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Aztec Saucer Crash (New Mexico; 1948)

Mighty_Emperor

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Cover article for FT181:30-36 and some news:

Aztec UFO fest opens Friday

By Debra Mayeux/The Daily Times
Mar 17, 2004, 12:54 am



AZTEC — Fifty-six years ago on a small, dirt road north of Aztec, something unexplainable happened.

A saucer-shaped ship, 100-feet in diameter, was said to have crash-landed leaving small charred bodies inside. There were eyewitnesses — military, locals and police officers. There are Air Force documents one man is working to declassify.

Scott Ramsey of Charlotte, N.C., has spent the past 14 years of his life researching the purported Aztec UFO crash of 1948. He has traveled to 28 states, visited numerous military bases and talked to alleged eyewitnesses of the event.

“We want to be extremely careful to make sure people are reliable witnesses,” Ramsey said of his research. “We really try not to open our mouth until a lot of research has been done.”

Ramsey will present his findings at the 7th annual Aztec UFO Symposium Friday through Sunday at Koogler Middle School. His talk, which he says is “no smoking gun,” will be presented at 11 a.m. Saturday.

The alleged Aztec crash occurred only months after the more famous 1947 Roswell crash of another alleged UFO. It was two years before the March 17, 1950, Farmington UFO Armada, which celebrates its 54th anniversary today.

News accounts at the time, including a front page story in The Daily Times, said a fleet of hundreds of UFOs were seen by hundreds of residents flying in formation at high rates of speed across the city. The event later became know as the Farmington UFO Armada.

Ramsey said there were several UFO sightings in the state between 1947 and 1953, almost of which were documented in Air Force archives.

“Aircraft were picking up UFOs in New Mexico,” the researcher said. “My declassifications are centered around Aztec and the Air Force during that time frame.”

Most of his research began with a book, “Behind the Flying Saucers,” published in the 1950s by Frank Scully, who was tipped off by New Mexico oil men Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer. The two did not have the best reputation and most skeptics believe the story was a farce used by Newton and GeBauer to sell oil “doodle bug” equipment.

“They had their share of encounters with the law,” Ramsey said of the men, but Scully also claimed he received information from eight or nine scientists.

Ramsey said Scully went into such great detail in his book, it had to come from scientists. Ramsey said he was able to prove many of the details from documents declassified in 1999.

“It’s hard to put my presentation into a nutshell, but we’ve looked at Scully’s story,” he said.

In addition to Scully’s claims, Ramsey was able to discover secret military radar sites in the state. These sites may have detected the UFO before it crashed near Aztec, but Ramsey said he still has years of research before solidifying that claim. What he does have is maps of the radar bases for public review at the symposium.

Ramsey also commissioned a study of artifacts found at the crash site. Unfortunately the findings will not be ready for presentation until next year.

A key artifact was a piece of concrete slab at the site. The slab has been dismissed as a well cap, but a member of the military told Ramsey its purpose was as a footer for a crane used to remove the UFO.

“It’s a controversial piece, we’re trying to date to 1948,” Ramsey said adding the study is highly controlled with only one person on staff knowing the concrete came from a purported UFO crash site.

Ramsey said he will present his findings to date, some claims from skeptics, as well as a time line for the crash. He will also lead tours to the crash site, when he is not speaking at the symposium.

The cost for the symposium is for Saturday and Sunday, plus an additional for the Meet and Greet from 6-8 p.m. Friday. A one day ticket is .

Information: The Aztec UFO Information Center, (505) 334-9890 or on the Web at http://www.aztecufo.com.

http://www.daily-times.com/artman/publish/article_9513.shtml
 
there is a book which meantions a ufo crash landing around the late 1940's, but i can't for the life of me remember the title or author, it has been mentioned on this board before...
 
You're probably thinking of Frank Scully's 1950 publication Behind the Flying Saucers. There's a slightly convoluted story behind the book:
Scully, Frank
Columnist on the showbusiness magazine Variety who in 1950 published his best-selling Behind the Flying Saucers. A centerpiece of the book was Scully's claim that a spacecraft containing 16 dead aliens had been found on a plateau close to the small town of Aztec, New Mexico. According to his informants, "Texas oilman" Silas M. Newton and his colleague "Dr. Gee" (the latter a pseudonym for a "specialist in magnetism"), the bodies were in the custody of the US military along with two other crashed disks.

Newton and Dr. Gee (real name: Leo GeBauer) turned out to be convicted confidence tricksters who had embellished a story that had originated with a Hollywood actor named Mike Conrad. Around 1948, Conrad had hit upon the idea of making a movie about UFOs with a base in Alaska. To generate interest in the project, Conrad claimed that the film would include footage of genuine UFOs. He also hired a promoter to pose as an FBI agent to spread the story that the FBI had custody of this footage. Newton and GeBauer were unaware that Conrad's story was a hoax, while Scully knew nothing about Conrad's publicity ploy. Newton and GeBauer's motive for elaborating the tale was purely commercial. GeBauer had built a gadget that, he said, was based on technology found in the downed saucer and could detect oil and gold deposits.

Ironically, the FBI took an interest in the affair and, in due course, its chief, J. Edgar Hoover, received a memo on the subject. This document - a commentary on a piece of hearsay - was later often cited as proof that the U.S. government was holding saucer wreckage and alien corpses.
source

The (fictional) Aztec crash story contains many elements which later pop up in the Roswell myth: a massive military cover-up, a crew of diminutive humanoids, and a craft constructed of an extremely lightweight yet strong material.
 
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Relevant posts copied from the FBI / Hottel Memo thread:

https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...d-saucers-recovered-bodies-hottel-memo.44929/

This will be the Aztec hoax

http://www.skepdic.com/aztec.html

What she had was a rumor eight times removed from the source, Silas Newton, that eventually ended up in a memo written to J. Edgar Hoover. Newton told George Koehler about 3-foot tall 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 in Kansas City where it was read by an Air Force agent in the Office of Special Investigations who passed on the story to Guy Hottel of the FBI who sent a memo to his boss (Thomas).

this is the memo, a rumour, nothing more. Interesting, though.
 
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I should hardly have to point out that the Aztec case was not the Roswell case, and was in fact a hoax; whereas Roswell was a misidentification (although the Santili video was a hoax, of course).
 
I'd guess that 99% of the people who read that article gained the impression the Hottel memo was about Roswell; either that article is intentionally misleading or the writer doesn't know anything about UFO lore.

Here's the Fortean Times on the subject of the Aztec Hoax

http://www.forteantimes.com/features/ar ... aztec.html
Link is dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine at:


https://web.archive.org/web/2007120.../features/articles/161/incident_at_aztec.html

In the diary Newton revealed that, in the early 1950s, he was contacted by US military officials who wanted to speak with him about his crashed UFO story. Newton was told that the military knew that his UFO-crash-at-Aztec story was bogus. Incredibly, however, they wanted him to continue spreading the story far and wide, and to whoever would listen.
Curiouser and curiouser...
 
(Relevant posts copied from the Roswell thread ... )

Analis said:
... tales of retrieved alien bodies were already circulating in 1949, almost identical to what we know today.
The Aztec Hoax was perpetrated in 1948/9; this story involved the recovery of sixteen bodies, but never really happened. There's no need to explain imaginary bodies with midgets or experiment victims or crash test dummies, or indeed with extraterrestrials; the Aztec crash just wasn't true.
 
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In fact, there was no 'Aztec hoax' in 1949. The name Aztec was put by Scully only later, and it was only one of the places mentioned. There were already a number of stories of crashes and retrievals of alien ships and bodies in 1949 end 1950, usually from the US South-west and Mexico, with details differing. In the 50s, the vicinity of White Sands was more often mentioned.
Sixteen bodies retrieved, this feature is from Scully's book and is not found anywhere else. Nobody else, to my knowledge, ever mentioned Aztec as a UFO crash site. Scully's description of the location is not even consistent with Aztec. Scully's book is often used as a convenient 'catch-all' explanation for early reports of what Jerome Clark calls 'Roswell-Like Events' (RLE), but it doesn't do the job.
 
That's true; there were no bodies found at Aztec. Neither were there any found at Roswell, or at any other of the numerous reported crash sites from that period; the reports of bodies were all hoaxes, or bad recollections of hoaxes. Some, many, or most of these reports were put about by Silas Newton and Leo Gebauer, who told Scully the tall tale that became the Aztec Hoax.

Basically the hoax explanation seems to cover all the bases quite well; no reliable witness ever reported bodies, it seems.
 
We should be pretty clear that most UFO researchers - even the ones who believe strongly in the ET hypothesis - believe that the Aztec 'crash' was a hoax. Unfortunately it has got mixed up with Roswell in people's memories.
 
It's an elaborate story that took on a life of its own, but apparently is entirely fictional. There are diehard believers, of course, but the story has not so much been debunked as deconstructed. A great deal of trouble has been caused by a fairly recent book, but it's a classic example of pseudoscience. The author doggedly searches for any bit of information (real or imaginary) to prop up his conclusion, but none of it holds up to serious scrutiny. The original story has been traced to a couple of con artists trying to sell electronic hokum to would-be oil prospectors. Frank Scully took the story and ran with it. With a pedigree like that, it's bound to be colorful at least.

A long, thorough, detailed and fascinating investigation of the original con can be found starting here:
https://www.saturdaynightuforia.com/html/articles/articlehtml/anatomyofahoax-part1.html

It's a very deep rabbit hole at a remarkable web site, so take a sandwich. I hope that site has been archived. It's a treasure trove that has not been updated in years.
 
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There are basically 3 crash sites widely cited in relation to the Roswell incident or a series of incidents of which the core Roswell story was a part: Aztec (in far northwest New Mexico); the Corona area (within tens of miles from the Foster Ranch); and the Plains of San Agustin (circa 150 miles to the west of the Corona area).

Of these, the Aztec crash story from 1948 may be the most important in terms of influencing the emergence of later saucer crash stories and being the first to claim a large craft of unusual type had crashed, unusual corpses were lying at the crash site, and the military swept in to take everything away.

The source of the story - two con artists named Newton and Grebauer - were convicted of fraud in 1953. They had been citing the saucer crashed at Aztec as the source of alien technology exploited in the "doodlebug" devices they peddled as detectors of petroleum and gold. The Aztec crash story was thoroughly debunked as a hoax, but its essential elements (crashed saucer; bodies; military clean-up) lived on in UFO publications. The fourth - more implicit - element of the Aztec hoax story was that civilians had witnessed the crash site and / or obtained bits of the wreckage.

During the run-up to the 50th anniversary of Roswell (i.e., circa 1995 - 1997) I conducted a massive literature review on the Roswell story, extending from the 1947 news articles up through the UFO literature (bulletins; newsletters; pulp paranormal books) of the Fifties and Sixties, ending with the outputs of the Roswell Renaissance from the Seventies / Eighties onward.

I found that the legacy elements of the Aztec story (with or without naming Aztec as the crash site) were being blended into the Roswell stories as early as the mid-Fifties, some of which went so far as to suggest the debris Brazel found had been lost from the saucer during its final time aloft. These incorporations of Aztec elements pre-dated the emergence of the Barney Barnett / Plains of San Agustin story and the proposition a second, larger, crash site had existed (and been cleared) somewhere in the Corona area.
 
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I don't know whether this is the first occurrence of the "aliens are here; cover it up" meta-meme, but I would nominate the Aztec crash hoax as a strong candidate for the meme's origin.

Newton and Grebauer alleged the crash occurred in March 1948. Their story first received national distribution in Frank Scully's magazine articles in 1949.

The Aztec story was the earliest published story I recall that involved alien (seemingly non-human) corpses discovered along with an actual 'saucer', military retrieval of remains and wreckage, accusations of deliberate military / government cover-up, and (if only eventually) allusions of some connection with the Roswell incident. This full set of story elements wasn't reflected in the Roswell documents at the time (1947).

The other two saucer crash / alien bodies accounts associated (however loosely) with Roswell - involving the alternate Corona and the Plains of San Agustin sites - didn't surface until years later.
 
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That's true; there were no bodies found at Aztec. Neither were there any found at Roswell, or at any other of the numerous reported crash sites from that period; the reports of bodies were all hoaxes, or bad recollections of hoaxes. Some, many, or most of these reports were put about by Silas Newton and Leo Gebauer, who told Scully the tall tale that became the Aztec Hoax.

Basically the hoax explanation seems to cover all the bases quite well; no reliable witness ever reported bodies, it seems.
Well, it depends on the definition of "reliable witnesses". If the military is trying to keep something secret no one is a reliable witness.
 
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No; it just demonstrates that even the most ardent believer is capable of seeing through a hoax.
 
No; it just demonstrates that even the most ardent believer is capable of seeing through a hoax.
It actually just deomonstrates that everyone will believe what they want to.
 
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