Aztec UFO crash

Aztec UFO crash

Type	Case (hoax)
Also known as	Aztec crashed saucer hoax, Aztec UFO incident, "the other Roswell"
Claimed date	March 1948
Claimed place	Hart Canyon, about 12 miles north-east of Aztec, New Mexico
Spread by	Silas M. Newton, Leo A. Gebauer, Frank Scully
Exposed	1952, by J. P. Cahn in True magazine
Outcome	Newton and Gebauer convicted of fraud in 1953

The Aztec UFO crash, also known as the Aztec crashed saucer hoax and sometimes as "the other Roswell", is the claim that a flying saucer came down near Aztec, New Mexico, in March 1948 and was secretly recovered by the U.S. military together with the bodies of its small occupants. The story was first published in 1949 by the Variety columnist Frank Scully and expanded in his best-selling 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers. His sources were two con men, Silas M. Newton and Leo A. Gebauer, who used the tale to sell oil-prospecting devices supposedly built with alien technology.^[1][2][3]

The hoax was exposed in 1952 by the journalist J. P. Cahn, and in 1953 Newton and Gebauer were convicted of fraud. From the 1970s some ufologists revived the story, and parts of it — alien bodies, a saucer of near-indestructible metal, storage at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base — became woven into accounts of the better-known Roswell incident. A 1950 FBI memo by agent Guy Hottel is often linked to the story; the FBI has called it an unverified second- or third-hand claim that it never investigated.^[1][4][5]

The story

Scully's first column

In his "Scrapbook" column in Variety on 8 October 1949, Frank Scully wrote that he had just spent a weekend with scientists who knew "all there is to know" about flying saucers. Weeks earlier, he said, they had told him of two discs that had landed on Earth from another planet — one in the Mojave Desert and one in the Sahara. The African one was badly cracked, but the other had come down gently, with only a hole in its side about the size of a pencil.^[2]

According to the column, the saucer was 100 feet across with a cabin about 18 feet in diameter; its centre stayed still while its outer rim revolved at great speed, like a magnetically controlled helicopter, and it travelled on magnetic waves from the Sun, which could carry it from Venus and back in 42 minutes. Its structure included two metals unknown on Earth. Inside were 16 very small men, intact but charred black, perhaps by gases that had entered through the hole. The scientists, Scully wrote, were too afraid to press any of the craft's many buttons; they found water heavier than ordinary water, tiny food capsules that they fed to guinea pigs, clothing in an 1890s style made of an unknown cloth, a magnetic radio with no tubes, and an indestructible parchment with uncoded writing. One scientist showed him a "gamma ray magnetron", a small black box he said could tell how deep to dig for oil and other deposits.^[2]

Behind the Flying Saucers

Scully expanded his columns into the 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers, which became a best-seller and shaped public ideas about UFOs. In the book's version, an unidentified craft containing sixteen humanoid bodies made a controlled landing in March 1948 in Hart Canyon, 12 miles (19 km) north-east of Aztec, and was recovered by the military, which covered up the incident and took the craft away for secret research. It was said to be 99 feet (30 metres) across — the Skeptic's Dictionary notes the figure was given as 99.99 feet, not 100 — the largest saucer yet. The Sahara saucer was dropped from Scully's later writings.^[1][3]

Scully wrote that this and other saucers captured by the government had come from Venus and worked on "magnetic principles", that their crews carried concentrated food wafers and "heavy water" to drink, and that every dimension of the craft was divisible by nine. On 8 March 1950 Newton gave a lecture about the saucers at the University of Denver. The science writer Martin Gardner criticised Scully's account as full of "wild imaginings" and "scientific howlers".^[1][3]

No local witnesses

No newspaper report of a crash or recovery operation from the time has ever been found. The UFO historian Jerome Clark wrote that Aztec residents have with virtually one voice denied that anything like a UFO retrieval ever happened there, and only learned of the story through Scully's publicity. Those who denied it include the local newspaper editor and the county sheriff of March 1948, the sheriff's son, who succeeded his father in the post, and the family who owned the land where it was supposed to have happened. Clark also noted that the pioneering ufologist Donald Keyhoe, who usually backed UFO claims, regarded Scully's story as absurd. As the Skeptic's Dictionary put it, with no witnesses Newton and Gebauer could play freely with the truth.^[1][3]

The hoax exposed

Silas Newton was an oil promoter and Leo Gebauer claimed to be a scientist. In the late 1940s and early 1950s they travelled through the Aztec area selling devices known in the oil business as "doodlebugs", which they said could locate oil, gas and gold because they were based on alien technology recovered from the crashed saucer. They charged $18,500 for one such "tuner", which could be bought at war-surplus stores for $3.50.^[1][3]

J. P. Cahn of the San Francisco Chronicle asked the pair for a piece of the supposed alien metal; the sample they gave him turned out on testing to be ordinary aluminium. Cahn exposed the scheme in True magazine in 1952, and a follow-up article in 1956 presented other people Newton and Gebauer had swindled. One of their victims, the Denver millionaire Herman Flader, pressed charges, and in 1953 the two men were convicted of fraud.^[1][3][4]

Newton went back to swindling energy investors. When he died in 1972 he faced 40 legal claims arising from allegedly fraudulent oil and gas schemes, as well as theft charges. The ufologist William Moore described him as the kind of character best avoided by anyone with money in their pocket; he had been in trouble in the 1930s in New York, Kansas and California.^[1][6]

Revival in ufology

From the mid-1950s to the early 1970s most ufologists regarded the Aztec story as thoroughly discredited and avoided it. Rumours of alien bodies kept at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base appeared in the 1966 book Incident at Exeter and inspired the 1968 science-fiction novel The Fortec Conspiracy. In 1974 the ufologist Robert Spencer Carr claimed publicly that alien bodies recovered near Aztec were stored in a building at Wright-Patterson called Hangar 18. The Air Force denied it, saying the base had no Hangar 18 and that Carr's claims mirrored the novel's plot.^[1]

In the late 1970s the author Leonard Stringfield said the incident was real and the craft one of many captured and stored by the military. Later, many supposedly first-hand accounts of the Roswell crash borrowed elements of the Aztec story: a craft of material impervious to heat, a craft damaged in the crash, humanoid bodies between 36 and 42 inches tall weighing about 40 pounds, and a quick military clean-up with the material taken to Hangar 18.^[1]

In 1986 William Steinman and Wendelle Stevens revived the story in their privately published book UFO Crash at Aztec. It surfaced again in 1998, when the UFO broadcaster Linda Moulton Howe said she had government documents proving the crash; according to the Skeptic's Dictionary, what she had was a rumour traceable back through a chain of people to Newton himself.^[3]

The 2012 book The Aztec UFO Incident by Scott and Suzanne Ramsey and Frank Thayer argued that the crash was genuine and that the fraud trial had been "engineered" to discredit Newton and Gebauer and sink the Aztec story. Reviewing it for the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Jerome Clark criticised Scott Ramsey, the main author, for baselessly calling Newton a man of science and for ignoring evidence that did not support his case. Most researchers, including many who believe other crash claims, regard Aztec as a hoax.^[1][6]

The Hottel memo

In April 2011 the FBI launched The Vault, an online archive of records released under the Freedom of Information Act. A one-page memo dated 22 March 1950 from Guy Hottel, special agent in charge of the FBI's Washington Field Office, to Director J. Edgar Hoover drew renewed attention there, and the FBI later said it was the Vault's most-viewed document.^[1][5]

The memo passes on a third-party account that an Air Force investigator had reported three circular craft recovered in New Mexico, each about 50 feet across and each containing three humanoid bodies only three feet tall, dressed in "metallic cloth". It blames the crashes on interference from a high-powered radar installation in the area and ends by noting that no further evaluation was attempted. The memo does not mention Aztec.^[1]

The Ramseys and Thayer, and David E. Thomas of New Mexicans for Science and Reason, linked the memo to Aztec because its story is closer to Newton's claims than to contemporary accounts of Roswell. Another theory traces it to a story printed in January 1950 in the Wyandotte Echo in Kansas City, which was traced at third hand to Newton. The Skeptic's Dictionary describes a chain of retellings: Newton told George Koehler about three-foot aliens and their saucer; Koehler told Morley Davies, who told Jack Murphy and I. J. van Horn, who told Rudy Fick, who told the editor of the Wyandotte Echo, where an agent of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations read it and passed it on to Hottel.^[1][3]

In 2013 the FBI said the memo did not prove the existence of UFOs, that it was an unconfirmed second- or third-hand claim the Bureau had not investigated, and that it had been public for decades before the Vault opened. Benjamin Radford, writing in The Christian Science Monitor, noted that the memo was unclassified — suggesting the FBI saw no need for secrecy — and had circulated among ufologists since the late 1990s. In August 2022 The Black Vault obtained an unredacted copy, which named the informant as "Karl Howe, Special Investigator, Sex Squad, Metropolitan Police Department", presumably of Washington, D.C.; where Howe got the story remains unknown, so it cannot be conclusively tied to Newton.^[1][5]

Legacy

Following Roswell's example of turning UFO interest into a tourist attraction, Aztec began holding an annual UFO Symposium, run by the town library as a fundraiser from 1997 until 2011.^[1][3]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Aztec crashed saucer hoax”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.