When they arrived on the scene, something much more than flames greeted them. Upon the rocky hills sat a large, metallic,
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circular aircraft with no apparent seams, rivets, bolts or welds holding it together.
The craft appeared to be about 100 feet in diameter, and a shattered porthole was its only sign of damage. As a small crowd began to form around the scene, one man managed to open a door to its interior, revealing two thoroughly scorched small bodies slumped in their seats. Within minutes, military personnel arrived at the scene and began to question everyone in the general vicinity, swearing them to absolute secrecy as they prepared to move the craft to a secure location.
No one would hear much about this incredible occurrence until two years later when Frank Scully (who would later be the namesake for the the character of FBI agent Dana Scully in the televison show, The X Files), a columnist for the entertainment newspaper Variety, published Behind the Flying Saucers, a book that has sold more than 64,000 copies. He claimed the story came to him from Silas Newton, a wealthy oil man, and a mysterious "Dr. Gee," allegedly one of the scientists the military enlisted to help uncover how the craft had flown and who , or what, had piloted it.
Yet J.P. Cahn, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle, followed up this book with two exposés in True Magazine in 1952. There, he argued that Newton was a fraud, attempting to make money off of unsuspecting oil investors through the mention of an oil-finding device detailed in Scully's book, thus using a false story about a UFO to capture readers' attention.
As far as Cahn was concerned, Dr. Gee was none other than Leo GeBauer, Newton's business partner and the owner of Western Radio & Engineering Company, a radio and television parts supply store. As a direct result of Cahn's second piece, Flying Saucer Swindlers, both men were brought to trial in the District Court in Denver and found guilty of conducting a confidence game. The fantastic UFO story was discredited, its proponents silenced and, as far as the American public was concerned, the whole thing never happened.
Stealth 'incident?'
Thus lay dormant as a fraudulent tale the so-called "Aztec Incident" until Mooresville residents Scott and Suzanne Ramsey became intensely intrigued by it. They have spent the last 25 years crisscrossing the country, collecting more than 55,000 archived documents and interviewing crash site eyewitnesses in an attempt to discover the truth behind Aztec. Their research has culminated in the publication of a book titled The Aztec Incident: Recovery at Hart Canyon, from which come the details of the crash and its apparent deliberate cover-up.
