My Strange New Mexico

Aztec's UFO Crash Part 2

Posted on Friday, May 30, 2008 at 10:38PM by Mike Smith in Roswell Edition Column | Post a Comment

Last week in the Roswell Edition we examined New Mexico’s other very famous UFO Incident, the Aztec Crash, in which an alien craft supposedly made an emergency landing in Hart Canyon…and how it was really just a story cooked up by two con-men, Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer, to help swindle people into buying their fraudulent doodlebugs which they claimed to be alien technology recovered from the crash.

Or was it?

Of course, Newton and GeBauer probably weren’t actually selling alien technology, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the Aztec crash itself never happened or that there wasn't something else mysterious afoot with GeBauer and Newton.

First off, it’s important to note that GeBauer could have very well not have been Dr. Gee, as skeptics who love to jump on the Newton/GeBauer bandwagon like to believe.  Dr. Gee was name given to a group of eight or nine scientists by Frank Scully that had investigated the Aztec crash.  Scully named them “Dr. Gee” to protect their collective identities.

Newton and GeBauer’s trial with Herman Flader also wasn’t necessarily all that it’s cracked up to be either.  Thanks to an investigation into Newton and Gebauer by longtime Aztec researcher Scott Ramsey some eyebrow-raising bits of information on the two have been found.  Ramsey answered questions about GeBauer and Newton’s trial and history in a recent email and had this to say:

Herman Flader was the only investor in the oil deal that was upset with Silas Newton. The court records show that he and only he felt that he was deceived with his investment. Most people would like you to believe that the oil field that was in question was a "dry well" when actually the court records show it was a big success and the other investors made a lot of money off of it. The skeptics on Aztec would also like you to believe that they were held on criminal charges when they were reduced to "civil charges" at the end, and were made to pay his original investment back plus court costs.

The "Doodle bug" devise that was presented in court was not the one the other investors were shown. Nobody ever saw the one that the F.B.I. presented at the trial. The other investors were not allowed to testify in the trial. (this is all on public record, not rumor mill stuff).

Prior to the 1950 book release "Behind the Flying Saucers" by author Frank Scully, the F.B.I. files showed that Silas Newton was a man of "high regard, a patriotic person of good standing, a big contributor to the Republican Party, and a man of great wealth". After Frank Scully's book came out, he was a “worthless man who could not be trusted, and a person of interest to the F.B.I." This all changed in a time frame of one year. When the F.B.I. decided to investigate Silas Newton, they could not get a judge to agree that Silas Newton had done anything wrong. This started in the Albuquerque Federal Court where the Judge said they had no case, they then went to Phoenix and the courts told them the same. Then they went to Salt Lake City and were told they had no case. They finally ended up in Denver where they had to convince a judge they "would present better evidence at trial."

I am probably the only person that has bothered to read the entire "complaint" concerning the charges brought up against them. I am also the only person to read the 269 pages (that's only 65%) of the F.B.I. files on [Newton]. The other 35% are not to be released according to the F.B.I.

I also had a trial lawyer read the entire work (criminal complaint and law suit) and he was "shocked" at how aggressively the F.B.I. went after them. Pyramid type investments were very common in the oil fields back then.

But Newton and GeBauer aside, there are much more important things to investigate pertaining to crashed UFOs, such as hard evidence and eye-witnesses.  Eventually two significant first-hand witnesses that had been at the crash site were found by Ramsey.

The first of these was Ken Farley.  Farley had been down from Colorado in northern New Mexico visiting a friend at the time of the crash.  When Farley picked his friend up at a town north of Aztec called Cedar Hill the friend told him how he had seen several trucks and a police car heading south on a small road.

Wondering what was afoot they followed the small dirt road until they reached Hart Canyon and found the surprise of their lives.  Atop a mesa sat a disc shaped craft with no noticeable damage. According to Farley there were also many oilfield workers, a couple of ranchers, and two police officers interviewing the locals.  Some of the oil workers were even said to have tried to climb up on the craft.  One of the police officers warned Farley and his friend that they should leave. Instead they ignored him and stayed at the crash site. Later on that morning the military arrived and threatened the witnesses with their lives.

When Ramsey managed to find another first hand witness to the crash his testimony would incredibly end up matching perfectly with Farley’s even though the two men had never met before in their entire lives.  The man was Doug Nolan who was an employee of El Paso Gas Company at the time of the crash.  Nolan stumbled upon the crash with his boss Bill Ferguson who had told Nolan they needed to get down to Hart Canyon to put out a brush fire there.  Once they arrived an oil field worker told them the brush fire had been taken care of but they needed to take a look at “something else.”  The “something else” turned out to be the flying saucer.

Their curiosity firmly aroused Nolan and Ferguson walked up to the craft and peeked into one of the windows in which they thought they could see two bodies slumped over a control panel.  Nolan, being a citizen of Aztec, unlike Ken Farley, was able to identify many people at the crash.  The two ranchers Farley described in his account were a husband and wife, Mr. and Mrs. Knight, who had cattle near Hart Canyon.  One of the two police officers at the crash actually wasn’t even from Aztec, but from Cuba, NM, and had followed the craft watching it in the sky to Aztec.  Nolan also recalls two other men at the crash site that he did not know, likely Ken Farley and his friend (who remains safely anonymous).

There have also been several secondhand witnesses to come forward, such as Fred Reed who claims that he was part of a cleanup crew called in to survey the crash site and make it look as though nothing had transpired there.  Part of the cleanup was to also cover up any tracks of heavy equipment.

Witnesses aside, hard physical evidence in Aztec’s support thus far has literally been a concrete slab found in Hart canyon.  Why is a concrete slab a big deal though you might ask?  Ramsey believes the slab was poured near the crash site to support a piece of heavy equipment such as a large crane support leg.

Corroborating the theory is an ex-Intel Air Force Officer involved in the crash who says the pouring of the concrete slab delayed the recovery operation for a few days.  The slab does not appear to be part of any of the oilfield businesses in the area as no one from Williams Energy, El Paso Gas, Dugan, or Burlington can connect the pad to any past operations in the oil fields.

Other skeptics point out that the Aztec crash couldn’t have happened because Hart Canyon Road did not exist in 1948. Actually the road has been around for quite some time, and is ironically the site of the last stage coach robbery in New Mexico back in the late 1800s.

UFOs were not scarce in northern New Mexico at the time either.  In 1950, the nearby town of Farmington, NM, witnessed a whole armada of flying saucers hover over their city leaving many witnesses to the event.

To quote directly from the Farmington Daily Times of Saturday, March 18, 1950:

Fully half of this town's population still is certain today that it saw space ships or some strange aircraft -- hundreds of them zooming through the skies yesterday. Estimates of the number ranged from "several” to more that 500. Whatever they were, they caused a major sensation in this community, which lies only 110 air miles northwest of the huge Los Alamos Atomic installation. The objects appeared to play tag high in the air.

And as for Frank Scully, his book Behind the Flying Saucers has many bits of information on technology that although far-fetched for 1950, was actually in existence at the time of the book’s publication, only classified.  The technology he wrote about, including methods of magnetic detection, wasn’t declassified until many years later.  The name Scully also rings a bell in popular culture today thanks to the character of agent Dana Scully of The X-Files, named after Frank Scully.

But even after all the newfound evidence Aztec is often still regarded as a hoax thanks to two con men.  But, after all, since the Roswell crash eventually overcame its weather balloon cover-up, maybe Aztec can one day finally overcome Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer as well.