Briar Patch
THE SPACEMAN'S LAST GASP
CRAIG RASPBERRY IS NINE YEARS OLD and strikingly reminiscent of Mr. Peabody's pet boy Sherman on the old Bullwinkle show, down to an air of scientific detachment which seems to be a trait he shares with his fellow citizens of Aurora, Texas, of whom there are not a great many. Aurora is a former small-potatoes boom town a little to the northwest of Dallas that was squeezed into virtual oblivion near the turn of the century when the railroad came to the bordering towns of Boyd and Rhome and siphoned out its lifeblood and its people, even its buildings. Now, 75 years later, Aurora is barely there at all, unmapped and largely unheard-of even by hard-core truckers.
But the ghost town image is not wasted, especially in light of the context it forms for what some people might consider some fairly spooky events.
In 1897, late in the spring and early in the morning, a large cigar-shaped aircraft came flying through the air over Aurora, powered by two propellor-type engines and displaying a row of windows on its bottom half. It was flying low enough to plow into Judge J.S. Proctor's 18 feet high windmill and explode in the air, scattering debris and burning out the better part of a hillside.
According to the story, which was recounted soon after in a Dallas newspaper, there was some sort of pilot inside, variously described by the people who saw it as non-human, charred, tiny, with a disturbing number of dismembered limbs. Eyewitnesses seem to drop out of the story here, but somebody apparently decided that, human or not, the thing deserved a decent burial and interred it in the Aurora cemetery, which was burgeoning from the effects of a spotted fever epidemic.
The newspaper story sparked a flurry of sympathetic sightings (including one in which the aliens wore sailor suits and told a farmer they were "off to bomb the Spaniards" in Cuba). But after the immediate concern wore off the event gradually wafted into a local legend, something colorful for the children of Aurora to grow up with.
But today, Aurora is a boomtown once again. A Dallas reporter named Bill Case came across the original newspaper story, made some investigations and came up with some odd-looking metal from the purported crash site, along with a reading from a metal detector that indicated the same substance was lying in an unidentified grave in the Aurora cemetery.
Coinciding with the resurrection of the UFO was the emergence of The Blob in nearby Garland, an unrelated slime mold that Could Not Be Stopped as it pulsated and mutated in Ms. Marie Harris' backyard. A dose of nicotine spray finally did it in about the time it was being pronounced harmless and terrestial by biologists. But it was enough to give the press a true-life double horror feature and focus still more attention on Aurora, whose bizarre and modest legend was now a global sensation. The town's occupants were either pestered or delighted by hundreds of reporters and UFO officials and roving sci-fi mongers.
Reports about the origin and composition of the metals come almost daily, with the UFO center in Oklahoma City consistently casting a debunking eye on any otherworldly attributes. Other UFO centers are not so sure and have expressed, at the least enthusiastic, "interest" in the fragments. More tantatizing is the possibility of the procurement of a court order to exhume the grave of the pilot, a project that at last report was still pending.
Craig Raspberry charges a dollar to take you on a tour of the major UFO attractions in Aurora, an itinerary with two stops, a visit to the crash site, which is now a chicken coop owned by Craig's grandfather, Brawley Oates, and to the famous grave, which until recently was under guard to protect it from premature necromancers.
For a nine-year-old boy with an even chance that someone from outer space bit the dust in his own back yard, Craig is peculiarly terse and skeptical. Maybe all the publicity, the dozens of people asking him What Do You Think? has dulled his willingness to fantasize.
"I don't know what it was," he says moderately, "something happened though."
Craig's grandmother, Bonnie Oates, doesn't seem to get too worked up about it either, just chuckles over her leatherwork at all the fuss and seems to enjoy it.
"They think they're going to find something from outer space. But how are they gonna know that that's what it is if they've never seen anything from outer space?"
The crash site looks like and is a chicken coop, and that's about it. It still has the base of Judge Proctor's windmill, but three-quarters of a century has replaced the charred grass and scattered or buried most other evidence. The accessible metal fragments have been dug up already and sent away to labs to be analyzed or to relatives for paperweights.
The alleged grave of the pilot is isolated under a large oak tree, haphazardly marked by two big rocks on which someone has scratched a just barely visible primitive depiction of the spaceship. According to the original account the pilot had a logbook with him, written in "hieroglyphics," which also went into the coffin, a courtesy that now seems a little exasperating.
C.C. Stephens was four or five when the spaceship crashed. Now he's over 80 and much-visited by the press, since he remembers when his father came home one morning and said that he'd seen something explode and burn over in Aurora, about three miles away. The next day he rode up to see what it was and found a ruin of debris and torn metal strewn over Proctor's land. He said nothing about a body.
"He didn't know anything about a man being in there. Nobody knew about that 'til lately."
Mr. Stephens is reticent about offering opinions as to what was going on back in 1897, he just remains philosophical about the possibilities.
"Oh, I wouldn't dispute what it was. I just believe it. I'm pretty sure what I've told you is the truth, though. The people came a lot closer to telling the truth then than they do now. Of course, I heard that in those days there were a lot of things flying around.
"Yessir," he says, lapsing into a nostalgia that somehow doesn't seem inappropriate. "Aurora in those days was a boomin' little town."
An impression works itself out of his demeanor, and out of the smiles of his grandchildren on the mantelpiece, that the power of the legend easily eclipses its factuality, however impressive. The vibes in Aurora go beyond credibility; the UFO was for this town a minor apocalypse; if not the harbinger or the agent of Aurora's demise, at least a sort of honored guest, a watcher.
"I heard that the next day some people thought it was the moon. But the moon rose up the next night and that killed that."
Craig gets off at his grandfather's Arco station. I gave him another dollar for taking me to see Mr. Stephens and thank him for his help. Inside his grandmother is thinking about the scrapbook she's going to make from all the articles about Aurora.
A man has parked his pickup in the cemetery and seems to be wandering about aimlessly. But it turns out he's from Aurora. We ask him if he's looking for the pilot's grave.
"No, but I've heard that story all my life. Never have paid much attention to it. Mostly I just like to come to the cemetery. I've got a boy up yonder."
Does he believe the story's true?
He looks away awhile, then makes a slight, lugubrious smile; but it doesn't seem to be an answer.
THE MAN WHO KILLED BONNIE AND CLYDE
In February I rode on the Salt Grass Trail, an event billed as "the largest horseback movement of modern times." While on the trail ride I ran into Ted Hinton, one of the lawmen (the only one still alive) who ambushed Bonnie and Clyde and machine-gunned them into history May 23, 1934.
Ted Hinton in no way resembled the character depicted in the movie "Bonnie and Clyde." He sat erect in the saddle and talked with the conviction of a man whose personal philosophy is rooted in "the hard facts of life," a man for whom questions of right and wrong are cut and dried.
I rode with him for over an hour just listening to his story, saying very little because all I knew about Bonnie and Clyde was what I had seen in the movie. Ted obviously enjoyed talking about it, and of course I enjoyed listening.
"It was pretty rough chasing those two around. There was six of us altogether and four of us who trailed 'em over the five states they operated in. Me and my partner took out after 'em in '33, and we never give up on 'em until we got 'em a year and six months later."
I don't guess they expected to escape. They had to know they would be caught eventually.
"Well, you gotta understand, they had no return. In those days people went to the electric chair for killin' people. They don't now. Hell, they give 'em a medal for shootin' somebody now. But back then after Bonnie and Clyde killed their first man—that was Mr. Belcher in Hillsboro, Texas—they had no return. They had to keep goin' cause they was gonna get killed anyhow. They went nearly two full years and was in 21 gun battles before we finally got 'em. During that time they killed 11 peace officers and two civilians."
My Library
