# Sixteen Little Men at Aztec [View on uap.fun]() CASE FILE 084 · 1948 Published: October 15, 2026 In 1950 a best-selling book told how government scientists pried open a saucer ninety-nine and ninety-nine hundredths feet across near Aztec, New Mexico, and found sixteen small dead men inside. The story came from a Denver oilman and a Phoenix radio-parts dealer who were selling oil-finding machines, and by 1953 both stood convicted of fraud. Aztec’s crashed saucer refused to stay buried. ![Photograph of a stony slope scattered with rounded cobbles and dark green junipers, looking across a valley with a dirt road and low juniper-dotted hills to pale mesas and a line of snow-capped mountains on the horizon under a clear blue sky.]() Hart Canyon, northeast of Aztec, with the La Plata Mountains on the horizon, May 15, 2014. Later retellings place the crash in this canyon; this is not an identified crash site. Photo: Patrick Alexander, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. ## AT A GLANCE - **DATE:** March 25, 1948 (as later told) - **LOCATION:** Hart Canyon, northeast of Aztec, New Mexico (as later identified) - **REPORT TYPE:** Crash report - **RESOLUTION:** [Hoax or recanted]() - **RECORD STATUS:** A con men’s yarn, exposed in 1952; still championed by a few ## The story ### Old Betsy Silas Mason Newton liked to be known as a genius of the oil patch. A Kentucky-born former Colorado amateur golf champion with offices in Denver’s Equitable Building, he said he had studied geology at Baylor and gone on to Yale, and from 1946 to 1948 he filled pages of Petroleum Review attacking the U.S. Geological Survey and promising a “revolutionary new technique” that might end the specter of dry holes. Petroleum deposits, he wrote, were constantly broadcasting microwaves. He also had a past. Between 1931 and 1936 he had been arrested in New York City, Oneida and Elmira on charges of conspiracy, grand larceny and false statements about stock, and, as the reporter J. P. Cahn later put it, “In every instance, the charges against him just melted away.” In April 1949 a Denver manufacturer named Herman Flader, a German immigrant who made clamps and couplings and owned some 47,000 acres of ranch land east of the city, had a visitor. “GeBauer entered my office and introduced himself as a geophysicist who had a machine that could locate water. Newton entered my office several weeks later with a similar machine. I introduced the two because of the similar interests. They claimed to be total strangers.” Leo A. GeBauer ran a radio and electronics parts house in Phoenix. His machine, Old Betsy, was by Cahn’s description a metal box about eighteen inches square with antennae at both ends, a row of small bulbs on one side and dials on the other: a white light meant gas, a red one oil. GeBauer said it had once found seventeen submerged Japanese submarines in a single day by tuning in on the oil in their tanks, that its antenna tips were plutonium worth $3,800, and that the government had issued him a bar of metal that vibrated whenever Washington needed him. In a staged trial of strength, Old Betsy beat Newton’s own mahogany-cased instrument, which he said had cost $800,000, and Newton conceded the point. Somewhere along the way, Cahn wrote, it came out, “confidentially, of course,” that GeBauer was the scientist the government had called in to inspect a flying saucer down in New Mexico. From July to November 1949 Flader wrote the Newton Oil Company check after check. Sources: [The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men]() · [J. P. Cahn’s series on the Newton–GeBauer fraud]() · [Frank Scully Papers · Newton, Silas M. · correspondence, typescripts and clippings]() · [Silas Newton]() ![Typewritten page beginning “Upon request of the Bureau, the Denver Field Division on September 24, 1938, received a copy of the criminal record of one SILAS M. NEWTON, FBI \#835861,” followed by columns listing arrests by police in New York City, Oneida and Elmira between 1931 and 1936 for a fugitive warrant, false stock statements, indictments and grand larceny, and notes that he was also wanted in Wichita and Binghamton.]() Newton’s New York arrests of 1931 to 1936, as the FBI’s Denver office copied them in 1938 under his FBI number, 835861. A Montclair conspiracy warrant, false stock statements, grand larceny: none, Cahn found, ended in a conviction. FBI report, U.S. government work, public domain, via the Denver Public Library. [Image source]() ### Scully’s Scrapbook Frank Scully wrote a weekly column called “Scully’s Scrapbook” for Variety from a house in Hollywood he called Bedside Manor, and he was the author, among other things, of a book called Fun in Bed. In the spring of 1944 a letter had reached him from Denver urging him to write a book about Frank Harris, the scandalous editor Scully kept writing around. “It was signed Silas M. Newton.” The two became friends, went hunting gold in the Mojave with Newton’s secret instruments, and at lunch one day at the Sportsman’s Lodge in the San Fernando Valley Newton told him he had “talked only the day before to some scientists who had been called in by the defense arm to check on a grounded flying saucer.” Scully took it to Variety. According to later bibliographies his first column on it, on October 12, 1949, was headed “One Flying Saucer Lands in New Mexico,” and a second, on November 23, “Flying Saucers Dismantled, Secrets May Be Lost.” The historian Jerome Clark found that no press mention of the crash has ever turned up from before that first column, and that it put one retrieval in the “Mohave Desert” and another in the Sahara, a site that quietly dropped out of later tellings. When the Air Force announced at the end of December 1949 that it was closing its saucer project, Scully answered with a list of fourteen “$64 Questions,” reprinted by the Los Angeles Mirror. Wasn’t the small saucer, thirty-six feet across, fitted with steel-looking spheres instead of wheels, so that ten men could not tip it over when it was moving but one man could tilt it at rest? “What has happened to the remains of the 16 men found dead in one of the large saucers and the two in a smaller flying disc?” Had the Air Force ever seen a radio like the one on “the flying disc that landed on a ranch near Aztec, New Mexico”? And why not release the tapes of the public viewing of one of the dead men, preserved in solution between human specimens “from pre-natal to grown man” at the Rosenwald Institute in Chicago? The Mirror checked with Chicago. “Yes, we have a 3½ foot man here,” the museum replied. “But he’s never been alive and he never came from New Mexico. He’s made of plaster and was brought here from the World’s Fair 15 years ago as part of a medical exhibit.” Sources: [In Armour Bright]() · [Aztec crashed saucer hoax]() · [The Aztec Incident: Recovery at Hart Canyon · review]() · [Frank Scully Papers · newspaper clippings, 1947–1951]() · [The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men]() ### A radio that spoke in a tongue not of this earth The story was also traveling on its own. Late in 1949, in the bar of the Lakeside Country Club in Hollywood, the actor Bruce Cabot overheard a man, “either Newton or Newman,” say he knew of someone who had pieces of a flying saucer; his friend, the man added, had salvaged a mysterious little “magnetic radio” from the wreckage, and they were using it to locate oil. In Denver, George Koehler, an advertising salesman at radio station KMYR who lived with his wife in Newton’s rented house on Franklin Street, was showing friends some small gears, a few metal disks and “a gadget he called a radio that spoke occasionally in a tongue not of this earth.” According to the Air Force account that the columnist Bob Considine relayed in 1950, Koehler said he and the doctor had lifted a grounded saucer, which was very buoyant, then dropped it when it showed signs of taking off; that fifteen other midgets had parachuted safely into the Southwest and made themselves invisible when pursued; that the saucers came from Venus at 100,000 miles a second; and that to enter the doctor’s laboratory near Phoenix he had to strip and put on a special one-piece suit. A Ford man in Denver, Jack Murphy, who had heard the story through an advertising man, examined the relics: the disks were “knockout plugs” from car engines, the gears were “just gears,” and the radio, if it was one, would not work. From Murphy’s circle the story reached Rudy Fick, a Kansas City auto dealer passing through, and on January 6, 1950, the Wyandotte Echo of Kansas City, Kansas, printed Fick’s version, with Koehler renamed “Coulter.” Coulter had “Crashed the Gate” at a radar station near the New Mexico–Arizona border and seen two saucers, one badly damaged and one almost intact, with a cabin about six feet wide inside a ring thirteen feet across, made of a metal like aluminum that “has defied analysis.” About fifty had been found in two years, forty of them in a “US Research Bureau” in Los Angeles, each with a crew of two. The Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations typed it all up on January 16: “All were uniform height of 3 feet; blond, beardless and their teeth were completely free of fillings or cavities. They wore no under garments, but had their bodies taped and were dressed in a sort of wire.” There were food tablets, and a clock or calendar whose dial went round once every twenty-eight days. The editor of the Kansas City Star, the report added, had known the story but “did not dare publish it in the paper because it is too fantastic.” By the end of March the FBI in New Orleans was hearing that a prominent Denver oilman, “also known as a ‘Mysterious Mr. X’,” claimed a disc had been found intact on land he had leased in the Mojave Desert, with eighteen three-foot occupants, all dead but not burned, and that Washington and the FBI had telephoned to ask him to keep it to himself. Sources: [Frank Scully Papers · newspaper clippings, 1947–1951]() · [UFO · Part 8]() · [The Aztec UFO Symposium: How This Saucer Story Started As a Con Game]() ### Scientist X In March 1950 a student who worked nights at KMYR told his University of Denver science instructor, Francis F. Broman, about Koehler’s stories, and Broman wanted Koehler to tell them to his basic science class. Koehler begged Newton to go instead and “save me from being pestered to death.” Newton, by his own account, agreed on condition there was no publicity, told Koehler to have the station engineer tape it so he could not be misquoted, and suggested that Broman not name him, so the class could decide in the next day’s quiz whether what they had heard was fact or fiction. On Wednesday, March 8, he spoke in a wooden assembly hall, he said, with every seat filled and the walls lined with standees. The KMYR tape preserved what they heard. Within five hundred miles of Denver, “on a day within the \[last\] two years,” a round object had settled gently to earth. “This saucer was 99 and 99/100 ft in diameter,” Newton said; “it lacked just the fraction I told you of being 100 feet.” The cabin was eighteen feet across and seventy-two inches high; a second ship measured seventy-two feet. For two days no one could get in, because there was no door, but one porthole appeared to be broken, and inside “there were sixteen people.” They were charred. “There has not been found one single medical fact to give the idea that they could have been midgets,” he said; they looked thirty-five to forty years old. “I happened to be to the dentist this morning and I reminded him that there wasn’t a single solitary bad tooth in any of their mouths, not a filling of any kind.” They did not shave: “They had what we call a little peach fuzz on their faces.” They wore the same uniforms, with no insignia, and little caps. Their writing was on something like parchment, in a pictorial language, and their arithmetic ran on nines: “five and four makes nine, six and three makes nine; seven and two makes nine, eight and one makes nine.” A timepiece took exactly twenty-nine days to go round, “a magnetic month.” The ships flew on magnetic lines of force, perhaps from Venus to Earth in under an hour, and carried water almost twice as heavy as ours. Captain Thomas Mantell, killed chasing a UFO over Kentucky in 1948, had been disintegrated, Newton suggested, and “we happen to know that that can be done magnetically, because we are doing just that today.” By his own later account, he had warned Broman beforehand: “I am not a physicist.” Sources: [Frank Scully Papers · Newton, Silas M. · correspondence, typescripts and clippings]() · [The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men]() ### ‘Absolute zero’ Afterward, Newton recalled, Koehler phoned him: “Somebody has spilled this story. All the stations have it on the teletype now.” At 9:25 the next evening the FBI office in Denver wired Washington that an unidentified man had lectured at the university on flying saucers “WHICH HE ALLEGEDLY PERSONALLY OBSERVED,” one of which had landed in New Mexico, with dead occupants “OF HUMAN FORM, BUT ABOUT THREE FEET TALL”; an associate who had made similar claims in January had been unable to produce anything verifiable, and the Air Force’s investigators considered him a “PROBABLE MENTAL CASE.” The Denver Post’s Charles Little reported that about half the class thought there might be something to it. “He gave no documentation but the story was a thriller, by all accounts.” Asked its scientific value, Broman told the Post, according to Cahn: “Absolute zero.” The versions of that day began to diverge at once. In Scully’s later telling, 350 students skipped lunch at 12:30 to hear “probably the most sensational lecture about this earth or any other planet since Galileo,” and the drawings on the blackboard were preserved in lacquer. Broman showed Cahn his typed introduction, which presented the talk as an exercise in evaluating a speaker, and said it was a regular class at the regular time: “Nobody missed any lunch that day or any other day as far as I know.” As for the lacquer, “It would have been ridiculous to preserve them. They were just a couple of circles labeled ‘Earth’ and ‘Venus,’ a crude sketch of what the saucers were supposed to have looked like, and a diagram showing how combinations of digits can be added up to total nine.” Within days the Post’s Thor Severson had unmasked “Scientist X” as Newton; Newton remembered the paper turning up at the class with an old golf picture of him from its files. Sources: [Frank Scully Papers · Newton, Silas M. · correspondence, typescripts and clippings]() · [UFO · Part 8]() · [Frank Scully Papers · newspaper clippings, 1947–1951]() · [The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men]() · [Behind the Flying Saucers]() ### Three bodies of human shape On March 17, nine days after the lecture, several hundred people in Farmington, Aztec’s larger neighbor down the Animas River, reported what the Associated Press called “a mass daylight flight of strange objects in the sky,” twenty or more than a hundred of them, depending on who was counting. Five days later, on March 22, 1950, Guy Hottel, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office and a former George Washington University football star, sent J. Edgar Hoover a one-page memo headed “Flying Saucers / Information Concerning.” It passed on what an informant had heard: “An investigator for the Air Forces stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico. They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots.” The saucers came down in New Mexico, the informant believed, because the government had a very high-powered radar there that interfered with their controls. “No further evaluation was attempted,” the memo noted. Three saucers, as the wire reports had the anonymous Denver lecturer saying; three-foot crewmen, a radar station near the New Mexico line and bodies taped or bandaged, as in Fick’s tale: every element was already in circulation, though the saucers had shrunk to fifty feet and the dead to nine. The memo stayed in the Bureau’s files until it was released in the late 1970s. Sources: [Frank Scully Papers · newspaper clippings, 1947–1951]() · [Guy Hottel]() · [UFOs and the Guy Hottel Memo]() · [UFO · Part 8]() · [The Aztec UFO Symposium: How This Saucer Story Started As a Con Game]() ![A grainy photocopy of a typed United States Government Office Memorandum dated March 22, 1950, to the Director, FBI, from Guy Hottel, SAC, Washington, subject “Flying Saucers, Information Concerning,” with a handwritten “Flying Discs or Flying Saucers” across it, blacked-out names, handwritten exemption codes in the margin, and three typed paragraphs about saucers recovered in New Mexico.]() Guy Hottel’s memo of March 22, 1950, two weeks after the Denver lecture. The names were blacked out until 2022. FBI Records: The Vault, U.S. government work, public domain. [Image source]() ### Behind the Flying Saucers Henry Holt published Scully’s book on September 8, 1950. Holt’s note assured readers that “Mr. Scully has approached his subject with probity”; Scully’s own preface declared, “I have never participated in the perpetration of a hoax on flying saucers.” He wrote it, he said later, in seventy-two days. The scientist at its heart was “Dr. Gee,” a magnetic researcher who had played a part in 35,000 wartime experiments involving 1,700 scientists, and who had told everything to Newton, presented as “one of the great geophysicists of the oil industry” and “a man who never made more than $25,000,000 nor lost more than $20,000,000.” The first ship, tracked in the upper atmosphere, came down in “very rocky, high plateau territory, east of Aztec, New Mexico,” on a ranch twelve miles from town. “I got a call and flew down from Denver in three hours,” Dr. Gee says. Eight specialists in magnetic research spent two days, Cahn summarized, “bombing it with Geiger counters, cosmic rays, and other protective devices.” Then someone pushed a pole through the broken porthole, hit a knob on the far side, and a door opened. “There we were able to count sixteen bodies, that ranged in height from about 36 to 42 inches.” Their skin was charred “a very dark chocolate color,” and they wore dark blue uniforms with metal buttons. The ship, 99.99 feet across, had no rivets, bolts or screws and shrugged off “$35,000 worth of diamond drills”; it came apart in segments fitted into grooves, and a gear around the cabin meshed with a gear around the rim, which spun around the cabin as a kind of gyroscope. There were booklets in pictorial script, little wafers that guinea pigs “seemed to thrive on,” and water nearly twice as heavy as ours, “very similar in fact to the heavy water the Nazis wanted so badly from Norway.” A second ship, seventy-two feet across, turned up on an Arizona proving ground with sixteen more dead, unburned, and sleeping quarters and a toilet. A third, thirty-six feet across, landed in Paradise Valley above Phoenix with a crew of two, one of them halfway out of an escape hatch. A fourth got away. Thirty-four dead in all, from Venus, along magnetic lines of force. Scully even wondered whether the Aztec saucer was the missing ninth of the nine objects Kenneth Arnold saw over Mount Rainier in 1947, the one that had had “magneto trouble.” Sources: [Behind the Flying Saucers]() · [The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men]() · [In Armour Bright]() ![Paperback cover headed “Popular Library” and “The Book Everyone Is Talking About,” titled “Behind the Flying Saucers” by Frank Scully: a crowd in pajamas and nightgowns, a woman in pink in front and a bespectacled man pointing upward, gaze at colored saucers flying over a dark city skyline.]() The 25-cent Popular Library paperback of 1951, number 326, with cover art by Earle Bergey. Public domain (copyright not renewed), via Wikimedia Commons. [Image source]() ### ‘150,000,000 people can’t be wrong’ The book sold some 60,000 copies at $2.75, Cahn reckoned, was digested by a mass-circulation magazine and reissued as a quarter paperback, and by Scully’s count went into twelve languages. “Several of the bookstores here have sold out,” Newton wrote to Scully from Denver. The Denver Post photographed the three men in October 1950 demonstrating saucer magnetism, Koehler holding a bowl for the Earth while Scully held up the book for the saucer. The Air Force was less amused. Col. Harold E. Watson, chief of intelligence at Air Materiel Command, told Bob Considine of International News Service that the Air Force had “no flying saucers, or parts of flying saucers. It has no bodies of ‘little men,’ nor any samples of the so-called clothes these imaginary creatures wore,” and that Scully’s book had “made me ill after 15 pages.” Considine’s series traced the story back through Fick and the Ford men to Koehler and the doctor “Gebauer or Jarbrauer,” where, he wrote, it “promptly grew cold.” That November Considine and Scully debated by telephone before the National Association of Radio News Directors in Chicago. Scully would not name Dr. Gee: “I am duty bound not to betray a confidence.” Had he ever seen a flying saucer himself? “No, but 150,000,000 people can’t be wrong.” Sources: [The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men]() · [In Armour Bright]() · [Frank Scully Papers · newspaper clippings, 1947–1951]() · [Frank Scully Papers · Newton, Silas M. · correspondence, typescripts and clippings]() ![Sepia newspaper photograph of three men in suits: a dark-haired younger man kneeling at left holds up a decorated bowl, a man in a bow tie stands behind him in the center, and an older white-haired man at right holds up a book toward them.]() George Koehler of KMYR (kneeling, with an inverted bowl as “the earth”), Silas Newton (center) and Frank Scully (with Behind the Flying Saucers as “the saucer”) demonstrate saucer magnetism. Photo: David Mathias, The Denver Post, October 19, 1950. Public domain in the U.S. (copyright not renewed), via Wikimedia Commons. [Image source]() ### Plain old aluminum In January 1951 the San Francisco Chronicle assigned J. P. Cahn to find out what was behind the little men from Venus. He began in February by calling on Scully, met Newton through him, and sat down with the oilman over an $18.20 dinner in the Palm Court of the Palace Hotel, where the oilman untied a knotted handkerchief. “You ever see anything like this?” Inside were two gears about the size of pocket watches and two disks the size of nickels. One gear, struck, rang the note A on a piano; another had a small fat arrow pointing at something “that looked very much like an ordinary 9.” “It’s magnetized,” Newton said, though it did not stir Cahn’s steel knife. Upstairs he told of the doctor’s laboratories by the Phoenix airfield, a magnetic disintegrator whose beams “would reach out and destroy the universe,” and a thousand-foot cigar-shaped saucer down in a swamp outside Memphis: “a lot of people would pay a dollar to see a thing like that.” Newton wanted to know “what there is in it for us”; Cahn says the price discussed was $10,000 in escrow and $25,000 before publication. The Chronicle’s Sunday editor, Scott Newhall, machined counterfeit disks in his garage, and at a later meeting, when Newton spilled his relics on the table, Cahn palmed one and left a fake. Newton noticed about ten days later. At Stanford Research Institute, the metal that had supposedly resisted 10,000 degrees in Dr. Gee’s laboratory melted at 657 degrees Fahrenheit. “It was plain old aluminum, 99.5 percent pure, a quality commercially described as grade 2S and used in the manufacture of nothing more cosmic than pots and pans.” The man Newton kept telephoning in Phoenix turned out to be Leo GeBauer, proprietor of the Western Radio & Engineering Company, and when Cahn showed Scully the address, Scully said, by Cahn’s account, “You’ve got the man, all right.” The firm GeBauer said he had run laboratories for during the war, AiResearch, remembered him as a maintenance man who had kept its laboratory machinery running. GeBauer, a stocky man with pale, deep-set eyes, wrote on his letterhead, “I am not the Dr. Gee mentioned in the book,” and told Cahn, “You’re mistaken there, my boy.” Even Koehler’s football career with the Chicago Bears, mentioned in the book, dissolved in a telegram: “DO NOT HAVE RECORD OF GEORGE KOEHLER PLAYING WITH BEARS.” In June 1951 Cahn confronted Scully with a dossier. In a private memo Scully called Cahn “a louse in the blouse of journalism” and described Dr. Gee as “a composite of scientists I had created out of the several who had told me the most sensational phases of the flying saucer story.” Cahn wrote back: “Is it Right to leave the thousands of people who have read your book clutching hopefully at straws we know do not exist?” A year went by, Cahn wrote, before he got the story printed: True magazine ran it in September 1952, calling the book one of the greatest scientific hoaxes “since the old Cardiff Giant.” Sources: [The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men]() · [J. P. Cahn’s series on the Newton–GeBauer fraud]() · [Frank Scully Papers · Newton, Silas M. · correspondence, typescripts and clippings]() ### A twenty-cent battery After True appeared, a Denver optometrist named Kleyhauer, who had given Newton $9,000 for oil leases in 1946, ran a want ad: “URGENT NOTICE! All persons having dealings with SILAS M. NEWTON, NEWTON OIL CO. … relative to oil investments, ‘Cosmic Rays,’ and/or ‘Flying Saucers,’ kindly contact me.” Flader phoned Cahn. He had, he said, “invested over a quarter of a million dollars with those bums and never got a penny back.” Cahn arrived in Denver on September 11, 1952, on special assignment for the Denver Post, and Flader opened his walk-in safe and brought out a double armful of canceled checks and two of the machines. GeBauer had sold him plutonium and magnetics; Flader, tired of waiting, had pried one box open himself and lifted out a battery wired inside. “There’s the joker that made the lights go,” he said. “It wasn’t Plutonium or magnetics or anything but this little battery … a little 20-cent battery that cost me all that money.” Asked how a man who made machinery for a living could have been taken in, he glowered: “When I build a man a machine, it works. I never gave it a second thought that the other fellow wouldn’t do the same.” Howard Roberts, an electronics technician at the University of Denver’s research institute, looked inside: “This one is the tuning unit out of an Army Signal Corps transmitter … it’s still got the Signal Corps identification plate on it … This thing couldn’t locate anything.” Roberts guessed a surplus store would sell one for about $3, and had to pay $3.50, Cahn wrote, for a box like the one that had cost Flader $12,000; the papers printed prices from $1.50 to $4.45. In October District Attorney Bert M. Keating charged Newton and GeBauer with a $50,000 confidence game, and the U.S. attorney added a federal complaint over $39,500 in checks carried across state lines. Newton was picked up in Los Angeles and GeBauer in Phoenix. Newton’s lawyer called it an attempt to collect a civil debt through the criminal courts, and pointed out that Flader had a gadget of his own, a device he believed cleaned the blood of sufferers from arthritis, asthma and diabetes. “Of all the flying-saucer stories that have landed in U.S. newspapers,” Time began, “the most fantastic was told by a Denver oilman named Silas M. Newton.” In December, returned from the West Coast, Newton was jailed in Denver to face what the Rocky Mountain News called bunko charges. Sources: [J. P. Cahn’s series on the Newton–GeBauer fraud]() · [Frank Scully Papers · Newton, Silas M. · correspondence, typescripts and clippings]() · [Flying-Saucer Men]() · [Flying Saucers and Fraud: The Silas M. Newton Story]() ![Yellowed newspaper clipping with the headlines “Is Returned From West Coast” and “Silas Newton Jailed Here, To Face Bunko Charges” above a close-up portrait of a heavy-featured, gray-haired man looking at the camera with a stern expression, stamped with a Denver Public Library Western History seal.]() Rocky Mountain News, December 6, 1952. Portrait of Newton by Dick Davis. Public domain (copyright not renewed). Denver Public Library, Western History Collection. [Image source]() ### Confidence game The trial opened in Denver District Court on November 10, 1953, before Judge Frank E. Hickey. Flader, sixty-eight, spent three days on the stand telling what the Denver Post called “weird stories of GeBauer’s discovery of flying saucers and three-feet tall men,” and why he had so long left the boxes shut: “GeBauer warned me not to open the machines because the government had the machines wired with explosives.” He had never got one cent back. A Colorado School of Mines geophysicist put the plutonium antenna tips under a Geiger counter: “These are no more radioactive than a spoon, knife or fork.” The defense called an oil operator who said the doodlebugs had divined thirty-five wells for him, and the famous archer Howard Hill, who said the pair had demonstrated a geophysical gadget in his Los Angeles backyard that found a buried oil tank and two water pipes, though he could not say whether either machine in court was the one. Under cross-examination Newton admitted he had paid no income tax from 1935 through 1950. GeBauer, hemorrhaging from ulcers, came to court in a wheelchair, collapsed in the judge’s chambers and finally waived his right to face his accuser so the trial could go on without him. On December 29 the jury found both men guilty of a confidence game and conspiracy, after less than three hours, Cahn wrote. Judge Hickey gave them probation “in the public interest” and ordered them to repay Flader $79,452 out of their future income. Cahn signed off his account of the affair in the Chronicle: “I don’t know where the little three-foot men came from. It sure enough wasn’t Venus, and that’s all I was assigned to find out.” Edward Ruppelt, who had run the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, summed it up in 1956: “The story made news, Newton and ‘Dr. Gee’ made fame, and Scully made money.” Sources: [Frank Scully Papers · Newton, Silas M. · correspondence, typescripts and clippings]() · [J. P. Cahn’s series on the Newton–GeBauer fraud]() · [The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects]() ### A composite of eight men Scully never recanted. He wrote to Newton that the conviction was “a bum beef and a bum rap,” and that Behind the Flying Saucers “still seems way out in front as the best and most plausible of all the strange tales from Elsewhere.” In his 1963 memoir In Armour Bright he described Warner Brothers’ lawyers asking for a clearance on Dr. Gee before a film deal: “But Dr. Gee is a composite character of eight men who have given me pieces of this story,” he told them. “I can’t give you a clearance on a character I invented for convenience to simplify the telling of the story.” He admitted he had never seen a flying saucer in his life, but held that the magnetic propulsion theory “still seems sound,” and that Newton had got “everything short of a one-way pass to a federal penitentiary, for his labor of love.” Scully died in 1964. Newton went on as before. Arrested in Denver in 1958 on federal charges of mail fraud and securities violations, he was acquitted by a jury; in 1969 he pleaded guilty in Los Angeles to selling interests in an oil well to be drilled in Sedona without a permit, a case dismissed the next year; and in 1970 the FBI was looking into a mercury mine he was promoting at Silver City, New Mexico, under the name Magnetic Research Foundation, where an informant’s assay found no mercury at all and overheard someone say, “This mill has to operate for only one day, that’s all we need, just one day.” He died in Los Angeles in 1972, Clark writes, with some forty legal claims against him. Then, in 1998, the former CIA officer and skeptical ufologist Karl Pflock was shown, by a source who insisted on anonymity, twenty-seven pages said to have been torn from a journal Newton kept around 1970. In them, as Pflock and later Nick Redfern related, Newton wrote that a couple of years after Scully’s book two men from what Pflock called “a highly secret U.S. Government entity” told him they knew his story was false, and wanted him to keep telling it. “They grilled me, tried to poke holes in my story. Had no trouble doing it and laughed in my face about the scientific mistakes I made. They never said so, but I could tell they were trying to find out if I really knew anything about flying saucers that had landed. Did not take those fellows long to decide I did not. But I sure knew they did.” Pflock wondered whether someone had used Newton to discredit crashed saucers so a real one could be kept under wraps, or whether it was “some sort of psychological warfare operation.” No one else, Clark notes, has seen or been able to verify the journal. Sources: [Frank Scully Papers · Newton, Silas M. · correspondence, typescripts and clippings]() · [In Armour Bright]() · [Silas Newton]() · [The Aztec Incident: Recovery at Hart Canyon · review]() · [The Most Complicated UFO Case Ever? Maybe, Maybe Not…]() ### Hangar 18 and Hart Canyon For two decades the case was poison; the Scully taint, Clark writes, kept serious ufologists away from crash stories altogether. Then in October 1974 Robert Spencer Carr, a science-fiction writer who had sold his first story to Weird Tales at fifteen and who was billed as a professor at the University of South Florida, announced in Florida that the government had captured a complete saucer that crash-landed in the desert near Aztec in 1948, with twelve dead beings aboard. They were, the Ann Arbor Sun reported, “exactly like small humans - three to four feet tall; white skinned; light haired; blue eyed,” killed by decompression when the hull was punctured, and still in deep freeze at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in what became famous as Hangar 18. He predicted the government would begin preparing the public for the truth by December 15. The Air Force said there was no Hangar 18 and noted that the story resembled a recent thriller, The Fortec Conspiracy; Carr’s son later wrote that his father had no college degree at all. In June 1975 a man calling himself Ray Meier, a retired Marine major, got off a Greyhound bus north of Aztec and asked to be driven six miles into Hart Canyon to see where a saucer had landed. GeBauer, Clark notes, had taken his oil detector to Hart Canyon in August 1949, which is generally assumed to be where the setting came from. William Steinman, a California researcher, followed the trail there in July 1982; he found nothing in the Aztec Independent Review for February to June 1948, but at a garage sale Vivian Melton told him, “We know about that; in fact we know exactly where it happened!!” His 1986 book with Wendelle Stevens, UFO Crash at Aztec, gave the story a date, March 25, 1948, and a cast. Three radar units, one of them an experimental installation on a mountaintop whose beam disrupted the craft’s controls, tracked it down; Secretary of State George C. Marshall alerted a secret unit at Camp Hale, Colorado; Vannevar Bush gathered a team at Durango airfield that included John von Neumann and J. Robert Oppenheimer, who thought the symbols on board resembled Sanskrit. Inside were fourteen charred bodies, two at the controls and twelve in a sleeping chamber. The land, Steinman said, was transferred to the federal government in April 1948, and Dr. Gee had been a composite of eight scientists, four of them members of the secret Majestic 12 committee. In 1991 two Ohio investigators, William Jones and Rebecca Minshall, telephoned Aztec and found W.M., the local man Steinman suggested had fled town after the crash and described as “now deceased,” alive in Aztec and denying everything, and the Bureau of Land Management reporting that the parcel had never been owned by anyone but the government. “It is clear,” they concluded, “that the flying-saucer-crash story is part of Aztec’s folklore but not its history.” Sources: [The Aztec Incident: Recovery at Hart Canyon · review]() · [Air Force Freezes Ufo Story]() · [Robert Spencer Carr]() · [Hangar 18 (conspiracy theory)]() · [UFO Crash at Aztec: A Well Kept Secret]() · [Aztec, New Mexico — a crash story reexamined]() ### Roswell’s little brother In 1998 Aztec’s public librarian, Leanne Hathcock, read about the town’s crashed saucer and decided to hold a symposium for its fiftieth anniversary. The Friends of the Aztec Public Library ran it every spring as a fundraiser for a new library until 2011, with talks on cover-ups and crop circles, children’s art contests and guided trips to the site. At the first one the skeptic Dave Thomas explained the con, and another speaker said it did not matter whether Aztec or Roswell were real: “they become real when we believe in them.” The case’s new champion was Scott Ramsey, a North Carolina wire-company executive who had been investigating since 1990 and said in 2004 that he had spent $200,000 of his own money visiting twenty-eight states. “Old-timers are dying left and right,” he told the Durango Herald. “I’m down to second- and third-hand witnesses.” That August the Canadian filmmaker Paul Kimball premiered Aztec: 1948, the first full-length documentary on the case, at Aztec City Hall, with Ramsey at its center. His witnesses, many of them nineteen at the time and in their eighties when he found them, recalled a disc domed top and bottom on a mesa, “a hole in the portal of the craft,” small, child-like bodies and soldiers who swore them to secrecy; in their telling, locals got inside within hours by poking a pole through a porthole, long before any officials arrived. With his wife, Suzanne, the journalism professor Frank Thayer and Frank Warren, Ramsey published The Aztec Incident: Recovery at Hart Canyon in 2012, with a foreword by Stanton Friedman, and in 2016 a reworked version, The Aztec UFO Incident, whose publisher declared Roswell “no longer the only proven flying saucer recovery we know about.” They now argue that the government deliberately made Aztec look like a hoax. “We had to make them the town drunk,” Scott Ramsey told DGO Magazine. Thayer imagined the military needing “the biggest Bekins truck available to cart away all that stuff.” Six and a half miles up a dirt road off U.S. 550 and a short walk along the Alien Run mountain-bike trail, a marker stands on the mesa: a plaque first went up in 1999, and the one Ramsey left in 2007 looks more like a lectern, with a circle of rocks a few feet away that visitors read as an alien face. “I been livin’ here 70 years,” a local driver told an Albuquerque Journal writer who spent four hours looking for it, “and don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.” Sources: [The Aztec UFO Symposium: How This Saucer Story Started As a Con Game]() · [Symposium: Is the UFO truth in Aztec?]() · [Aztec to premiere UFO documentary]() · [UFO researchers looking for witnesses to N.M. crashes]() · [Aztec UFO landing subject of new book]() · [The Aztec Incident: Recovery at Hart Canyon · review]() · [Was what happened in 1948 flying saucer incident a cover-up? A hoax? Or something else entirely?]() · [The truth is out there: Aztec is home to another purported alien crash-landing site within NM]() · [Aztec, New Mexico: UFO Crashed Here]() ### The most popular file in the Vault The Hottel memo had been public since the late 1970s, and in 1998 Linda Moulton Howe described it on Art Bell’s radio shows as a government document proving that the United States had known about real saucers for decades. Then in April 2011 the FBI opened The Vault, its online reading room, and the British tabloids found it. “The amazing UFO find at Roswell, New Mexico, was detailed by FBI agent Guy Hottel in a 1950 memo to the agency’s director,” The Sun announced. Benjamin Radford answered in the Christian Science Monitor: “The memo is not secret, nor is it new, nor does it refer to anything that happened in Roswell.” In March 2013 the FBI itself weighed in. “It’s the most popular file in the FBI Vault,” it said, viewed nearly a million times in two years. “Yet, it is only a single page, relaying an unconfirmed report that the FBI never even followed up on.” It was “simply a second- or third-hand claim,” and while some believed it repeated a hoax circulating at the time, the Bureau’s files could not confirm that. “Sorry, no smoking gun on UFOs. The mystery remains…” Skeptics had long traced the memo to the Wyandotte Echo chain, but in August 2022 John Greenwald of The Black Vault obtained an unredacted copy and found a different messenger: the story was told to Special Agent Robert H. Kurtzman by Karl Howe, a special investigator on the “Sex Squad” of the Metropolitan Police Department. Where Howe heard it is unknown. The writer Jason Colavito argued that he was passing on, slightly garbled, the talk of the Denver lecture, the same rumor that the FBI’s New Orleans office had pinned on a Denver oilman nine days later. Sources: [The Aztec UFO Symposium: How This Saucer Story Started As a Con Game]() · [Roswell FBI memo: Baloney or hogwash?]() · [UFOs and the Guy Hottel Memo]() · [The “Guy Hottel” Memo and the Crashed Flying Saucers of New Mexico]() · [Why did a vice cop report crashed saucers and dead aliens to the FBI in 1950?]() ## The evidence ### Nothing from 1948 No document, newspaper item or official record from 1948 mentions a crash near Aztec. The earliest datable telling is Scully’s Variety column of October 1949, and Clark notes that no earlier press reference has ever been found. Newton himself, in March 1950, placed the landing only “within 500 miles of the city of Denver,” “on a day within the \[last\] two years”; the book says a ranch twelve miles from Aztec, and the January 1950 rumors put it in the Mojave or at a radar station on the Arizona line. The date March 25, 1948, and the name Hart Canyon belong to the later literature, and Steinman’s 1986 book is the earliest source here that tells the event day by day; even its author found nothing in the local weekly for February to June 1948. When Jones and Minshall checked Steinman’s claims in 1991 they found the man he had placed at the center of a hasty departure alive and denying everything, the landowner’s son saying his father knew nothing of a crash, the man who later bought the land recalling a fire-blackened patch strewn with potsherds and a fence that was one of many federal grazing exclosures, and the Bureau of Land Management writing that “There is no record of the land being owned by anyone other than the federal government.” The county assessor’s map they ordered marked most of the surrounding land “FED,” which, they wrote, the map in Steinman’s book appeared to have been altered to play down. Clark sums up: for as long as they have been asked, Aztec residents “have with virtually one voice denied that anything like a UFO retrieval happened there on March 25, 1948, or any other date,” including the newspaper editor of the time, the 1948 sheriff and his son, and the family that owned the property. Sources: [The Aztec Incident: Recovery at Hart Canyon · review]() · [Frank Scully Papers · Newton, Silas M. · correspondence, typescripts and clippings]() · [Behind the Flying Saucers]() · [UFO · Part 8]() · [UFO Crash at Aztec: A Well Kept Secret]() · [Aztec, New Mexico — a crash story reexamined]() · [NM MUFON News no. 13 · interview with Rebecca Minshall]() ### A story that would not hold still Every telling changed the numbers. The first saucer was 99.99 feet across in Newton’s lecture and Scully’s book (which also gives 99.9), about 100 feet in Steinman and Ramsey, and fifty feet in the Hottel memo; Fick’s “Coulter” described a six-foot cabin inside a thirteen-foot ring. The dead numbered sixteen in the first ship and thirty-four in all in the book, eighteen on a single Mojave disc in the New Orleans memo, nine in Hottel’s three saucers, two per craft in the OSI report, twelve blond, blue-eyed beings in Carr’s freezer, fourteen in Steinman, and “up to 16” in Ramsey. They were 36 to 42 inches tall in the book, thirty inches in Time, three feet in the government papers; charred chocolate-brown in the book, unburned in the New Orleans memo, taped or bandaged in Fick and Hottel. Their timepiece ran a twenty-nine-day “magnetic month” for Newton and twenty-eight days for Fick. The cause of the crash moved from Scully’s guess at “magneto trouble” to a high-powered radar that jammed the controls (already in Hottel’s memo, and built up by Steinman into an experimental mountaintop installation), a puncture and decompression (Carr) and a controlled landing after the craft was perhaps shot at (Ramsey). The scientists of 1950 needed two days to get in; Ramsey’s locals managed it in a few hours. Even the anniversary drifted: Aztec’s first symposium in 1998 was said to mark a crash in May 1948, and other researchers have offered February 13 and April 12. One image survived, from the 1950 book through Steinman to Ramsey’s witnesses: a pole poked through a porthole to press a knob, and a door swinging open. Sources: [Frank Scully Papers · Newton, Silas M. · correspondence, typescripts and clippings]() · [Behind the Flying Saucers]() · [Guy Hottel]() · [UFO · Part 8]() · [Air Force Freezes Ufo Story]() · [UFO Crash at Aztec: A Well Kept Secret]() · [Flying-Saucer Men]() · [The Aztec UFO Symposium: How This Saucer Story Started As a Con Game]() · [Alleged UFO crash, Aztec, 1948 · Another alleged crash, February 13, 1948]() · [The Aztec Incident: Recovery at Hart Canyon · review]() ### What the government files show The FBI and Air Force papers from 1950 are real, and they are often cited as corroboration, but each records a rumor rather than an investigation. The OSI spot report of January 16, 1950, is a summary of a Kansas newspaper article. The Denver teletype of March 9 reports an anonymous lecture and passes on the Air Force’s view that the lecturer’s associate was a probable mental case. The New Orleans memo of March 31 relays what a Denver oilman had been telling people since the autumn. The Hottel memo passes on, at second or third hand, what an “investigator for the Air Forces” was supposed to have said, and states that nothing further was done; its unredacted text, released in 2022, shows the Bureau heard it not from the Air Force but from a Washington police vice investigator; how the police came by it is unknown. By the FBI’s own account in 2013, the Bureau never investigated it. In 1950 the Air Force’s chief intelligence officer at Air Materiel Command denied having any saucers, parts or bodies, and in 1974 Wright-Patterson denied there was any Hangar 18. The Bureau’s files on Newton, by contrast, are concerned entirely with his business dealings, from the California attorney general’s 1951 complaint that he appeared to be “engaged in the perpetration of a hoax or swindle of large proportions” to the mine at Silver City. Sources: [UFO · Part 8]() · [Guy Hottel]() · [The “Guy Hottel” Memo and the Crashed Flying Saucers of New Mexico]() · [UFOs and the Guy Hottel Memo]() · [Frank Scully Papers · newspaper clippings, 1947–1951]() · [Robert Spencer Carr]() · [Silas Newton]() ### The court record The fraud case, No. 40891 in Denver District Court, is the best-documented part of the story. The motion for a new trial lists checks to the Newton Oil Company from July to November 1949 and agreements signed with Flader, and the Denver papers covered weeks of testimony about the machines, their surplus radio parts and their batteries. The conviction was for selling Flader oil-detecting equipment and leases, not for telling saucer stories; the saucer was part of the sales pitch, and the jury heard Flader tell it. Sources disagree on the money: Flader’s losses are given as anything from $50,000 to more than $231,000, and the restitution as $79,452 in the wire reports but $18,000 in the memoir of one of the prosecutors, Edward Lehman. Scully held to the end that it had been “a bum rap” that should have been a civil suit, and Ramsey and Thayer go further: “We realized the government engineered that story to sink Aztec,” Thayer told DGO Magazine, “and they were willing to ruin the lives of two, three people.” Nothing in the trial papers and press reports gathered here places the swindle’s saucer at Aztec. Sources: [Frank Scully Papers · Newton, Silas M. · correspondence, typescripts and clippings]() · [J. P. Cahn’s series on the Newton–GeBauer fraud]() · [Rolling with the Press: A Publisher’s Journey]() · [Was what happened in 1948 flying saucer incident a cover-up? A hoax? Or something else entirely?]() ### The case for a real crash Those who believe a saucer did come down near Aztec point to several things. Ramsey and Thayer say they reviewed more than 55,000 documents and interviewed witnesses in twenty-seven states who, Thayer said, though “separated by hundreds of miles,” told coinciding stories of a craft, small bodies and oaths of secrecy. The physicist Robert Sarbacher, who in 1950 reportedly told the Canadian engineer Wilbert Smith that Scully’s book was “substantially correct,” wrote to Steinman in 1983 that von Neumann and Vannevar Bush had been “definitely involved” in recoveries and, he thought, Oppenheimer too, though he added that he had “no knowledge regarding the dates of the recoveries” and named no place. If Pflock’s Newton journal is genuine, someone in government took an interest in the story. Clark’s review of the 2012 book found the witnesses thin on inspection. Only two named men claimed to have been there: Doug Noland, interviewed after a “series of strokes,” and Ken Farley, interviewed while “dying of a respiratory disease.” A police officer said to have been present was never interviewed at all, an intelligence source is named only as “George,” and a pastor said to have seen the bodies had a son, also a pastor, who never heard his father speak of it. Another witness, Fred Reed, had written to the Aztec paper days before Ramsey interviewed him that the OSS, which had been disbanded in 1945, sent his group to the site in 1948, and that it “did not look like a crash site.” The aliens, he wrote, had built stone cairns marking the path from the oil-field road, and the trees opened to the south, “a typical distress signal for extraterrestrials”; “what it boiled down to was this: No UFO crash.” The saucer had landed on purpose to bury something, then flown away. None of this appears in the book, Clark notes, which instead presents the swindler Newton as a “man of science.” Against all of it stands the paper trail of the original story: it leads to two men who used it to sell oil-finding machines, Cahn took it apart with a laboratory test in 1952, and Scully himself conceded that Dr. Gee was a composite he had invented. No witness account gathered since the 1970s has yet been matched by a single document from 1948. Sources: [Aztec UFO landing subject of new book]() · [UFO Crash at Aztec: A Well Kept Secret]() · [The Most Complicated UFO Case Ever? Maybe, Maybe Not…]() · [The Aztec Incident: Recovery at Hart Canyon · review]() · [The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men]() · [In Armour Bright]() ## Timeline - **SPRING 1944:** Silas M. Newton writes to Frank Scully from Denver, urging him to write a book about Frank Harris. - **1946–1948:** Newton writes in Petroleum Review about oil deposits broadcasting microwaves and drills dry wells in the Mojave. - **25 MAR 1948:** The date later writers give for the Aztec crash. No record from 1948 mentions one. - **APRIL 1949:** Leo GeBauer calls on Herman Flader in Denver with a machine to find water; Newton follows weeks later. - **JULY–NOV 1949:** Flader signs agreements and writes checks to the Newton Oil Company for leases and GeBauer’s machines. - **AUGUST 1949:** GeBauer demonstrates his detector in Hart Canyon near Aztec, by Clark’s account; Newton and GeBauer tell Scully their tales. - **12 OCT 1949:** Scully’s Variety column “One Flying Saucer Lands in New Mexico,” as later bibliographies date it. - **6 JAN 1950:** The Wyandotte Echo prints Rudy Fick’s story of “Coulter” and the three-foot men; the Air Force’s OSI files it on January 16. - **8 MAR 1950:** Newton, unnamed, lectures a University of Denver basic science class on the 99.99-foot saucer and its sixteen dead. - **17 MAR 1950:** Several hundred people in Farmington report a mass daylight flight of objects. - **22 MAR 1950:** Guy Hottel sends J. Edgar Hoover a memo on three saucers recovered in New Mexico. - **8 SEP 1950:** Henry Holt publishes Behind the Flying Saucers. - **FEB–JUNE 1951:** J. P. Cahn meets Newton, switches a disk, has it tested as aluminum and finds GeBauer in Phoenix. - **SEPTEMBER 1952:** True publishes Cahn’s exposé; Flader calls Cahn, and the doodlebugs are opened in Denver. - **OCTOBER 1952:** Newton and GeBauer are charged with a $50,000 confidence game and arrested in Los Angeles and Phoenix. - **29 DEC 1953:** The jury finds both men guilty; they are later given probation and ordered to repay Flader. - **1963:** Scully’s memoir calls Dr. Gee “a composite character of eight men.” He dies the next year. - **1972:** Newton dies in Los Angeles. - **OCTOBER 1974:** Robert Spencer Carr announces that twelve beings from an Aztec crash are frozen at Wright-Patterson. - **1986:** Steinman and Stevens publish UFO Crash at Aztec, fixing the date at March 25, 1948, and the site at Hart Canyon. - **SEP–OCT 1991:** Jones and Minshall report in International UFO Reporter that Aztec’s old-timers deny any crash. - **1998:** Aztec’s library holds its first UFO symposium; Linda Moulton Howe presents the Hottel memo on Art Bell’s show. - **APRIL 2011:** The FBI’s online Vault opens and the Hottel memo goes viral as Roswell proof. - **2012:** The Ramseys and Frank Thayer publish The Aztec Incident: Recovery at Hart Canyon. - **8 AUG 2022:** The Black Vault publishes the unredacted Hottel memo, naming a Washington police investigator as the source. ## Sources & interviews - [Behind the Flying Saucers]() — Frank Scully · Henry Holt and Company · New York, September 8, 1950 · via the Internet Archive - [Frank Scully Papers · Newton, Silas M. · correspondence, typescripts and clippings]() — American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, collection 9554 · Box 3, Folders 1–2 · Newton’s University of Denver lecture transcript and “Running Account,” Scully’s memo on J. P. Cahn, the June 1951 letters, GeBauer’s denial and Better Business Bureau report, Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News trial clippings, the motion for a new trial · via the Internet Archive - [Frank Scully Papers · newspaper clippings, 1947–1951]() — American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, collection 9554 · Box 6, Folder 1 · Denver Post, Los Angeles Mirror, Rocky Mountain News, Bob Considine’s INS series of November 1950 · via the Internet Archive - [The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men]() — J. P. Cahn · True · September 1952 · pp. 17–19, 102–112 · in the Frank Scully Papers, magazine clippings 1949–1952, via the Internet Archive - [J. P. Cahn’s series on the Newton–GeBauer fraud]() — San Francisco Chronicle · January 1954 · six parts · clippings in the Frank Scully Papers, Box 3, Folder 2, via the Internet Archive - [UFO · Part 8]() — FBI Records: The Vault · file 62-83894 · OSI spot report of January 16, 1950, Denver teletype of March 9, 1950, New Orleans memo of March 31, 1950 - [Silas Newton]() — FBI Records: The Vault · Parts 1–6 · California attorney general’s letters of 1951, arrest records, the 1969–1970 Los Angeles and Silver City files - [Guy Hottel]() — FBI Records: The Vault · Office Memorandum, SAC Washington to the Director, “Flying Saucers / Information Concerning,” March 22, 1950 - [UFOs and the Guy Hottel Memo]() — FBI News · March 25, 2013 · archived copy via the Wayback Machine - [The “Guy Hottel” Memo and the Crashed Flying Saucers of New Mexico]() — John Greenwald · The Black Vault · updated August 8, 2022 · with the unredacted release of FOIA 1555167-000 - [Why did a vice cop report crashed saucers and dead aliens to the FBI in 1950?]() — Jason Colavito · blog · August 8, 2022 - [Flying-Saucer Men]() — Time · October 27, 1952 · Press section · via the Internet Archive - [The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects]() — Edward J. Ruppelt · Doubleday, 1956 · chapter 7 · Project Gutenberg - [In Armour Bright]() — Frank Scully · Chilton, 1963 · chapter 18, “Flying Saucers, Where Are You?” · via the Internet Archive - [The Aztec UFO Symposium: How This Saucer Story Started As a Con Game]() — David E. Thomas · Skeptical Inquirer 22(5) · September/October 1998 · News and Comment · via the Internet Archive - [UFO Crash at Aztec: A Well Kept Secret]() — William S. Steinman, with contributions by Wendelle C. Stevens · UFO Photo Archives, Tucson, 1986 · foreword by Leonard H. Stringfield · via the Internet Archive - [Aztec, New Mexico — a crash story reexamined]() — William E. Jones and Rebecca D. Minshall · International UFO Reporter 16(5) · September/October 1991 · pp. 11–15, 23 · via the Internet Archive - [NM MUFON News no. 13 · interview with Rebecca Minshall]() — New Mexico MUFON · February 14, 1994 · via the Internet Archive - [Air Force Freezes Ufo Story]() — Ann Arbor Sun · November 1, 1974 · via the Ann Arbor District Library - [Robert Spencer Carr]() — Wikipedia · with citations to the Tampa Tribune, Cincinnati Enquirer and Dayton Daily News of 1974 and Timothy Spencer Carr in Skeptical Inquirer, 1997 - [Hangar 18 (conspiracy theory)]() — Wikipedia - [The Aztec Incident: Recovery at Hart Canyon · review]() — Jerome Clark · Journal of Scientific Exploration 26(3) · Fall 2012 · pp. 707–714 · reprinted on Kevin Randle’s blog, October 27, 2012 - [The Most Complicated UFO Case Ever? Maybe, Maybe Not…]() — Nick Redfern · on Karl Pflock’s Newton “journal” · reprinted by Journal News Online - [UFO researchers looking for witnesses to N.M. crashes]() — Associated Press · The News & Observer, Raleigh · May 5, 2003 · transcription by Patrick Gross - [Symposium: Is the UFO truth in Aztec?]() — Dale Rodebaugh · The Durango Herald · March 21, 2004 · transcription by Patrick Gross - [Aztec to premiere UFO documentary]() — Debra Mayeux · The Daily Times, Farmington · August 22, 2004 · transcription by Patrick Gross - [Aztec UFO landing subject of new book]() — Leigh Irvin · The Daily Times, Farmington · March 28, 2012 · archived copy via the Wayback Machine - [Was what happened in 1948 flying saucer incident a cover-up? A hoax? Or something else entirely?]() — Amanda Push · DGO Magazine, Durango · 2023 - [The truth is out there: Aztec is home to another purported alien crash-landing site within NM]() — Toby Smith · Albuquerque Journal · November 19, 2020 · archived copy via the Wayback Machine - [Aztec, New Mexico: UFO Crashed Here]() — RoadsideAmerica.com · visitor tips and directions - [Roswell FBI memo: Baloney or hogwash?]() — Benjamin Radford · The Christian Science Monitor · April 11, 2011 - [Flying Saucers and Fraud: The Silas M. Newton Story]() — Denver Public Library · Western History and Genealogy blog - [Alleged UFO crash, Aztec, 1948 · Another alleged crash, February 13, 1948]() — Patrick Gross · UFOs at close sight · compilations of researchers’ summaries, 2001 and 2004 - [Rolling with the Press: A Publisher’s Journey]() — Edward Lehman · Filter Press, 2016 · the memoir of a deputy district attorney at the 1953 trial · via the Internet Archive - [Aztec crashed saucer hoax]() — Wikipedia · for the titles and dates of Scully’s Variety columns and Newton’s death in 1972 Spotted an error, or know a better source? Write to hello@uap.fun. ## Connected files - [The Roswell Incident]() — The crash that eclipsed Aztec; when the Hottel memo went viral in 2011, headlines called it proof of Roswell, though its story of three-foot dead men most likely echoed Newton’s. - [The Death of Captain Mantell]() — Newton told his Denver audience that the pilot who died chasing a UFO in January 1948 had been disintegrated, a thing “we happen to know” could be done magnetically. - [Nine Objects over Mount Rainier]() — Scully wondered whether the Aztec saucer was the missing ninth of Kenneth Arnold’s formation, the one with “magneto trouble.” - [Linda Moulton Howe]() — In 1998 she brought the Hottel memo to Art Bell’s listeners as proof that the government had known about saucers for decades. - [Stanton Friedman]() — He went hunting Aztec witnesses with Scott Ramsey in 2003, “racing the undertaker,” and wrote the foreword to Ramsey’s 2012 book. ## A NOTE ON EVIDENCE Unidentified describes a limit of the available information. It doesn’t identify an origin. [NEXT CASE FILE: The Saucer over the Baciu Forest]()