Case file · Retrieval claim
Aztec, New Mexico 'crash'
A claimed 1948 saucer crash and body recovery.
1948 CE · 36.82, -107.99 · status: hoax
The sceptical view
Traced to a con by Silas Newton and promoter Frank Scully; a documented hoax.
The researched reading
A documented con by known fraudsters, popularised by Frank Scully’s 1950 book. It has no evidential value.
| Explanation | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A hoax or fabrication | 95% | The tale came from Silas Newton and "Dr Gee" (Leo GeBauer), confidence men selling fake oil-detecting devices said to use saucer technology; a 1952 True magazine exposé unmasked them and they were later prosecuted for fraud. |
| Something known, misidentified | 1% | There is no underlying sighting to misidentify. |
| A known natural phenomenon | 1% | No natural event was involved. |
| Perception, memory or mind | 1% | Later "witnesses" appear to have absorbed the story rather than seen anything. |
| Secret human technology | 1% | No secret crash at Aztec is supported by records. |
| Genuinely anomalous | 1% | Nothing supports the claim. |
| A poorly understood natural phenomenon | 0% | No natural event is reported. |
Official position: No official investigation; journalists exposed it as a confidence trick in 1952.
How the account grew
A 1949 story of a Venusian saucer and sixteen bodies recovered near Aztec, New Mexico, was exposed in 1952 as a con by two oil-device swindlers, then revived from the 1970s and merged into Roswell lore, and revived again online by an FBI memo.
| Year | Who | Added |
|---|---|---|
| 1949 | Frank Scully, Variety columns | A 99-foot craft with sixteen humanoid bodies recovered in Hart Canyon in March 1948 and hidden by the military; a similar craft in the Sahara. |
| 1950 | Frank Scully, Behind the Flying Saucers | Best-seller: the saucers come from Venus, run on 'magnetic principles', carry food wafers and heavy water, every dimension divisible by nine. (dropped: The Sahara craft is omitted.) |
| 1952 | J. P. Cahn, True magazine | The 'alien metal' is ordinary aluminium; Silas Newton and Leo Gebauer invented the story to sell oil-finding devices. They are convicted of fraud in 1953. (dropped: The crash is treated as discredited by most ufologists for two decades.) |
| 1974 | Robert Spencer Carr | Claims the Aztec bodies are stored in 'Hangar 18' at Wright-Patterson; the Air Force says no such hangar exists. |
| 1978 | Leonard Stringfield and later Roswell witnesses | The crash is one of many retrievals; heat-proof material and small bodies migrate into first-hand Roswell accounts. |
| 2012 | Scott and Suzanne Ramsey and Frank Thayer, The Aztec UFO Incident | The crash was real and the fraud trial was engineered to discredit it. |
| 2013 | FBI (The Vault) | The 1950 Guy Hottel memo, the Vault's most-viewed page, is called an uninvestigated 'second- or third-hand claim'. |
| 2022 | The Black Vault | An unredacted memo names the informant as a Washington police investigator, Karl Howe; his own source remains unknown. |
Connections in the atlas
- The Farmington 'saucer armada'
- Nezahualcoyotl
- Tzitzimimeh
- Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe (Tepeyac)
- Kukulkan
- The "Hangar 18" alien-bodies claims
- The Codex Borgia
- Hunab Ku
- The figure in the moon
- Island of the Dolls (Isla de las Muñecas)
- Parallel texts: The flood
- Maya sky-reckoning