![]() ![]() In July of 1947, an Army Air Forces press release reported that airmen had collected a “flying disk” that fell from the sky. Shaw, as caricatured in the San Francisco Call, Wikimedia Commons// Public DomainĪsk many people about the first major modern UFO incident, and they’ll think back to Roswell, New Mexico. SMALL TOWNS IN CALIFORNIA AND TEXAS REPORTED CLOSE ENCOUNTERS 50 YEARS BEFORE ROSWELL.Ĭol. Were it not for a clumsy prop crew member, who knows where he'd be today. McCurdy was finally laid to rest on Boot Hill in Guthrie, Oklahoma, 66 years after he was killed. (Carnivals did a brisk trade in outlaw corpses to attract crowds in the early days of the 20th century.) McCurdy's body also spent time as repayment for a bad debt, playing a mummy in a freak show, and collecting dust in a wax museum storage space before he became a funhouse prop. It seems that after being shot, someone had gone to the funeral home and identified themselves as McCurdy’s long-lost brother in order to take the body. McCurdy, specifically, as an autopsy later revealed. As one of the crew members moved a dummy, its arm fell off-revealing that the dummy was actually a mummy. That’s when the crew of The Six Million Dollar Man borrowed an amusement park funhouse to shoot an episode. No, Elmer McCurdy gained his fame more than 60 years after his death, in 1976, when memories of those wild days on the frontier were dying with the last people who’d lived them. Neither did his status as one of the last real Wild West outlaws, killed in a shootout with the law. Unlike Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Jesse and Frank James, or Billy the Kid, his exploits as a train and bank robber never gained him much infamy. ELMER MCCURDY’S AFTERLIFE WAS STRANGER THAN HIS LIFE AS AN OUTLAW.Įlmer McCurdy is not exactly a household name. Some of those stories are exactly what you’d expect, while others are surprisingly modern. Gold and silver rushes.ĭinosaurs, UFOs, feral camels, and giant cannibals probably don’t come to mind.īut every time period has its strange stories, and the Wild West is no different. The old Wild West is the stuff of legends: Gunslingers robbing banks and trains. ![]()
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