Not Stressed Out Enough? UFO Data To Be Declassified By President

COPPER RIVER COUNTRY JOURNAL 

Whenever America Is Running Into Chaos, There's A Renewed Interest In UFOs, Martians & Aliens From Outer Space 

It Happened During The Gold Rush & It's Happening Today 

THE HEADLINES

1897: Spaceship Crashes In Texas 

A year before the Copper Valley Gold Rush of 1898, an amazing thing happened in the little cotton town of Aurora, Texas.

On April 17th, 1897, at 6 am, two early-rising children spotted an inbound airship, billowing smoke. 

t's always bad to see a plane go down. But this event was truly ominous. Mainly, because there were no planes.

The Wright Brothers wouldn't  invent the first successful aircraft until 16 years later, in 1903.

By definition, then, this was a UFO, an "unidentified flying object."  The burning craft swept in out of the sky, crashed into a nearby windmill, fell into pieces, and eventually dropped into a well.

Townsfolk gathered round. There was a mangled pilot in the cigar-shaped vehicle. He had been killed, and was duly identified – as a Martian -- by an army officer who came over from Fort Worth with the express purpose of checking things out. 

Although today, some would probably ungraciously label the hapless Martian "an illegal alien," small-town Texans like doing the right thing. 

Even for a stranger. The Texas villagers of 1897 solemnly interred the spaceman in the Aurora Town Cemetery. 

According to the papers, he was given a full Christian burial.

War Of The Words 

It's not as if people weren't expecting something like this. Ever since they saw those canals through their telescopes on Mars, America was obsessed with aliens and Martians. 

For at least a year before the Texas crash, there had been growing numbers of dramatic UFO sightings reported in small-town papers all over the country. 

People were jumpy as the century ended. It was tough times in America. The country was in a long economic depression.

The Civil War was over, but tensions still remained. The great Indian Wars were every bit as homegrown and personal as the Civil War had been. Many Americans, worried about German immigrants, feared a German invasion. 

Meanwhile, the two big English-speaking countries, the Americans and the British, were busy taking over many parts of the world. 

The little island nation of Great Britain was trying to turn itself into an empire, and had scooped up Canada, parts of Africa, India, and big chunks of the South Pacific including Australia and New Zealand. 

So the idea of invasion was a very real one -- even if you were the one doing the invading.  

To the south of Alaska, the United States was expanding its territories across the West. Winning the Spanish-American War (which took place in 1898, the same year as the Alaska Gold Rush) would hand over the Phillippines, Guam and Puerto Rico to the United States. America took over the lush Hawaiian Islands, and was about to take over the Panama Canal, controlling the shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

 In Alaska, the northland was being overrun, by swarms of gold miners -- coming down the Yukon River in boats, tramping up over the Valdez Glacier on foot, or hiking in through the Klondike.

The average 19th century American was well aware of two things: That there were strange new worlds out there: in Asia, Africa and Alaska. 

And that Americans, Germans, the British -- anyone, even Martians -- could arrive out of nowhere and  just take over,

It was no surprise, then, that in 1897, the same year as the Texas Martian incident -- and a year before the Gold Rush --  that H.G. Wells, a British writer, wrote his classic novel: 'The War of the Worlds".

It was about Martians arriving in a small town in England in their space capsules and having to be beaten back.