On March 25th, 1948, reports came that a fourth unidentified flying object came down in the vicinity of Los Alamos Nuclear Power Plant, near Aztec, New Mexico, with 16 dead extraterrestrial bodies on board.
Journalist and author, Frank Scully was the first to write about the incident in his book, Behind the Flying Saucer, in 1949. However, in the mid 1950s, the story was exposed as a hoax fabricated by two of Scully’s witnesses, Silas M. Newton and Leo A. Gebauer as part of a fraudulent scheme to sell fake alien technology.
In the early 1970s, new claims and findings started to come out confirming the Aztec story was real thanks to a decades-long investigation carried by researchers Scott and Susanne Ramsey alongside Dr. Frank Thayer, who managed to interview some of the direct witnesses before they passed away, and compiled over 55,000 classified intelligence documents – including the Hottel memo, in a book titled, The Aztec UFO incident, that was published in 2015.
According to the investigators, in the early morning of March 25th, 1948, patrolman Manuel Sandoval was following a strange light in the sky which appeared to be a spacecraft moving slowly over the desert of New Mexico.
After few hours in pursuit, the officer observed the craft wobbling back and forth before it soft-landed on a mesa in Hart Canyon, about 11 miles away from Aztec, New Mexico, and 100 miles away from the El Vado high-powered radar installation that operated in the area at the time. There, over 20 people including the inhabitants of the area, as well as workers from the El Paso Oil Company including World War II Navy Veteran Doug Nolan and Bill Ferguson also saw the craft laying on a plateau on top of the mesa and gathered around it.
The oilfield workers happened to be at a close proximity of the landing site due to a bush fire that threatened to damage their drip storage tanks located nearby below the mesa.
According to Scott and Susanne Ramsey, the witnesses didn’t think anything extraterrestrial when they got to the craft. They thought it was a new type of airplane that belongs to the U.S Army Air Force making an emergency landing, but couldn’t identify any common feature to it such as bolts, screws, signs of welding or even a landing gear.
They described the craft as lenticular in shape measuring about 100 feet in diameter with a dull aluminium-looking color to it. It had a raised glass-like dome on its top and a smaller one on its bottom.
As Nolan was walking around the craft to get a closer look at the dome, he could see through its surface two bodies collapsed over a control panel. The dome also had a quarter-size hole, in which Ferguson stuck a long pole and somehow hit a switch inside the craft, causing its hatch to open up.
Inside the craft, the workers saw 4 child-like dead bodies in the main cabin and 10 others lying on the floor who did not look human. The beings were described as measuring one meter or less in height, wearing odd metallic suits and looking burned and dehydrated. It was believed that the beings were exposed to the high level of RF radiation emitted by the El Vado radar system which caused their death and brought their craft down.
Soon after, the military arrived and took control of the area. They interrogated everyone involved and confiscated their cameras and films. Some of the witnesses, as told by Nolan in his testimony, were even taken individually and locked up as prisoners for debriefing. They proceeded to a high-security recovery operation that took approximately two weeks with all the remains taken to the Los Alamos Laboratory for scientific study.
All the witnesses who knew how to keep silent were later made millionaires and the story of Aztec was buried for the next 60 years.
