From the Author of the Internationally Bestselling Books — Red Herrings & White Elephants, What Caesar did for My Salad, Shaggy Dogs, Pop Goes the Weasel, Ten Minute Mysteries:

The Famous Aurora Spaceship Mystery
Did a UFO really crash in a small town in Texas over a century ago?

When it comes to spaceships and and little green men from Mars, most people’s thoughts turn to the notorious events at Roswell, New Mexico, where in 1947 the US government apparently captured an alien who had crashed his flying saucer. US military personnel are then said to have quickly sealed off the area, removed all evidence and engaged in a complete cover-up.

After a thorough debriefing, presumably in sign language, the little green man sadly died. Much later the film of the top-secret autopsy supposedly carried out on him was sold on the black market, ending up nearly fifty years later, in 1995, on a prime-time TV documentary broadcast around the world.

This programme, Alien Autopsy, caused a sensation and ‘Martiangate’ was back on the agenda with a vengeance. As is often the case, those who wanted to believe such a story inevitably did, while those of us really living on planet Earth could smell a rat. In fact, there were rats everywhere.

But it took eleven years before the programme maker Ray Santilli admitted that the autopsy had been staged, for the most part, in a flat in Camden Town, London. Strangely enough, he owned up to this two days before a humorous parody of his subject was due to be aired on television. He confirmed that his props had included sheep brains set in jelly, knuckle joints and chicken entrails bought from Smithfield meat market.

That should have knocked the Roswell mystery on the head for good, and all those UFO enthusiasts, who had been obsessing about the whole affair for years, must now be quietly licking their wounds in their garden sheds, or wherever it is they go to study their favourite subject.

But Roswell wasn’t the first time: aliens had been captured before. In 1897, Aurora, a small, unremarkable town near Dallas, Texas, became the site of an astonishing event.

This, then, is the story of America's first UFO and where the U.S. fascination in beings from another planet all started.

UFOs & Extraterrestrials