The Aztec Crash – Behind the Flying Saucers
“Between the people and the government today lies a double standard of morality.”
—Frank Scully, 19501
It was Frank Scully who first alerted the world to the Aztec crash in the desert of New Mexico in his book Behind the Flying Saucers, published in September 1950. It was the first hardback book on the subject of flying saucers and only the second book published about flying saucers; Major Donald Keyhoe (Ret.) published the first paperback the same year with his Gold Medal book, The Flying Saucers Are Real.
Frank Scully was a best-selling author and columnist who was syndicated in many different venues throughout the United States, but who was he and why was it that he was the chosen one to reveal the story?
Frank Scully’s life seemingly embodied his quote “Why not go out on a limb? Isn’t that where the fruit is?”
Born in Steinway, New York, Scully attended the Columbia University School of Journalism. Complications from an athletic injury resulted in the amputation of his leg. Additionally he contracted tuberculosis, which led to the removal of a lung. Through all of his hospital stays, surgeries, and medical procedures, Scully wrote when he could. Over the course of his career he made a very good living. In fact, he ended college with a profit of $385 and all of his medical bills paid.
Frank Scully, author of Behind the Flying Saucers.
During his lifetime, Scully traveled to 30 hospitals in seven countries seeking a cure for his physical afflictions. He held positions of stature professionally and personally. A few of his distinctions included being the publicity and advertising director of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Productions in Nice, France. He was knighted by Pope Pius XII into the Order of St. Gregory the Great, and he was the president of the Catholic Interracial Council of Hollywood.
Regardless of where Frank, his wife, Alice, and five children lived, the Scully home was a haven for friends from all walks of life. A safe and trusted environment, the Scully Circus, as the ranch in California became known, was a shelter for guests who were in trouble and needed their stories told to the public. This possibly sheds light on why the several scientists whom you will come to know collectively as Dr. Gee selected him. Frank was told that the Top Secret information described in Behind the Flying Saucers was to be released to the public “within one year.”2
Of course, we now know the information has never been officially released to the public. Whether it was part of his journalistic integrity or just the nature of the person he was, Scully took the names of those scientists to his grave, despite the firestorm of controversy and government harassment that threatened his reputation.
Scully first heard about the Aztec story from a man named Silas Mason Newton, who had corresponded with Scully concerning an article Scully had written in his Variety column “Rogues Gallery.” The two started a friendship, and Scully was invited by Newton to join a group on an excursion into the Mojave Desert where Newton was to test one of his oil-detection devices, for which he was to become both famous and notorious. As they rode through the desert on September 8, 1949, Peverly Marley, Silas Newton, a scientist referred to by Scully only as “Dr. Gee,” and Scully traveled to test the oil-finding device. Marley was an award-winning cinematographer most remembered for having been married to actress Linda Darnell. As they drove through the desert, one topic led to another and finally to a discussion of flying saucers.
Newton had already briefed Scully on the fact that this Dr. Gee had confided to him in the summer of 1949, during a drive from Denver to Phoenix, concerning the fact that the United States already had recovered two flying saucers. Dr. Gee wanted to break the story, saying the government was to reveal the story within a year, but he wanted the story out immediately. This Dr. Gee claimed he was one of several scientists who had personally seen, examined, checked on, and researched the recovered flying saucers that the U.S. government had in its possession. Dr. Gee had told Newton during their drive to Phoenix that one craft had crashed or landed near Aztec, New Mexico, just south of where they were driving, and that one of the fallen saucers was recovered almost undamaged.
This scientist had left his government job, saying he was released the previous July, after seven years of service. He had worked on top-drawer projects and had become a master of magnetic energy, but $7,200 a year was all he could make for all his mastery.
He worked on a device called the Magnetron, and it was his group during the war whose devices claimed to have “knocked out as many as 17 Japanese submarines in one day. They had conducted 35,000 experiments for the government on land, sea, and air. They had moved magnetic research ahead hundreds of years and had spent a billion dollars doing it.” Additionally, Dr. Gee told Scully, “They worked out of two laboratories and had a budget of $1 billion at their secret command.”
After their day in the desert trying out magnetic oil finding devices, Newton, Marley, Scully, and Dr. Gee drove across the desert and returned to the Scully house, where Dr. Gee told his amazing story of working on these recovered saucers, especially the Aztec saucer that was, as Dr. Gee put it, “virtually intact.” He described the details of the craft, such as the crew compartment, unusual water found on board, and the peculiar clothing of the occupants, just as though he was describing the living room of someone’s home.
It was explained by Dr. Gee:
In the laboratories and also at Alamogordo and Los Alamos and at different parts of the country we have tenesope observers who spend 24 hours a day watching for evidence of objects or ships flying in the sky. Everything that comes within the range of these tenescopes is noted. If it is unfamiliar and lands, the Air Force is aware of it almost immediately, and if it presents scientific problems, we or the other groups are consulted. Two tenescopes caught this unidentified ship as it came into our atmosphere. They watched its position and estimated where it would land. Within a few hours after it landed, Air Force officers reached the flying field at Durango, Colo., and took off in their search for the object.
The object apparently landed or crashed northeast of Aztec, on a mesa.
Scully’s book describes how Dr. Gee explained to the men that these craft were powered by magnetism and that certain metals found on the craft or part of its construction were “not found on this earth.” Dr. Gee said he suspected that these craft were space ships from another planet. Scully found it interesting that a man who was helping others look for oil in the desert was in fact discounting oil as the means of propulsion in the future. During the evening, Dr. Gee promised the group that he would return at some point and show the men parts from one of these craft.
During a later meeting, Dr. Gee showed up with what Scully described as small parts of the disc that landed or crashed at Aztec. Scully described one artifact as being a small radio-like cube “with no tubes, no aerials, no wires.” Dr. Gee explained he thought that the craft itself was the antenna for the object. He claimed that he could hear a “high singsong note 15 minutes past the hour” emitting from the box. The object, according to Scully, was “not much bigger that a pack of king-sized cigarettes.” This device, according to Scully, had Dr. Gee completely baffled.
Scully described how Dr. Gee felt about the dismantling of the Aztec saucer: “He regretted the ship was dismantled this way, but the Army seems to breed souvenir hunters as it does rank.” This meant, according to Scully, that Dr. Gee had grabbed what he could, not for his own self-interest, but for scientific research.
Dr. Gee told Scully that the Air Force took some motion pictures, but the developed film would apparently fade after two hours for reasons of security. A special chemical, only available to a few, would restore the film for another hour. Scully did not further explain this unverified story about disappearing images on film, but it confirms the high priority given to photographs or film of the Aztec saucer. Dr. Gee also told Scully that he had taken his own film of the craft, but it was not of good quality. He promised to show it to Scully and the group at a later meeting.
So much of Dr. Gee’s story and its details seemed incredible in 1948, whereas today this technology has either become reality or is commonly accepted as possible.
Scully said that Dr. Gee fulfilled his promise at a later meeting where the group, including Silas Newton, was able to study the flying saucer material. They examined the gears and the radio, and viewed Dr. Gee’s film. Scully was not initially convinced that this was a real story to run with, but after some time with Dr. Gee, he was ready to write the book that would turn out to be the first published book about a possible alien space ship that somehow made an impromptu landing in a remote desert region in the United States.
Dr. Gee explained that it was his technical group of scientists from World War II that examined the craft as well as study the propulsion system. The little bodies of the saucer occupants had gone to another facility for examination. Additionally the military had found some pamphlets or booklets inside the ship. These were described by some sources as having the texture of parchment and possibly had to do with navigation or navigation problems. The booklets or pamphlets were composed of pictorial symbols that some said were akin to Egyptian hieroglyphics. These items were turned over to officials of the Air Force, who in turn got them into the hands of cryptographers experienced in deciphering codes and languages.
Dr. Gee later said that the last he had heard (in 1950), there had been no headway in translating the material and that the ship carried no instruments of destruction, nor did the crew appear to have any firearms of any kind. The craft had a way of demagnetizing any object that came in contact with it, hostile or otherwise. He speculated that the demagnetizing, or degaussing, would destroy or disintegrate any object in the path of the craft.
When Dr. Gee was questioned as to the construction of the craft, he explained that the outer skin of the craft appeared to be aluminum, but further tests indicated that it was no form of aluminum known on earth. The craft was very light; two or three men could easily lift one side of it. However, the other side of the equation proved that as many as a dozen men who had crawled up on the top of the “wing” could make no impression or dents on it.
Dr. Gee told Scully that the Air Force wanted to move the ship from the Aztec recovery site, of course, and decided to dismantle it because it was too large to move otherwise. The craft or ship, as he referred to it, was absent of any rivets, bolts, or screws to give technicians any reference as to how the craft was constructed.
After a long study of the craft, it was agreed that it was assembled in segments. These segments were “fitted in grooves and were pinned together around the base.”
In Scully’s book, Dr. Gee tells more:
When the cabin was lifted out of the bottom of the saucer, they found a gear completely encircling the bottom of the ship, and this gear fitted inside a gear of another ratio that was on the cabin. The whole thing was very ingeniously put together, and a lot of care was taken in breaking it down. After it had been broken down, it was moved to a government testing laboratory and there it remained while parts were being tested for a considerable period of time.
According to Scully’s book, the next time Dr. Gee saw the recovered disc, “the instrument board, to his amazement and chagrin, had been broken up and all of the inner workings torn apart. This prevented any further study by them as to the magnetic operation of the ship itself.”
Dr. Gee said he regretted the way the dismantling had been done, because if they had been able to keep it intact long enough, “there might have come a time when they might have worked out a plan whereby they could make certain tests as to the different push buttons on the instrument board. These, he was certain, held the clews [sic] to the magnetic form of combustion developed on the ship itself.”
When asked “What has been done with the people that were on the ship?” Dr. Gee told Scully: “…some of them had been dissected and studied by the medical divisions of the Air Force and that from the meager reports he had received, they had found that these little fellows were in all respects perfectly normal human beings, except for their teeth. There wasn’t a cavity or a filling in any mouth. Their teeth were perfect.”
Dr. Gee said, “From the characteristics and physiology of their bodies they must have been about 35 to 40 years of age, judged by our standards of age.”
As to what the saucer occupants were wearing, Dr. Gee told Scully they all wore the same type of uniform: a dark blue garment, with metal buttons. He said it was significant that there were no insignia of any kind on the collars, sleeves, or on the caps of these people. So, to all intents and purposes, “all of them had the same rank.”
Furthermore, Dr. Gee commented on the fact that the “little people” on board
seemed to be charred a very dark chocolate color. About the only thing that we could decide at the time was that the charring had occurred somewhere in space and that their bodies had been burned as a result of air rushing through that broken porthole window, or something going wrong with the means by which the ship was propelled and the cabin pressure. None of us could arrive at any conclusion as to when or how this window had broken, or at what possible point in space these occupants must have been killed. The simple fact was that there they were, dead from either burns or the bends, and we proceeded with the further examination of the interior of the ship.
Scully recorded in his book that Dr. Gee described two bucket seats inside the main cabin “…in front of the instrument panel board and two of the little fellows were sitting there. They had fallen over, face down, on the instrument board.”
This was the short version of Frank Scully’s story on the flying disc that landed or crashed near Aztec. Dr. Gee told Scully a very interesting story, and it was our (the authors’) job to research this event to see what light we could shed on an important historical event, and to see if the original story could hold up through the many years of research that ensued.
It should be mentioned again here that “Dr. Gee” was used as a name by Scully to represent contributions from up to nine different scientists involved in the study of the Aztec saucer, and that material quoted in this chapter appears to come from one particular scientist whom Scully accompanied on the oil finding trip and who came to his home for subsequent meetings.
Frank Scully’s book came under attack shortly after it was published—not by the Air Force, not by the Army, not by the Pentagonians as Frank Scully called the military, but by a man named J.P. Cahn, who thought he had gotten the short end of a business deal with Scully wherein he had attempted to buy Scully’s saucer story. That was the deal that never was, according to Scully. Cahn had worked at the San Francisco Chronicle in the early 1950s and had heard about Scully’s story on the flying disc recovery. Cahn contacted Scully and made him an offer to purchase the story for the Chronicle.
Cahn had resigned from his full-time position with the Chronicle and was freelancing when he contacted Scully, although he still had a desk at the newspaper. We have dedicated an entire chapter (Chapter 5) to J.P. Cahn and, as part of our research on this book, I (Scott) traveled to California to interview some people who knew him, worked with him, and were with him up until his last day. I missed interviewing J.P. Cahn by only a few months. Regrettably, I had listened to the late Karl Pflock rather than trusting my gut instinct in this regard. Pflock was one of the Aztec skeptics, and he touted himself as an expert. One night, as I was talking to Karl, I mentioned I was going to try to track down J.P. Cahn, and Karl informed me that Cahn had long since passed away. Supposedly I was years too late. The truth of the matter was that the former journalist and hit-piece author was alive and fairly well, living in a retirement home outside of San Francisco.
This was a major lesson learned: Do one’s own research and do not count on others.
J.P. Cahn tried to negotiate a deal with Frank Scully for the rights to the Aztec story. That was Cahn’s side of the story. Scully claims the offer was so cheap that he (Scully) would never consider it. Cahn apparently thought he could give the Aztec story more bang for the buck since flying saucer stories were hot news in the early 1950s, and Cahn had a passion for not only the flying saucers but also the incredible story that Scully had to offer.
Keep in mind that this unique incident is a flying saucer recovery story, not just a great sighting, nor lights in the sky, but the 1948 recovery of a flying saucer that was never revealed to the public. After all, it was only eight months earlier, in July 1947, when the Roswell flying saucer story was so quickly swept under the rug by the Army Air Corps cover story that it was a misidentified weather balloon. Aztec seemed like the real deal to Cahn and, because he was an excellent writer himself, he desperately wanted the story. He even convinced Scott Newhall, his friend and a section editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, that the story was “in the bag.”3
After it became apparent that Scully had no intentions of selling an incredible story such as the Aztec recovery, and because he already had a book deal lined up, cold reality set in for Cahn: The story was Scully’s and he was on the outside looking in. With egg on his face, Cahn did an about face and decided to keep his word to Scully that he would destroy not only Scully, but the entire Aztec flying saucer story.
This was done in several segments: First, Cahn had to discredit the sources for Scully’s story; second, Cahn had to discredit Scully; and third, he had to make sure the Aztec story looked as phony as the business deal with which he had proposed to dupe Scully.
First, Cahn contacted the FBI after he discovered that Silas Newton, one of Scully’s informants, had some questionable business dealings in Colorado. This was nothing new, as the oil business always has a high level of risk when it involves investors putting in large, or sometimes small, amounts of money into an oil well investment. That was how Silas Newton made his money: selling percentage ownerships in oil wells. Sometimes the oil wells hit big, and everyone was happy; sometimes the wells struck nothing but dirty water and everybody was very unhappy. So went the oil business in the 1950s, just as it does today.
Cahn was clever enough to locate one Herman Flader, a Denver businessman who had his own series of bad and very speculative business deals as well. Flader had invested a lot of money in one of Silas Newton’s oil wells, as well as in one of Newton’s doodle bug devices (a term used for electronic sensing equipment used to find oil, gas, water, and whatever else the inventor claimed the unit could locate) that Flader and others were convinced would make them millions of dollars.
By ruining the source of the story, meaning Silas Newton, Cahn was assured that Scully’s story would crash and burn faster than a rookie driver at Daytona during speed week.
Number two on Cahn’s list was to destroy Scully, which would be done by destroying the sources for the Aztec story, thus ruining Scully’s new book, which was selling better than fans on a hot summer night in the Carolinas. With this accomplished, the Aztec flying saucer story would die a quick death, and Cahn’s mission would be accomplished.
Surprisingly, this all happened in a rather short time. Cahn, as the reader will see later in this book, with the help of the U.S. government and the military powers, or Pentagonians, as Scully called them, would all team up against the Aztec flying saucer story and put a quick and nasty end to what would have been just another story about a crashed flying saucer in the New Mexico desert. It would end up on the trash heap, along with the already-forgotten Roswell crashed disc story.
As we researched this book, many things completely amazed us; one of those things was the Cahn angle on this. He seemed to go further than one would think concerning a bad business deal. His only ostensible reward was a per-word payment for his long hit piece, “The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men” in True Magazine.4
After all, most of us have experienced bad business deals at one time or another, but to take this to the vendetta level as Cahn did seems extreme to say the least. He and Scott Newhall were good friends in the 1950s, arriving at the San Francisco Chronicle together as a team when the owners of the paper wanted some new, young blood to get the newspaper back on track. He did not leave the paper under a cloud, and never lost credibility with Newhall or any of the staff over the saucer story. Plus, he was not a full-time employee when he tried to negotiate the deal between Scully and the newspaper. Even though his former friends and coworkers all said he had a big ego, this entire flying saucer story seemed to take Cahn to a stratospheric level of frustration.
Who else was behind the mission to get Scully’s book discredited? It certainly was not the other investors of Silas Newton’s doodle bug device, nor was it the other investors in Newton’s oil well ventures. It turns out that Newton‘s investors were, in the main, all quite happy, as court records show. These satisfied investors were not even allowed to testify in the Denver fraud trial brought on by the FBI looking into Silas Newton and his oil well schemes.
After the bad press on Silas Newton, the entire Aztec flying saucer story did die a quick death. Behind the Flying Saucers did very well up until the Cahn derailment. By the mid-1950s, no responsible writer or UFO investigator would touch the Aztec story with a 10-foot pole. It was not until the mid 1980s when William Steinman and Wendelle Stevens co-wrote the 623-page book UFO Crash at Aztec that the rumor of the Aztec incident began to awaken from its four-decade sleep.
Steinman and Stevens’s book was well researched, but Aztec still carried the stigma as a non-event in most UFO research circles, and experts said that anybody doing research on Aztec was wasting her or his time. The public had long before consigned Aztec to a quaint legend with no basis in fact.
Steinman had secured some excellent interviews in the book, but he rarely used names when it came to witnesses—only initials. This was a major problem to many when it came to the credibility of the sources with whom Steinman claimed to have talked and interviewed. It wasn’t until I (Scott) started researching the Aztec story more than two decades ago that I came to fully understand what Steinman had gone through to resurrect the Aztec recovery story.
So, the Aztec UFO or flying saucer story lay dead for years, even after the 1986 Steinman book that almost unknown outside of the town of Aztec itself. When I learned about Aztec, and the book, during a visit to the community of Aztec, as I explained earlier in this book, I was suddenly aware of a story that might be as big as Roswell. Frank Scully had possibly come across a flying saucer story that was second only to the Roswell crash retrieval of 1947, or perhaps it was the biggest scam of the 1950s, the way Cahn had described it.
The only way to carefully research a story as big as this is to take every part of the story, piece by piece, and carefully look at every claim made by Scully, Cahn, Newton, Leo GeBauer, Flader, the FBI, and a cast of hundreds, all of whom would be interviewed before the verdict was in.
