"Do I believe?" she asks. "Oh, why not? It'd be incredibly naive to think we're the only people in the universe." In the box in her office there's a yellowed copy of a local newspaper with a picture of kids sitting near a headstone. Richardson says a stone engraved with a delta and a couple of circles used to be near the base of the oak tree. During the '70s, when the world found out about Aurora, the stone disappeared — stolen, some say. There's one thing missing from the box: a contemporary newspaper article documenting the alien's crash. The article was written by E.E. Hayden, a Dallas Morning News reporter. He said the spaceship was the same one that had been traveling all over the country. In UFO circles, 1897 is known as the Year of the Great Airships because of sightings that were reported everywhere from Illinois to Texas. The spaceship, Hayden wrote, "collided with the tower of Judge Proctor's windmill and went into pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wrecking the windmill and water tank and destroying the judge's flower garden. The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one aboard and, while his remains were badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world." When talk turns to the alien, everyone in Aurora sort of smirks. It seems a joke, but not quite, because after 110 years the story has become legend. Richardson smirks. Maybe because she didn't want to tell me what she was about to tell me. Or perhaps because she thought it was silly. "My previous mayor," she says, "said the original gravestone is still there. It's out back by the fence line." The Wise County Heritage Museum is a stone building, a former Baptist college in Decatur, the county seat, about 20 miles north of Aurora. Inside are old typewriters and what appear to be printers, old and worn with large rollers and metal lettering. Rosalie Gregg, executive director of the historical society, emerges from her office. A tall, fair-skinned woman with crystal-blue eyes, Gregg has lived in Wise County most of her life. Next to the birth and death records, she keeps a box of papers pertaining to the Aurora alien. She says there's a flurry of alien questions every three or four years. She responds to every query. In the box there are probably hundreds of typewritten letters that start the same way: "It didn't happen." Hayden wasn't a staff writer, Gregg says, but a stringer who wrote the alien story to foist attention on Aurora, a dying town that had just lost a fight to route a railroad through it. Either way, Gregg says she recorded a conversation with Oscar Lowrey, an Aurora resident who was 11 in 1897. Lowrey said nothing happened, that he would have heard about an event as earthshaking as a spaceship crash. "Also, if it had happened, it would have been all over the Decatur newspapers," which it wasn't. "Plus, we know who's buried there," she says. "But the family doesn't want anyone to know." So what about all that fuss that went on in the '70s, when the townspeople didn't want the body exhumed? What was the big deal? "Well, some folks say the boy who was buried there had yellow fever, and they didn't want another epidemic," she says. "So why are you so hellbent on proving this didn't really happen?" I ask. "I mean, it's kind of fun to think that an alien crashed in a rural North Texas town, no?" Gregg scrunches her face and shakes her head. "I thought that at first," she says. Then the tourists came in droves, disturbing the cemetery's peace, stealing headstones and taking tapes Gregg had at the museum. "I thought that at first," she says, "but once people started getting hurt, I didn't think so anymore." I go back to cemetery to look for the headstone. Finding it might prove there's a little more to this tale than a well-produced prank. I work my way past the vines, past the curtain of thorns and a barbed-wire fence and on to the creek that borders the cemetery, where the old mayor said the headstone was thrown. It looks like a forgotten valley, littered with empty vases and faded plastic flowers. Trudging through the mud, I find a few stones, but none with a delta or the three circles that were described. I do find a small cross — made of two wooden planks put together with drywall screws — at the head of an unmarked grave. Maybe that's where the alien is buried; or maybe water rose one spring and washed the stone away. It could be the stone never existed or it was placed there for a photo op the day the reporters came to town. In Aurora, there used to be an alien shop. The town was touted as Area 114, spoofing Roswell, N.M., and incorporating the number of the two-lane highway that passes through Aurora. But as the legend of the alien faded, those did, too. What's left is a bunch of suburban houses and a huge Baptist church. I ask an old man at Tater Junction whether he believes the story. "It would surely be a shame if the good Lord made just this one little planet," he says. Some residents say the alien story was concocted by two drunks who wanted to cover up a fire they had set at Judge Proctor's windmill. Someone else says the alien didn't die in the crash. It survived and drank whiskey and played poker with the locals — until the Texas Rangers got wind of it and shot it dead. I'm not convinced anyone in Aurora actually believes in the alien. And what about me? Who am I to say? 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