What Happened In Aurora?

I’m fascinated by anything that can’t be explained by conventional knowledge. It’s sort of terrifying, but yet thrilling to think that there is so much that even our best minds don’t understand about our universe. Our human race has made so much progress in such a relatively brief span of time since the advent of mankind on earth. Yet, there are still so many aspects of our existence that are completely out of our control. We have figured out how to split atoms and build satellites, but we are still impacted by odd events that defy our puny logic.
Take for example, an incident that took place on April 17th, 1897 in the town of Aurora, Texas. The History Channel recently ran an episode of their excellent, documentary style show, UFO Hunters which focused on the incident. This account tells of one of the earliest UFO cases ever recorded in the USA.
At approximately 6:00 am that day, something plummeted out of the dawn sky over a ranch and smashed into a windmill, shattering it and casting metal debris over a wide area. It was reported that a strange, cigar-shaped “airship” had crashed that morning. What’s more, residents drawn to the site by the collision claimed to have found a small body in the wreckage. It was said that the townsfolk brought the strange little corpse to the Aurora Cemetary and buried it there, beneath a huge live oak, said to be over two hundred years old. The investigators found that the enormous tree reacts strongly to a metal detector moved vertically up its trunk. For nearly eighty years, a small, rough-cut stone served as a marker for the spot where the little alien was allegedly buried. The only thing engraved in the rock was thin oval shape, dotted along its horizontal length with circles, resembling a cigar-shaped craft with porthole style windows. Although there are photographs of the makeshift headstone, it disappeared in the early 1970s, presumably stolen.
The debris from the destroyed craft was rumored to have been dumped in a nearby well belonging to the Oates family. Although an attempted search of the well didn’t turn up any significant pieces of metal, the water was found to have an abnormally high aluminum content which could not be explained, and the family had suffered for generations, from health problems that had been attributed to tainted water from that same well.
I always try to maintain a skeptical, yet open mind about this type of thing. Those who refuse to even acknowledge the possibility that our planet may have been visited by extra-terrestrials will, no doubt, try to find rational, mundane answers to explain away this story and thereby protect their mental comfort zones. The fact that this incident took place 6 years before the airplane was invented may make that a little more difficult.