Contribution*:

The Time When a Mexican Met a Man from Marrs

Looking back, 2016 was a good year for me.
Like everything in life, that year had its ups and downs: I lost my job (but it was a shitty one anyway); I contributed to the wonderful anthology “UFOs: Reframing the Debate” edited by my late friend Robbie Graham, which was the first time I saw something written by me in a bona fide printed book (the cover wasn’t half bad either, if I can brag for a bit); I also attended my first (and only, so far) International UFO conference in Flagstaff, Arizona, where my pal Greg Bishop and I engaged in a bit of ‘guerrilla publicity’ for his book “It Defies Language!”
But the highlight of 2016 for me, was definitely the rare opportunity of meeting a true legend in the paranormal field —and in one of the most iconic places in the world of UFOlogy, to boot.
The year before, some of my closest friends in the ‘Fortean blogosphere’ —as I used to call it way back when blogs were still a thing— had the wacky idea of celebrating a sort of ‘un-conference’ of the paranormal. You know how when you attend one of these events which usually cost hundreds of dollars (without even adding travel and boarding expenses) that the most fun parts happen when you’re not at the conference per se, but sitting instead at the hotel bar with newly made friends you just met at the venue, laughing and chatting about all this weird shit, as if someone had magically just given you permission to finally talk about the things you’re really into, instead of just mingling via dull ‘normie’ trivialities like sports and current gossiping?
Well, that is what my pals wanted to recreate, and so they decided to open the invitation to anyone willing to attend to the first ever ‘Paramania’ gathering, during the first weekend of April —April Fools, get it? — in Dallas, Texas.
We spent that long weekend, my friends and I (Greg Bishop, Joshua Cutchin, Micah Hanks and Tim Binnall, to name just a few) hopping from bar to bar as we visited locations that would be of interest to fellow weirdos; like the (in)famous book depository where Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly killed JFK in 1963, as it is explained on a metal plaque pasted on the façade of the building which is now a museum —someone had actually underscored the word “allegedly” with a knife, as if to keep the old conspiracy alive in the minds of passersby. We all thought that was cool.
The ‘pièce de résistance’ of the trip happened miles away from Dallas, though; courtesy of Daniel Alan Jones, who organized for us an impromptu meetup with famed author Jim Marrs at the legendary cemetery of Aurora, Texas, where the occupant of some mysterious airship that crashed with a windmill in the late XIXth century is said to have been buried by the locals —farmer folk whose Christian kindness toward the dead was evidently more predominant than their scientific curiosity…
Following the customary ‘American road trip’ (albeit a rather short one) like the ones a middle-class Mexican geek such as I had often dreamt of, we arrived at the cemetery which has been featured in countless books and TV programs. The town of Aurora didn’t seem to be in any hurry to become a tourist attraction of the UFOlogical kind, like Roswell or Point Pleasant; so aside from a sparse mention of the rumored incident in the cemetery’s plaque, there wasn’t any other indication alluding to the ‘paranormal pedigree’ of the place.
Daniel was already waiting for us with Jim, who very graciously served as an informal tourist guide to our group, showing us his copy of the original newspaper article which secured Aurora’s place in the annals of UFO history, while pointing to the spot where the mortal(?) remains of a strange visitor from the unknown had supposedly had their final earthly rest; a strange tale worthy of the pages of pulp fiction magazines of the 1950s, whose veracity Mister Marrs tried to corroborate on numerous occasions throughout the years.
By this time in my delving with UFO lore I was already heavily critical of the standard “nuts and bolts” hypothesis of the phenomenon, and I was equally skeptical of the Aurora affair, truth be told, which had all the earmarks of having been nothing, but a “tall tale” triggered by the airship sightings which plagued wide portions of the United States in 1897 —mass hysteria, media hoaxes or the first documented UFO wave over the United States? The UFO community will keep debating over this ‘til the cows come home.
I remember raising a few questions to Jim, who was always polite and wasn’t bothered at all when people didn’t agree with his point of view —something woefully lacking in the age of Twitter wars and cancel culture.
Years later, I ended up reading in one of Jacques Vallee’s books (“Trinity: The Best Kept Secret”) how the Aurora story had been secretly studied in 1973 by members of the McDonell Douglas aircraft company, who seemed to have taken it very seriously and had indeed managed to retrieve samples of aluminum in a molten state; giving some credence to the theory that something indeed crashed in this little town which its highly evocative name —‘Aurora’ means ‘Dawn’ in Spanish, and it seems highly serendipitous how with the help of stories such as these, it is beginning to ‘dawn’ on us how the history of our world is very different from what we initially imagined.
Whether a Western yarn, a malfunctioning Martian spaceship, a hapless Cryptoterrestrial vessel, a time travel experiment gone awry, or something even weirder and harder to wrap our heads around, the chances are we may never be able to solve the mystery of Aurora. But on that magical afternoon of 2016, with the warm sun in my face and even warmer company at my side, I didn’t much care.
Mister Marrs ended up having his own ‘trip to the beyond’ the very next year, so having had the chance to shake his hand and meeting him in person remains one of the highlights in my career as a paranormal raconteur. And it also goes to show how, even if one doesn’t ever find the ultimate answers to Life, the Universe and Everything, pursuing the white rabbit down its endless hole has a way to reward those brave enough to pick up the trail.

– Miguel Romero (Redpill Junkie)