The Aztec Crashed Saucer Hoax

1949. Frank Scully, a columnist at Variety, began telling readers about a flying saucer recovered in New Mexico. In 1950 he expanded the tale into a book, Behind the Flying Saucers. It sold about 60,000 copies.

His sources were Silas M. Newton, whom Scully knew as a wealthy Denver oilman, and a scientist Newton called "Dr. Gee." On 8 March 1950 an anonymous "Mr. X" lectured a science class at the University of Denver. The speaker was Newton.

March 1948. Hart Canyon, on a mesa about 12 miles northeast of Aztec. A disc rested on the ground. It measured 99.99 feet in diameter. Not 100. Scully said it had made a controlled landing, that it ran on magnetic principles, and that it came from Venus.

Investigators found a broken porthole. "Finally, we took a large pole and rammed a hole through this defect in the ship." Inside were sixteen small humanoid bodies, between 38 and 42 inches tall in Newton's telling, dressed in an unknown cloth that could not be torn. On board were concentrated food wafers and heavy water.

True magazine offered Scully $25,000 for proof. It never heard from him again. Then J. P. Cahn, a reporter hired by the Denver Post, went after the story. Dr. Gee turned out to be Leo A. GeBauer, a Phoenix electronics dealer. The pair gave Cahn "unmeltable" saucer metal. Tests showed it was "nothing but pot & pan aluminum."

They also had something to sell. Their "doodlebug," an oil finder said to use alien technology from the crash, was "just a piece of war-surplus radio equipment that could be bought for $3.50." Cahn's 1952 exposé concluded the saucer was bait to make Newton credible to oil investors. Scully had been fooled. On 14 October 1952 the Denver Post reported the fraud allegations. Denver industrialist Herman A. Flader had pressed charges. Both men were convicted of fraud and received probation with restitution.

The legend did not stay buried. In 1974 Robert Spencer Carr claimed the Aztec bodies were kept at Wright-Patterson. William Steinman and Wendelle Stevens published UFO Crash at Aztec in 1986. In 1999 Scott Ramsey placed a plaque at the site: "On or about this site on March 25, 1948, a spacecraft of origins unknown crashed or landed on this mesa."

Ramsey found new witnesses. Doug Noland remembered that "a very large, metallic disc sat silently on the mesa." He said he looked through a broken porthole and saw "two bodies slumped over what he thought was a control panel." Ken Farley described a craft "perfectly smooth on the outside."

Critics were unmoved. Donald Keyhoe, himself a believer in UFOs, called the story "absurd and fanciful." Jerome Clark wrote that "Aztec residents have with virtually one voice denied that anything like a UFO retrieval happened there." Kevin Randle noted that El Paso Gas, Noland's supposed employer, did not reach the San Juan Basin until the summer of 1950. Ramsey, Ramsey and Thayer argue the crash was real and the 1953 trial was engineered to discredit Newton.

Today the marker stands on the Alien Run mountain bike trail. The FBI's 1950 Hottel memo, with its three saucers "circular in shape with raised centers," keeps the debate alive. The Bureau calls it "simply a second- or third-hand claim that we never investigated." The con is a matter of court record. The story has outlived it.