Chariots of the Gods

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Story 1.

The Mystery of Aurora.

America has played host to numerous high-profile UFO incidents, perhaps the most notorious of which took place in New Mexico during the summer of 1947.

But the reported discovery of a downed alien spacecraft near Roswell was by no means the first such incident, with an equally mysterious crash having allegedly taken place in the neighboring state of Texas 50 years before.

This week, we visit the Mystery of Aurora.

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It was still dark outside when Charlie Stevens had been awoken by an insistent knock on his bedroom door.

Wiping the sleep from his eyes, the 10-year-old had wearily risen from his bed before washing his face in the basin opposite and then pulling on his overalls.

Unsteadily making his way to the front door of the house, he had found found his father waiting, holding his hat out ready for him to wear.

Crossing to the barn, the pair saddled their horses and then commenced their short journey out to the farm's furthermost pasture in order to round up the cattle.

As usual, father and son rode in silence, both keen to complete their daily morning routine.

before returning to the farmhouse and the hearty breakfast which would be waiting for them, courtesy of Mrs.

Stevens.

Overhead, the deep dark blue of the night-time sky was now finally surrendering to a much lighter shade, when both of the horses unexpectedly began to fuss.

As Charlie gently kicked at the sides of his mount, trying to encourage it to move on, he could see up ahead that his father was experiencing similar difficulties.

They had both dismounted and were in the process of trying to coax the animals forward when they became aware aware of a mysterious humming sound which was gradually increasing in volume.

Unable to motivate his horse, Charlie gave up and instead walked over to his father, who was stood looking about himself trying to figure out where the strange noise was coming from.

Suddenly, A dark shape seemed to materialise in the skies above them.

It was descending slowly out of the clouds, heading in a northerly direction towards the nearby town of Aurora.

As the strange object passed directly over them and continued on its journey, Charlie found himself staring up at it in wonder.

Save for birds and kites, and the one time he had witnessed the hot air balloon at the county fair, the youngster had never seen anything else that could fly before.

It was long and cylindrical, with a bright light situated at one end that seemed to be powering it.

As the airship began to move away, the humming also faded, leaving the father and son watching on in stunned silence.

With the craft now out of sight, the horses seemed to calm, allowing the farmers to continue their journey.

But moments later, they heard the sound of a distant rumble to the north, and the skies there were suddenly brightly illuminated.

Turning to his father, Charlie shouted that the flying craft must have crashed, begging to be allowed to go and investigate the incident further.

But Stephen Sr.

flatly refused.

Such matters were best left to the authorities, and besides, if they both rode off on some wild goose chase, then who would round up their cattle?

It would not be until the following day, after his father had ridden into town, that young Charlie would discover the fate of the mysterious airship, and its occupant.

Most reports involving unidentified flying objects are often dismissed out of hand due to a lack of supporting evidence.

In the instances where there happens to be video or photographic evidence, this is usually of such poor or ambiguous quality that it is rendered almost useless.

With the advent of drones, hoaxes are now unfortunately far too common.

Similarly, in cases where there is more than one witness to the incident, they are usually in comparatively small numbers.

Often the testimony of multiple witnesses is conflicting, which undermines their overall credibility.

It is also common for alleged alien spacecraft to leave little or no physical evidence of their passing.

Which is why the events that took place in Aurora in April of 1897 stand out from the overwhelming majority of American UFO encounters.

In the early hours of the 17th of that month, something fell out of the skies above the town, something that was witnessed by multiple residents, resulting in the death of its pilot and leaving a trail of wreckage across the town.

Perhaps one of the more surprising aspects of the Aurora incident is the pragmatic response by the town's inhabitants to the event.

Whereas the the Roswell incident 50 years later would generate paranoia and national hysteria, to the solicitous people of this small Texan community, the crash was treated like any other tragic accident.

The incident took place at roughly 6am as the earliest risers of the town were slowly going about their business.

All of the witnesses agreed that the flying craft, which they referred to as an airship, was first seen approaching the settlement from a southerly direction.

It was steadily losing height as it headed towards the town, and making a strange sound which the residents believed was the result of mechanical failure.

Finally, as it drew ever closer to the ground below, it made contact with a windmill belonging to the town judge, Spencer Proctor.

The craft was estimated to have been travelling at a speed of approximately 12 miles an hour when it collided with the structure.

It immediately exploded, showering the judge's property with flaming wreckage and causing significant damage.

Rescuers attending the scene were initially held back by the fires, unable to sift through the devastation until the flames had eventually died down.

When they did so, They found the severely burned remains of a single occupant and several tons of twisted metal, which resembled a compound of aluminium and silver.

The crash was immediately reported to the authorities in the nearby city of Fort Worth, who dispatched a signals officer named Weems to investigate the matter.

In his subsequent report on the incident, the military investigator stated that he believed the downed craft was not of an earthly origin.

The body of the pilot was too disfigured to give any clue as to its origins, but Weems surmised that it was too small to be that of an adult, more comparable in size to that of a human child.

He was also unable to decipher strange markings and glyphs found engraved on material at the site of the wreckage, stating that he believed it to be of an extraterrestrial origin.

With nothing further to investigate, the remains of the pilot were buried in the town cemetery, with a Christian service administered by a visiting pastor.

Several smaller pieces of wreckage were buried along with it, whilst the larger pieces were collected and then thrown down Judge Proctor's well, which had been damaged along with the windmill.

Somewhat amazingly, an article written in the Dallas Morning News, which directly asserted that the airship had come from another world, was met with little interest by the national press.

Markers were erected at the crash site and the grave of the pilot, commemorating the event, but it would be a further 80 years before there was any significant interest in the incident.

In 1973, local journalist Jim Mars visited the town in an attempt to establish the facts behind the crash.

He managed to locate what he believed to be the grave of the pilot, and found a stone marker there with what appeared to be a saucer-shaped object depicted on it.

He also noted that this marker looked to have been desecrated, desecrated, as it was broken into two pieces.

Following on from the Mars article, a fellow journalist named Bill Case initiated his own investigation.

He was also the head of the local branch of MUFON and brought a metal detector with him to the site to see if he could locate the wreckage that had allegedly been buried along with the pilot.

From the readings on his detector, Case concluded that there were at least three sizable pieces of wreckage buried within the confines of the grave.

But when he applied for an exhumation order to remove the metal, this was refused by the church authorities.

In the aftermath of this refusal, the MUFON investigator later found that the grave had been excavated by unknown persons, with the marker removed and a length of metal pipe now buried under the ground.

This avenue of investigation now closed, Case began to canvas for witnesses.

He was able to locate Charlie Stevens, then in his late 80s, who related the tale of how he and his father had observed the object travelling north towards the town.

A woman by the name of Mary Evans also came forward, who was 15 at the time of the crash, and whose parents had seen the body and the wreckage.

The following year, Time magazine published an article debunking the crash, in which they alleged that the entire affair had been fabricated by the author of the original newspaper story regarding the incident, a reporter by the name of Hayden.

This piece was based on an interview with historian and local resident, Etta Peggies.

The 86-year-old told the magazine that in the years leading up to 1897, the town had suffered a catalogue of unfortunate mishaps.

There was an outbreak of weevils which severely blighted the crops of the local farmers, followed by a widespread epidemic of fever, and then a large fire which damaged several buildings.

Peggies claimed that when a nearby railroad which was under construction had been diverted to avoid Aurora, Hayden had conceived the story as a desperate attempt to keep the town relevant.

She further alleged that Judge Proctor had never even owned a windmill, and that the journalist had falsified that element of the story as well.

In November of 2008, a documentary named UFO Hunters managed to gain access to the judge's property, which had been purchased from him in 1935 by a man named Brawley Oates.

In interviews with his grandson, they learned that Oates had cleared the wreckage from the well, later claiming that the material had tainted the drinking water.

afflicting him with an aggressive form of arthritis.

Timothy Oates stated that as a result of this, his grandfather had blocked off the well with a concrete slab.

He allowed the documentary makers to take samples of the water, which contained high levels of aluminium, and showed them the foundations of the windmill that had once stood on the site, seemingly undermining the testimony of Etapeges.

It would not be until the morning of December 17th, 1903, five years after the incident, that the Wright brothers successfully piloted a powered flying machine.

And with the witnesses of the Aurora crash adamant that the craft involved was not a hot air balloon, is it possible that it was indeed an extraterrestrial vessel?

This question is difficult to answer with any certainty.

It is true that at the time, Efforts to create a powered airship were finally starting to achieve success.

Across the world, inventors backed by wealthy industrialists continued to achieve limited and localized periods of flight, which sadly often resulted in accident and death.

The manner of the crash certainly seems to suggest that the technology behind the unknown vessel was rudimentary in nature, with the craft travelling in a slow and sluggish manner, unable to correct whatever defect would doom it to its fiery demise.

The area to the south of Fort Worth is particularly well suited for flying and would later be chosen by the military as the site of one of the country's first air bases.

So is it possible that some unknown inventor was killed piloting an experimental airship of some kind, as opposed to an alien visitor?

From 1896 onwards, the world was beset by reports of mysterious airships and their occupants interacting with bewildered witnesses.

These incidents originated in the western United States, but soon spread to Europe and as far afield as Australia and New Zealand, reaching their peak with the outbreak of the First World War.

These unknown zeppelins would regularly be seen shining mysterious lights down as they passed over rural communities, sometimes encountered on the ground as their crews conducted hasty repairs.

Witnesses reported that these flyers often spoke in mysterious languages, wearing bizarre uniforms, and quickly fleeing to avoid detection or capture.

With the approach of the Great War, many of these reports were attributed to the German Air Force, who was suspected of attempting to perfect the Zeppelins, which would pound and pummel targets across mainland Europe during the coming conflict.

And yet, with the defeat of Germany, It became apparent that no such expeditions had been undertaken, and that the technology described by witnesses was still decades away from being created.

The Royal Air Force had invested no time or interest in the pursuit, so who on earth could have been responsible?

The Aurora airship crash remains a polarising subject.

Many residents there claim that the event was very real and left a lasting impact on the community.

Others bemoan the unwanted attention that Hayden's newspaper newspaper article had brought the town, the result of a cynical attempt to obtain national interest and investment.

Evidence to support the allegation remains frustratingly as divisive.

Recent claims have suggested that Mr.

Weems was in fact the town blacksmith, and not a signals officer at all.

Others claim that in the aftermath of Roswell, the government made efforts to cover up the affair, fearing further public scrutiny on the subject.

Ultimately, whether you are of the belief that it was an alien or an airship inventor that lost their life in the fields of Aurora on that misty April morning, the evidence would suggest that the event did indeed occur.

And whilst we may never fully know the whole truth behind it, we can take heart in the very compassionate and humane manner in which the people of this small Texan town responded to the tragedy.

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Story 2.

The Ariel School Encounter

One of the most common reasons that alleged encounters with unidentified flying objects are often dismissed is that they usually involve only one or two witnesses.

But how has society reacted when such occurrences have taken place involving larger groups of onlookers?

This week, we examine one such incident.

Join us as we delve into the mysteries of the aerial school encounter.

It was predictably hot outside on the playground as Colin Mackey sat waiting in a stuffy office for the rest of his teaching staff to join the meeting.

Currently they were preparing their young charges to go out and play in the sun, but they would join him shortly.

Pouring himself another cup of coffee, he glanced down at the newspaper on his desk and then smiled to himself.

For the last two days, The headlines had been saturated by reports of UFOs hovering in the skies above Zimbabwe.

Each emerging description of these alleged sightings seemed to be more colourful and fantastic than the preceding ones, but despite the media clamour surrounding the reports, there was suspiciously little in the way of hard evidence to support them.

He looked up as the first couple of teachers finally began to filter into the staff room.

He listened with interest to the snippets of conversation that were taking place as they entered, trying to catch the surnames of any of the children that were being discussed.

When the last participant finally arrived, he commenced the meeting as planned.

As the headteacher of the Ariel School, Mr.

Mackie was ultimately responsible for the delivery of the national syllabus and the health and safety of his pupils.

Daily responsibilities of a more menial nature were naturally delegated out to his staff, and so once a week, he liked to be able to gain an overall picture of what was going on within the school community.

This meeting had started out like any other, with the usual concerns and complaints being raised.

Blocked toilets, damage caused to the facility's perimeter fencing, and a lack of variety in the school dinner options were merely a few of the ongoing issues that needed to be tackled.

But a short time into the discussion, Mackie became aware of a perceptible increase in volume coming from the children playing outside.

As the disturbance had increased, he began to hear screaming and wailing, and it quickly became clear that something was quite amiss.

As one,

the room immediately emptied, with every teacher running for the exits to find out what had upset the children.

When they finally made it outside, the scene that awaited them was akin to something out of a science fiction movie.

Roughly half of the pupils had strayed beyond the boundaries of the playground, and were gathered around the border of a patch of nearby scrubland.

All were clearly emotional, some having collapsed to the ground, whilst others stood crying.

Several of the youngsters claimed they had encountered a Tokolshi, an evil spirit from local folklore, but the older children told quite a different story, one of a little man from another world, who had visited them in order to warn humanity about the future.

When Maki asked one of the youths where this visitor had gone, the child pointed upwards and told the adult that the man in question had flown away again off up into the heavens.

The headmaster stood scanning the skies above the school but could see no trace of what the youngsters were describing.

As he watched his staff move amongst the crying children trying to comfort them, he realised that despite his scepticism, it was clear that something had taken place.

Collecting several of the older pupils, he headed back to the school, explaining that he wanted them to draw what they had witnessed.

The town of Rua lies approximately 22 miles southeast of the Zimbabwean capital, Harari.

It is home to roughly 20,000 inhabitants and sits on one of the country's main road and rail routes.

Beyond these mundane statistics, there is little to distinguish this featureless settlement from many others within the country's borders.

That is, save for an event which is believed to have taken place there one morning in September of 1994.

In the two days prior to this alleged incident, the Zimbabwean media had been reporting a series of nocturnal UFO sightings above Harare.

The majority of witnesses had described seeing glowing fireballs traversing the night skies.

These lights had moved around at breakneck speeds, making impossible twists and turns, before shooting off again and out of sight.

The Ariel School is a private elementary school, which is located on the outskirts of Rua.

At the time of the 1994 UFO flap, the facility taught approximately 90 pupils, varying in age from between 5 and 12 years old.

On the morning of Friday the 16th of September, All the teaching staff were taking part in a meeting inside the main school building and had left the 62 children who had attended that day to play unsupervised outside.

As the youngsters had run and chased one another beneath the burning sunshine, they had suddenly become aware of three silver balls hovering in the sky above the schoolyard.

Before long, the majority of the children had stopped to watch these objects, which would suddenly disappear in a flash of red light, before reappearing again several meters away.

With each successive disappearance disappearance and reappearance, the objects were slowly descending closer and closer to the ground, making some of the younger children feel anxious.

Seeming to sense the unease of those watching, two of the objects started to rise back up to their original position, whilst the third continued to move towards the ground.

The silver orb followed the path of a line of electricity pylons, which ran parallel to the school's perimeter fence, before descending into a cluster of gum trees trees located roughly 300 feet from the playground.

This area was strictly off limits to the children as it was home to a variety of poisonous snakes and spiders, but a deputation of the pupils promptly set off to investigate what the object could be.

They had moved to within a few feet of the foliage when a figure suddenly emerged from the top of the hovering craft.

Immediately, the watching children were taken aback, as no door or hatchway had been seen to open.

It was as if the man had simply levitated up from within the object's interior.

The individual was only about 3 or 4 feet tall, and was clad in a shiny and tight-fitting suit of some kind.

Descriptions of him in the aftermath of the event varied somewhat from child to child, but most agreed that he was thin, with elongated arms and legs and oversized black eyes, which were shaped like rugby balls.

Some of the witnesses described him as having a thin neck, whilst others stated that he had black hair that fell down to his shoulders or was wearing a hood.

The entity floated down the side of the orb until he landed on the ground beneath and then began to walk around as if inspecting the rough terrain.

At this point, a second figure suddenly appeared at the top of the craft, causing the nerve of the younger witnesses to break, sending them screaming back to the school building to fetch help.

Apparently aware of the commotion that its presence had caused, the first creature then moved over to the waiting children, where it surveyed them through emotionless eyes.

Straight away the youngsters were consumed by an overwhelming feeling of despair and hopelessness.

Several claimed to have visions of the world decaying and dying around them, and a voice in their head, warning them of a perilous and dystopian future, centered around a falsehood.

Inside the main building, a number of the children had located the school dinner lady, the only adults not involved in the staff meeting.

She had been running the breaktime tuck shop, but believed that the children were trying to draw her away with the story so that some of the others could steal sweets.

and refused to come outside with them.

Meanwhile back outside, the children assembled near the floating craft continued to be tormented by a whispering voice that warned them of the danger they were all in and that their future would be a dark and foreboding one.

Throughout this interaction, the entity standing before the pupils did not speak, seemingly able to plant the dystopian thoughts and images they were experiencing directly into their minds.

After a number of minutes, the intruder turned away and then floated back up into the waiting orb.

The object promptly shot up into the sky at great speed, before disappearing with a further red flash.

When the teachers finally emerged from their meeting to see what had caused the commotion, there was no trace of the craft, either in the skies above or on the ground where it had landed.

Realising that something significant had taken place, Colin Mackey quickly encouraged the children involved to draw pictures of the being they had interacted with.

In total, the pupils he identified created 35 images of the entities and the orb in which they had travelled.

When investigators and journalists attended the school the following day, Mackie laid all of these renderings out as proof that the children were not lying about the encounter.

Over the decades that have passed since the incident, it has become increasingly difficult to find any of the children involved.

The overwhelming majority have long since left Zimbabwe to settle on foreign shores.

Many others have died as a result of the country's ongoing civil issues.

But the few who have been located have maintained their story, increasingly concerned that the warnings the creatures issued continue to be ignored.

In the days following the occurrence, A number of prominent ufologists visited the aerial school in order to investigate the encounter.

Whilst the visual inspection of the alleged landing site, along with the use of Geiger counters, produced nothing of value, interviews with 12 of the young witnesses completely persuaded investigators that the incident had transpired exactly as it had been reported.

The fact that the children were all of varying age, ethnicity and social standing, but were providing a near-identical account, was believed to be a clear indicator that the story could not have been made up.

Alongside this, the early observations of the teachers and the drawings supervised by Mr.

Mackey further reinforced the apparent validity of the witness accounts.

Many of the children who were spoken to had no concept of UFOs or extraterrestrial entities.

They were local youths from poor backgrounds.

and believed that the entity which they had illustrated and described to the investigators must have been some form of spiritual creature or demon.

Days later, reports emerged in the press that witnesses at the neighbouring Pier House School had also observed the objects, further reinforcing the incident's credibility.

Over the years, commonalities with the aerial school encounter have been uncovered in the testimony of other alleged alien abductees.

The concept of extraterrestrial visitors speaking telepathically is commonplace.

and a minority of other witnesses have described warnings from aliens about the future and what is in store for mankind.

There are also a number of other incidents where UFOs have been witnessed, apparently visiting teaching facilities.

Perhaps the most notorious of these events took place in the Australian city of Melbourne on the 6th of April 1966.

At approximately 11am,

A number of pupils at the Westall High School informed their teachers that an odd-looking craft was hovering over the school playground.

As these reports circulated circulated throughout the children and their teachers, the school buildings quickly emptied out, with approximately 300 witnesses attending what was taking place.

The majority of them described that the object hovering above the school was oval shaped, and was roughly the size of two cars parked next to one another.

It was grey in colour, but emitting a purple hue into the air around it.

As with the subsequent Ruhr incident, the object slowly descended towards the ground, before it was obscured by a nearby patch of trees.

At this point, five military aircraft suddenly appeared overhead and began to circle around the school perimeter.

The unidentified object immediately rose back up into the sky and engaged in a short game of cat and mouse with its pursuers, before flying off again at great speed.

In the days that followed, the headteacher told the students not to discuss what they had seen with anybody outside the school, and a number of military officials attempted to persuade the witnesses that they were mistaken about what it was they had seen play out.

There were also reports of other men, dressed all in black, who were seen inspecting the patch of trees the craft had descended into.

So what are we to make of these reported incidents?

Are they indeed instances of extraterrestrial visitation, trying to usher mankind along a less destructive path, whatever that may be.

Or are we instead seeing classic examples of mass hysteria, or merely extremely convincing youthful pranks?

Both incidents involved a staggering number of eyewitnesses.

The Australian case in particular was witnessed by both juveniles and adults.

And whilst there was a notable lack of physical evidence at either of the alleged landing sites, there are sufficient similarities in the witness testimonies which make them difficult to dismiss or debunk.

One theory is that these mysterious visitors are not extraterrestrial at all, but are actually travellers from Earth's far future.

This may explain their ability to materialise in different time periods and geographical locations, whilst attempting to carry out their mission to prevent the mistakes of the past from dooming mankind's future.

as far-fetched as that all sounds.

As we leaf through the pictures drawn by the Ariel schoolchildren, it becomes increasingly difficult to deny that they saw something unthinkable on that fateful September morning.

In the nearly three decades that have passed, they have never altered or disavowed their stories, and that conduct alone should persuade us all to perhaps give their claims at least a second thought.

Whatever they saw, They certainly believed that it was real, and that the warnings they were given were both clear and ominous.