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Behind The Flying Saucers -- The Truth About The Aztec UFO Crash

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This is a 2008 "Conspiracy Journal" reprint of Frank Scully's original book which caused something of a stir on its publication in 1950. Scully was a successful journalist with a national profile who claimed he had information that a dome-shaped craft of non-human origin had crashed in Aztec NM in 1948, been recovered by the military and the whole incident hushed-up by the Truman administration. He also claimed a number of dead bodies of small, humanoid aliens were recovered from the crash. In 1950, no details of the 1947 Roswell crash recovery had leaked into the public domain. With the exception of Donald Keyhoe mentioning widespread Air Force mess-hall rumors of a saucer crash-recovery event in NM in his second book, the idea did not enter the mainstream until the 1980s. So in 1950, Scully's public claims were revolutionary and led to sales of 62,000 copies in several printings, an enormous number at that time. As a consequence, Scully became a minor national celebrity.

Controversy surrounds Scully's main informants Leo GeBauer and Silas Newton. These guys were financial players, oil investors and speculators who had business dealings in all the Four Corners states. Following the publication of Scully's book in 1950, the FBI went after GeBauer and Newton and started a campaign to discredit them ending with their conviction in a court in Denver when they were ordered to pay back US$18,000 to an "investor", Herman Flader. However, no other investors dealing with GeBauer or Newton ever had any complaints and all refused to testify against them, and the tenacious defamation campaign mounted by the FBI failed to make anything else stick. The Flader conviction did its job, however, and mud had stuck on Scully's expose of the Aztec crash: the book went out of print and the story slowly faded from memory.

The long introductory section to this CJ edition includes a piece by Sean Casteel summarising the evidence unearthed by UK researcher Nick Redfern, who spent a great deal of time investigating the story in the 1980s and 90s and uncovered a substantial paper trail including FBI files on GeBauer, Newton and Scully. 200 pages of documentation on the case remain classified, even after 60 years. Stan Friedman is also interviewed at length and gives his opinions on the episode and its likely authenticity, and Casteel also profiles the extensive work of respected researcher Scott Ramsey into the affair. The overall assessment is that Something Happened out there in the desert which cannot be dismissed as a hoax, and the story at core is probably true.

The text of the book itself is prefaced by an introduction by the original author whose description of the encroaching "National Security" apparatus into the lives of ordinary citizens in 1950 is highly prescient and absolutely relevant to the 21st century. The text of the original book takes up 133 pages, due to the large page format adopted by CJ enabling a greater number of characters per page and some compression.

The book is short but good, and worth reading. Without going into too much detail, Scully describes an intriguing incident involving a mysterious "scientist" reported as giving a lecture to students at the University of Colorado talking about UFOs, advanced physics and crash recoveries. He then details contemporary sightings and encounters and speculates about interplanetary travel, describes and illustrates the current aerospace industry's attempts to design disk-shaped craft which would fly (a project designed to discredit encounters with non-human-origin UFOs by alleging confusion with more prosaic aircraft), discusses Einstein and the Unified Field Theory and lists 20 questions about the management of the UFO phenomenon which he put to "Pentagon desk generals" - not one of which was answered. The episode describing the NM crash recovery is actually quite short and scant on detail, but as it was reported to Scully second-hand he simply gives the facts as he heard them and does not enter into extensive speculation about the case.

Despite - or perhaps because of - the controversy surrounding Scully's book and the FBI's persistent and ruthless campaign to discredit him and his informants, this is an important book historically. It was one of the first ever to address the UFO issue in print, pre-dating Donald Keyhoe's "The Flying Saucers are Real!" by several months, and the first ever book to discuss or even refer to credible reports of crashed and recovered alien technology.

You can still find the original 1950 hardcover book, as so many were printed and are still in circulation. However the updated 2008 CJ version containing the interviews with Redfern, Friedman et al is more informative about the history behind it all and this is the one I would recommend.