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
interplanetary spaceships were rumored to have landed and to have come
into the pos-session 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 stu-dents 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 extrater-restrial 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 visit-ors 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 fragment-ary 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.