The Aurora crash
The account
An airship slammed into a windmill, and its pilot, "not of this world," was buried in the town cemetery.
What investigators found
The newspaper story is seen as a prank by a local correspondent, and no physical evidence has ever been found.
The story
On April 19, 1897, the Dallas Morning News ran a short item sent from Aurora, Texas. It said an airship had struck a judge's windmill and exploded. The pilot, killed in the crash, was supposedly a native of Mars, and papers covered in strange markings were said to have been found in the wreckage. According to the story, the body was given a Christian burial in the local cemetery.
The episode emerged in the middle of a wave of "mystery airship" reports that swept American newspapers that year. Longtime residents interviewed decades later said they had never seen anything of the kind, and searches of the cemetery turned up no alien remains. The most widely accepted explanation is a hoax meant to draw attention to a town in decline.