Britain: Death of a sky visitor — 1211
But where is the Alien body?
In later retellings of the above story the motive behind the sailor’s descent is a trapped anchor, thus substituting the traditional spear for an object more suited to navigation. Gervase of Tilbury collected a similar tale in his work, Otia Imperialia (1211 AD): “As people were coming out of church in Britain, on a dark cloudy day, they saw a ship’s anchor fastened in a heap of stones, with its cable reaching up from it into the clouds. Presently they saw the cable strained, as if the crew was trying to pull it up, but it still stuck fast. Voices were then heard above the clouds, apparently in clamorous debate, and a sailor came down the cable. As soon as he touched the ground the crowd gathered around him, and he died, like a man drowned at sea, suffocated by our damp thick atmosphere. An hour afterwards, his shipmates cut the cable and sailed away; and the anchor they left behind was made into fastenings and ornaments for the church door, in memory of this wondrous event.” It is not reported whether the dead sailor’s body is shipped home in the airship, or whether the deceased is given a Christian burial on earth. In either case, this would be the first account of an aerial navigator that dies in an accident on our planet, some seven centuries before Roswell.
Source: Case: W492