Beaumont, Texas: Four men at landed airship ask John Ligon and son for water
After 11 p.m. on April 19, 1897, brewery agent John R. Ligon and his son Charley met four men beside a large dark object in a pasture near Beaumont, Texas, who asked for water.
Background
After 11:00 p.m. John R. Ligon, an agent for a Houston brewery, and his son Charley noticed lights in a pasture a few hundred yards away near Beaumont, Texas. Walking over, they found four men moving around a large dark object, who asked for water and filled two baskets each at Ligon's house. One of them, calling himself "Wilson", said they were travelling in a flying machine that had been over the Gulf of Mexico and was headed toward Iowa, one of five built in a small Iowa town. Ligon described the airship as 130 feet long and 20 feet wide, propelled by four large wings and powered by electricity, and said Wilson gave him a tour of it. Rabbi Aaron Levy of Beaumont also claimed to have met aeronauts from a landed airship near the city around the same time. The story was reported in the Houston Daily Post on April 21, 1897, and later in the New Orleans Daily Picayune and the New York Times. The account follows the entry in George M. Eberhart's chronology UFOs and Intelligence (CUFOS) and the sources cited there; it is not an independent determination by From Beyond Space.