Thomas E Henderson

🚨BREAKING🚨: In March 1948, eight months after Roswell, the US military recovered an intact hundred-foot flying saucer from a mesa outside Aztec, New Mexico, with sixteen dead beings still aboard. The craft went to Los Alamos and then to Wright Field, and after decades of investigation, we can now name sixteen witnesses, nine scientists who worked on reverse engineering it, and the Air Force personnel who hauled it away. For seventy years, the case has been filed under "The Aztec Crash Hoax," and in this documentary we name the government disinformation agent responsible for that. We discuss Robert Sarbacher (a top atomic physicist who worked alongside Oppenheimer and Vannevar Bush) who put it in writing that the story of the UFO Crash at Aztec was "substantially correct." Then there are the FBI's redacted files on Silas Newton, the wealthy oil prospector who first leaked the story, and Leo Gebauer, the radio engineer who backed him up. We now know the pair were likely framed by J. Edgar Hoover in coordination with Hoover’s friend, a journalist named JP Cahn. Scott Ramsey, our chief investigator, who with his wife Suzanne has spent decades and more than half a million dollars of their own money on this case, walks us through the four civilian witnesses he tracked down and spoke to himself, along with many other second degree witnesses; he also details the high-powered radar station guarding Los Alamos that brought the craft down in the first place (a phenomenon well documented in the FBI’s 1950 Hottel memo along with contemporary cases like the testimony of Jake Barber). The first people up the mesa that March morning in 1948 were oil field workers who'd been called out to a brush fire, and what they found instead was a hundred-foot disc sitting on its belly in the dirt, seamless, without a rivet or a dent on it. Nineteen-year-old Doug Noland climbed on top, found a hole the size of a quarter punched through one porthole, and put his eye to it, and inside were small figures in blue jumpsuits slumped over a control panel. When his boss Bill Ferguson poked a fire pole through the hole, a hatch in the belly dropped open, and the men went in and counted sixteen beings, three to four feet tall, charred head to foot in a cabin that showed no sign of fire. Eighteen civilians stood around that craft before the military arrived, and two of them, one on his deathbed fifty years later, gave the same account down to the rancher's wife yelling at them for climbing on it. The soldiers who came for it had done this before, with a helicopter overhead within hours, a machine most Americans in 1948 had never seen, and older men with no insignia of any branch working the hill like drill sergeants, one of whom put a rifle butt in Ken Farley's gut when he argued. By mid-morning the mesa was sealed and the only civilian still up there was a travelling Baptist minister named Solon Brown, who was asked to pray over the bodies laid out in a row while the flatbed trucks came up the road below, and was then sworn to silence and walked off the hill. He broke down crying in a deacon's living room that night, and the deacon's son, who was in the room, has now gone on record with us about it. Then the Air Force erased the recovery itself, and the sergeant who did the erasing is named here under his real name for the first time. Dick Harper's only job for two weeks was rewriting the files of the two hundred men sent to the mesa so that every one of them was officially somewhere else, which meant that if any of them ever talked, his own service record would call him a liar. The mesa was scrubbed and landscaped to look like nothing had happened, and the man hired to replant it wrote years later that of every crash site he'd cleaned up for the government, this was the only one that was already spotless when he got there. Somebody was still protecting Aztec long after the craft was gone. Frank Scully, the Variety columnist who broke the story in 1950, and was later knighted by the Pope, took the scientists' names to his grave, and what he got for it was seventy years as the punchline of the case, “the gossip writer who was taken in by con men”. Bill Steinman was the UFO researcher whose 1986 book reopened Aztec and drew the Sarbacher letter out. He wrote it while working as an engineer at Lockheed, and when he ignored their orders to stop, Lockheed fired him and made sure no one else in aerospace would hire him. Another UFO researcher, Chris Evans, got closest to the proof: Scully's widow Alice told him photographs of the crash still existed, and he was on the road to bring what he had to the Ramseys when he died. The highway patrol wrote it up as a jump from a bridge, but the one witness they cited was never found, and his body came down in a cornfield, well clear of the water. The Ramseys' work also points straight at who took the craft: all nine scientists flown in to examine it trace back to Vannevar Bush's wartime research network, the same machine that built the atomic bomb, and six of them went on to help found Texas Instruments. The technology went to the top of the nuclear program and then it went private. The hoax was manufactured, and we show how. A rival writer, JP Cahn, who'd lost the scoop took his grudge to Hoover, who knew a thing or two about ruining people, and Newton and Gebauer were prosecuted over an oil-prospecting gadget in a case seven judges refused before one would hear it, and that conviction became the proof that Aztec never happened. Newton was worth 20 million dollars at the time. Adjust for inflation, and that becomes nine figures, so he definitely didn’t need to con anyone. The skeptic who kept the verdict alive for decades was a self-described former CIA officer, Karl Pflock, who'd never set foot on the site until Scott Ramsey drove him there. And a source who came to us during production says that when Ramsey later sent his evidence to a congressman investigating the case, Pflock was caught on the office's security cameras breaking in, and the only thing he left with was the package containing evidence around Aztec. Groundbreaking documentary in partnership with Area 52 (@chrisramsay52), live now.