Latest MJ-12 Documents: A Final Look

For those of you who tuned into Midnight in the Desert to listen to me discuss the latest MJ-12 document release, well, I was bumped early in the evening because Heather Wade had “overbooked the show.” At least I wasn’t dragged off by security for refusing to give up my place at the microphone… which couldn’t have happened since I was at home and she controlled the telephone system anyway.

But I did listen to the beginning of the program because like so many others, I wondered what Stan Friedman would say about the authenticity. Like many of us, he was interested in the source of the documents. They had seemed to excite him in earlier statements, but he now was somewhat more neutral though a careful reading of them should have given away the false nature of them... The mere mention that the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit (IPU) was involved should have been a huge red flag. The IPU has been identified and it has nothing to do with aliens or UFOs or anything of the nature. For more about the IPU see:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=IPU

I found one point hilarious and which nearly everyone has failed to mention. The first page says, “READ-AND-DESTROY. I have to wonder how the document survived with that instruction on the first page, which also argues against authenticity. I will note here that a top secret document’s destruction must be documented saying that it has been properly destroyed. Whoever “stole” this one would have had to violate that rule because he would have had to sign the destruction form.

Heather wouldn’t name names, and in one respect I understand that but that also tends to undermine the validity of the documents. She did say that the person who “stole” them originally had died so that he or she can’t be questioned about how he or she gained possession of them.

Heather hadn’t received the originals either. They had come to her in a .pdf file, which, as I have noted in the past, does not allow for much in the way of a forensic analysis of the paper, ink or anything else that might be gained by examination of the originals. We are left with a study of the format, the font, if the documents conformed to others created at the highest-levels of the government and if the documents fit into our current understanding of the situations being discussed in them.

Instead of analysis of these latest documents on the show, we were treated to another waltz down MJ-12 memory lane from the alleged moment the original documents first arrived at Jaime Shandera’s house in 1984 to the point we have reached now. There was nothing new here, other than listening to Stan talk about all his visits to archives, and he enjoys to do so (and hey, that is fun going through all this material, looking for that single and often elusive nugget) and things he had learned about the men who were named to the original MJ-12 committee, all of which was irrelevant to understanding these new documents.

For those who haven’t looked at them yet, though they can now be accessed through a variety of websites including that for Midnight in the Desert. You can still find them here if you are still interested:

http://midnightinthedesert.com/exclusive-ultra-top-secret-assessment-situation-statement-position-ufos/

I have outlined some of the many mistakes in these documents already and find it difficult to believe that something created at this level would be so riddled with errors. I am sorely tempted to enumerate the errors in the Roswell section but will refrain from doing that. Anyone interested can take a look at Roswell in the 21^st Century (or almost any of the other Roswell books) and compare the information there with that in this document. The errors will be apparent and we have to think that anyone who was far enough inside of the loop to be writing this document would be cognizant of the facts of the case.

I’m going to move onto the Aztec case which was covered in depth here. Stan had made a big deal out of the research in Scott Ramsey’s book while he was on Midnight in the Desert and how careful and meticulous it has been. But this document is at a wide variance with what Ramsey published. This sets up a conundrum… if the document is accurate, then Ramsey is wrong but if Ramsey is right, then the document is fake and I haven’t even mentioned the possibility that both are wrong and Aztec is a hoax.

According to the document, on March 25, 1948, the craft was watched on three radars “belonging to the recovery network of the White Sands Test Range and located in classified areas of southwest New Mexico.” In 1948, it was the White Sands Proving Ground, and if the radars were in southwest New Mexico, that would have prevented tracking of the object to low altitudes in northern New Mexico because the mountainous terrain would have been in the way. In fact, once you get very far north of White Sands, their radars aren’t much good for an object below 10,000 feet. Radar is line of sight.

Again, according to the document, the crash site was secured by 10:45 p.m. that night, which meant that no civilians would have been gathered at the site on the morning of March 25 to watch the military arrive because the object had yet to crash according to these new documents. And, if the civilians were on hand to see the military to arrive, it would have had to be on the morning of March 26, but then the site was already secured and the civilians would have been prevented from getting near.

We are treated to a reference to the base at Flat Rock, Nevada, which, of course, was the scene of much of the action in The Andromeda Strain. We learn that the Blue Berets (whoever they are… no, they don’t exist) came in disguised as National Guard, but I’m not sure how you pull that off since the uniforms worn by the National Guard are the same wore by those on active duty with the Army. I suppose they removed their Blue Berets and wore regulation headgear.

Stephen Bassett

But there really doesn’t seem much reason to drag this out. The documents are faked. I spoke with Stephen Bassett yesterday afternoon, and almost the first thing he said to me was that he too thought the documents faked. We discussed some of the bloopers in text, the problems with the classification markings, and all the other errors. Bassett said that he didn’t think these were disinformation, but more likely just someone outside the government who had too much time on his hands. I’ll add someone who didn’t actually know much but who had gotten his hands of William Steinman’s book UFO Crash at Aztec.

What we need to do now is place these documents in the same file folder with the Roswell Slides, the alien autopsy and little grey men who like strawberry ice cream and Tibetan music. Footnotes in the great journal of UFO information, or maybe, even better, have them all deleted from anything to do with UFO research because they have only distracted us. They have added nothing to our knowledge.

The Real, Honest-to-Goodness Date of the Aztec UFO Crash (Maybe)

It is now time to consolidate all the information we have gathered about the date of the Aztec UFO crash. It began when it was claimed that the date had been identified and agreed to by all the various UFO researchers for a long time. That didn’t seem to be right to me so I decided to take a look into it.

Yes, in my book, History of UFO Crashes, I said the date was March 25, 1948. I had gone through some of the literature on the subject and like everyone else; I liked the precision of having a single date for it. I also noted that this was a hoax, one that I believed everyone in the UFO community had accepted… well, there were a few who didn’t, but they seemed to be unaware of the history and in a relative minority.

Aztec, New Mexico. Photo courtesy of Paul Kimball.

I began a search for the original source of the March 25 date and couldn’t find it in the Scully’s early writing about UFO crashes. In fact, he didn’t even mention Aztec in the first article that he wrote in Variety in 1949.

I scanned his book, Behind the Flying Saucers, but found no date for the crash. There were a lot of dates in the book, but none for the Aztec crash. I also looked through J. P. Cahn’s article exposing the crash as a hoax. I found a reference for the Roswell crash with an exact date, or rather the date that the Army released the information that it had really been a weather balloon (or for the purists, it was the date that most of the newspapers in the country explained the Roswell crash.)

In the 1970s, the Aztec case resurfaced, but now there was a date associated with it. According to Robert Spencer Carr, the crash took place on February 13, 1948, (or more accurately, this is what Mike McClellan said in his Official UFO article.) But that date seemed to have slipped from the public consciousness because I don’t know if anyone else ever used it.

I also ran across a couple of references that suggested the crash took place in either the spring of 1949 or in October of that year. Both of these were rather obscure which might explain why no one mentioned them very often.

Then along came William Steinman and it seems that he was the one who pinned the date down to March 25. After Steinman, all who talked about the Aztec crash used that date.

All this actually proves is that the date had been relatively fluid with dates as late as October 1949 and as early as February 1948. That many now accept the March 25, 1948, date as accurate strikes me as somewhat absurd. Do we really want to accept this date by consensus or would we rather have something a little more tangible?

Here’s where I now dive into the pool. According to Scott Ramsey, his witnesses arrived at the scene of a fire that might have ignited some drip storage tanks that were nearby. He tells us that when Doug Nolan arrived, the fire was contained and the tanks were no longer in danger.

Okay, that makes sense, but what we’re being told is that this was not some small brush fire, but something larger that drew many people to the location of the UFO crash. The military arrived sometime later and took control of the area. Although this does not agree with much of what Scully had written in his book, the question that springs to my mind is, “What do the newspapers say?”

Granted, no one has found a newspaper article about the crash from that time in that area, but I think what we should have been looking for was a story about the fire. This is, or was, remote New Mexico and a fire of the magnitude of the one described would have drawn the interest of the local newspaper. There should have been an article about the fire in the newspaper.

Back in 1976, when McClellan wrote his article, he interviewed George Bowra, who had been the editor of the Aztec newspaper in 1948. According to that article, Bowra was convinced that “Nobody could have gotten in there and out without attracting a lot of attention.”

The follow up question is, “Did anyone check the newspaper for an article about a fire in Hart Canyon in 1948?” It would seem to me that if such an article appeared in the newspaper, it would be some corroboration for the tales told by some of these witnesses. Not much, but some.

I currently have no way of checking the newspaper records, other than a letter or email to the publisher, who might not be all that interested in looking for the story. I’ll give that a shot, but if there is someone in that area that wouldn’t mind taking a look through the newspaper (which would be the Aztec Independent-Review which ceased publication in the 1980s) for late March 1948 (or for some of the other dates mentioned for that matter), we might find the fire story and that might give us the opportunity to verify that much of the tale. If, and when, I get an answer, I’ll publish it here. Until then, the question remains, “Why did everyone settle on the March 25, 1948, date?”

Aztec and Roswell

As those of you who visit here on a regular basis know, there has been a question of when the Aztec crash took place. It was stated that March 25, 1948, was the agreed upon date by nearly everyone. It was considered solid, but I seemed to remember a number of different dates being offered, so, on a lark, I began looking into that. And I did find a number of different dates being offered until William Steinman seemed to settle on March date in his book UFO Crash at Aztec. After the publication in 1986, the date became solid.

The Roswell "Saucer" in Ramey's office.

But that's not the point here. In the search, I reread the J.P. Cahn story, "The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men," (who BTW, were described then as perfect humans of small stature with perfect teeth and dressed in 1890 garb), published in True in September 1952, I found an interesting sentence or two in that article. Cahn wrote, "Back on July 9, 1947, only two weeks after private flyer Kenneth Arnold had alerted the nation with his nine disks seen skipping 'saucer-like' near Mt. Rainier, Washington, Southwest newspapers headlined that a captured disk that had fallen on a New Mexico ranch was a dud. That one, when delivered to the Eighth Army Air Force, was identified as a tinfoil-covered reflector from a weather balloon. [which is seen in the photograph]."

Unless you're unable to read, that clearly is a reference to Roswell even though the town wasn't mentioned and it was made only a little more than five years later. I just found the reference interesting given that Cahn's article was about a different crash. I'm not sure that it means all that much, but thought I would mention it for what it's worth.

Roswell vs. Aztec

No, this isn’t what you think. It was something that I noticed in a Billy Cox column which addressed Tom Carey’s appearance at the American University. Cox was discussing the purpose of the panel discussion and interviewed adjunct professor John Weiskopf who asked his honors students to consider the impact of ET themes

Display in the International Museum and
Research Center in Roswell.

on popular culture. Cox wanted to know if he had any regrets about asking Carey to appear. That started a discussion about Carey and his revelation about the Roswell Slides at the discussion and also reminded me of another lecture in front of college students that was somewhat similar.

Some sixty-five years before that, on March 8, 1950, a lecture about flying saucers was held at the University of Denver. This lecture became part of the mythology involved in the Aztec UFO crash and was given by a “mystery man” who was later identified as Silas Newton. Frank Scully, in Behind the Flying Saucers:

The negotiations between the faculty and the spokesman for the lecturer took months to arrange, as the speaker wasn’t keen about being “evaluated,” but when the science students voted 100 per cent to hear the lecturer, he acquiesced. Of these, 80 per cent said, after the lecture, that they were “impressed.” By a show of hands 60 per cent indicated they believed the man knew what he was talking about, that he obviously was a member of the group of scientists he described as having examined space ships which had landed on this earth from, in all likelihood,  another planet. More, they believed the mystery man of science had the best answer to the secret propulsion behind these flying saucers and that it was neither combustion nor jet.

William Steinman added a little to this in his UFO Crash at Aztec, published in 1986. He identified the instructor of the class as Francis F. Broman, who taught a basic science course. Steinman wrote that Broman had actually invited George T. Koehler to give the lecture, but Koehler said that his friend knew more about the subject, so it was Newton who gave the talk.

Steinman also mentioned that an intelligence officer had contacted Broman to learn more about the lecture. When Broman said that he hadn’t believed the tale but that he didn’t speak for everyone in the class that seemed to satisfy the officer. The call was terminated.

William E. Jones and Rebecca D. Minshall took up the investigation and reported their findings in the International UFO Reporter for September/October 1991. While they suggest that Steinman had almost everything right about the lecture, they reported that the name of the class, rather than Basic Science was Science and Man.

And they report, “The purpose of the lecture was to provide the students with an assertion against which they could apply the critical thinking methods that Broman was teaching.”

They also noted, “Broman found Newton’s claim about the crashed saucer unconvincing, as did many of those who attended his lecture. Further, Newton failed to live up to an agreement to allow his story to be critiqued using the methods being taught by Broman. As a result of statements made later by Broman about some aspects of the lecture, Broman was reportedly threatened with a lawsuit by the author of a book entitled, About UFOs. The dispute was settled out of court.”

Well, I’m not surprised by the threats of a lawsuit. That seems to be standard operation procedure in the world of the UFO. But the important points here, are the facts about the lecture, including that the professor and the students found Newton’s claims and evidence unconvincing.

So, fast forward 65 years.

Back to the original question.  Did he have any regrets about asking Carey to appear?  According to Billy Cox:

‘Mr. Carey surprised attendees and participants alike that evening at a near full capacity event (170 people) with his disclosure,’ Weiskopf stated in an email, ‘but many attendees whom I spoke with afterwards (including my students) said that they were quite skeptical of Tom Carey’s claim. Mr. Carey got what he wanted, his disclosure eclipsed much of the substantial discussions by the other three panelists who have remarkable careers and credibility. The lead teaser for WTOP’s radio coverage the following morning beginning at 6 a.m. contained three points, the most dramatic being Tom Carey’s leak.’

Tom Carey was, as you say, ‘the odd man’ out, but that was deliberate; that was intended,” Weiskopf went on. “If we present knowledge and experience of the same or identical frequencies, then we are only limiting ourselves.” He preferred instead to reflect on how the course forced his students to stretch, which he says manifested during a session with the speakers before the public event that evening: “It was a remarkable luncheon to watch my honors students question, challenge, and in some cases, retort or refute statements that the panelists made in their books/articles/interviews. In my course during the book discussions, my students were ‘less than kind’ in discusssing Tom Carey’s co-authored book Witness to Roswell. At the luncheon, two students told Mr. Carey face-to-face that they did not like his book nor did they believe it. They told him that his logic and conclusions were faulty.”

Weiskopf said it wasn’t his job to tell the class what to think. “When I taught this course I never colored any book, film, television show or blog with my personal beliefs or what I thought about the extraterrestrial issue, either in general or specifically. I allowed my classroom academic environment to unfold as objectively as possible allowing the students to ‘conclude, be confused or indecisive or become staunch believers’ on their own after examining and evaluating all of the data for 14 weeks.”

Bottom line: “I would hope that other universities and colleges would take the same bold and courageous step that American University did in supporting this extremely important event.”

The whole article can be seen here:

http://devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15296/au-prof-the-kids-are-alright/

And here’s my point. Not much has changed in those 65 years. In 1950, the students, according to the best accounts, were not impressed with Newton. The reason was probably the lack of evidence. It was heavy on speculation and if you reject the Aztec crash, then it was heavy on fabrication.

With Tom Carey, the students, according to the best accounts, were not impressed with Tom. The reason was probably the hyperbole of his remarks and the lack of evidence. Of course, today, we know that the major problem is that the source of his information, those slides have been uncovered and that the body shown is not alien.

The real point is that we all need to look at the evidence with a little bit more skepticism, we have to be more diligent in our research, and we have to reject this will to believe. If we don’t, some 65 years from now someone might be writing a similar story (and hey, if I’m around, I’ll do it.)

Aztec in Perspective by Monte Shriver - Part One

(Blogger’s Note: The following is reprinted by permission. Given the length of the original article, I have broken it into three parts and will publish all three over the next week. It was written by one-time resident of Aztec, Monte Shriver, and provides an interesting insight into the alleged crash. Again, reprinted by permission of Monte Shriver.)

 

IT’S ABOUT TIME 

(SOMEONE FROM AZTEC WROTE ABOUT THE HART CANYON UFO AND REPORT THEIR FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS) 

INTRODUCTION 

by

Monte Shriver

 

I was born in El Dorado, Kansas in 1934 and in 1937 we lost our ranch in the depression and moved to Aztec, New Mexico. My Grandfather Shriver bought the old experimental farm north of the Estes Arroyo and my Dad rented a farm on the Ruins Road. I entered the first grade in 1940 and had my first experience with riding a school bus. In 1941, my Uncle Jim Shriver joined the Army so my Grandfather sold the farm and we moved to town in 1941, purchasing a house on Mesa Verde Avenue. In May 1946 we sold the house in Aztec and moved to Falcon, Colorado where we lived until February 1947 when we returned to Aztec and purchased a home at 402 San Juan Ave - a home where my Mother lived until she passed away in 2006.

 

I graduated from Aztec High School in 1952 and enrolled at the New Mexico College of  Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in Las Cruces, New Mexico and graduated in 1957 with a degree in mechanical engineering. After various jobs including serving in the United States Air Force as an intelligence officer, I went to work for the Bell System in 1962 and retired in 1990. In 1989, I was transferred to Las Cruces, New Mexico by the telephone company and we have lived in southern New Mexico since that time.

I would like to thank my classmates from the Aztec High School Class of 1952 all of whom let me test my memories of the late 40’s and early 50’s with them during our recent 60^th class reunion. These included Herb Collins, John Franchini, Bruce Hare, Robert Sipe, Alice Crane Hardin and Lee Atchison and Betty Lawson Waggoner and Bud Crane from the Class of 1951. I would also like to thank Elizabeth Flores and her staff at the Special Collections Branch at the NMSU Library for providing me with access to old New Mexico State Highway Department Maps as well as other historical documents. Others I talked to included Gerald Williams,  Evaleene Andrews Dunn and Jack Dunning.

The first time I recall hearing of the UFO crash in Hart Canyon was when I

learned that the Aztec City Library was holding an annual symposium about the UFO crash. During the 2000s, I read about the symposium in the Aztec newspaper, the Talon and even wrote one or more letters to the Talon on the subject. Finally, I attended my first symposium in 2011 (the last one unfortunately) and revisited Hart Canyon for the first time in many years. 

As a result of the Symposium, I purchased  two books, Behind the Flying Saucers -- Updated Edition by Frank Scully with Bonus “Truth About Aztec UFO Crash” by Sean Casteel and published by Conspiracy Journal as well as William S. Steinman’s UFO Crash at Aztec - A Well Kept Secret. I also recently purchased Scott Ramsey’s book The Aztec Incident - Recovery at Hart Canyon. After reading these three books, I decided it was time that someone from Aztec reviewed these books and reported their findings and conclusions.  I hope that future researchers will find this information helpful in their quest to determine what really happened in Hart Canyon if, in fact, anything did happen. I know that the Ramsey’s believe that “…the Aztec Incident is a real event….” I start this work as a skeptic based on my research and interviews with my classmates who attended the Aztec Public School system in 1948. And you, dear reader, may make your own decisions based on the mistakes I have found and the questionable conclusions that have been reached. The question that must be answered is “How many errors and mistakes must be made before the entire work is invalidated?”

 

In Ramsey’s book, at page 20, he quotes a Virgil J. Riggs as saying “As a young kid growing up in Aztec, NM in the late 1940’s to the late 1950’s, I had heard many rumors and talk about the UFO crash north of Aztec.” At my recent class reunion with members of the classes of 1951 and 52, I asked them if they knew Virgil Riggs and if they remembered any talk of a UFO crashing north of Aztec. Many of them remembered Mr. Riggs, but no one, including me, could remember anyone talking about a UFO crash in the Aztec area during the 40’s and 50’s. As one of my classmates said, if we had heard about a UFO crash in Hart Canyon, we would have been all over the place looking for it. Robert Sipe told me he and his father had  cut fence posts in Hart Canyon in 1948 and never heard anything about a UFO landing there. Sometime between 1947 and 1950, I shined shoes at Ray Current’s barber shop for two years. During that time, I never heard anyone mention a UFO in Hart Canyon. The conversations always seemed to center on hunting, sports and farming. Of  course, Mr. Current would become quite animated when he would talk about how Farmington tried to steal the county courthouse from Aztec. The barbershop had hot showers and on weekends, it was quite common for farmers to come into the shop for shave, haircut and a hot shower since many of the farms did not have running water. Afterwards, they would sit around the shop and “bat the breeze” but no mention of a  UFO was ever made to my recollection.  I was a boy scout during 1947-49 and I remember camping at the cave about 5 miles up Hart Canyon and no one in the scouting group ever said anything about a UFO in the Canyon. I have know Jack Dunning for over 60 years and I never remember him mentioning it at all until I asked him about it in 2011.

Beginning at page 210, the Steinman book contains an article by Mike McClellan which indicates that Roy Sullivan was sheriff of San Juan County in 1948 and he “… had no recollection of a crash, aircraft being in the area or anything that would support Carr’s claims…”. Further, Bruce Sullivan (the sheriff’s son who would have been in Aztec High School at the time) is quoted as saying he lived in Aztec all his life and never “knew or heard anything about it”.

 

UFO CRASH AT AZTEC BY STEINMAN AND STEVENS

 

On page 24, Mr. Steinman states that “A flying saucer did indeed crash land …twelve miles of Aztec on 25 March 1948...This craft, of unknown origin, was recovered  by a team composed of military intelligence and scientific personnel…dismantled and secretly carted off to a covert hiding place…”.

At pages 27-28, he has the reported sighting of the 25 March 1948 UFO going directly to Secretary of State George C. Marshall and that Secretary Marshall was giving direct orders as to how this situation should be handled.  I would have thought the reports would have gone through the military chain of command to the Secretary of Defense.

On page 31, he states that the IPU scout team found the “crash landed disc” and gave directions to the recovery team on how to reach the disc. Further, he indicates that the IPU team members reached the crash-site virtually unnoticed by civilians living in the area. As soon as the IPU team arrived at the scene road blocks were set up two miles from the site on all roads leading to the area. Guards were then posted and only people with the appropriate pass could enter. This assertion is contradicted by the Ramsey book which states that oil field workers, Doug Noland, Bill Ferguson, people in route to California, a traveling preacher, local law enforcement and even a law enforcement officer from Cuba, New Mexico (more about him later) and others were on the site before military and/or government personnel arrived on the scene later in the morning.

Further, he states that the Dunning family was held incommunicado within their own ranch house and that the Dunning property upon which the disc was located was immediately transferred from the ownership of Harold Dunning to federal status. The Dunning’s  phone line was also monitored.

In 2011, I raised these issues with a long-time friend on mine, Jack Dunning, the son of Harold (Hy) Dunning. He told me that they were not held incommunicado on the ranch, no property of theirs was transferred to the government and that their phone line could not have been monitored because they did not have a phone.  He reaffirmed the same with me in 2012 after I visited Aztec for my 60^th class reunion June 29-30.

On page 38, Mr. Steinman says the government scientists reportedly gained entry to the disc by breaking out a porthole window with a hammer, then finding a long pole which they pushed through the porthole, barely reaching  a “pushbutton” which when pushed by the pole caused a door to open, allowing access to the disc. On page 139 (of the Conspiracy Journal’s Behind the Flying Saucers Updated Edition by Frank Scully), the scientists (Dr. Gee’s group) waited two days before deciding it was safe to approach the disc. They found a broken glass porthole and rammed a pole through this defect in the ship (No mention is made of breaking the porthole with a hammer). They prodded around with the pole used to push through the opening in the broken porthole, ultimately hitting a double knob which caused a door to fly open. Compare this to  Ramsey’s book, page 3, as related to Scott Ramsey by Doug Noland, Doug’s boss, Bill Ferguson “…was trying to poke around the craft with a fire pole or something…Soon, he hit some damn thing and a door or walkway appeared…”.  (No mention of pushing the pole through  a broken porthole.) When there are conflicting stories about the same event, only one can be right or they could all be wrong. You, dear reader, must decide.

On page 42, the saucer was disassembled, loaded on three trucks, covered with tarps with signs indicating the trucks carried explosives so that anyone seeing these trucks would be easily deceived. Contrast this with Ramsey’s book on  page 159 where his transportation expert speculated that separating the disc into thirds would result in 1/3 of the craft being 50 feet wide, 86.6 feet long and the top of the craft 17 feet above ground level and extending about 26 feet behind the trailer carrying it. Anyone seeing 3 trucks loaded like this and marked explosives must have had one hell of a scare and obviously they would have been easily deceived.  Unlike Mr. Ramsey who has extensive detail on how the disc could have been moved to Los Alamos, Mr. Steinman basically says the disc was moved to Los Alamos without giving any details of how the move actually took place.

Depending upon whose account you read, the roads in Hart Canyon were barricaded for anywhere from three days to two weeks or more. With oilfield workers and ranchers in the area, wouldn’t you think someone in Aztec would have heard about it?

On page 72, Mr. Steinman makes a statement that I am sure will come as a complete surprise to the citizens of Aztec as it did to me and I quote “MJ-12* ordered the entire town of Aztec, New Mexico placed under complete surveillance. The family of the ranch owner H.D. were under special watch. Their phone calls, all mail, and all movements were monitored at all times. All of their relatives, school mates, teachers, close friends, etc., were also watched like a hawk. This close surveillance is still going on 39 years after the event(that would be 1987), and will  continue (emphasis added) until MJ-12 sees fit to relax the net.” So watch it Aztec! Someone is watching you. Heck, they might even have been at my 60^th class reunion because I will admit there were some people there from the class of  ‘51 that I didn’t recognize”.

*Some people maintain that an MJ-12 organization never existed.

I should note that when Mr. Steinman visited Hart Canyon in 1982, he noted on page 257 that “…two huge unmarked helicopters followed me in and out of the canyon!! This didn’t bother me so much at first; but, when I got back home, the same type of unmarked helicopters circles very low over my house…over a period of several months….” REALLY??

On page 242, when Mr. Steinman arrived at the Durango airport in 1982, he states that he headed the back way to Aztec on Highway 172 which, I understand him to say, was the route the recovery team took from the airport to the crash site. The only problem with this is that in 1948, Highway 172 went from Ignacio to Arborles, CO and wasn’t rerouted south to meet NM Highway 511 until 1972. NM Highway  511 wasn’t extended north from the Navajo Dam to meet CO Highway 172  until the early 1970’s.  In fact, the 1948 New Mexico State Road Map doesn’t show any road going into Colorado on the route now covered by NM 511. That of course doesn’t preclude the possibility of dirt roads between the states but how the recovery team was able to travel over unnamed dirt roads and find Hart Canyon is a mystery to me. In fact, Jack Dunning told me that in 1948 there was no road that he knew of that would take you from Hart Canyon to Durango.  What I never understood was why not take the easy way to Hart Canyon? Just drive west from the Durango Airport to paved highway US 550 from Durango to Aztec  and drive south to the entrance to Hart Canyon.

A few other areas where Mr. Steinman is wrong:

1. On page 72, he states that “Admiral James V. Forrestal was the Navy Chief of Staff at the end of the war.” I could find nothing in the record to indicate that Mr. Forrestal was ever an admiral. Further, unlike the Army and Air Force who were headed by a Chief of Staff, the Navy is headed by the Chief of Naval Operations(CNO). The office of CNO was established in 1915. During the war, Mr. Forrestal was Under-Secretary of the Navy for several years, appointed Secretary of the Navy in May 1944 and in 1947 appointed the first Secretary of Defense. This is an example of rather shoddy research if you ask me.

2. On page 258, he reports finding an eyewitness  (V.A) whose place “…is a neatly kept little farm on the Animas River, on the outskirts of  Blanco….” The only minor problem here is that it is the San Juan River on the outskirts of Blanco, not the Animas. If you can’t get the name of the river right, what  do you get right? 

3. On page 259, he states that V.A.’s daughter told him that you could see the south side of the south walls of Heart(sic) Canyon from her father’s front yard. A friend of mine told me that to see Hart Canyon from Blanco, one had to have either a very long neck or be a world champion high jumper or both. When I drove the area on June 29-30, 2012 I found it impossible to see Hart Canyon from the Blanco Area.

Geezers vs Youngsters

Back when I was in graduate school and preparing to write my dissertation, I learned that the first thing you did to prepare was make a search of the literature… well, the second thing, after you have figured out what you wanted to research. You looked to see what others had done before you, if someone had already accomplished what you wanted to, and how you might improve on both your idea and what had gone before.

 

 Apparently in UFO research, this is not the case.

I don’t know how many times we must revisit cases that seem to have been solved, that seem to have nothing to do with UFOs, or that are hoaxes. Every five years or so another crop of interested people show up and we begin all over again… and somehow the blame is pushed on the “Geezers.” We just haven’t made the case, whatever the case might be.

 

Take the Allende Letters, that group of correspondence between Carlos Allende or Carl Allen and Morris K. Jessup. Allende/Allen wrote about Jessup’s UFO books. Allende/Allen suggested a knowledge that was based on inside information and personal observation. Part of it was the so-called Philadelphia Experiment in which it is claimed that the US Navy teleported a ship in 1943. Ignore the fact that no documentation has ever surfaced to prove it. Ignore the fact that the allegedly teleported ship’s logs place it elsewhere at the time. Ignore the fact that there is nothing to support this claim except Allende’s allegation.

 

Allende/Allen arrived in Tucson, Arizona in the 1970s, apparently on his way to Mexico for cancer treatment. While in Tucson he met with Jim Lorenzen, then the International Director of APRO and signed a statement that the whole Philadelphia Experiment, the letters, and everything else associated with it was a hoax. Allende/Allen said he made it up because Jessup’s writing frightened him and he didn’t want Jessup to write anything more.

 

To me, that admission, by Allende/Allen ends the discussion. It is a hoax. It is an admitted hoax. They guy who started it said it was a hoax. What more do we need?

 

Remember, that was in the 1970s. I even did a magazine article about this in the 1970s. Robert Goerman, a UFO researcher interested in the Allende Letters found Allende’s family who told him, Goerman, that Allende was slightly unhinged… bright but unhinged. There was nothing to the story he told…

 

But then the youngsters enter the field, bringing their “fresh” perspective to it, and we begin again to hear about the value of the Allende Letters. We hear there might be something to them. We hear how they might be the key to solving the UFO mystery… and away we go again, covering the same ground because Allende/Allen’s admission of hoax was forced by the CIA and should therefore be ignored.

 

Or take the latest of the Aztec “re-investigations.” We have a new book that suggests that there might be something to the Aztec UFO crash. Once again, this is a case that should have been relegated to a footnote a long time ago. It is clear that Aztec is a hoax started by a con man, Silas Newton, who is probably laughing his ass off in his grave because there are still people who believe it.

 

Newton told the story to Frank Scully who made fun of it in his newspaper column in 1948, but a couple of years later Scully seemed to have changed his mind and suddenly began to believe the tale. He wrote a book about it that became a bestseller… and then J. P. Cahn wrote an expose about it that should have put the whole thing to rest… but didn’t.

 

In the 1970s Robert Spencer Carr said that he had found five witnesses to the Aztec crash and the case was revitalized… but even the reinvestigation failed to find much in the way of evidence. Carr relied on unidentified witnesses and rumor and we don’t know who his witnesses were or why he accepted what they said. There was nothing new… until the 1980s when William Steinman began his new investigation, “proving” there was something to the crash tale. Of course, Steinman offered little evidence of anything other than he is a fan of garage sales and that he had been to Aztec annoying the locals with his less than gracious manner.

 

But even with all these investigations and the failure to find anything substantial, Aztec is back. We’re told that the proof is now incontrovertible, but it is weak at best. Though we’re told to ignore Newton and his con man buddy Leo GeBauer, they are still tied to the case. We are treated to links between alleged witnesses and the event, but when we look deeper, we find the links broken. There is simply nothing there that hasn’t been discussed before, yet we’re supposed to roll over and accept this new data as if it is proof.

 

I could go on in this vein. We have arguments that maybe the contactees had something important to say, but in reality, they merely cluttered the UFO field with their nonsense making it easier to hide the truth, whatever that truth might be. We hear about great air wars between the aliens and our Air Force, but the evidence doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. We have phenomenon, such as crop circles linked to UFOs, but that really should be another field of research…(get it? Field?).

 

True, there are some things that do need to be reexamined. The Majorie Fish Star Map that was based on Betty Hill’s memory needs new work now that we have better information. Some of the stars she used are not where we had thought them to be and she excluded red dwarves because she didn’t think there was anything interesting to be found near them, not to mention there are so many of them. Fish’s work was great when she did it, but it is now badly out of date. Maybe a youngster who plays with computers could do the work in minutes rather than the months it took Fish.

 

The point is that we geezers have something to add, if only it is to direct the youngsters into areas that should be explored. We don’t really need to study the Allende Letters again. We have all we need to know about Aztec, and if Scott Ramsey really spent a half a million dollars on his research, I can think of better areas that he could have explored with that kind of money.

 

So rather than dismiss us all as failures, maybe some should look to what we have learned. It just might save someone a half million dollar mistake; years of research that will go nowhere, or help focus the spotlight on areas that could provide a breakthrough or two.

 

And rather than pit the geezers against the youngsters as some are attempting, maybe we should all work together. Why does it have to be an either or propostion?

The Aztec Incident - Review by Jerome Clark

(Blogger’s Note: This review was written by Jerome Clark and appeared in a slightly different form in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, 26, 3 (Fall 2012) pp. 707 – 714. Reprinted with permission. And a thank you to Jerry Clark as well.)

Reviewed by Jerome Clark

The Aztec Incident: Recovery at Hart Canyon by Scott and Suzanne Ramsey, Dr. Frank Thayer and Frank Warren. Mooresville, N.C.: Aztec 48 Productions, 2012.  217 pp. $24.95 (paperback). ISBN 978-0-9850046-0-6.

            One scarcely knows where to begin.  Perhaps with this quote from a June 19, 1951, letter – reprinted in these pages (90-91) – written by San Francisco Chronicle editor Paul G. Smith to Variety entertainment columnist and author Frank Scully: “Frankly, I recall that when I first saw your book I thought you were merely having fun with your readers.”  The book, the already notorious Behind the Flying Saucers, which Henry Holt had issued the previous September, was a marketplace success but a disaster in every quarter that did not involve commerce.  Even so prominent an early UFO proponent as Maj. Donald Keyhoe, the first outsider to investigate Scully's claims of a 1948 saucer recovery near Aztec, New Mexico, rejected them as absurd and fanciful.  When I read Scully's book in junior high school, my impression – even as a naive adolescent -- was the same.

 

Scott Ramsey
Photo courtesy Paul Kimball

            In fact, though they circulated freely through the larger society, because of the Scully taint rumors of UFO crashes were spurned by mainstream ufologists until the late 1970s.  Around that time, a respected colleague, the late Leonard H. Stringfield, began collecting what he called “crash/retrieval reports” from mostly anonymous sources with whom he privately communicated.[1]   In 1980 the first major book on the subject, The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, saw print.  Other books, mostly though not exclusively focused on Roswell, followed (and an Air Force refutation followed them in the late 1990s, succeeded by refutations of the refutation, and so on in continuing loop to the present). 

            Inevitably, Scully's tale – at least in a cleaned-up version that did not incorporate the dead Venusians of the original – would get a second look.  The first book-length treatment was William S. Steinman and Wendelle C. Stevens's UFO Crash at Aztec (1987), a work notable only for its levels of paranoia (high) and coherence (low).  The second is the new The Aztec Incident, based on what we are told is a $500,000 investment in research expenses and more than two decades' worth of inquiry.

            First, so that future authorial references will be clear, the crowded by-line is courtesy of a writing novice's error that no experienced author would have committed.  There is only one author – Scott Ramsey – who refers to himself in the first person throughout.  The other three, who participated in one way or another in accumulating the material that made the book possible, ought to have been cited in the credits, and not represented as co-authors.    Thus, in what follows, I refer to the real author in the singular. 

            Since there is much to pan and little to praise in the comments that follow, let's start on the most positive note circumstances render available.  Aztec Incident reprints some of the private correspondence, never before seen as far as I know, of the principal figures in the episode.  As one who has written at length on the history of the UFO controversy in all its dimensions, including its less lucid moments, I like that.  The off-stage voices, I have found, are illuminating. 

            Here, however, the revelations are modest. One never imagines for a moment that Scully appreciated the efforts of investigative reporter J. P. Cahn (who memorably uncovered the confidence swindle behind Behind in a couple of hard-hitting, entertainingly documented True articles[2]), but it is interesting to read this record of his personal complaints about Cahn's hard-charging approach.  And who can blame Scully?  Though as late as 1984 Cahn observed that he had always liked Scully personally, clearly the affection was not destined to be reciprocal.  At the end of the job, Cahn had exposed Scully as -- in the most charitable interpretation -- a fool.

            Unfortunately, one thing Incident does not address – cannot address by its very purpose, which is to turn dross into gold – is to what degree Scully was a party to the hoax.  To his death in 1964, Scully professed his confidence in what his informants, whose probity he endorsed in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence, had told him about the crash in New Mexico along with others, less detailed, in Arizona, Maine, and elsewhere in the late 1940s.[3] My supposition, for which I make no larger truth claim than I can glean from observation of his behavior over the years, is that Scully was initially gulled into acceptance of the yarns, then grew eventually to perceive that he'd been bamboozled.  By that time, he was sufficiently invested in the bamboozlement that he felt he could not disown his silly book and the attendant controversy; if it took whopper-forging to sustain his otherwise untenable position, then smalltime grifter Leo A. GeBauer – top magnetic authority “Dr. Gee” in BFS – would become, years later, a composite figure representing not GeBauer but some of the leading magnetic scientists in America.  (In reality, a waitress had given GeBauer the nickname “Dr. Gee,” according to GeBauer's widow, and Scully merely borrowed it for the book.)  In other words, Scully was complicit in the hoax.  The only remaining question is if that complicity happened sooner or later.

            Obligingly, Ramsey devotes an eye-glazing chapter (4: Dr. Gee and the Mystery Men)  to profiles of eight leading magnetism-studying scientists of mid-century America.  “Without a doubt,” he insists (p. 51), “they possibly knew or worked with Silas Newton, a man of science himself.”  Only a book as rhetorically hapless as Incident could cram “without a doubt” and “possibly” into the same pronouncement without betraying the faintest cognitive dissonance, and then proceed to characterize lifelong swindler Newton not only as a “man of science” but as a major one at that, sharing his purported colleagues' access to the U.S. Government's classified extraterrestrial bodies and technology. Having declared as much, Ramsey feels no obligation to provide a fragment of actual evidence that links these eminent scientists to Newton.  For that matter, he fails even to document his repeated assertion that Newton was an imposing figure in the oil industry.

             It is Newton who was the intellectual author, if that's the phrase, of the Aztec legend.  His stories would almost certainly have been forgotten months after their concoction if not for Scully.  In the consensus-reality version, here highly condensed and necessarily incomplete, is how BFS came to be:

            The print record – no prior press references to the described event, said to have taken place on March 25, 1948, have ever been located and are almost certainly nonexistent – begins with Scully's Variety column of October 12, 1949, where he reports having learned from unnamed “scientists” of two saucer retrievals, one in the Mohave Desert, the other in the Sahara.  The latter vanishes from the story hereafter, but in Scully's account the scientists examined the American ship (intact but for a small hole in a port window), presumed to be from Venus and housing 16 humanlike midgets – all dead and “charred black” – clad in 1890s-style clothing.  The ship, it turned out, flew along “magnetic waves.”  All of its dimensions are equally divisible by nine.

            BFS, published 10 months later, mentions two Arizona crashes but provides few details beyond the allegation that the bodies were identical to those found at Aztec and that the alien mathematics appeared nine-based. 

Hart Canyon Crash Site
Photo Courtesy Paul Kimball

             It developed that Newton and GeBauer had imparted these tales on to Scully in August 1949.  GeBauer had shown Scully parts from the saucer, among them a tubeless “magnetic radio.”  It is generally assumed that the location for the story has its origins in a trip GeBauer took early that same month to Hart Canyon near Aztec – a small town in the northwestern Four Corners part of the state – to demonstrate his alleged oil-detection device (the sort of thing known derisively in the industry as a “doodlebug”) to locals.  Hart Canyon would evolve into the location where the ship came down and was recovered.

            As Cahn and – much later and in considerably more detail – ufologist William L. Moore[4] would determine, Newton and GeBauer had devoted their lives (the smart and polished Newton more lucratively than the relatively slow-witted GeBauer) to various confidence scams, many involving oil-finding schemes.  Characterized wryly by Moore as “the type of character best avoided by anyone with money in his pocket,” Newton got into trouble in the 1930s in New York, Kansas, and California for assorted shady dealings.  “Newton's tactic in every case was to suck in additional investors,” Moore wrote, “and pay off the complaining  party with the money raised – in exchange, of course, for the dropping of charges against him.”  When he died in Los Angeles in 1972, Newton had 40 legal claims filed against him based primarily in fraudulent oil and mining schemes.  Two years earlier, he had been indicted for grand theft.

             The saucer story was intended to draw the interest of the well-heeled, who would soon learn that GeBauer's doodlebug (the “magnetic radio”), in reality made up of ordinary mechanical parts (as Cahn determined), was a product of extraterrestrial technology.  In other words, if not for Scully's broadcasting the story to a national and international audience, it would have been no more than another of Newton/GeBauer's ephemeral efforts to separate fools from their hard-earned.

            In attempting to rehabilitate the Aztec “case,” Ramsey falls into the fatal tactical error of defending the indefensible, namely Scully, Newton, and GeBauer, rather than conceding their manifest flaws and drawing up an Aztec episode that is not so fundamentally dependent upon their being who they clearly weren't..  From one way of viewing it, Ramsey's approach is ill considered.  From another, his book wouldn't exist without BFS and all it brought into the world.  There's little else outside Scully's pages, and even there, there isn't much. One thinks of Woody Guthrie's famous words: “That stew was so thin even a politician could have seen through it.”

            Ramsey's defense is unlikely to sway any but guile-free readers.  To any critics Ramsey responds with the self-serving, unverified words of Scully, Newton, and GeBauer, presented as the equivalent of divine revelation standing unshaken against the darkly driven contrary assertions of Cahn, portrayed relentlessly as pursuing a “petty vendetta” motivated by pure “envy,” or else – and what else? – doing the dirty work of some sinister official agency.  To any sensible  observer, Cahn emerges as an old-fashioned, aggressive shoe-leather reporter of a type sorely missed in this era of celebrity journalism.  If Moore is mentioned, it is so briefly that I missed it in the extensive notes I took during multiple readings of Incident.  The back pages that should have been devoted to an index are taken up with irrelevant photographs of historic Aztec.

            Affirmation of unswerving faith in Scully's severely flawed sources is not quite all of Ramsey's book, however.  After half a million dollars and more than two decades, he has his own evidence to put forward.  That evidence, he boasts, makes the Aztec recovery “true beyond argument.”  Or maybe not.

Aztec, New Mexico
Photo Courtesy Paul Kimball

            First, however, it must be stressed that for as long as they have been interviewed on the subject, Aztec residents have with virtually one voice denied that anything like a UFO retrieval happened there on March 25, 1948, or any other date.  That includes the man who was newspaper editor during the period, the 1948 county sheriff, the son who succeeded him in that office (all of whom actively sought out local informants without success), the family that owned the property, and other longtime residents.[5]     They first heard of an extraordinary UFO incident through the publicity surrounding Scully's claims or its revival in subsequent decades.  This contrasts tellingly with residents of another New Mexico town, Roswell, to whom an incident many tied to the crash of an unknown object – however conflictingly interpreted -- was widely known.  No one has to prove that something happened in the Roswell area in July 1947.

            The book opens with Ramsey's two claimants to first-person experience at the site.  Both contradict the original – Scully – account in notable ways.  Newton's drawing of the craft, shown to a University of Denver class to whom he lectured sensationally on March 8, 1950, depicts, in researcher Joel Carpenter's words, “a bizarre contraption that … resembled a can on top of a [spinning] saucer.”[6]  The alleged witnesses, on the other hand, speak of a disc with a dome on top and a corresponding one on the bottom. In Scully's account as related by Dr. Gee, it took a team of scientists two days to break into the craft, where as in Ramsey's version it took a few hours for locals to gain entry well before the arrival of official personnel.  (In both stories a pole poked through a small porthole opening manages to push a door handle, exposing the craft's interior.) 

             There are two, and only two, named persons who tell the story from what is supposed to be first-hand experience  One, Doug Noland, was interviewed by Ramsey after a “series of strokes.”  The other, Ken Farley, since deceased, was “dying of a respiratory disease.”  Ramsey has their alleged experiences occurring on the Scully-approved date of March 25, 1948, without ever explaining how they remembered it with such precision decades after the alleged fact.  One can only suspect an editorial insertion into the narrative, hardly the first one.

            Even as these narratives would have us believe that dozens of civilians congregated at the site, independent testimony to that effect is hard to come by.  Ramsey's rhetoric is slippery enough to mislead a careless reader, one who notices other names appearing in the testimony and is lulled into thinking they amount to verification.  A police officer said to be present has “since been identified as Manuel Sandoval” – even in the absence of any testimony from Sandoval (presumably dead or otherwise unavailable; clearly, he was never interviewed) pertaining to the event.  Noland's friend Bill Ferguson “died long before we got involved in our research” (p. 5).  Later (p. 201) Ramsey casually remarks that Ferguson “revealed his Aztec knowledge to very few people” while offering no reason, in the first instance but for Noland's testimony, that Ferguson possessed such “knowledge” and, in the second, that Ferguson told anybody at all.

            Two other informants claim to have participated in aspects of the recovery operation.  One is identified only as “George,” for whom Ramsey vouches, which – all else considered – does not  reassure.  In any event, his story of a large operation run out of Roswell's Walker Air Force Base lacks any supporting evidence.  Such supporting evidence, Ramsey notwithstanding, certainly does not come from Fred Reed.

             He writes that in April 1948 – take notice of the date – Reed's military “team was dispatched for a 'crash clean-up' as Fred would describe it to me years later [in 1999].”  The clean-up, at the Hart Canyon site, was to be of anything tied to the craft (which he later learned was a UFO) and to a subsequent military presence at the site.  But this was not the story – as Ramsey does not inform his readers – that Reed provided in a strikingly different account just a few days before he faced questions, perhaps seriously leading ones, from the “investigator.”  Here are Reed's words as expressed in a March 27, 1999, letter to the Aztec newspaper: 

Today, my wife and I … went out to the site of UFO crash in late 1948 [note: not March 25] in Hart Canyon..... The aliens had built stone cairns marking the path from the oil field road to the crash site.  These cairns are             still in place today.  The trees around the crash site open to the south, which is a typical distress signal for extraterrestrials. 

The area looked basically as it had in 1948 when the OSS [Office of Strategic Services, which disbanded in 1945] sent our group there.... We had heard rumors that a UFO had crashed there.  But it did not look like     a crash site.  And we had heard that army personnel had rushed in there and cleaned up the site.  But it did        not look like a clean-up site either....

So what it boiled down to was this: No UFO crash.  Instead, the UFO landed there for some specific intent to place (bury?) some instrument or thing there.  Then they got into their saucer and flew away.

 

            While failing to mention that his “witness” (whose eccentric beliefs about aliens and their ways also go missing)  had flagrantly contradicted the testimony he solicited from him, Ramsey effects his own (unacknowledged) clean-up.  Knowing, one infers, the OSS reference to be unsupportable, he revises Reed's resume so that “he had worked for the OSS … back in the early 1940s, [and] was now working for the military.”  In Incident everything that fails to serve the narrative either undergoes revision or gets dropped into the memory hole.

            Among other reported witnesses is a pastor who allegedly confided to a church officer and his son that he had witnessed dead aliens and a saucer at Hart Canyon on (Ramsey would have it, again without justification) on March 25, 1948.  Ramsey located the minister son's, also a pastor, who remarked that he had never heard his father talk about such an experience, though he had expressed interest in press accounts of the Roswell event at the time.  An Air Force man who supposedly participated in the Aztec cover-up in 1948 confided it to a fellow Air Force member, an Aztec native, in England in the 1960s.  The informant, Donald “Sam” Bass, cannot be found.  Experienced investigator Kevin D. Randle learned that the claim related here that Bass was killed in an accident while serving in Vietnam cannot be verified in military records.

            In Ramsey's judgment of his own work, he has established that an Aztec recovery occurred and nobody can any longer argue otherwise, unless I suppose on the payroll of a sinister intelligence agency.  Ramsey's credulity is awesome and bottomless.  In a passing aside (p. 203), he outs himself as a member of that small army of far-right cranks who discern a conspiracy to  conceal President Obama's birth certificate, apparently to protect his true identity as a Kenya- born socialist Islamic jihadist.  In fairness, Ramsey is not always impossible to take seriously. Earlier in the book (p. 31) he acknowledges that in high school he “was never a superior student” and that he has always been “disappointed in how history is taught.”  To those assertions, if to no others, The Aztec Incident offers compelling testimony.

 I would like thank Kevin Randle and Joel Carpenter for their generous assistance in the research on which this review draws.

 

                                                                                                            JEROME CLARK

                                                                                                            Canby, Minnesota

                                                                                                           

---

[1]    Stringfield died without ever revealing their identities.  To the extent that subsequent investigations were possible, none seemed to lead anywhere, leaving only speculation about the informants' motives.

[2]    “The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men” and “Flying Saucer Swindlers,” September 1952 and August 1956 issues respectively.

 

[3]    A  secret diary/memoir allegedly composed by Scully informant Silas Newton professes uncertainty about  Scully's true attitude.  The late ufologist Karl T. Pflock claimed to have examined it under peculiar circumstances, though no one else has seen or been able to verify its existence.  See Pflock's  “What's Really Behind the Flying Saucers?  A New Twist on Aztec.”  The Anomalist 8 (Spring 2000): 137-161.

[4]    See Moore's “Crashed Saucers: Evidence in Search of Proof,” esp. pages 133-154, in Walter H. Andrus Jr. and Richard H. Hall, eds. MUFON 1985 UFO Symposium Proceedings. Seguin, TX: Mutual UFO Network, 1985.

[5]    See Moore, p. 147-148.  Also Mike McClellan, “The UFO Crash of 1948 Is a Hoax,” Official UFO, October 1975, pp. 36-37,60-64, and William E. Jones and Rebecca D. Minshall, “Aztec, New Mexico – A Crash Story Reexamined,” International UFO Reporter, September/October 1991, pp. 11-15,23.  Ramsey says that the son of the owners of the Hart Canyon property in 1948 refused to speak with him (p. 199), but in 1991 that man, Jack Dunning, told Jones and Minshall that, in their paraphrase, “his father [the now-deceased Harold] knows nothing about such a crash, though they are both aware of the rumors, having met [Aztec crash advocate William] Steinman when he came to Aztec” (p. 15).

 

[6]    See Cahn, 1952, p. 19, for the similar drawing Newton later provided for the True writer.