Flying Saucer Swindlers: Silas Newton and the UFO Crash

In 1950, the public had been told that flying saucers are real, but there was even more exciting news circulating. A scientist disclosed that four spaceships had been captured by the US government - and we should expect another flying saucer landing soon. The story was issued by United Press (UP) and published as front page news by many papers across the USA on October 20, 1950.

Hartford Courant Oct. 20, 1950

The Minneapolis Star Oct. 20 1950 

The "scientist" was oil man Silas M. Newton, billed in the news as a geophysicist. The Newton story began circulating in late 1949, and spread faster than a virus, and by early 1950, several variations of it were in circulation. 

... the story got from Silas Newton to J. Edgar Hoover: Newton told George Koehler (employed at radio station KMYR in Denver), who told Morley Davies, who told Ford dealers Murphy and van Horn, who told auto dealer Fick, who told the editor of the Kansas City Wyandotte Echo. By that time, Koehler had become "Coulter," just like a game of "gossip" (or a game of "pi")!       

This article was picked up in the news, where it caught the interest of the OSI. The OSI agent passed the story on to Guy Hottel of the FBI, and he gave the 8th-hand story to Hoover. http://www.nmsr.org/aztec.htm

The FBI Hottel Memo

A version of Silas Newton's story was recorded by agent Guy Hottel of the FBI New Orleans office on March 31, 1950. It's a real document, but it has often been misrepresented, taken out of context. Since it surfaced in the 1970s, the "Hottel Memo" has been frequently cited as evidence of a government cover-up of recovered UFOs, and also falsely linked to another incident, the alleged flying saucer crash known as the "Roswell Incident." 

The document itself can be viewed at the FBI Vault:

FBI Memorandum - Subject: Flying Discs (Guy Hottel Memo)

In 2011, Isaac Koi made a thorough examination of the frequent "re-discoveries" of the Guy Hottel Memo: "Debunked! The FBI alien bodies memo – A case study in the reinvention of the wheel"

Behind the Flying Saucers

Silas Newton's story really caught fire when it was picked up in a national magazine. Frank Scully was a Hollywood gossip columnist, with "Scully's Scrapbook" dishing up tinsel town gab for Variety magazine. Scully was also a respected reviewer of literature and wrote a few books of his own. In 1949, he published two Variety columns on the discovery of flying saucers (Aztec) and a follow-up piece Jan. 11, 1950 with 20 questions he thought the Air Force should answer, accusing the US Government of covering things up.

Newton and Scully

Those columns laid the foundation for what is arguably, the most influential book in UFO history, Behind the Flying Saucers, the original story of the cover-up of small alien bodies retrieved from captured UFOs in New Mexico. The tale also featured other elements that would later resurface in the resurrection and expansion of the story of the saucer debris taken to Roswell, such as the recovery and scientific examination of the spaceship's strange light metal, advanced technology and the dead aliens it contained.

The saucer story itself was thin, barely fleshed out from Scully's sketchy columns, but he added details about how oilman Silas Newton had heard about the discs from the mysterious magnetic research scientist Scully called "Dr. Gee," and there was extensive discussion of how the saucers were constructed on the "System of Nines," and flew using magnetic propulsion. Newton was interested in using that alien magnetic technology to detect oil, and that would come to play an important role in his future.

The story was a hoax, part of a scam by Newton to provide an exotic technological origin for the "doodlebug" he was selling with partner Leo GeBauer, a device that was supposed to magnetically detect oil deposits beneath the earth. He was tried and found guilty of fraud in 1953.

Before: Co-defendant Leo GeBauer, his attorney, and Silas Newton

After: Newton Sentenced

Here's a short version of the Silas Newton Aztec hoax, a non-UFO article examining the episode as just as an oil swindle. It's from the site of the The American Oil & Gas Historical Society:

Doodlebugs, Magnetic Loggers & Flying Saucers 

Here's a rare recording of Silas Newton telling the story himself. This undated 24-minute audio was part of Wendy Connor's Faded Discs collection: 

Aztec, NM. 1948. Silas Newton relates the crash of a UFO with humanoids.

The Gift that Keeps on Giving

Although the hoax had its critics, it took two years before it was debunked by J.P. Cahn in "The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men" in True Magazine, Sept. 1952, and in a follow-up piece in True Magazine, Aug. 1956, "Flying Saucer Swindlers." Newton and Scully exploited the hopes and fears of those interested in the UFO mystery, promoting the belief that extraterrestrials were visiting Earth and that there was a Government conspiracy to hide it. When the hoax was exposed, the story was largely forgotten, but the alien and cover-up concepts were adopted as canonical beliefs. The Air Force was portrayed as a villain in Newton's story and Scully's book, and it continued to be a source of irritation. In 1965, answering a request for information about it, the Air Force replied:

For more on the Frank Scully book, see the previous STTF article,

Operation Hush-Hush: The UFO Crash and ET Bodies Cover-Up

The Shape of Things to Come

As for Silas Newton's 1950 prediction that a flying saucer would soon land, he was off. It happened in 1952, according to the story told by George Adamski.

For more on the Adamski hoax, see:
Saucer News presents: the George Adamski Exposé

The Saucers That Time Forgot will be presenting an series of in-depth articles on other early Flying Saucer Swindlers. Next up, Harold J Berney: The FBI’s Flying Saucer Fugitive.

Captured UFOs and Building Hangar 18: A Chronology

Captured Saucers in Hangars and Related Tales

The Saucers That Time Forgot series on Robert Spencer Carr and the revived UFO crash stories stemmed out of an investigation into when the name “Hangar 18” was first used. The first known published mention of Hangar 18 we located was in the news story reporting Robert S. Carr’s university debate about the reality of extraterrestrials visitations:

The Tampa Tribune Jan. 16, 1974: “Does USAF have UFOs?” by Frank Bentayou: “One of the best-kept secrets of the United States Government is that in Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, there are two flying saucers of unknown origin, a University of South Florida instructor said yesterday.”

If Carr wasn’t the first to name it, he is certainly responsible for making the name Hangar 18 famous. However, the notion that the US government had captured flying saucers goes much further back. Here are some of the most notable early claims of retrieved UFOs, especially those said to be hidden in an Air Force hangar.

1947: Fakes, Foil from Roswell, Slag from Maury Island and Beyond

Sampling of crashed saucers covered in previous STTF articles.

Within weeks, maybe days, of Kenneth Arnold’s famous sighting, jokers and hoaxers got started producing fake flying saucers. Reports also came in from Roswell and elsewhere of balloon-launched rawin targets mistaken for flying saucers, with the fakes and mistakes often got more coverage than genuine sightings. Some of the stories talked about the discs being captured or turned over to authorities, and that fueled rumors that an actual flying saucer was in the hands of the military.

1949 - 1950

The January 8, 1950, edition of the Atchison, Kansas Daily Globe, reprinted the Dec. 31, 1949 Amarillo Globe-News page one story by editor Wes Izzard, an anonymously sourced account of the Silas Newton Aztec crashed saucer story:

“... the government has collected several flying saucers and are analyzing them at a secret base in California. This base is not far from Los Angeles.”

January 11, 1950: Variety, “Air Force Asked Twenty Questions” by Frank Scully: 

4. Did the Air Force ever make public what the "Explosives," looking like a dismantled flying saucer, were, which they transported in army trucks from a western research base to Dayton, Ohio?

In Behind the Flying Saucers, Scully has a scene where he and Silas Newton meet with Dr. Gee for an interview.

Newton asked, "Where is the little ship?""We have that one in the laboratories at the present time," replied Dr. Gee. "As soon as I get your appointment through I will be authorized to let you inspect it."In time Newton's appointment came through, but by then the ship had been dismantled and reported shipped to Dayton, and all comment thereafter proscribed, denied, or ignored. (Dayton was referring to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.)

In the section summarizing saucer news stories, Scully mentions his own ‘Twenty Questions,” and comes closest to the Wright Field/Hangar 18 legend:

“Queries indicate that flying saucers were dismantled in New Mexico and Arizona and shipped back to Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio and never heard of since.”

1952 

CSI Quarterly Bulletin, Sept. 1952

Civilian Saucer Investigation's Ed Sullivan, "To the Man with the Pickle Jar." 

“CSI has received hundreds of letters from people seeking the facts behind reports of crashed flying saucers, unknown metals which defy laboratory analysis, mysterious top-level rendezvous in the Australian Bush, and the little man from outer space preserved in a pickle jar... a captured saucer being held under wraps at March Field, as rumor has it.”

Sullivan went on to say that the stories are not backed by any evidence:

“In answer, let us say that we do not believe that any facts are in anyone's possession to support such claims... If there were one single iota of fact, certainly someone, somewhere, would be willing to bring it out into the open.”

1953

Silas Newton had been attending early flying saucer conferences, but at the end of 1953 was facing conviction for fraud for oil swindling, selling phony oil-detection devices he claimed used technology from crashed flying saucers. James Moseley interviewed Newton on Dec. 29, 1953. 

“Newton told me that there are two hangars at White Sands at which captured flying saucers are kept. About 15 or 16 saucers are now in government hands. Ordinarily, saucers float toward the earth... saucers contain a mechanism so... it comes gently to rest... The reason some saucers have crashed is that something goes wrong with this mechanism.”

James W. Moseley: Unpublished manuscript

Bill Nash and the Wright Field Story

There was a story circulating among UFO researchers that there was a captured flying similar to what Scully had said, held in secret by the Air Force at “Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio.” Pan American World Airways pilot, Bill Nash became heavily involved in the flying saucer discussion after his own encounter of July 14, 1952, known as the Nash-Fortenberry UFO sighting. He frequently mentioned the "Wright Field Story” in his correspondence, and it later played into him making a sensational claim during a lecture.

In his Oct. 19, 1953 letter to Maj. Donald Keyhoe, Nash  discussed two rumors from an anonymous source involving captured discs. While appearing on a WJZ television program in the fall of 1952 to discuss UFOs:

Before the program, some tall man… took me down the TV hall…He said that the reason that the saucers were over Wash. in droves in July was because the Air Force had operated a radio found in a cracked up saucer.  That the "Wright Field Story” was true - The Air Force had several saucers. 

(More on Bill Nash and Wright Field in 1954.)

1954

CSI Quarterly Bulletin, Jan. 1954

In their final issue, the organization wanted to leave readers with a summary of what their research had determined. Regarding landed or crashed UFOs:

There is no factual evidence to support any claim that a "flying saucer" has ever landed or set down on the ground, even momentarily. (After discussing a It is also easy to understand how a tall tale recounted in a friendly circle can spread until it is accepted as authentic "flying saucer" lore. During the past two years we have followed such a story of a “captured flying saucer” from March Field, where it was kept under a tarpaulin, progressively through three southern California aircraft plants. This is the one made of the transparent metal, which cannot be machined with a diamond fly-cutter. At last report it had been loaded on a truck at the Hughes Aircraft Company plant and was headed for some unknown destination."

Another good quote from the opening:

People want to know what the UAOs are, and where they come from. They aren’t particularly concerned whether the objects are finally proved to be natural phenomena or whether they may be coming from another planet. Just as long as brass curtains cut off from the public the findings of the various governmental investigations, and no other qualified agency is available to give part of the answers, these same people will continue to accept the irresponsible statements of those who would have us believe that the "little men" have landed, or that there is a Venusian living in Pasadena.

Bill Nash again. 

Filling in for his friend, Norman Bean, Bill Nash gave a lecture on flying saucers in March for the Greater Miami Aviation Association. At the end he was asked why he thought the Air force was keeping secrets about saucers. In his answer, Nash gave his opinion based on some rumors he heard, saying he was convinced that the "the Air Force has collected hardware from outer space." There was a reporter in the audience and Nash’s speculative remark became headline news.

The Day, New London, Conn. Mar 23, 1954 

WASHINGTON, March 23 (AP)--A spokesman today termed without basis as assertion that the Air Force has recovered hunks of 'flying saucers' and just isn't telling the public about them... Bill Nash, a Pan American World Airways pilot, told the Greater Miami Aviation association recently he was convinced that 'the air force has collected hardware from outer space. I do not believe the air force cares to make all its findings public so long as the United States is threatened by unfriendly powers,' Nash said.”

In exchanges from the same period with Capt. Joe Hull of Capital Airlines (author of the Airline Pilot magazine article, "The Obituary of the Flying Saucers"), Nash tried to persuade Hull of UFO reality. In his letter of April 18, 1954,  he went deeper into the rumors that ultimately formed the Hangar 18 legend.

He told Hull about this Miami lecture that started the “hardware” controversy, and repeated the WJZ story he told Keyhoe about meeting the mysterious man with saucer secrets.Nash reports how his friend Norman Bean had been told by an AF major that there was “a saucer at Wright Field,” but he couldn’t be quoted. He said Bean also had several reports from “GI’s who saw the thing on a flat-car, but this is a vague one.”Nash goes on to tell about hearing (what he considered to be a deathbed confession) the “Wright Field Story," how “a flying saucer had been found after landing… and the thing had been brought to Wright Field.”

The Wright Field Story by James W. Moseley

The rumors Bill Nash had heard about a captured saucer were widely circulated and reached Jim Moseley, publisher of Saucer News (then called Nexus). From April to May 1954, Jim heard the story and tape recording from Gene Wolfer, about a woman from the Army who was sick with cancer, and through detective work, Moseley tracked down the source to interview her.

She was Vivian Walton, not a WAC, but a former civilian employee of the Signal Corps of Army at Columbus, Ohio. She said that in 1952, a landed (unmanned) saucer was taken through Columbus Army Supply Depot where it where it was photographed before being taken to Wright Field. Moseley checked with the photographer she reluctantly named, who described Walton as “a night girl on the teletype,” without access to secret materials, and was unable to confirm any portion of her saucer story. She’d seemed sincere, but also discussed details like little bodies and the saucer’s magnetic propulsion that couldn’t have come from the experience she described. In Vivian Walton’s library, Moseley spotted a familiar volume, Behind the Flying Saucers.

“It is perhaps significant that the only saucer book that the Walton’s have is Scully’s.”

Moseley’s report on his investigation sensationalized it a bit, emphasizing the ambiguity between the claims versus the denials. It was published in the Sept. 1954 in Nexus as “The Wright Field Story, or Who's Lying?” 

In 1971, the story was expanded into non-fiction book ghost written by Gray Barker,  The Wright Field Story, with some added Saucerian flair and drama. There was no mention of a “Hangar 18” in the story or book until it was reprinted in 1992 with some sensational (not in a good way) new material by Timothy Green Beckley.

Hangar 27?

Valor (The Magazine of Soulcraft), October 9, 1954

Desmond Leslie was the co-author with George Adamski of Flying Saucers Have Landed. When interviewed by George Hunt Williamson for Valor, Leslie said he’d investigated the story of a landed flying saucer held at a California Air Force base. An anonymous witness, "an Air Force man" told him that "President Eisenhower had a 'look-see' at the craft during his Palm Springs vacation." The "rumored saucer at Muroc was actually there," under guard, "in hangar 27." 

1955

The Flying Saucer Council of America' magazine, The Vimana  March 15, 1955, published a story, “Mexican Saucer Landing of 1949 Appears Verifiable... from Three Different Sources” Two versions of the Silas Newton story are given as corroboration, then a 2nd-hand story from an anonymous man’s son: “his son revealed to him, when he was stationed at Wright-Patterson Air base... a huge-semi-truck came into the Air Base, with heavily canopied material jutting out, of immense size... it was shortly driven to a far hangar (was it No. 27? ) where no windows or accessible doors could be discerned.” Frank Scully related either this or a near episode in his ‘Behind the Flying Saucers’ and George Adamski certifies that the above incident is more than likely factual...”

May 23, 1955: Gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen sent an INS wire that "the scientific and aeronautic authorities of Great Britain, after having examined the remains of a mysterious airship… have come to the conclusion that these strange flying objects do not represent optical illusions, nor are they Soviet inventions, but that we have to deal with objects that really fly and that originate from some other planet." It’s believed that she was reporting on the hoax of a flying saucer crash in Spitzbergen, Norway. For a detailed examination of this episode, see Patrick Gross’ page, UFOs at close sight.

Flying Saucer News-Service Research Bulletin Oct 20, 1955 relates a far less specific rumor. Not only was the hangar unnumbered, the name of the base wasn't disclosed, just that the saucer was "being housed in a hangar near the northeast sector" at an “eastern air base.” The Bulletin was published in Ohio, so they weren’t describing Dayton’s Wright Field.

1964

Barry Goldwater was supposedly denied entry to see the saucer secrets at Wright Patterson AFB. The name Hangar 18 or Blue Room seems to have been retroactively attached to this tale in later accounts, not used in describing it originally. The earliest version of this story we were able to locate was in 1974, connected with the news of Robert Spencer Carr’s Aztec revival.

Carr contends that Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) had tried to see UFO material at Wright-Patterson during a visit to the base. Radio station WBSR, Pensacola, reached Goldwater's Phoenix office, where a spokesman said that in 1964. when Goldwater was at the base for a ceremony, he asked to enter a building that he heard contained UFO material. The spokesman said Goldwater was told no one was allowed into the building.

AP story printed in The Circleville Herald, Oct 12 1974 

1965

Aztec's 

"Little Men" 

... again

Interplanetary Intelligence Report Vol. 1, No. 4, Nov. 1965, was published by Hayden C. Hewes. It featured a picture of the infamous German 1950 April Fool's Day "Man from Mars" on page 18.  

The photo is described as one of the "little men" from the Aztec, NM crash, the debris from which they say was trucked to Wright-Patterson AFB. 

The text is all recycled material from Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers, just accompanied by a hoaxed picture the book inspired.

(Note: Found in Project Blue Book, erroneously connected to the Atlanta shaved monkey hoax file.)

1966

John Fuller, Incident At Exeter

Fuller repeated a rumor that helped get the juices flowing again.

There have been, I learned, after I started the research, frequent and continual rumors (and they are only rumors) that in a morgue at Wright-Patterson Field, Dayton, Ohio, lie the bodies of a half dozen or so small humanoid corpses, measuring not more than four and a half feet in height, evidence of one of the few times an extraterrestrial spaceship has allowed itself either to fail or otherwise fall into the clutches of the semicivilized Earth people.

The rumors continued to circulate, resurface and multiply over the years, but few took them seriously until Robert Spencer Carr relaunched the Aztec story in 1974 with his Hangar 18 story. 

. . .

The Blue Room at Wright-Patterson?

The Blue Room, a 1920 novel by Cosmo Hamilton

There’s also supposed to be a mysterious “Blue Room” at Wright-Patterson where they hide the UFO secrets, or maybe that’s another name for Hangar 18. Like with the Hangar 18 term, it’s hard to pinpoint its origin. Maybe it started as a verbal gaffe by John R. Blandford, chief counsel for the House Armed Services Committee?

The Secretary of the Air Force, Harold Brown appeared before the House of Representatives, Committee on Armed Services, Washington, D.C., March 31, 1966. After discussing other topics, the chairman turned to the upcoming “Unidentified Flying Objects Hearing by Committee on Armed Services” to be held on April 5, 1966, an inquiry requested by Michigan Representative Gerald Ford. 

Brown answered a few questions in preparation for the inquiry:

Secretary Brown: We have an investigation going. Of course we have been doing this since 1948, you know, Mr. Chairman, and in 1965, for example, we investigated almost 900 reports. We will put out a written report which the committee can use to answer these questions.Whether we will ever satisfy all the people who have seen or think they have seen unidentified flying objects, I doubt. But I think we should try to at least satisfy the committee and the Congress.  

The Chairman: Yes, sir.  

Mr. Blandford: May I suggest to have the officer in charge of this program, at Wright Patterson, here Tuesday morning to indicate that we did have the people who had it — what do they call it, the blue room ? 

Secretary Brown: Blue Book.  

Mr. Blandford: Have that individual here so it can appear in the record.

"Blue Room" was a familiar name, from restaurants to books and movies. Blandford may not have been the first person to say it instead of Blue Book.

Source: 

United States. Congress. House. Committee on Armed Services. Subcommittee No. 3,, . (1966). Hearings on military posture and H.R. 13456 to authorize appropriations during the fiscal year 1967 for procurement of aircraft, missiles, naval vessels, and tracked combat vehicles, and research, development, test, and evaluation for the Armed Forces, and to maintain parity between military and civilian pay, and for other purposes: before the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, Eighty-ninth Congress, 2nd session. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office. (1966)

A digital copy can be found at the Internet Archive.

. . .

Acknowledgements

Thanks and acknowledgements to those who provided support, materials, and background detail for this project.

Claude Falkstrom, my co-author, for his work in digging deeper and finding the stories behind the stories, particularly in the case of Lawrence Brill.

Martin Kottmeyer for reference materials from his own Hangar Minus One.

Isaac Koi, for his dedication to the preservation of UFO literature, which helped greatly in the research of this project.

Also, thanks to those who provided other details, materials and verification:
Lance Moody, Brad Sparks, Roger Glassel, Robert Sheaffer, and Rich Hoffman.

Roswell Reborn: The Hangar 18 Legacy

Continued from The Day After Saucergate

Robert Spencer Carr

In 1974, Robert Spencer Carr had put a crashed flying saucer on newspaper front pages, and the sensation caused by somehow persuaded a veteran researcher Leonard Stringfield to begin reexamining UFO crash stories. At the time were still considered crackpot and tabloid material, having been tainted by the stink of the Silas Newton Aztec hoax popularized in Frank Scully’s Behind the Flying Saucers.

The first major mainstream ufologist to declare crash/retrieval reports a matter of legitimate concern, even vital interest, was Leonard Stringfield, a widely respected figure whose history in the UFO field went back to the early 1950s. His advocacy of crash/retrievals would have enormous impact on ufology's subsequent direction… Stringfield first declared himself in a 1977 book, Situation Red, the UFO Siege!, which sought to revive both the extraterrestrial hypothesis of UFO origin (a notion that had largely fallen out of favor among many ufologists) and the idea of an official cover-up (also judged passe). In doing so, he marshaled the usual evidence familiar to readers of 1950s UFO books, such as those by Donald E. Keyhoe. Less predictably, he dedicated 10 pages to crashed-disc stories.

Jerome Clark, UFO Encyclopedia Vol. 3: High Strangeness: UFOs 1960-1979 (1996)

Stringfield became interested in the crashed saucer stories mainly because they could prove that UFOs were not some hallucination or psychic projection, but physical proof of the extraterrestrial. In Situation Red, The UFO Siege!, Stringfield said:

“The little men at least provide provocative evidence—and perhaps specimens— to show that they are part of a nut-and-bolt universe. If we are to believe… reported cases of crashed UFOs and dead occupants… Some of these stories are now legend. One persists: Following the crash of a “spacecraft” thirty-one feet in diameter near Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948, twelve human-like bodies, three to four feet in height, were found inside. They were moved surreptitiously to Wright-Patterson Field, where they had been stored in refrigeration in a secret building.

Frank Scully, in his book Behind the Flying Saucers (1950), revealed the intrigues of another crashed-UFO and little-men incident, but Scully’s story was to be exposed as a fraud. However, some researchers have never given up and believe that Scully was the victim of official counteraction and that his smeared book was actually true.”

The figures Stringfield cited, the 31-foot diameter saucer with 12 bodies, were not Frank Scully’s, but Robert S. Carr’s.

From EC Comics' fictional version of the fictional Aztec crash.

Retrievals of the Third Kind

At the 1978 MUFON Symposium in Dayton, Ohio, Stringfield gave a lecture, “Retrievals of the Third Kind: A Case Study of Alleged UFOs and Occupants in Military Custody,” which he later published as UFO Crash Retrievals - Status Report I: Retrievals of the Third Kind.

He discussed how the subject of crashed saucers had been unfairly tarnished by the discredited Frank Scully story, and presented several cases from anonymous sources that he felt showed evidence of were legitimate.

Stringfield also told how in late March of 1978, he renewed his acquaintance with Bob Carr:

“I had not corresponded with Professor Carr since the 1950's when I published the CRIFO ORBIT. Checking my old files, I reviewed his letters sent to me. Certainly all were well-written, factual and conservative.” He telephoned Carr and liked what he heard, but didn’t check too closely into the academic non-qualifications of his source, or his source’s alleged informants.

“While Scully used shady characters to support his case, new data, supported by people with solid credentials, have surfaced through the efforts of Professor Robert Spenser Carr, a long-time researcher with his own proper credentials.”

Carr’s sources weren’t just shady, they were shadows, and they’d multiplied. Originally, Carr had three, an Air Force officer, a security guard and a biologist, then picked up an autopsy nurse, but when he described the witnesses to Stringfield, the Air Force officer now had a degree in anthropology, the biologist went AWOL, but Carr had two aeronautical engineers to take his place, were the source of the technical details of the recovered saucer.

Carr's informants? A military officer, a nurse, and a biologist.

In his original disclosure, Carr has emphasized that the aliens were human beings, small in stature, but otherwise identical to us except for their longevity and brainpower. In the version he told Stringfield, they picked up far more alien characteristics, with Carr’s witnesses supposedly having “all agreed that the bodies were from three to four feet tall, with elongated heads, oversized compared to their bodies; and, with eyes slanted, looking oriental.”

Stringfield was sold on Carr and his story. “I feel that the Aztec affair can now be viewed with new confidence and free of the Scully stigma.”

The Scully stigma was supplanted by the Carr creativity, and UFO crashes were born again, all the sins washed away. Maybe Carr was John the Baptist in this story and there are a lot of Jesuses, starting with Len Stringfield who preached the word of the UFO crash/retrieval, or the Church of the  C/R.

A Lecturer Hears His Calling

Stanton T. Friedman and Don Berliner dramatically described how Stringfield’s 1978 sermon changed ufology in their 1992 book, Crash at Corona:

Then Leonard Stringfield came winging out of Cincinnati to drop his bomb at the July 1978 annual convention of the Mutual UFO Network... held in Dayton, Ohio, not far from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the home of the old Project Blue Book and the scene of so many rumors of alien bodies held in cold storage in the probably mythical Hangar 18...

Stringfield spoke at the Dayton MUFON meeting for two hours, detailing one C/R after another, to the amazement of the hundreds of veteran UFO investigators... Among those galvanized into action by the shocking revelations at Dayton was Stanton Friedman. It had been but a few months since his revealing talk with Jesse Marcel, who described recovering strange debris from a sheep ranch. A few months after the Dayton meeting, Friedman talked with Vern Maltais and got the story of Barney Barnett at the Plains of San Augustin. Soon... Friedman and Bill Moore zeroed in on the Corona, New Mexico, crash, for it was then thought the downed craft seen by Barnett must have been the one that left some of its pieces on the Foster ranch before crashing 150 miles to the west.

From those pieces, The Roswell Incident was made. In the book, Charles Berlitz and William Moore acknowledge Robert Spencer Carr, but only in the bibliography. They posit that Frank Scully’s Behind the Flying Saucers book was true, just flawed and poorly researched and that the time and place of the crash was not 1948 and Aztec, but 1947 and Roswell, New Mexico. Berlitz and Moore recycled just about every recovered saucer rumor in a patchwork to support their Roswell story, and mention a few hangars and UFO storage buildings along the way:

There are even persistent rumors that, sometime in the mid-1950s, presumably after an alleged viewing by President Eisenhower of the material and bodies at Edwards, they were reunited under one roof inside a structure referred to only as "Building 18-A, Area B" at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Rebranded as Roswell

Hangar 18 was becoming a mainstream term, a household word even before the Berlitz-Moore book, but their mention of it in The Roswell Incident helped. But things changed. Hangar 18 was no longer associated with Aztec, it’d been replaced by Roswell. From a TV listing for Oct. 4, 1980:

Channel 41: In Search of ... UFO Cover-Ups. Is the Air Force hiding alien corpses in Ohio? Host Leonard Nimoy visits the "infamous" Hangar 18.

Having the crashed saucer rumor recast as Roswell stirred things up again, and once more Wright-Patterson faced a barrage of inquiries about Building or Hangar 18.

Like the plot of the movie it apparently inspired, the rumor of Wright-Patterson's aliens on ice is farfetched enough to make it almost believable. And, based on the number of letters that keep flowing in here every month demanding that the Air Force come clean about its extraterrestrial cover-up, more than a few people believe every word of it. The rumor is that in 1947 a saucer-shaped spaceship, manned by aliens, crashed in an isolated area of New Mexico...

The Cincinnati Enquirer, April 23, 1981

Crashed and Retrieved

The Aztec story was too strong to die, but it never really caught on until the little men became more alien and it was grafted onto Jesse Marcel’s testimony about taking crashed foil and sticks to the base at Roswell, NM. The Roswell Incident became THE saucer crash story.

Robert Carr continued to be a trusted source for Leonard Stringfield for several years, and as late as 1982 was supplying him with new details about his Aztec witnesses for UFO Crash / Retrievals: Amassing the Evidence, Status Report III. It’s interesting to note that even after the debut of the recrafted Roswell story, Carr was still devoted to his Aztec story and the goals of Operation Lure.

New and Improved!

With the public’s discovery of Area 51 in the 80s and 90s, it became the new “Hangar 18,” the mysterious hiding place for the government’s UFO secrets, and it and Roswell received most of the UFO love. Don’t mourn for Aztec, though. Seeing the Roswell story’s success and acceptance, like hungry raccoons, ufologists pulled the Aztec story back out of the trash can. In 1987, William Steinman and Wendelle Stevens gave us UFO Crash at Aztec, then in 2011, Scott and Suzanne Ramsey dug it out again for The Aztec UFO Incident, complete with a blessing and introduction from Stanton T. Friedman, the flying saucer physicist.

Roswell became the biggest UFO franchise of all time, with a spin-off hoax industry that owes a few debts to Professor Carr’s tales from the alien crypt. We all owe a big thanks to Robert Spencer Carr for giving us not only Hangar 18, but for being the grandfather of the Roswell crash, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Alien Autopsy and Area 51.

And also a big thanks to Lawrence Brill, who gave Professor Carr a voice by putting on a show. 

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Epilogue: A Final Word of Thanks

In the article above, we quote Jerome Clark saying that Leonard Stringfield was "The first major mainstream ufologist to declare crash/retrieval reports a matter of legitimate concern." But he was not the first. Some less "reputable" ufologists were already promoting saucer wreckage, chiefly Otto Binder, but also the legendary Gray Barker.

In "America's Captured Saucers: Cover-Up of the Century," UFO Report, May 1977, Barker discussed crashed saucer tales including Robert Spencer Carr’s. It's possible that this publicity helped encourage Leonard Stringfield to dig deeper in the subject. Barker's magazine article was later used as a source for Berlitz and Moore’s 1980 book, The Roswell Incident.

A big thanks is due also to Gray Barker, for his hand in bringing the UFO crash story to Roswell.

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For more on the impact of the Hangar 18 story...

UFO and Alien Movies: It Came from Hangar 18