Proving that history can indeed be a heckuva lot stranger than science fiction, today’s installment revisits a wacky wave of “Mystery Airship” reports that flooded Texas newspapers in 1897. Long before the infamous Roswell UFO crash sparked the public imagination and endless alien conspiracy theories in 1947, folks were spying odd “Aerial Travelers” during an outbreak of sightings between 1896 and 1897 that sounded like something straight out of a Jules Verne novel. The earliest autumn sightings were in California, but hundreds of reports quickly spread east into the Midwest and Texas by the following spring. You may have heard about the most famous sighting that occurred in Aurora, TX on April 17, 1897, which has been the subject of several books and numerous TV investigations, because it spectacularly crashed and locals purportedly buried it’s pilot thought to be “a native of the planet Mars” in their cemetery. The Aurora Spaceman’s graveyard even has a State Historical marker! The literally hundreds of other eyewitness encounters with various Mystery Air-Ships across Texas both before and after, however, are even more insanely entertaining and fantastically bizarre. Read on for more craziness!