Space Invaders in the Old West!
Did "Martians" pay a visit to the American West in the nineteenth century…?
There’s no shortage of strange stories of things seen and done to be gleaned from the newspapers and broadsheets of the nineteenth century.
When it comes to the Old West, that often means tales of outlaws, gunfights, train and stagecoach robberies, Indian attacks, gold and silver strikes—you know, the usual wild west stuff of which legends were made. But, as we’ve seen before, every once in a while you can find buried in the most obscure newspapers and local gazettes the absolute strangest and most thrilling stories of curious cryptids, relict dinosaurs, and even—as we’ll see—the occasional alien visitation or two.
Because if you thought that whole Roswell business was the first time our space brothers decided to pay the great American West a personal visit…well, you couldn’t be more wrong. As a case in point—or I suppose I should say several cases in point—I’ll present here what I suspect you’ll agree are three very sober and not at all suspicious accounts of close encounters of the “Martian” kind—Martian being the standard nineteenth-century nomenclature for any extraterrestrial being, irrespective of its actual planet of origin.
So, without further ado, let’s dig in:
The Martian Mummy
Our very first strange story of extraterrestrial visitants in the Old West comes courtesy not of any old rag in Santa Fe or Denver or San Francisco or even Los Angeles; no, this story comes all the way from the Old World itself—from France, to be exact.
Actually, the only account we seem to have of it is a rather sarcastic and dismissive mention in the old nineteenth-century French scientific journal L’Année Scientifique et Industrielle,1 which, in a chapter titled “A High-Flying Scientific Corker: The Inhabitant of Mars,” recounts a story that evidently appeared in the June 17, 1864 issue of the newspaper Le Pays.
The opening paragraphs give us a pretty clear indication of what the author thinks of the whole matter:
“Le Pays of June 17, 1864 put into circulation a dreadful whopper, of supposedly American origin, but which obviously came from a news bureau in Paris, and which was intended to mystify the sophisticated Frenchman by a comical amplification of recent discoveries concerning meteorites and fossil man. We do not know how far such undertakings are allowed on public credulity, especially when they are perpetrated with a scope and length that betokens a great bias for success…
“The hair-raising piece which made the rounds of the provincial newspapers, after having been welcomed in a few sheets of Paris, was entitled: An inhabitant of the planet Mars; it purported to be a correspondence from Richmond, and Le Pays published it ‘with all reservations!’ We guess so.”
The gist of the story goes something like this: somewhere in the vicinity of the 13,294-foot James Peak, in the country of the Arapahoes (“dans le pays des Arrapahys”), a wealthy landowner by the name of Mr. Paxton began digging around in search of petroleum—which is perhaps not the sort of thing nineteenth-century miners were often questing after in the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies, but perhaps Mr. Paxton was a man ahead of his time.
In any case, the excavations uncovered a rich seam of miscellaneous minerals, and a Mr. Davis, “a very distinguished geologist from Pittsburgh” who was attached to Mr. Paxton’s team, insisted on following this vein deeper into the mountain. After two weeks of digging, they unearthed what sounds like an immense geode, forty or so meters in diameter, its surface encased in a black enamel and its substance comprising numerous silicates and metals commonly found in the composition of meteorites.
It gets better.
The geode…er, meteorite—since that was obviously what the thing was—had evidently been buried in the mountain for many millions of years. There was also a chance of finding within it rich veins of precious metals, so the team continued to dig. During the ensuing weeks, the excavators bored ever closer to the center of this strange meteorite, until finally they encountered what appeared to be a central cavity of some kind. Ten days were spent in widening the opening, and finally Mr. Davis and John Paxton, son of the wealthy landowner, lowered themselves into the mysterious hollow.
After a few minutes, the two men returned, pale of face and somewhat shaken, bearing with them a “crude amphora of white metal (silver and zinc) all riddled with little holes and bizarre designs.”
There was more. Paxton and Davis had found the artifact embedded in the rock, and below that was a metallic surface—a kind of lid or cover to some vessel. It was of black and oxidized metal, and about two meters wide; after three days of endeavor, the team removed this cover, and John Paxton, Mr. Davis, and another man—a Mr. Murchison by name—descended into the cavity. What they found was a rectangular sort of tomb, and in the midst of it was what sounds like a limestone sarcophagus, sculpted in the shape of a four-foot-tall humanoid.
Thrilled at the discovery, the men used acid to break open the sarcophagus, and what they found was…well, not surprisingly, a mummy. Clearly, though, it was no human mummy:
“The head emerged almost intact: no hair, smooth, wrinkled skin, transformed into leather; triangular brain; knife-edge face; a kind of trunk, starting from the forehead, as a nose; a very small mouth, with only a few teeth; two orbital pits, from which the eyes had been removed; very long arms; five fingers, the fourth much shorter than the others. Generally slender appearance.”
Moreover, the Murchison fellow discovered a silver plate near the mummy, upon which were inscribed figures that resembled a rhinoceros, a palm tree, etc., along with a serviceable diagram of the Solar System—rather like that on the famous golden plaques of the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft, or the golden records mounted on the Voyager probes.
In any case, the most telling point of all was that the planet that corresponded to Mars on this diagram was noticeably larger than the others; from this fact, the excavators sensibly concluded that the mummy represented an inhabitant of Mars. This mummy had apparently been entombed within the giant meteorite—perhaps as part of some Martian sepulchral ritual—which was somehow ejected from the Red Planet to wander through space for a time, and then collide with the Earth in the distant past, somewhere in the vicinity of James Peak in the Colorado Rockies.
It was, without doubt, the most sensational discovery of the nineteenth century, and it proved beyond any reasonable objection that man was not alone, and that Mars was home to an advanced civilization of man-like beings.
You can be forgiven for never having heard of it though, because unfortunately, although Le Pays’ correspondent in America promised to have the mummy molded and very accurate graphical reproductions rendered, nothing was ever forthcoming.
As for the mummy, and Messrs. Paxton and Davis and Murchison? Well…who knows? Maybe they made a few bucks exhibiting the thing in lousy sideshows in dusty old west towns, like poor Pedro the Mummy…a sad fate indeed for such an important extraterrestrial visitant, and quite possibly the most important scientific discovery in human history.
The Lodi Close Encounter
Our next story occurred some three decades later, on November 27, 1896, in Lodi, California—an agricultural town located in the midst of California’s fertile Central Valley, and nowadays known most of all for its viticulture.
The story of the Lodi Encounter is interesting for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that it contains an early description of living extraterrestrials, along with definitive Close Encounters of the Third and possibly Fourth Kinds, including a possible attempted alien abduction. It’s like an abortive Travis Walton Encounter, nearly eighty years before the fact.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Our knowledge of this matter comes from The Evening Mail of Stockton, California, with a curious story bearing the sensational headline: “Three Strange Visitors, Who Possibly Came From the Planet Mars.”
The story is related by a Colonel Henry Glenville Shaw (1843-1907), a Civil War veteran and news correspondent who had apparently belonged to the Mail’s editorial staff prior to his encounter. At any rate, Col. Shaw wasn’t just a figment of someone’s imagination (unlike, say, a Mr. Paxton or Mr. Davis), and so the man’s unusual story carries some weight. Furthermore, he wasn’t the only eyewitness, and this second individual seems to have been a real person as well.
In any case, it’s best to let Col. Shaw tell his own story:
THREE STRANGE BEINGS
“Were it not for the fact that I was not alone when I witnessed the strange sight I would never have mentioned it at all. Wednesday afternoon I went out to Lodi and Lockeford in company with Camille Spooner, a young man recently arrived from Nevada…We left Lodi on the return trip, I should judge, shortly before 6 o’clock, and we were jogging along quietly when the horse stopped suddenly and gave a snort of terror. Looking up we beheld three strange beings. They resembled humans in many respects, but still they were not like anything I had ever seen. They were nearly or quite seven feet high and very slender. We were both somewhat startled, as you may readily imagine, and the first impulse was to drive on. The horse, however, refused to budge, and when we saw that we were being regarded more with an air of curiosity than anything else we concluded to get out and investigate. I walked up to where the strange looking persons were and addressed them. I asked where they were from. They seemed not to understand me, but began—well, ‘warbling’ expresses it better than talking. Their remarks, if such you would call them, were addressed to each other, and sounded like a monotonous chant, inclined to be guttural. I saw it was no use to attempt a conversation, so I satisfied myself with watching and examining them. They seemed to take great interest in ourselves, the horse and buggy, and scrutinized everything very carefully.
WEIGHED LESS THAN AN OUNCE EACH
“While they were thus engaged I was enabled to inspect them as well. As I have already stated, they were seven feet in height and very slender. I noticed, further, that their hands were quite small and delicate, and that their fingers were without nails. Their feet, however, were nearly twice as long as those of an ordinary man, though they were narrow, and the toes were also long and slender. I noticed, too, that they were able to use their feet and toes much the same as a monkey; in fact, they appeared to have much better use of their feet than their hands. I presently discovered that this was probably a provision of nature. As one of them came close to me I reached out to touch him, and, placing my hand under his elbow, pressed gently upward, and lo and behold I lifted him from the ground with scarcely an effort. I should judge that the specific gravity of the creature was less than an ounce. It was then that I observed him try to grasp the earth with his toes to prevent my lifting him. You can readily understand that their slight weight made such a provision necessary, or they might be blown away.
“They were without any sort of clothing, but were covered with a natural growth hard to describe; it was not hair, neither was it like feathers, but it was as soft as silk to the touch, and their skin was like velvet. Their faces and heads were without hair, the ears were very small, and the nose had the appearance of polished ivory, while the eyes were large and lustrous. The mouth, however, was small, and it seemed to me that they were without teeth. That and other things led me to believe that they neither ate nor drank, and that life was sustained by some sort of gas. Each of them had swung under the left arm a bag to which was attached a nozzle, and every little while one or the other would place the nozzle in his mouth, at which time I heard a sound as of escaping gas. It was much the same sound as is produced by a person blowing up a football.
OF INDESCRIBABLE BEAUTY
“From the description I give I do not want you to get the idea that these creatures were hideous. In appearance they were markedly the contrary. They were possessed of a strange and indescribable beauty. I can express myself in no other way. They were graceful to a degree, and more divinely beautiful than anything I ever beheld.
“The strangest part of this story is yet to come. It is the lights they carried. Each held in his hand something about the size of a hen’s egg. Upon holding them up and partly opening the hand, these substances emitted the most remarkable, intense and penetrating light one can imagine. Notwithstanding its intensity it had no unpleasant effect upon our eyes, and we found we could gaze directly at it. It seemed to me to be some sort of luminous mineral, though they had complete control of it.
“Finally they became tired of examining us and our horse and buggy, and then one of them, at a signal from one who appeared to be the leader, attempted to lift me, probably with the intention of carrying me away. Although I made not the slightest resistance he could not move me, and finally the three of them tried it without the slightest success. They appeared to have no muscular power outside of being able to move their own limbs.
STRANGE AIRSHIP
“Well, after trying in vain to move either of us they turned in the direction of the Woodbridge canal, near which we were, and as they flashed their lights towards the bridge we beheld a startling sight. There, resting in the air about twenty feet above the water, was an immense airship. It was 150 feet in length at least, though probably not over twenty feet in diameter at the widest part. It was pointed at both ends, and outside of a large rudder there was no visible machinery. The three walked rapidly toward the ship, not as you or I walk, but with a swaying motion, their feet only touching the ground at intervals of about fifteen feet. We followed them as rapidly as possible, and reached the bridge as they were about to embark. With a little spring they rose to the machine, opened a door in the side, and disappeared within. I do not know of what the affair was built, but just before it started I struck it with a rock and it gave no sound. It went through the air very rapidly and expanded and contracted with a muscular motion, and was soon out of sight.
“I have a theory, which, of course, is only a theory, that those we beheld were inhabitants of Mars, who have been sent to the earth for the purpose of securing one of its inhabitants…”
That’s it. That’s the story of the Lodi Close Encounter in toto. The Martians arrived, attempted to abduct Col. Shaw and his companion, and, thwarted, left as suddenly as they had appeared.
It is interesting to note, however, in Col. Shaw’s description of the Martian spacecraft, that it tallies quite well with other cigar-shaped UFOs that make an appearance every now and again in the American West.
The Aurora Incident
Finally, we come to the celebrated Aurora Incident, which usually wins the award in ufological circles for the first reported crash of an extraterrestrial spaceship in the United States—or at least the American West—antedating the infamous Roswell Incident by an entire half-century.
The remarkable event in question was said to have occurred in Aurora, Texas, a small town located to the northwest of Fort Worth, on the morning of April 19, 1897. If true—and in the absence of any relics of the aforementioned Martian Mummy of James Peak, Colorado—the crashed Aurora spaceship and its occupant would be the earliest extraterrestrial artifacts and remains ever recovered in the American West.
All of our information about this incident comes from the Dallas Morning News, which—in an apparent fit of springtime boredom—decided to go all in on the so-called “Mystery Airship” UFO flap that consumed the United States in the period 1896-1897. In the middle part of April 1897, the Dallas Morning News was reporting an airship sighting nearly every day.
Some of these stories were humorous and plain ridiculous, and some were rather clever—including one in which a man said he had spoken to the weird aeronauts of one such airship, who told him they were the inhabitants of a country at the North Pole that was populated by the descendants of an old English polar expedition from the sixteenth century, as well as some survivors of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition in the 1840s. They used a chemical process to burn icebergs for fuel to heat their buildings and greenhouses, and—owing to a lack of timber—couldn’t build seagoing ships, so they were compelled to invent airships in order to communicate with the outside world.
You’ve got to hand it to these Old West newspapermen—they certainly weren’t lacking in the imagination department.
Anyhow, on April 19, 1897, the coverage by the Dallas Morning News reached a crescendo, with the newspaper printing a full sixteen stories about airships on that same day. Among these was the famous story of the Aurora Incident, headlined “A Windmill Demolishes It,” which I think you’ll agree is worth reproducing here in its glorious entirety:
“About 6 o’clock this morning the early risers of Aurora were astonished at the sudden appearance of the airship which has been sailing through the country.
“It was traveling due north, and much nearer the earth than ever before. Evidently some of the machinery was out of order, for it was making a speed of only ten or twelve miles an hour and gradually settling toward the earth. It sailed directly over the public square, and when it reached the north part of town collided with the tower of Judge Proctor’s windmill and went to pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over the 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 on board, and while his remains are badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world.
“Mr. T. J. Weems, the United States signal service officer at this place and an authority on astronomy, give it as his opinion that he was a native of the planet Mars.
“Papers found on his person—evidently the record of his travels—are written in some unknown hieroglyphics, and can not be deciphered.
“The ship was too badly wrecked to form any conclusion as to its construction or motive power. It was built of an unknown metal, resembling somewhat a mixture of aluminum and silver, and it must have weighed several tons.
“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.”
Sadly, there was no follow-up to this remarkable story.
For instance, where was the pilot buried? Did any mourners attend? Of what denomination was the officiating priest, if indeed there was one? More importantly, what particulars of the pilot’s “badly disfigured” remains sufficed to prove to everyone’s satisfaction that he was “not an inhabitant of this world”?
Maybe there’s a lot more going on in Texas after all than ten-gallon hats, dusty cowboys, and cattle herds as far as the eye can see…
Verdict: So what can we say about these three tales of Martian invaders in the Old West?
Well, to use the lingo of the time, they’re almost certainly just a bunch of cock-and-bull stories. To begin with, there’s the story of the Martian Mummy. The story appears at second hand in a French scientific journal, where it is sarcastically dismissed as utter nonsense.
That’s the first bad sign.
Now, there certainly is a “Pic James,” or James Peak, in the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies, in Arapahoe country, but no one remembers anyone named Mr. Paxton, still less any “very distinguished geologist from Pittsburgh” by the name of Mr. Davis. And you better believe someone would have remembered the discovery of a giant Martian meteorite in the Rocky Mountains…especially if it contained an actual sarcophagus bearing the unusual remains of a genuine inhabitant of the Red Planet.
Besides, why is the only notice of this tale in a French newspaper? Surely some American rag, eager for a sensational story, would have picked it up first. Then there’s the little matter of an almost identical story—right down to the names of the discoverers and the exact description of the mummified Martian—which appeared in the Argentine newspaper La Capital in 1877. The only thing changed was the location of the discovery: near Carcarañá, Argentina, rather than the Rocky Mountains.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I guess, but it also tends to give the game away.
No, in this case it’s safe to say this was merely a bit of imaginative French science fiction, set in the faraway Rocky Mountains of Colorado—a very remote and exotic place to nineteenth-century Frenchmen.
The next story, of the Lodi Close Encounter, must be equally spurious. Col. H. G. Shaw was indeed a real person, a known Civil War vet, and his fellow eyewitness, Camille Spooner, was apparently also a real person. We have Lodi resident and local artist John Callahan to thank for this information; he did some research into the matter, uncovering more on Col. Shaw’s background, and learning that Camille Spooner was connected to the well-known Spooners of Lake Tahoe. Spooner Lake and the Spooner Summit mountain pass, for instance, were apparently named after the young man’s father.
Unfortunately, although Mr. Callahan promised a forthcoming book to present his findings on the matter, and even once apparently had a website detailing some of his research, both appear to be non-existent. And perhaps that is just as well, for it is almost certain that the account appearing in The Evening Mail is a total fabrication—of the kind commonly found in newspapers of the time.
Or even today, for that matter.
And that brings us to our final tale, that of the celebrated Aurora Incident. This one has attracted a great deal of interest over the years, probably because its claims are so outrageous.
A crashed spaceship. A buried alien pilot. It’s got a little bit of everything.
Despite this, no one seemed much interested for over half a century, but in 1966 a Dr. Alfred E. Kraus, distinguished Director of the Kilgore Research Institute of West Texas State University, took an interest in the matter, and started poking around in the area with a metal detector.
Predictably, he found some license plates and other metal junk, but nothing demonstrably out of this world. Certainly not a spacecraft or an alien pilot. At the same time the ufologists Donald B. Hanlon and Jacques Vallee learned of the incident, and their interest prompted a visit to Aurora by a friend of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, of Project Bluebook fame. The investigator learned, among other things, that the august Mr. T. J. Weems, the signal service officer and “authority on astronomy,” was actually just Jeff Weems, the town blacksmith.
Moreover, no one in the town really seemed to remember the incident, and even the titular windmill of the famous article didn’t seem to have ever actually existed. Nor, for that matter, did the records of the local cemetery mention a burial involving any damned Martian, nor any other type of intelligent being save the good and Christian folk of Aurora, Texas.
Still, investigators and ufologists have descended on Aurora from time to time, and in 1973 MUFON researchers even scoured the cemetery with metal detectors, where they registered anomalous readings at a certain grave, perhaps connected with bits of metal that some thought were fragments of the crashed spaceship. Shortly afterwards, vandals stole the tombstone that marked this grave, which some had said even bore a crude image of a cigar-shaped UFO (others said it merely looked like just the kind of dent a carelessly-swung shovel might produce).
The town of Aurora has done pretty well as a kind of small-town Texan answer to Roswell, New Mexico. It even has a sculpture of a crashed UFO and windmill to welcome tourists. Just don’t ask to go poking around in the town cemetery, because the locals don’t take kindly to city folks and outsiders showing up and disturbing their dead.
So could the Aurora Incident be the first government coverup involving a crashed alien spacecraft? Maybe the debris from the wreckage was secretly recovered by Federal authorities, and is one of those 12-15 alien spacecraft in government custody that investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger (
) reported on in June? And maybe these old-school MIBs also exhumed the alien body—one of those “dead pilots” mentioned by military whistleblower David Grusch in his bombshell interview with NewsNation?Yeah…maybe.
Or maybe the whole thing is just another cock-and-bull story, contrived by a desperate local trying to drum up some interest in his dying town.
Still, it’s a good story—all of them are—and even if there weren’t any Martian invaders in the Old West…well, these wild tales of visiting spacemen form part of the indelible legendry of the American West, the sort of thing that lives on in our imaginations and inspired such films as Cowboys & Aliens (2011).
So, for my part, I say hats off to those anonymous newspaper writers of the nineteenth century—our folklore of the weird and wild west wouldn’t be the same without ’em!