SUBJECT: SPACESHIP CRASH IN 1884 ? FILE: UFO2425
On June 6, 1884, as a band of cowboys rounded up cattle in remote Dundy
County, Nebraska, a blazing object streaked out of the sky and crashed some
distance from them, leaving (according to a contemporary newspaper account)
"fragments of cog-wheels and other pieces of machinery . . . glowing with heat
so intense as to scorch the grass for a long distance around each fragment."
The light was so intense that it blinded one of the witnesses.
This incredible event was recorded two days later in Lincoln's Daily State
Journal, which printed a dispatch from Benkelman, Nebraska, by an anonymous
correspondent. The correspondent wrote that prominent local citizens had gone
to the site, where the metal now had cooled. He reported, "The aerolite, or
whatever it is, seems to be about 50 or 60 feet long, cylindrical, and about
10 or 12 feet in diameter." A State Journal editor remarked that this must have
been an "air vessel belonging originally to some other planet."
But on June 10 an anticlimactic dispatch came from Benkelman. In a heavy
rainstorm the remains had "melted, dissolved by the water like a spoonful of
salt." The obvious message: Take the story with a grain of sodium chloride.
The State Journal, redfaced, dropped it then and there.
In the 1960s a copy of the first newspaper article resurfaced, and reporters,
historians, and ufologists rushed to Dundy County. Lifelong residents of the
area assured them no such thing had ever happened. Later, even after the
telltale followup dispatch was uncovered, one humorless author theorized that
the "storm was artificially created so that a UFO concealed within the clouds
could retrieve the wreckage of the crashed UFO."
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