In the tropospheric sky of a diminutive Texas town, a small population rose in the morning hours to the sudden appearance of an airship making its way across the horizon. The year is 1897, six years before Wilbur and Orville Wright invented the first airplane.
Ultimately, the strange aircraft would collide with the windmill of Judge J.S. Proctor, a local resident in the town of Aurora, Texas, according to S. E. Haydon, a correspondent with the Dallas Morning News.
As dwellers of the nearby windmill gathered at the crash site, they purportedly stumbled upon an unidentifiable body, frantically carrying it to a well right beside Judge Proctor’s home, before re-transporting it to a nearby cemetery. Shortly after, Haydon of the Dallas Morning News would print a story about the incident, headlined: “A Windmill Demolishes It,” filed Monday, April 19th, 1897.
The story by Haydon describes the wreckage caused by a windmill collision and the extensive damage done to the judge’s flower garden. The crash also purportedly destroyed a water tank sitting beside the windmill tower.
In Haydon’s newspaper column, a man named T.J. Weems, a signal service officer with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, was said to be “an authority on astronomy,” assessing and identifying the disfigured body as “a native of the planet Mars.”
Papers found on this person—evidently the record of his travels—are written in some unknown hieroglyphics, and can not be deciphered. The town is full of people to-day who are viewing the wreck and gathering specimens of the strange metal from the debris. The pilot’s funeral will take place at noon to-morrow. — S.E. Haydon
For decades, residents of Aurora lived in trepidation, with some recounting instances of the windmill crash right before their deaths. The story would fade from the public eye until nearly a century later, when independent investigators, and conspiracy theorists, began to put the pieces together on what transpired in the early morning hours of that fateful day.
Eyewitnesses came forward with their accounts of the windmill collision, while others refuted Haydon’s story, implying the incident never occurred and staff members printed it to increase tourism and bring a spotlight to an infinitesimal town.
Other incidents involving airships preceding the one in Aurora included a case involving German aviation pioneer Friedrich Wölfert and another with a New York professor, as published in Scientific American and the New York Times.
By the beginning of the 20th century, it became evident the story was likely disinformation by the Texas newspaper, prompting pressure on Haydon to assert the validity of the report. Eventually, Haydon claimed his own story was a fabrication, with some experts asserting a cover-up, with no means as to why the incident reached public awareness.
Haydon’s windmill story was perhaps the earliest and first of its kind, with similar stories of disinformation succeeding over the following decades, including a renowned Soviet-era surveillance crash in the New Mexico desert, weeks before the enactment of the National Security Act of 1947 by the 80th United States Congress. The 1952 Invasion of Washington, the 1976 Tehran Dogfight incident, and the 1980 Rendlesham Forest case near RAF Woodbridge, are also classic instances of entirely deceptive or unwittingly misleading information.
Strange Aeronautical Encounters
On a frigid winter night in 1980, as a group of British soldiers cruised near RAF Woodbridge after a Christmas gathering in Suffolk, England, one soldier purportedly observed a bright light on the horizon. Following a trail along the woods, the soldier eventually reached the location of the strange light, witnessing what appeared to be a stationary black object with unknown hieroglyphics on its side.
Approaching its location, the soldier, identified as Lt. Col. Charles I. Halt, allegedly touched the craft before it illuminated a bright light, launched into the night sky, and zeroed away, only leaving behind indentations on the ground where it once stood.
Before the landmark incident in England, another case occurred over the skies of Tehran, Iran in 1976.
Flight radars at an airbase detected a foreign object crossing into Iranian airspace, prompting the scrambling of F-4 Phantom II jet interceptors. Upon tactfully engaging the strange object in the sky, Iranian General Parviz Jafari claimed the object, resembling bright orbs, jumped from one side of the radar to the other, in the blink of an eye. The strange object purportedly disabled his jet before taking off without a trace.
Both incidents in England and Iran, in addition to many others around the globe, have sparked an array of ideologies concerning such phenomena, mainly adopted by intuitive-minded conspiracy theorists.
Scientific Interest in Conspiratorial Beliefs
Since the incident in Aurora, Texas, conspiracy theories of strange aeronautical encounters, transpiring in the form of deliberately false information, or disinformation, have perceptibly surged, as well as scientific research examining such beliefs.
In the case of landmark incidents, like the dogfight over Tehran or the New Mexico surveillance crash, which can be both rationally explained away as weather phenomena or black budget programs, as authority figures declared, many still refute official narratives, flocking to conceptualizations mirroring impossibleness, or pseudoscience.
Even decades after a forced explanation by U.S. Air Force officials regarding the New Mexico crash, conspiracy theories continued to expand, alleging alien bodies recovered at the site. Despite the rational notion that the alleged bodies witnessed were presumptively test dummies or foreign personnel in a post-mortem, charred condition, conspiracies of more abnormal origins continue to be trusted to this day.
Countless studies probing conspiratorial beliefs, like the Moon landing hoax or the Obama “birther” theory, have placed focus on personality, religiosity, and a well-studied cognitive phenomenon in an effort to understand why belief in pseudo-scientific conspiracies occurs.
In a study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, a team of researchers investigated flaws in the way one’s brain processes information and how it contributes to holding irrational beliefs. Research has investigated the role of a cognitive mechanism known as illusory pattern perception in the brain’s endorsement of conspiratorial thinking.
Experts supporting the theory of pattern perception have argued the following: “Feeling a lack of control in one’s environment is so aversive that individuals will often endorse illusory patterns and irrational beliefs in order to diminish feelings of lacking control and return to the more pleasant view that one’s environment is predictable. Consistent with this argument is additional evidence demonstrating that lacking control increases conspiracy.”
In previous studies, leading experts on conspiracy theories, such as Jan-Willem van Prooijen, Ph.D., an Associate Professor of Psychology at VU Amsterdam, have tested how pattern perception affects conspiratorial thinking processes.
“A common assumption is that belief in conspiracy theories and supernatural phenomena are grounded in illusory pattern perception. In the present research we systematically tested this assumption,” said Van Prooijen in one study he led. “We conclude that illusory pattern perception is a central cognitive mechanism accounting for conspiracy theories.”
Aside from pattern perception, experts have investigated confirmation bias and specific personality traits associated with narcissism and paranoia. But even with all these efforts toward understanding conspiratorial beliefs, more research is still necessary considering the emerging threat of political discourse in the digital age.
Perhaps more disinformation may be the key to a better grasp of such incongruous beliefs.
