April 16th, 1897, around 2 o'clock in the morning.

A night watchman in the town of Paris, Texas is coming home late from work.

As he's letting his dog out, the night watchman catches sight of something strange and unsettling in the sky.

A giant, luminous cloud is moving toward his house.

A little freaked out, he runs across the street to alert his neighbor,

and together they look up.

In horror, they see a 200-foot-long ship slicing through the air.

His neighbor describes it as, like the return of Noah's Ark with wing-like attachments.

And these two were not the only ones who saw strange lights flashing above the sky in the west.

Between 1896 and 1897, unusual flying objects were reported in newspapers all over California, Texas, and Oklahoma. Some onlookers described a cigar-shaped

craft with a searchlight brighter than the moon. Others saw indistinct shadow objects moving at a

chilling unnatural speed. In any case, the day after Noah's arc, the sequel, was spotted in Paris,

Texas, that thing, whatever it was, would touch down in the small nearby town of Aurora. And this crash

landing would transform the town forever. I'm Amanda McGowan and this is Atlas Obscura,

a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today we are heading to Aurora, Texas, where many people believe the local cemetery is home to an alien grave site.

Did an extraterrestrial really land here way back in the 1890s?

That's a question that still divides the town even today.

More after this. On the morning of April 19, 1897, residents of the Dallas Fort Worth area, sitting down for breakfast and coffee with their newspaper, would have come across a very strange article

in the Dallas Morning News. The date line was from two days prior, from a place called Aurora,

about 50 miles west of Dallas. This is what the story read. At about 6 o'clock this morning,

the early rises of Aurora were astonished at the sudden appearance of the

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