Alien Lore No. 194 - The first UFO visit, and the first UFO crash 114 years ago?

 By Jack Brummet, Paranormal and Alien Lore Editor

This incident is often considered to be the first documented sighting of a UFO, although generally UFOlogists skip ahead to the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting near Mount Rainier half a century later. . .

In 1897 a cigar shaped object--they weren't known as "flying saucers" until 1947--was reported by numerous Americans as it traveled from San Francisco to Chicago. Hundreds of people lined Lake Michigan in wait for it's appearance.  Earlier that same year, newspapers reported that a spacecraft crashed into a Judge J.F. Proctor's windmill and then exploded.  They found the body of a tiny pilot, described as "not of this world."  A journal found in the space vehicle contained writing in an unknown language.  Sweetly, the townspeople arranged for the burial of the tiny pilot.

In  1973, a Dallas Times Herald reporter, Bill Case, digging around the crash site found a number of metal fragments.  He brought the shards to Dr. Tom Gray, a North Texas University physicist, who said at least some of the strange pieces of metal could not be identified.

The reporter compared metal detector readings from the crash site to those at the grave of the space pilot. The unusual signals were identical. This first "documented" UFO crash is still a mystery.

Curiously, around the same time, Marie Harris, in Garland, Texas, found a strange thing growing in her backyard that was "as big as a platter, foamy and creamy, and pale yellow" and "pulsated like a beating heart." When Mrs. Harris chopped on it, its "blood" was a red and purple goo.  A biologist from the University of Texas called it a fungus. Finally, sunlight seemed to kill it.

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