The Dundy County "Celestial Visitor" Hoax

Summer, 1884. More than a decade before the airship stories of 1896 and 1897, the Nebraska State Journal in Lincoln printed a dispatch from its "special correspondent" in Benkelman, Dundy County. Most sources date it June 8, 1884. Its subhead called the thing that fell "Evidently a Machine of Human Manufacture."

Friday, June 6, 1884. On the ranges about 35 miles northwest of Benkelman, rancher John W. Ellis and his cowboys were at work. They saw "a blazing meteor of immense size falling at an angle to the earth." They heard "a terrific rushing, roaring sound overhead." The object came down out of sight in a draw.

They rode up and found "cog-wheels and other pieces of machinery" scattered on the ground. All of it was too hot to get near. A cowboy named Alf Williamson went too close anyway. His face was blistered and his hair singed, and his eyesight was damaged. The sand had fused over an area "twenty feet wide by eighty feet long."

They came back the next day. In the draw lay an object "about fifty or sixty feet long, cylindrical, and about ten or twelve feet in diameter." Nearby were "a blade of a propeller screw" and "a fragment of a wheel", made of a light metal like brass. Brand inspector E. W. Rawlins was said to vouch for the details.

A second dispatch followed on June 10. The correspondent had just come back from the spot where the "aerial visitor fell last Friday." A crowd had gathered to see what a heavy rainstorm would do to "the glowing mass of metal." The storm broke around 2 p.m. and lasted about thirty minutes.

When it cleared, the object "had melted, dissolved by the water like a spoonful of salt." All that was left were "small, jelly-like pools", which washed away toward a nearby creek and left "a faint, sweetish smell." Williamson had gone to Denver with his brother, and it was feared he would not see again.

It didn't take long for doubts to appear. On June 14, 1884, the Laramie Boomerang read the story as "a political allegory for the temperance movement." The full answer came on July 24, 1927, in the Journal's 60th-anniversary edition, when Calhoun's former assistant Horace W. Hebbard revealed that managing editor James D. Calhoun had invented the story as a joke. Calhoun was known for tall tales and had once written a weekly column called "Nothing But Lies." Hebbard said the hoax fooled at least one Journal employee, who took the train to Benkelman hoping to bring the wreckage back for exhibition and found nothing.

Later attempts to trace the witnesses failed. In 2013 Patricia C. Gaster published the standard study of the hoax in Nebraska History. Ufologist Patrick Gross calls it "probably a hoax", though he notes how precise the account's details are.

The story hasn't gone away. Robert Golka began investigating the case in 2006. In the summer of 2009 he identified a heavy piece of molten green glass at the Museum of the High Plains in McCook. He suggested it could be residue from a probe "released from a mother ship", possibly made of beryllium. Golka's inference is the only thing connecting it to 1884.

Today it gets called Nebraska's Roswell, and the first recorded UFO crash in modern history. In fact it was one editor's joke. It still works as a story, which is probably why people keep retelling it.