Aztec Incident

I'm a journalist. Been one for forty years, worked for newspapers, magazines, the works. And I need to tell you about something that happened back in March of 1948 that the government buried so deep, most people think it never happened at all. There was a UFO crash near Aztec, New Mexico. Hart Canyon, about twelve miles northeast of town. March twenty-fifth, 1948. A disc, nearly a hundred feet across. Completely intact except for a single entry point on the dome. And inside that craft were sixteen bodies. Small, humanoid, wearing metallic suits. I'm telling you this happened. Now, I wasn't there. I didn't see the crash site myself. But I spent years tracking down the people who were. I talked to oil field workers who discovered it while fighting a brush fire. I spoke with a county commissioner who was on scene. A preacher who saw it with his own eyes. These weren't crackpots or attention seekers. These were regular working people who happened to be in the wrong place at the right time.

The craft had scraped along a rock cliff face before coming to rest on a mesa. Witnesses described sparks flying as it made contact with the stone, then it wobbled north and settled. When the workers got close enough to examine it, they found this perfectly smooth metallic surface. No rivets, no seams. The thing looked like it had been molded in one piece. One of the oil workers, young guy named Doug, he grabbed a pole from his truck and started poking around inside through the damaged section. That's when the craft opened up. Just opened, like a door mechanism triggered. And there they were. Two beings slumped over in what looked like control seats. Dead. The rest were in a compartment behind them. Sixteen total. All of them small, maybe three and a half to four feet tall. Gray skin. Wearing these thin metallic suits. The military showed up fast. And I mean fast. Within hours, the whole area was cordoned off. Armed guards, unmarked trucks, the whole nine yards. They loaded that craft onto flatbed trailers and hauled it away. Took about two weeks to completely clear the site. Every witness was told in no uncertain terms to keep their mouths shut.

Here's where it gets interesting. Two men, industrialists named Simon Nichols and Leon Grant, they came forward in 1949 claiming they had inside knowledge of the recovery. Nichols was a wealthy oil prospector, owned property all over the Southwest. Grant presented himself as a scientist, called himself Dr. Gray, said he'd worked on classified government projects. They approached a colleague of mine, Fred Sullivan, a columnist who wrote for the entertainment magazines. Told him everything about Aztec. Sullivan published their story. First in his columns, then in a book in 1950 called Behind the Flying Saucers. Sixty thousand copies sold. hate when people claim inside government knowledge - Tom' It became a sensation. People were fascinated. Here was proof, they thought, that the government had recovered not just one crashed saucer like Roswell, but multiple craft. Then in 1952, everything fell apart. An investigative reporter, guy named J.R. Kane from the San Francisco Chronicle, he dug into Nichols and Grant. Turns out they were running a con. They'd been selling these devices called doodlebugs to investors, claiming the machines could detect oil and gold using technology reverse-engineered from the Aztec crash. Kane did a sting operation, got them to hand over a sample of what they claimed was indestructible alien metal. Had it analyzed. Standard aluminum. The kind you'd find in any hardware store.