The other Roswell

This is an incredibly dragging documentary about a once famous UFO case, the 1948 saucer crash in Aztec, New Mexico, United States. It happened after the 1947 Roswell incident and was actually more famous for a number of years. The main reason was that the Aztec crash was seriously treated by journalist Frank Scully in two articles and a best-selling book, “Behind the Flying Saucers”.

Unfortunately for Scully, the case was exposed as a hoax just a few years later. It seems Scully´s main sources, Silas Newton and Leo A Gebauer, were notorious conmen who had tried to sell a “doodlebug” supposedly based on alien technology from the downed saucer! (A doodlebug is a miraculous device with the help of which one can supposedly find oil faster than with any standard method.) Newton and Gebauer were convicted of fraud in 1953, and after this the Aztec incident faded into obscurity…until now. UFO researcher Scott Ramsey has reopened the case and believes it to be a genuine one. He is interviewed in this documentary, together with Stanton Friedman (who popularized the Roswell crash) and Nick Redfern, British author of books about things occult and paranormal. Weirdly for a UFO documentary, a non-token skeptic is also featured, a certain Karl Pflock.

My conclusion after watching this material is that it´s *possible* that something crashed in Aztec that day, and that the two con artists knew too much about it, which may explain why the FBI were keeping tabs on them. But what was it? Roswell was a classified weather balloon used by USAF to spy on the Soviets, so chances are that Aztec was something similar, perhaps a spy plane of some sort. As usual, the story didn´t lose anything in retelling, Newton and Gebauer got wind of it, and then tricked Scully to promote it. After reading John Michael Greer´s “The UFO Phenomenon” and Greg Bishop´s “Project Beta”, I believe that many UFOs are really earthly military aircraft and similar gadgets. Sometimes, UFO lore is used as a smokescreen *by the military itself* to hide the fact that what crash landed was really a piece of USAF hardware (non-enhanced by alien tech). This has been misinterpreted by US ufologists as a conspiracy to hide the truth about aliens!

That being said, my main objection to “Aztec 1948 UFO Crash” is that it´s quite boring and contains a lot of filler. You probably need to be a hard line UFO buff to enjoy this production. If you are, I readily concede that you will find it interesting.

And yes, the X-Files character Dana Scully is named after Frank Scully.