... First-Ever UFO Hoax (or Maybe Not)
Three years after Kenneth Arnold's June 24, 1947 saucer sighting convinced Americans to Watch the Skies!, the author of the world's first flying saucer book sought, ironically, to direct the collective attention once again to the ground – specifically to the sandy desert floor near Aztec, New Mexico, and two other Southwestern United States locations where inter-planetary spaceships were rumored to have landed and to have come into the possession of military officials.
Frank Scully never mentions Roswell or crashed discs, but on September 8, 1950, his book Behind the Flying Saucers captured the American imagination with an early version of a story that continues to haunt UFOlogy to this day: A flying disc is grounded in the desert. Ship and undersized humanoid crew are retrieved by US military personnel. A cloak of secrecy is thrown over the event by order of high-level Washington bureaucrats in the name of "National Security." Sound familiar?
Scully's tale begins on March 8, 1950, when an "unidentified middle-aged lecturer" addressed 350 students and professors at the University of Denver on the topic of flying saucers, their pilots, and many technical aspects of the vehicles' operation. The lecture had been arranged for students of a basic science class on the condition that the speaker remain anonymous, and that the talk not be publicized. But word got around and, by the time the speaker was introduced (under a false name), the lecture hall was filled to overflowing, every seat occupied, the aisles jammed with students and professors alike, notebooks at the ready to record the torrent of revelations about to rain down from the podium on the sensational topic of alien visitation.
They were not disappointed. The speaker addressed the standing-room-only crowd for 50 minutes, after which he was whisked away through a side exit to catch a waiting flight.
The man at the podium spoke slowly and with a powerful command of scientific language. He verified that flying saucers are real, and revealed that four such vehicles were known to have landed on Earth – three of which had been retrieved by military officials and examined in detail by scientists. The bodies of 34 extraterrestrial crewmen, ranging from 36" to 40" in height, had been recovered and stored for study.
The Aztec saucer, on which he had the most detailed information, contained in its construction at least two substances not found anywhere on Earth, ruling out the possibility that the disc might be Russian or American made. The ship used a magnetic system of propulsion, by which scientists estimated the saucer might bridge the 161,000,000 miles between Earth and Venus (the craft's hypothesized planet of origin) in under an hour. The vehicle measured 99.9 feet in diameter, and had a cabin 72" in height – plenty of headroom for its diminutive occupants.
The second captured disc was only 72 feet in diameter, and the last was smaller still, at only 36 feet across. All measurements of and within each ship were found to be divisible by the number nine, a mysterious clue, perhaps, to their creators' system of mathematics.
Sixteen humanoid beings had been removed from the Aztec saucer, their slight bodies burned a deep chocolate brown as the atmosphere inside their ship rushed out through a small hole in one circular window. Sixteen more bodies were recovered from the 72' saucer, but only two from the smallest disc. All of the extraterrestrial visitors were dead when discovered.
The fourth, uncaptured, disc had, like the others, landed on the hot desert sands, but as scientists and military personnel approached it, the ship's crew, still very much alive, scampered frantically back aboard the vehicle. The gleaming disc rose slowly over the observers' heads, then fired off like lightning into the afternoon sky.
Of the three ships captured, none carried any identifiable weapons. All were well stocked with food wafers and water said to be "twice as heavy" as its earthly counterpart. The alien crewmen bunked in hidden sleeping units which retracted invisibly into the walls when not in use.
The mysterious speaker illustrated his lecture with chalkboard drawings detailing the "system of nines" used in all the saucers' construction, as well as schematics of the Aztec disc's interior as viewed from varying angles. Another drawing revealed the magnetic lines of force running between the sun and planets, the presumed "highways" by which the visitors traversed the apparent "emptiness" of interplanetary space.
Soon after the explosive lecture, University and law enforcement officials began working to uncover the speaker's true identity. They discovered that he was not a scientist as he had claimed, but was, rather, Silas M. Newton, a millionaire oilman famous for using microwaves to locate gold and oil deposits, often deep beneath sites long abandoned by his less technologically adventurous competitors. Newton claimed to have received his information from a "Dr. Gee," a magnetics specialist who had personally examined the captured discs as a member of the government's team of experts. While Newton was disappointed that "Dr. Gee" had not been able to grant him a personal peek at the alien spaceships, he did manage to acquire from him several disc-shaped samples of metal and a few tiny gears which "Dr. Gee" had smuggled out as souvenirs of his secret government work.
But in the coming days, these souvenirs would prove the unraveling of Newton's secondhand story.
J. P. Cahn, a reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle, took interest in Scully's book and published several articles on the saucer mystery. He met with Newton, offering $35,000 for his story, but only if the oilman could verify its truth. He asked to borrow one of the metal discs for analysis, but Newton refused. Cahn pulled a switch, pocketing Newton's sample and successfully replacing it with a homemade look-alike.
Newton's metal, which he claimed was 100% pure aluminum with a heat resistance of up to 10,000 degrees, turned out to be aluminum, all right, but low grade and common, with a melting point of just over 650 degrees. There was nothing "unearthly" about it.
Cahn went on to locate the mysterious "Dr. Gee." He was Leo Gebauer, an Arizona electrician who, in Cahn's opinion, had joined in cahoots with Silas Newton to perpetrate a hoax on the University of Denver, on writer Frank Scully, and, through Scully's bestselling Behind the Flying Saucers, on America and the world.
But the "defrauded" story simply wouldn't die. In 1974, author Robert Carr presented new evidence that a saucer had, indeed, crashed at Aztec, New Mexico. According to Carr, Scully had been right, even if a few of his details had missed the mark. World-class UFOlogist Stanton Friedman would echo this sentiment a few years later in his investigations of claimed UFO crashes at Aztec and the Plains of San Augustin, both desert sites perched precariously close to the now legendary Roswell.
Just how many interplanetary visitors met their sad fate in New Mexican skies? Was the US government shooting them down? Were all the stories simply diluted shadows of the Roswell crash, spun out of the fragmentary and disconnected bits of information that managed to slip past the well-documented Roswell cover up?
More than 50 years after its initial publication, Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers remains an open book, and the search for the truth behind the military retrieval of crashed discs goes on.
____________________Three years after Kenneth Arnold's June 24, 1947 saucer sighting convinced Americans to Watch the Skies!, the author of the world's first flying saucer book sought, ironically, to direct the collective attention once again to the ground – specifically to the sandy desert floor near Aztec, New Mexico, and two other Southwestern United States locations where inter-planetary spaceships were rumored to have landed and to have come into the possession of military officials.
Frank Scully never mentions Roswell or crashed discs, but on September 8, 1950, his book Behind the Flying Saucers captured the American imagination with an early version of a story that continues to haunt UFOlogy to this day: A flying disc is grounded in the desert. Ship and undersized humanoid crew are retrieved by US military personnel. A cloak of secrecy is thrown over the event by order of high-level Washington bureaucrats in the name of "National Security." Sound familiar?
MYSTERY SPEAKER
Scully's tale begins on March 8, 1950, when an "unidentified middle-aged lecturer" addressed 350 students and professors at the University of Denver on the topic of flying saucers, their pilots, and many technical aspects of the vehicles' operation. The lecture had been arranged for students of a basic science class on the condition that the speaker remain anonymous, and that the talk not be publicized. But word got around and, by the time the speaker was introduced (under a false name), the lecture hall was filled to overflowing, every seat occupied, the aisles jammed with students and professors alike, notebooks at the ready to record the torrent of revelations about to rain down from the podium on the sensational topic of alien visitation.
They were not disappointed. The speaker addressed the standing-room-only crowd for 50 minutes, after which he was whisked away through a side exit to catch a waiting flight.
WHAT THE SCIENTIST SAID
The man at the podium spoke slowly and with a powerful command of scientific language. He verified that flying saucers are real, and revealed that four such vehicles were known to have landed on Earth – three of which had been retrieved by military officials and examined in detail by scientists. The bodies of 34 extraterrestrial crewmen, ranging from 36" to 40" in height, had been recovered and stored for study.
The Aztec saucer, on which he had the most detailed information, contained in its construction at least two substances not found anywhere on Earth, ruling out the possibility that the disc might be Russian or American made. The ship used a magnetic system of propulsion, by which scientists estimated the saucer might bridge the 161,000,000 miles between Earth and Venus (the craft's hypothesized planet of origin) in under an hour. The vehicle measured 99.9 feet in diameter, and had a cabin 72" in height – plenty of headroom for its diminutive occupants.
The second captured disc was only 72 feet in diameter, and the last was smaller still, at only 36 feet across. All measurements of and within each ship were found to be divisible by the number nine, a mysterious clue, perhaps, to their creators' system of mathematics.
Sixteen humanoid beings had been removed from the Aztec saucer, their slight bodies burned a deep chocolate brown as the atmosphere inside their ship rushed out through a small hole in one circular window. Sixteen more bodies were recovered from the 72' saucer, but only two from the smallest disc. All of the extraterrestrial visitors were dead when discovered.
The fourth, uncaptured, disc had, like the others, landed on the hot desert sands, but as scientists and military personnel approached it, the ship's crew, still very much alive, scampered frantically back aboard the vehicle. The gleaming disc rose slowly over the observers' heads, then fired off like lightning into the afternoon sky.
Of the three ships captured, none carried any identifiable weapons. All were well stocked with food wafers and water said to be "twice as heavy" as its earthly counterpart. The alien crewmen bunked in hidden sleeping units which retracted invisibly into the walls when not in use.
The mysterious speaker illustrated his lecture with chalkboard drawings detailing the "system of nines" used in all the saucers' construction, as well as schematics of the Aztec disc's interior as viewed from varying angles. Another drawing revealed the magnetic lines of force running between the sun and planets, the presumed "highways" by which the visitors traversed the apparent "emptiness" of interplanetary space.
THE SPEAKER EXPOSED
Soon after the explosive lecture, University and law enforcement officials began working to uncover the speaker's true identity. They discovered that he was not a scientist as he had claimed, but was, rather, Silas M. Newton, a millionaire oilman famous for using microwaves to locate gold and oil deposits, often deep beneath sites long abandoned by his less technologically adventurous competitors. Newton claimed to have received his information from a "Dr. Gee," a magnetics specialist who had personally examined the captured discs as a member of the government's team of experts. While Newton was disappointed that "Dr. Gee" had not been able to grant him a personal peek at the alien spaceships, he did manage to acquire from him several disc-shaped samples of metal and a few tiny gears which "Dr. Gee" had smuggled out as souvenirs of his secret government work.
But in the coming days, these souvenirs would prove the unraveling of Newton's secondhand story.
J. P. Cahn, a reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle, took interest in Scully's book and published several articles on the saucer mystery. He met with Newton, offering $35,000 for his story, but only if the oilman could verify its truth. He asked to borrow one of the metal discs for analysis, but Newton refused. Cahn pulled a switch, pocketing Newton's sample and successfully replacing it with a homemade look-alike.
Newton's metal, which he claimed was 100% pure aluminum with a heat resistance of up to 10,000 degrees, turned out to be aluminum, all right, but low grade and common, with a melting point of just over 650 degrees. There was nothing "unearthly" about it.
Cahn went on to locate the mysterious "Dr. Gee." He was Leo Gebauer, an Arizona electrician who, in Cahn's opinion, had joined in cahoots with Silas Newton to perpetrate a hoax on the University of Denver, on writer Frank Scully, and, through Scully's bestselling Behind the Flying Saucers, on America and the world.
THE STORY THAT WOULDN'T DIE
But the "defrauded" story simply wouldn't die. In 1974, author Robert Carr presented new evidence that a saucer had, indeed, crashed at Aztec, New Mexico. According to Carr, Scully had been right, even if a few of his details had missed the mark. World-class UFOlogist Stanton Friedman would echo this sentiment a few years later in his investigations of claimed UFO crashes at Aztec and the Plains of San Augustin, both desert sites perched precariously close to the now legendary Roswell.
Just how many interplanetary visitors met their sad fate in New Mexican skies? Was the US government shooting them down? Were all the stories simply diluted shadows of the Roswell crash, spun out of the fragmentary and disconnected bits of information that managed to slip past the well-documented Roswell cover up?
More than 50 years after its initial publication, Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers remains an open book, and the search for the truth behind the military retrieval of crashed discs goes on.
This is an excerpt from the book The Golden Age of Flying Saucers: Classic UFO Sightings, Saucer Crashes and Extraterrestrial Contact Encounters by Frank G. Wilkinson, which can be purchased through Amazon.com, or direct from the publisher at www.NewParadigmPress.com.
To read more excerpts from The Golden Age of Flying Saucers, click here!
