer McCurdy is not exactly a household name. Some of those stories are exactly what you’d expect, while others are surprisingly modern. Gold and silver rushes.ĭinosaurs, UFOs, feral camels, and giant cannibals probably don’t come to mind.īut every time period has its strange stories, and the Wild West is no different. The old Wild West is the stuff of legends: Gunslingers robbing banks and trains.
0 kommentar(er)
