Aurora, Texas UFO crashes into nonexistant windmill

The history of UFO cases is pretty straightforward, as much as the UFO enthusiast would like you to believe otherwise. In the 1890s, people began reporting seeing airships that looked like blimps or zeppelins floating above their cities. The vast majority have been shown to be the product of hoaxes or people looking for attention. Unfortunately, time and exaggeration have blown this phenomenon out of proportion.Not much happened for the next few decades, until people started to report seeing flying objects shortly after the second world war. This is when the term 'flying saucer' was coined, and no one really knew what was going on. There were a few "flaps", during which thousands of people saw the objects, that concerned the government to the extent that the Air Force was ordered into investigating. They were afraid that the Soviets could use UFO reports to cause confusion in the critical, early stages of some sort of Russian/American war, so the Air Force bent over backwards to discredit everything even peripherally related to UFOs. Even when they couldn't find an explanation, they really went to town to try and quell the publics' fears. Considering that the Soviets were well-armed and deficient in the morals department, I can hardly blame them. Anything that the Soviets could use to even a tiny advantage over us had to be neutralized. Of course, the UFO enthusiast sees things differently. They would have you believe that it was not crippling fear of the Red Menace that led our government to try and discredit UFO reports; rather, the government is in league with space aliens for some nefarious reason and needs to cover things up. I can also understand and respect this; the American people have a long history of not trusting the government farther than they can throw it. It's healthy to be a little paranoid about a group of people that controls our whole lives and has a giant pile of atomic weapons. On the other hand, thinking that the government is in league with space aliens is based on only the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence. I'd suggest going back to thinking that they're trying to tax you too much.Anyway, during the 1950s a group of people calling themselves Contactees sprung up. They claimed that they'd been contacted by space aliens and given some important information about how to live life without exploding our planet. Usually, they started cults and bilked people out of money. Over time, the contactees disappeared and were replaced by abductees, who spoke of substantially less pleasant contact with life from outer space. Here, for your reading pleasure, are samples of UFO cases that were proven to be hoaxes. I'm not naive enough to think that one can prove all cases to be untrue by proving some of them to be hoaxes, but perhaps after reading them you'll be less likely to believe everything you hear on the internet or in the supermarket checkout line. The place: Aurora, Texas. The date: April, 1897. Several prominent citizens of the town claimed that they had seen a large, blimp-like airship hovering over the town for some amount of time, doing all the creepy things UFOs usually do: changing course rapidly, moving at great speeds and other maneuvering feats that seemed pretty amazing for an era before the airplane had been invented. They further claimed that the airship collided with a windmill, and that the body of a strange alien had been buried in the town cemetery. Mind you, the pilot of this craft could have navigated the non-trivial distances between stars and the barrier between space and atmosphere, but he met his undoing at the hands of a windmill?Upon further investigation, it was revealed that the town never had a windmill anywhere near it. This is Texas we're talking about, not 14th century Belgium. Further, the town's mayor owned the parcel of land where the ship was said to have crashed and had been very upset that the town did not have enough tourists visiting it. Either of these two facts is a fatal blow to the credibility of the case, and yet recently a group of researchers petitioned a judge to let them dig up the graveyard in search of the craft's alien occupant. I can only imagine that the judge shook his head in disbelief as he said no.The first and most famous of the 'abductees' are Betty and Barney Hill. They were more or less the first people to report being abducted by aliens and having terrible medical procedures performed on them. Now that a few decades have elapsed, only the most hardcore of die-hard holdouts continue to think that what Betty and Barney Hill experienced was real. Before the abduction, Betty was known to have an active interest in the occult; afterwards, she led a group of people to an empty field and claimed there was an invisible spacecraft there that only she could see. She also claimed her cat could fly and her husband, to his credit, poached part of his account of the experience from an episode of The Outer Limits. You can read the entire story in an article I wrote a few months ago. And to those of you that did and claim I am somehow dirtying the memory of the now-deceased Hills, let me just say that I am sure they were nice people. I'm sure they were sweeter than a molasses milkshake. I'm just saying they weren't abducted by space monsters. One thing keeps popping up in cases where aliens are seen: sometimes, they are described the same way. People have reported seeing everything from Hitler to giant metal robots with carrots for noses to Bigfoot to normal looking humans inside UFOs, but a lot of them claim to see the small, big-headed, hairless, gray monsters that made Chris Carter a millionaire a hojillion times over. They were described in the Aurora, Texas case and they were described by the Hills. How dare I say that these are hoaxes when the details line up so well?I dare because I know something about history. After the Civil War newspapers began speculating as to what humankind would look like "in the year ten million." Just like today, when a story sold well for one paper, all the others copied it, and this story sold well. The author speculated that, because we would have machines to do all our work, we would become smaller, with giant heads and big black eyes. Starting to sound familiar? Also, we wouldn't have hair and our skin would turn gray. I'm not sure why he said that, but that's what was reported. This description was then printed in every newspaper, written in thousands of books, and appeared in the early 20th century in legions of comic-books. Everyone knows what they look like; I'm not surprised or concerned in the least that so many UFO stories involve such characters.For some people that cannot grasp this fact, they lose their jobs. Supposedly, in 1989 there was a huge crash of a flying saucer in Canada that the military tried covering up. A gentleman, calling himself only "Guardian" contacted the head of a UFO group, MUFON, and told him he had videos and evidence from the crash. This fellow, Bob Oeschler, swallowed the hook, the line, the sinker, and a fair portion of the reel itself. When some friends of his were able to duplicate the 'evidence' from the video using some fireworks and a remote-controlled airplane, it looked like he was in trouble. When they discovered that the 'aliens' shown in the video were twin brothers to a plastic mask that you can buy in any mall or costume store, Oeschler found himself unemployed. This is, as far as I know, the only time that a UFO enthusiast has been censored for being too enthusiastic. Anyway, I could go on and on about this stuff. I'm sure that, since I badmouthed Betty and Barney Hill a little bit back there, I'll be getting a pile of angry emails. To those of you who read this, I challenge you to a public debate at a time and location of your choosing, to which I will arrive armed to the teeth with cold, hard logic and common sense. To the rest of you, stop reading this tripe and apply yourself to something useful, like studying actual science.