Orthoteny: from a work in progress: from On The Phantom Air Ship Mystery: April 17, Aurora

Today, I share the next instalment from On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery, a retelling of the archetypal UFO crash in Aurora, Texas, 17 April 1897. Like the uncannily prophetic depiction of the alien abduction schema in the 1963 film The Haunted Palace, the story of the Aurora, Texas airship crash possesses many of the features of later, similar tales avant le lettre: the crash itself; the small, burnt body of its pilot; strange, heiroglyphic writing found on items in the wreckage; and the “burying” (metaphorically, the cover up) of the body and wreckage. However tall the tale (as Kevin Randle maintains), it is nevertheless canonical and haunts ufology to this day; Jacques Vallée and Paola Harris reference its similarities to the Trinity crash, the subject of their recent book, in all its versions…