One day in March 1948, an unidentified body flying across the sky abruptly derailed from its course and fell along a curve somewhere in the deserted rocky area of Hart Canyon, which is not far from the city of Aztec (New Mexico, USA).
Two workers from the local oil rig, Silas Newton and Leo Gebauer, are considered the main eyewitnesses to this event. They were just trying to put out a small fire on the equipment when they saw a "huge metal disk" in the sky.
The disc was about 30 meters in diameter and looked impressive, while on its metal surface there were no traces of seams, joints, rivets, as if it were monolithic. The disc fell to the ground very carefully and externally no damage was noticeable in it.
When Newton and Gebauer got closer, they saw that there were several windows in the disk, and when they looked into one of them, they saw that there were at least 16 bodies of small humanoid creatures lying on the floor inside. Their bodies were covered with dark soot, as if they had suffered in a fire, probably a local fire occurred when they fell in the disk.
On the same day, workers called the police and told them about the fallen disc with the corpses, after which the police arrived and examined the disc for a long time with their mouths open in amazement. Then the police called the military and they quickly cordoned off the entire territory, and then took the disc with them, ordering everyone to keep quiet about what they saw.
For almost a year, Newton and Gebauer were silent, fearing the threats from the military, but then they could not resist and told in detail about everything to journalist Frank Scully, who was published in the popular entertainment magazine Variety Magazine. In 1949, the story of the UFO crash in the Aztec appeared in this magazine, and then Scully also published a book with details of the incident called "Behind the Flying Saucers"
Both the articles and the book gained great popularity, but soon a real heap of various accusations fell on Scully and two eyewitnesses, which ended with the fact that even other ufologists recognized this whole story as a fake, and the story of Newton and Gebauer was fiction for the purpose of fraud.
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The fact is that both workers managed to extract some items from the fallen UFO and then tried to sell them as "alien technology". I was convinced that they had invented the whole UFO story in order to sell some knick-knacks at a high price. One of these "artifacts" somehow allegedly got to the journalist of the "San Francisco Chronicle" and he gave it to the laboratory for research, where they found out that the "alien artifact" was made from an ordinary piece of aluminum.
Because of these revelations, the whole story of the Aztec UFO crash was quickly forgotten, and even Newman and Gebauer themselves at some point admitted to a fake and a scam.
30 years later, in the early 1980s, one of the ufologists pulled the story of the UFO crash in the Aztec from the dusty archives and looked at it in a new way. And I discovered that all this could be reality, because the whole story with the exposure turned out to be very muddy.
When the UFO case in Aztec fell into the hands of famous ufologists Scott and Susan Ramsey, they began to check and verify the facts indicated in the articles and books, after which it turned out that the whole part with the revelations looked like a carefully worked out scenario to discredit the testimony of workers.
“From 1952 to 1986, no one came close to the incident in the Aztec. It was as if poisoned by accusations of forgery and UFO researchers "bypassed it for seven kilometers." We analyzed this case thoroughly in our book and concluded that the authorities were ready to go even to the complete destruction of the lives of these two or three people (if you include the journalist Scully) in order to get a good cover. If we analyze the original testimony of eyewitnesses, it is impossible to refute them,”said Scott Ramsey.
In 2011, Ramsey also drew attention to a bizarre FBI document that surfaced the same year called the Hottel Memo, written by Guy Hottel, the head of the Washington DC FBI in 1950, to FBI chief Edgar Hoover.
The document was posted in the archives on the official website of the FBI and over the next few years was often featured as a document that "officially confirmed the 'alien cover' by the US authorities."
It specifically stated that:
In 2013, the FBI finally commented on this note and said that it did not confirm anything, but simply outlined some information that came through second or third hands. However, many ufologists are still sure that this note only accidentally leaked from the FBI's secret folder and that it is completely true.
True, she is believed to be describing the Roswell incident, but Scott Ramsay in particular is confident that she is also referring to the Aztec incident. Firstly, because, according to eyewitness accounts, one disc crashed in Roswell, and three appeared in the note.
And secondly, there was one strange case when a certain person from Denver tried to sell photographs allegedly taken at the site of a UFO crash in the Aztec and the FBI tried to persistently go out to this person in order to acquire these photos. If the Aztec incident hadn't existed, why would the FBI be trying to get hold of these pictures?