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Jan. 1, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:03:31
Edition 235 - Frank Thayer

Never heard of The Aztec incident? ... Did another Roswell happen in 1948?

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is the first edition of The Unexplained in 2016.
I don't know when you're going to hear this.
Maybe you'll hear this on the 1st of January, perhaps a couple of days into the new year, but I wish you sincerely everything that you would wish yourself in this year of 2016.
One thing that I am convinced of, in my own life experience, is that sometimes if you're looking for a little miracle to happen, it can.
And all you've got to do is sincerely want it.
So let's see what this year delivers.
I am going to make no predictions, and I think if you're a regular listener, you'll know why I won't.
Interesting Christmas period, really very quiet.
A lot of flooding, a lot of rain here in the UK, also in other parts of the world.
I know you've had your own flooding problems in the US.
But they're telling us here that it's all to do with the trajectory of the jet stream being further north.
I think that's right, that it has been in recent years.
And that's brought us ridiculous spring temperatures that mean that I'm sitting here now, and I'm not complaining, recording this with no heating on and wearing a t-shirt.
I've got about 15 degrees here, maybe 16, in the place where I do my recordings.
So that's how life stands at the moment.
It is, as I record this, the final few hours of the year.
The sun is beginning to go down on a beautiful sunny day.
And I guess, you know, in the quiet of the end of one year and the beginning of another, we do reflect, don't we, on the way life has been and what life could be.
A new year is a blank canvas.
And as artists of the world, then we can paint on it whatever we want.
Now, I'm going to do some shout-outs, not as many as usual, but I'm going to get through as many as I can before we get to the guest on this edition.
One thing to say before we do that, we're going to be telling a story of ufology.
It's about the Aztec incident, a claimed crash of an alien craft that was recovered and examined by U.S. officials.
Now, you may have heard about this before, but there's a new book out about it.
It is a subject and it is a case that has been debunked over the years.
And the man I'm going to speak to, Frank Thayer, who's one of the co-writers of a book about this, is going to tell us a number of reasons why it's been quite wrong to look askance at this particular UFO story.
One thing I do have to say, though, because it's needled away at me all over this Christmas holiday and into the new year.
Every day I turn on my computer and various news sites of various states of repute report a video or a picture or somebody's account of strange alien craft.
Now either there's a massive spike in UFO cases in the last few months or some of these are just fakes and used by some of these news websites to try and gain traffic.
I'm not sure.
But none of the stories that I've looked at over this period have been particularly convincing.
And some of them have just had all the imprints of hoax written all over them.
And tell me what you think.
Let's do those shout-outs now before I get myself into any more trouble.
Oh, by the way, thank you and happy new year to Adam, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot.
Thanks, Adam.
I know you're going to hear this for another great year of work.
And we're going to try and do big things in 2016, aren't we?
More details of that soon.
Okay, shout-outs.
Got to do them now.
Otherwise, they won't get on.
Mitch, thank you very much for your email, which I received today.
Andy and Bethany in Fazakali, Liverpool.
I wish you the very best for 2016 both.
Guradat, my good friend, nice to hear from you.
Gurdat.
Stephanie C. in Ohio, some nice words, Stephanie.
Chris in Auburn, California says, I sometimes listen to your show To and From Work on my 45-minute commute down the hill, mostly at bedtime when I'm winding down from the office.
A buddy and I used to watch the weather channel for hours as they covered from coast to coast, and I love hearing what the clouds are doing across the pond.
Here in the United Kingdom, it snowed once so far, and I'm around 1,500 feet elevation.
God, I'd love to live where you live.
Also says something about mainstream media, with which I cannot disagree, Chris.
You say it is a crock.
I won't actually say here on the unexplained what you say it is a crock of, but quite often I think it is indeed a crock.
Andy in London, good to hear from you in the last few days.
James Alan Murray in Portland, Maine, a place that I went to and really liked, says I'd just like to let you pass on the problem to your listeners who are finding books by your guests here in the USA overpriced.
Some people have been trying to buy books like David Paulitis books and others and finding them costing a great deal.
And James in Portland basically says that sometimes people try and sell them on Amazon, etc., at ridiculous markups.
So the cover price might be $25, might be $40, and people will try and bump up the prices when they resell them for hundreds.
And that's why this happens, says James.
Okay, thank you, James.
Gerald Dunbar on the island of Cochang.
Gerald, good to hear from you.
Happy New Year.
Kurt Foster really enjoyed Dr. Ron Mallet on time travel.
Had a few emails about that show.
Thank you very much.
Nick says, do I have any plans in 2016 to get some cryptozoologists on?
Yes, I do.
Casper, very interesting email.
Thank you very much.
Jim in Southern Ontario, Canada.
Good to hear from you.
Jim.
Dot Melton in BC, British Columbia, Canada.
Dot, thank you very much for your email.
Joe White, Joe, I'm going to check that info about time travel that you sent me.
Thank you.
Chaz in California.
Happy New Year, Chaz.
Thank you for your greeting.
Says, as a surfer, I'm very interested in mysterious and unknown things associated with the vast oceans of our planet.
Could be an interesting topic.
You're right.
Thank you for that, Chaz.
And finally, good wishes.
Come to me and I reflect them back to you, Drew, in Arizona.
If you'd like to get in touch with The Unexplained during 2016, I'd love to hear from you.
If you'd like to make a donation to the show, messages to me and donations, all done at the same place, the website, theunexplained.tv.
Please go there now.
And if you can send a message, tell me where you are and how you use this show.
And if you can make a donation, that would be great because we need all the rocket fuel we can to try and take this forward and develop it in 2016.
Right, let's get to Frank Fayer now and some new information about this fascinating case.
Frank, thank you very much for coming on.
I'm happy to be talking with you, Howard, and looking forward to discussing this with your audience.
Well, absolutely.
And when I got a news release about the book and about the research, I have to tell you, I knew nothing about the Aztec incident.
Did a little bit of reading about it and thought, I wonder why somebody hasn't done something more about this in the modern era.
I know they have in the past, but more recently they haven't.
And it seems that even though the debunkers have been at work and the story has had holes shot through it over many decades, it does seem, and you certainly saw this in it, that there is scope for further research.
Yes.
Well, the debunkers are like gophers.
They're always working.
And this is a phenomena that was buried after about 1953 as a hoax.
And one researcher said, well, all it's ever been is a hoax.
But once the research started to come out, it was obvious that this was a slam-dunk real event.
And in our book, it is proved beyond reasonable doubt.
So I think that this is something that the readers will find interesting, that we have the incident, we have the path of cover-up, we have the debunkers covered and showing how it disappeared since 1948 and only popped back into the culture, say in the 90s and maybe even 2000s.
Right.
When people presumably understood more about these things and also minds began to open somewhat.
Yes, fortunately.
And even I, and I grew up in New Mexico where it happened, I had no idea about the Aztec incident until the late 1970s, 1980s.
And I was, even Roswell, let's not forget, people think that Roswell was known from 1947, but it disappeared after one day.
Nobody knew about Roswell after one day.
And it was only after Stanton Friedman found Jesse Marcel that it became a book in 1980.
And all of a sudden, the idea of a crashed and recovered saucer was no longer outrageous.
And Aztec, it took many more years for that to become established.
Now, Stanton Friedman, I've met him in the flesh.
I've spoken with him many times.
He is described by many people as the father of modern ufology.
I know that he's given his backing to this project.
That must have made a big difference.
It really did.
And of course, he is a grand guy, and I like him very much, and I will put my money in his bank anytime.
And we are very grateful that he has looked at the research and says he thinks we've got a case here.
Now, I know nothing about you.
I've done some talking with one of your co-authors, Suzanne.
I know a little bit about her.
I know nothing at all about you, but I've been to your website, frankthayer.net, isn't it?
And you appear to do a lot of different things, don't you?
You don't just do ufology.
I'm a very ordinary guy with many, many unusual interests.
But ever since I was a newspaper reporter when I got out of college, I did stories in New Mexico about flying saucers.
And then I moved on from there.
I went into the service, came out.
I moved to Canada where I worked.
I taught journalism in Canada for 11 years.
And so UFO sort of dropped off my radar until later on when I returned to New Mexico and I began to go back over my old notes.
And then I read the Roswell incident and stumbled upon a book by William Steinman in about 2006.
And his UFO crash at Aztec really opened my eyes to the reality that the Aztec incident was not Roswell, it was different, and it was also real.
And in 2009, Scott Ramsey contacted me because of my website, and he said, hey, do you want to join the team and work on our book?
And I was all in, as they say.
And we've been working on it ever since.
So he's been at it for 30 years.
I've been at it for about six.
Now, most journalists, and I'm a journalist too, that's our training, isn't it?
We tend not to be starry-eyed pushovers.
We tend to be fairly analytical people.
And one thing I noticed, I don't know if did you write the news release about the book?
Somebody really good wrote that news release.
it was you, I could tell there was a journalist's hand behind it.
But what I'm saying...
Yeah, well, no.
I mean, there is a way that you get to the point you told a logical story, and it's very much appreciated because some of the news releases I look at for things are not that good.
But the reason I say that is that neither of us is a starry-eyed pushover.
What was it that spoke to you about this case, perhaps compared with others that we've heard of down the years that haven't been resurrected?
Let me say first that I am a romantic, but when it comes to looking at real events, I do have to see the proof.
And I saw the proof.
Here we had two interviews with people almost on their deathbeds who were on the Mesa on March 25th, 1948.
They saw the saucer.
One of them got up and walked around on it.
And then they were sworn to secrecy by the government when the military arrived.
And they didn't speak of it until very late in life.
Now, these two people did not know each other.
They were on the Mesa, but they did not know each other.
And when Scott Ramsey interviewed each one of them in two separate states, they told a story that was virtually identical.
And that is very tough to do.
Well, it's very tough to do when you're doing it five minutes after the incident.
If you're doing it, you know, decades and decades after the incident, it's extremely tough to do.
I agree.
And it means that That event was seared into their minds forever.
Let's talk about the event then.
For listeners in the UK and Europe, we have to explain, and I hope that my geology classes were right, but a mesa is a mountain with the top cutoff.
Is that right?
It's like a tabletop mountain.
It's a tabletop thing.
There's a flat top to it.
So what we're saying is that in 1948 at this place, Aztec, Aztec Canyon, yeah?
Aztec, New Mexico, and the canyon is named Heart Canyon.
Okay, Heart Canyon in Aztec.
We're saying that something questionable came down and landed right on top of the meso.
That's right.
Now, some policemen were traveling a highway, lonely highway between one town and another, and they saw this craft in the sky, and they followed it northwest toward the four corners where New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and Arizona meet.
And they, and all of a sudden, this craft seemed to be wobbling, and a rancher also saw this thing going headed north, and it hit one mesa by his ranch, struck sparks, but it kept on going.
It went directly up and north, and it did not crash on the mesa in Hart Canyon.
It made a controlled landing.
That is, it was just sitting there on the mesa, sort of tilted about five, ten degrees.
But at that time, the idea of a controlled landing if everybody was dead seems outrageous.
Today, drones can do it without even blinking an eye.
I mean, when we think of fighter aircraft, sometimes they'll almost touch ground and they'll scootle along and eventually the pilot will get the thing down.
That's what we're saying happened here.
But the thing is that apparently all the crew people in this saucer were dead at the time.
And maybe 14 to 16, the estimates vary, of little bodies were found inside that craft when they opened it up.
So when the thing landed, it didn't crash like Roswell.
Roswell was a horrific crash, but Aztec, it settled to the ground and was undamaged, absolutely undamaged.
And these oil field workers came out there just before dawn because they had heard about some fire near the mesa where it happened.
And there were some oil drip tanks at the bottom of this mesa.
And the oil company wanted to make sure that these tanks were not in danger.
And they got there and they found that there was no danger to the oil tanks at the bottom.
But they went up on top of the mesa where there was smoldering brush.
And there was this 100-foot diameter aluminum colored disc just leaning on the top.
Now, I've been there, and it is, the flat place on this mesa is just large enough to accommodate a 100-foot disc with a few feet around it with no problems.
And it's, can you imagine walking up on this thing absolutely unlike anything they've ever seen before?
But they were 18, 19 years old.
So they play around.
One of them got up and walked around on it.
A couple of the adults who were there, ranchers, said, hey, get off of there.
But they didn't.
They kept playing around.
One of them, who was later interviewed, looked at these portholes, which looked like mirrored sunglasses, and you have to get up close to it to look inside.
He looked in, right up close, and he saw two or three bodies slumped over a console.
And the only thing that damaged to this saucer, the only damage, seemed to be a hole in one of these portholes, about the size of a quarter, which is, I don't know, maybe the size of a shilling, but it was a round hole.
And it's speculated that perhaps the atmosphere leaked out and killed all these people.
But that's how they actually got into it.
There was no seams.
There was no rivets.
There was nothing to show that this thing was other than a one-piece casting.
Now, those oil field workers, would they have known about pressurization and that sort of thing then?
Because that was very much something of the jet age, wasn't it?
Yeah, it is.
And I look at myself when I was 18, 19.
What did I really know?
Of course, I thought I knew everything.
But I've learned since how little I do know.
But these guys were just young guys.
They were roughnecks, and they were working hard for a living.
And so this was just some bizarre entertainment.
And it was a couple hours later, maybe three hours later, that they saw something else they'd never seen, a helicopter.
1948, helicopters were not in service normally.
And they said, one of the guys said, I didn't know which was more strange to me, this disc sitting on the Mesa or that helicopter flying over the Mesa.
So clearly somebody somewhere important had been alerted about this.
That's right.
They knew it was there.
Now they knew it was there because New Mexico had very high-powered radar to protect Los Alamos National Laboratories.
Los Alamos is where the atomic bomb was developed, of course.
And so they wanted to protect that from the Soviets because in 1948, the Cold War was in full swing.
And so this is what happened.
And no one knows exactly why the saucer crashed or landed.
But that's one hole in it.
And the way they got in, it was very much like The Day the Earth Stood Still, the movie, which I'm sure that everybody over there has seen.
Oh, yes.
And they found this, they stuck a pole, a very long pole, through this hole and began poking around inside the cabin.
And they hit these buttons and the saucer opened up, just like in The Day the Earth Stood Still.
It just opened up.
And they were able to get in.
And that's when the military began to take out all these bodies and lay them out on the mesa.
And they began debriefing all the people, about 16 people who were there, including two policemen, one of which at least had followed the saucer all the way north to its resting place.
Now, we know that this isn't a populated area.
It's not a place where there are hundreds of thousands of people.
But is that the kind of place that you could get away with an operation of that size without people knowing and talking?
Absolutely.
Now, they fumbled the ball in Roswell and they let it out with a press release and then had to cover it up the next day.
But by Aztec, eight months later, they had their act together.
And they moved in on the Mesa, they swore everybody to secrecy, and then they cordoned off the area and spent two weeks getting the thing taken apart and transported to Los Alamos.
So you're saying that whereas at Roswell, it's pretty well documented that one or two people were caught with their pants down.
It wasn't well handled.
The news got out.
People were scarred by the experience.
But by the time this happened in 48, there were procedures in place and they clicked into gear.
Yes.
Obviously, the government knew these things were happening.
They knew they were flying and they had to have a procedure which they developed.
And even today, if there's an incident, we'll never know about it because they're so good at covering it up and recovering the debris or whatever it might be.
Can I just say for my listeners, the audio quality is very good.
We're doing one of these Skype digital connections.
Frank is using the microphone in his laptop netbook, and you might be able to hear a little bit of what I think is fan noise in the background.
I think, Frank, that's either AirCon or the fan of your computer, but it's not putting me off particularly, but I just want to explain to people what it is.
Thank you.
Okay, but if you can be as close to that microphone as possible.
So here we have something that has happened, has been responded to in a very efficient way.
As far as we are aware, and we'll get into the question of how we know this, what happened then?
Okay, now we have all these people being debriefed.
They are being sent away.
The site is cordoned off.
The military brings many resources in.
They put guards on the surrounding mountains.
And it was a very high priority operation for them.
They brought in low-boy trucks, the kind that were used to haul tanks from the battlefield.
And as far as we know, they broke the saucer apart in three pieces.
We know this because Frank Scully wrote his book Behind the Flying Saucers in 1950.
And this book was reviewed as a hoax.
It sold 50,000 copies.
It should have been the great revelation of the flying saucer.
But you're saying that that work and that research was dunned down and was popularly debunked and knocked because people simply didn't believe that something like that and the operation that happened after it could occur.
That's right.
It just didn't make sense in 1950 culture.
But later on, as we have shown in the book, The Aztec UFO Incident, that Frank Scully was a good journalist.
He had his facts together, and everything he has in his book is accurate, as we have proved later on.
Okay, you say that you proved it.
How do you go about doing that, especially with the passage of time?
That was tough, but thanks to William Steinman and, of course, Scott Ramsey, began to compare things.
William Steinman went to Aztec on his own in 1982, and he looked around and he began to compare what he found with what was in Scully's book.
Now, in our book, written a chapter on comparing Frank Scully's observations with Steinman's.
Now, Scully was never an Aztec.
He relied on his sources, the scientists, for his information.
But Steinman went to the site and he found it absolutely, precisely exactly what Scully said it was.
Where it was, what kind of territory it was, how far it was from the town of Aztec, and so forth.
And that's pretty hard to refute.
There are people who say that when there have been, and there's a lot of evidence about this, when there have been air crashes of our craft and a plane has come down, even decades later, you cannot do a complete and total cleanup of a site.
There will still be signs and pieces of metal.
I saw only last night a documentary about something similar, where they were finding numbered pieces of wreckage decades after the site had supposedly been cleaned up.
Are there any signs of this thing today?
I guess is what I'm coming to.
I agree with you.
In a normal aircraft crash, the debris is never completely sanitized.
But with this case, you had a craft from another world absolutely intact.
No pieces came off of it.
And when it came apart in three sections, they hauled it away.
Now, what was left on the Mesa, however, was a lot of military debris.
Later on, Steinman and, of course, Ramsey found all manner of things from ration tins to ammunition clips, old canteens, mess kits, and materials such as that, on top of this mesa in the middle of nowhere where you wouldn't expect the military to have camped.
But of course, the U.S. military, just like our military here in the U.K., they hold exercises, they put on missions of various kinds in different places to either to try out equipment, test the men, or whatever.
And how do you know that this wasn't some kind of exercise?
We don't.
Now, one other thing that you have on the mesa that is unusual, there is what they call the concrete block.
It was a piece of concrete that was cast into the mesa, which we Have assumed were formed for the base of a crane that was used to haul, to lift the pieces and put them on the trucks.
There's no reason for this concrete block to have been poured on the mesa.
And so, this is one other thing that was covered in the book.
And by the way, the chapter discusses all the alternative explanations that could explain Aztec and then shows why they were not true.
Well, it was a bit of a tense time immediately after the Second World War.
And look, I can tell you that you can go to various parts of the UK and you will find concrete blocks in places, and they were the remnants of gun emplacements.
Yes.
But this one was very small.
It was about three feet long and, you know, two or three feet deep and so on.
It just, it doesn't seem to fit with any kind of other explanation.
However, this is circumstantial.
And so we have to admit that if somebody comes up with another explanation, it'll have to be considered.
There are two facets to telling a story.
We both know this as journalists.
There's the evidence of your eyes and witness evidence of things that have been seen.
And then there's talking to people.
What are the human accounts of this that we know of?
The human accounts, we've already mentioned the two interviews with the participants.
There was one other interview that was done with a parishioner of a preacher who was one of the people on the Mesa that day and discussing how he came back to his parish in Colorado the same night, March 25th, and he called his deacon and his son and the deacon's son, and he said he had to tell him this.
He was told not to say anything, but he had tears in his eyes.
He said his whole, the framework of his world was shaken by what he saw in your Aztec that morning.
So that's one other interview.
There are other people who have been talked to and who have known they were there or they knew somebody who was there to confirm the story.
But again, you're talking about 16, 18 people, and most of them have died, of course.
As Stanton Friedman says, we're always in a race with the undertaker.
And we go from there to the people, the military people.
Why haven't all these old military people said, yes, I was there for the recovery?
And they don't understand the nature of military service.
And I would say this, that in 1948, if you told me to keep a secret for national security, we totally believe the government, we would accept that and never speak of it again.
We're talking about a different mindset, aren't we?
People were very much conditioned to this.
This wasn't an era of whistleblowing and getting your name in the papers.
This was an era of doing your duty and keeping quiet.
You stated it very well, Howard.
And I think that even today, because I've been in the military, I knew how to obey orders.
And if somebody said, you do this or you don't do this, I either did it or didn't do it.
So I really think that the fact that all these people who were there, who recovered, who worked on research or whatever it might be, they kept their secrets right to the very end.
A great American broadcaster who I was a big fan of, Paul Harvey, used to say, now the rest of the story.
So here we have a craft that is supposedly cut into pieces, 16 dead beings removed, everything taken away for analysis.
What happens then and where does it happen, do we think?
Now we're into speculation.
We know it disappeared to Los Alamos.
Los Alamos was one of the most closely guarded cities in America at the time.
And it's still, you have to have a secret clearance to get on the base, even if you're going to change bottles in the Coke machines.
But let's say that it made it to Los Alamos.
Now, we had eight to nine scientists who worked on it.
These people did not always keep their mouths shut.
Now, they came, they went to California and they talked to this oil man, Silas Newton, who was a geophysicist, by the way, and they knew him before the war, World War II, and so they talked to him afterwards.
In 1949, as Scully puts it in his book, that they thought it was going to be, everything was going to be released within a few months.
And so they talked to Silas Newton, the oil man, and they talked to Scully.
Then all of a sudden, in 1950, what Scully says, men who would tell a story for nothing in 1949 would not tell it for $20 million in 1950.
The government put the lid down and said, this is going to be the highest secret in the nation, and it has been ever since.
You say the government put the lid down, these people who were freely telling their stories in the period immediately after this thing.
What exactly was done to or said to them?
We don't know.
They just never talked.
Some of them had newspaper stories in 1949, and all of a sudden they said nothing.
But one thing you do say is that the media was pretty tightly sewn up about this.
Yes.
And we have to remember that in World War II, the mass media was very patriotic, and they voluntarily censored their work.
I mean, if we really knew what Bomber Harris was doing over Germany at night and what the Allies were doing during the day, today we would be appalled at the carnage that was being wrecked in Germany.
But yet that was the only way to win the war.
So the media, once the word went down from Washington saying, we don't talk about flying saucers.
They do not exist.
That is the policy that's, even by Associated Press and other news agencies, it's held today.
You only publish a flying saucer story if there is a mundane explanation for it or that it's something you can smile about on TV.
Well, it seems to be the way that the media works, although that does seem to be changing to an extent.
You know, the only stories you see in our papers here are ones that tend to say something's been seen in the sky.
It was kind of cigar-shaped.
Here's a picture that somebody took of it.
And then at the end of it, you get somebody saying, but actually, it was probably this.
That's right.
That is the narrative that is used by almost all journalists.
Even with that, as Stanton Friedman has shown, statistically, the more education a person has, the more likely they are to accept the reality of extraterrestrial visitation.
And that's just the numbers show it that.
All right, this craft was cut into pieces, and that was a big operation, put on flatbed trucks, taken away to Los Alamos.
The 16 beings within were presumably taken there.
Where is all this stuff now?
Well, I think we would love to know.
Everybody speculates.
I would say that in 1949 or 1950, that the Great Center was a foreign technology branch at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.
They were there to analyze all foreign material that they could get.
So I think that would be a secure place.
Roswell's material was taken to Wright-Patterson.
And I would assume that the bodies and the Aztec sections were probably taken to Wright-Patterson first.
Some people say that eventually everything went to Area 51 in Nevada, but no one's been able to prove that.
And some have tried, but it's been a tough sell.
Okay, before we go on to the next section of this, I just want to ask you about your sound again.
Do you have a fan or something running there, Frank?
Because it is slightly intrusive.
Okay, I can.
Whatever it is has just gone off.
The central heating system turns on its fan.
Ah, okay, that's what that is.
Okay, well, we'll cope with it.
But if you can be as close to that microphone, because I really do want to tell this story.
Yes, well, I'm going to lean over and make sure that I stay as close as possible.
That's great.
Now, that's an improvement.
Thank you.
All right.
So what, now you have a couple of accounts.
You have some eyewitness stuff.
You have a description of a piece of concrete on the top of this mesa.
But you're saying with this new book that it's all compelling now, and you have compelling proof is a word that you use.
Where is and what is the proof?
We begin, the foundation are those two non-colluding interviews that establish the detail chapter and verse for what happened.
We have other supplementary interviews for people whose families were familiar with it, who knew what happened.
And we have another, in one chapter we talk about a fellow in the U.S. Air Force who supposedly was there for the recovery.
And he talked to a fellow Aztec resident when he was in Britain on station.
And he confirmed that he was there for what happened to the craft after it was recovered.
So we have that.
We have the preacher interview.
We have, and Scott Ramsey in 2010, I believe it was, he had an expedition to see if he could show how they moved the craft from the Mesa down a canyon to the roads and off to Los Alamos to show that it could be done.
So there was that.
That is a logistical proof.
And I think that there's probably other things like this.
And I think that we have to go back to Frank Scully.
We have to look at William Steinman and some of the things that they had to say based on their own research before Scott Ramsey got involved or before I got involved, certainly.
But it came to pass that I accept this incident as real.
And I think that if people read the book, it is set up as though, here's the case, here's the opposition, here's what the debunkers and skeptics say, and here's what we think is the compelling proof.
And we present our case to the jury in the final chapter.
The one thing that is always trotted out around stories like this is that you don't know, and I don't know, we might have an idea, what our governments are working on behind the scenes.
And I'm even talking about now.
I mean, there are people working on aircraft of kinds that we haven't seen and we may not see for years, we may never see.
How do we know that what crashed there wasn't something that was secret, belonged to the governments, perhaps belonged to a number of governments, and obviously they want to keep technology, just like the stealth fighter, which remained secret and private for years, they want to keep technology that exotic quiet, wouldn't they?
Excellent question.
And we know that, for example, there was a book by a New York journalist named Jacobson who said that the Aztecs or the Roswell saucer was really Joe Stalin's flying saucer that he sent over for propaganda purposes, and he had actually bred some dwarf humans to scare the Americans.
So stories are rife.
But yes, technology is always ahead of what the public understands.
But this particular saucer had no means of propulsion.
There was no jets, no motors.
It was completely sealed device.
And it's presumed that it was a magnetic field propulsion type of thing, which I think the government, our governments, have developed now.
I think the Germans developed something like this in World War II, but it was not practical.
There's a lot of evidence for that stuff.
Now, we were saying at the beginning of this that this craft, unlike Roswell, did a little bit of hovering and skipping and skimming, which is how it came to rest on the Mesa as it did.
Are there potential bits of evidence elsewhere in the places that it touched in the process of coming down?
I'm glad you mentioned that, Howard.
The rancher who saw it fly over his place just before dawn said that it was headed north and it struck the mesa across from his ranch.
Now, the team has gone to this mesa and shown where a large flake of rock had broken off that mesa and fell as debris to the to the bottom.
So that sort of comports with the rancher's statement and what he saw.
Well, certainly if it was the same kind of damage in the same kind of place, it might.
But of course, we know that rock weathers for other reasons.
That's why there are mesas in the first place.
There are always alternative explanations.
This rancher was so impressed with what he saw, this wobbling saucer headed north, that he went to a nearby little town where there was a telephone, and he made a long-distance call to Albuquerque to contact the Air Force to tell them what he had seen.
And at this time, New Mexico had very few telephones.
Private telephones were almost unknown outside of the big cities.
And when I was a kid, we didn't have a telephone in the house until the early 1950s.
And so he was that impressed with it to make a long-distance call from the store where they had a, you get into the store even before it opened to use the telephone if you needed to.
So that's something else.
And presumably he wasn't just talking to Lily Tomlin.
He was talking to somebody, you know, professional.
What was he told?
He was told, they thanked him for the information, and he was told not to worry about it.
But it could have been his phone call, say, 5.30 in the morning or whatever it was, that alerted them to say, okay, we know where this thing is, and we've got to get our material together from Camp Hale in Colorado, which is north of the New Mexico border.
I suppose they could have come from Los Alamos or from Albuquerque.
But you have to remember that there were probably more military personnel in the state of New Mexico in 1948 than there were civilians.
Because of the nuclear bomb program.
Or White Sand's Proving Ground, as it was called then.
Got to explain my reference to Lily Tomlin, by the way, for listeners in the UK, people who might have forgotten or weren't old enough.
Lily Tomlin played a character who operated a phone switchboard.
That's what I was saying.
Long time ago and far away, but very funny.
But the point that I was trying to make is that obviously his call was rooted to somebody in the military who would have had something to say about that and would have known what to do.
That's right.
And the fact that it was important enough for him to make a long-distance call shows that he believed he saw something very unusual.
Okay, I don't doubt in the book, you know, I've read about the book.
I haven't actually held a copy of the book in my hand.
I don't doubt you tell a cogent tale.
You've got a journalistic background.
You wrote a great news release about it.
I'm sure it's a great story.
Once you get a great story like that, based on what you think might well be fact, what do you do next?
Where do you go now?
That's, wow, what a question.
I haven't thought beyond the book.
I thought that I was, I think, committed to the idea.
I accepted the evidence.
I wanted to write this book.
Where do we go from here?
I think that Scott Ramsey has, he says, something like 55,000 pages of documentation.
He's been to the U.S. Air Force headquarters where they keep all the crash data to find out if there was any aircraft in the area.
He has got government information, and I would expect to keep searching for potential witnesses or families of witnesses who might come forth to corroborate what they have read in the book.
And I hope when you get your book, your copy of the book, that you are able to read it and make further commentary on your take on the subject.
Yeah, and we'll talk about it again because it must fire within you the desire to know more about this.
And of course, time is always our enemy.
The clock is always ticking down.
It is nearly 70 years ago, so the number of people alive who might have had some direct experience of this, perhaps through a family member, that number is going to be diminishing all the time.
That's correct.
And this is something that's really not in the book, but it's something that's, I don't know if you can correlate it or not.
But here we have all these guys, these young, roughnecks, uneducated, well, they had a high school education on the Mesa that morning.
Strangely enough, them and the ranchers who were there profited and prospered in their lives.
Many of them became very rich.
One of them was even governor for a day in New Mexico at one point.
Now, what are the odds that everybody who worked on the oil rigs would get rich in succeeding years?
There's no way of ever proving any of that.
This is just, that's idle speculation, but it's kind of fun to think about.
So you think that potentially they were told or it was implied to them that they need to keep quiet about this and then somebody engineered it for them to do well in their life?
Why not?
What's an interesting thought?
Remember Matt Brazil in the Roswell incident, all the movies we've seen.
Matt Brazil didn't have two nickels and within a few weeks, a couple of weeks after he was taken in for interrogation by the Army Air Force, he had a brand new pickup truck.
He was able to buy a frozen food locker in a nearby town and so on.
He was able to quit his job as a ranchhand.
So we're kind of implying, aren't we?
And I've heard this sort of stuff before, that there's a whole tier of people who have the capability and have the wherewithal to say, okay, this is how it's going to be.
You've got to keep quiet about this.
It'll go well for you if you do.
And if you don't, then we don't even want to think about what might happen.
Yes.
And we know from Roswell, many of the 600 witnesses who were interviewed, many of them said they received death threats from the U.S. government.
And so I'm sure that that was the implied stick as opposed to the carrot.
It seems to me, and we're coming back to a point that I know I've made before, that the book that you've got now is only a starting point on this.
Well, I would hope so.
You never know where things are going to go.
And for example, the idea of identifying the major scientist who revealed or opened the door to Frank Scully back in 1949, 1950, we've never known his name because Scully refused to tell anybody the names of his sources.
And even though his reputation was assaulted, even though people, Silas Newton, the oil man, was actually set up for a trial in Denver on a fraud charge.
And the whole idea of this was to land Aztec in the hoax basket and keep it there.
But we have now found who we think is the one scientist that Scully spent most of his time with and with Silas Newton.
So there may still be sources that we can dig up.
They may be secondary sources, but they will have evidence that will confirm rather than deny the reality of Aztec.
In the meantime, like we said, this thing was cut up and taken away, and it must, if that happened, it must be somewhere.
It would be kind of nice to try and get a trail to that, to the wreckage, to the evidence.
Let me make sure your listeners understand that this saucer was not cut.
It came apart.
It was held together by pins that they found inside.
The material itself was very tough and they could not cut it.
So the saucer came apart.
And that's amazing.
And that's something that Frank Scully said.
The scientists told him.
And apparently that's how they got it apart to take it down the canyon and off to Los Alamos where it would be safe.
Well, isn't that interesting?
I mean, that ties in very much to Jesse Marcel and Jesse Marcel Jr.
Metal materials that could not be cut were incredibly resilient.
Well, if something that landed on this mesa was made of similar materials, we wouldn't be able to cut it.
But if they built it as a kit that could be taken apart, then they could find a way of getting it apart.
Yes, and today, of course, we accept that their technology may have been hundreds or thousands of years ahead of what we had.
But I would say that we have been working diligently on it since then.
Difficult, isn't it, to take the story forward because here we have a world where you can read all sorts of stuff online now.
I was only reading the other day about a group of ufologists or whatever they were talking about a discovery in Austria of a thing that looked like a cell phone but 800 years old with strange characters in the place where numbers would be.
Amazing.
Well, amazing, but great potential for hoax material.
That's the difficulty, isn't it, that we've got now, that you might well be telling a story that's perfectly true, but the waters are getting cloudier and muddier all the time.
Let me sort of divert to disinformation.
One of the courses that I've taught for 20, 30 years is propaganda and public opinion.
In my study of propaganda, propaganda is just an amazing thing.
It creates a mythology, a reality of its own, that the public buys into.
Now, disinformation means that you tell lies, you tell the truth from spurious sources, you muddy the water so much that nobody can ever get to the real facts.
And I think that's what's been done in the UFO field.
The disinformation has made it seem so strange that you can't really accept any story on face value.
But there was no apparent disinformation about the Aztec incident, was there?
Nobody came out and said, well, you may have heard some scuttlebuttsome talk about this thing, but it was a weather balloon.
No, they never did do this because it was not known in 1948.
Nobody knew.
The few people who were on the Mesa were the only ones who saw it, the only ones who knew about it.
And so until Scully, Frank Scully, brought out his book in 1950, there was no concern.
The government thought that it was completely buried.
Then Scully brings out his book Behind the Flying Saucers, and suddenly it's a bestseller, 50,000 copies on the street, and they had to do something about it.
Well, then we have the dog in the manger, and that is J.P. Kahn, who was a rich guy, born rich, and he wanted to buy the story from Scully before the book came out.
Scully refused to sell it to him, and so he decided he was going to destroy Scully and the sources.
And he wrote an article in True Magazine in 1952.
And that story was about the frauds.
He destroyed the character of oilman Silas Newton and his friend Leo Gabauer and took them to court, had them prosecuted.
And because they were prosecuted for fraud, therefore, it is demonstrated, QED, that there was no such thing as the Aztec flying saucer.
Okay, well, and what is it that speaks to you about this, that tells you that the accounts that you've collected, collated, and looked back on, that these are correct and they're true accounts.
Apart from the fact, as we've said, that there are two people who don't actually live together.
They're a long way apart, but they tell the same story.
Is that the linchpin of what you're saying?
That forms the foundation, or the concrete block, if you want to put it that way, of the story.
And I think that the more you read, the more that we dig into the William Steinman case, the Frank Scully case, and the evidence, the people we've talked to, the documents.
And in the book, there's, for example, there is an incident where somebody claimed to have photos of the Aztec saucer, and they were going to sell them to the government.
The government put a lot of effort, and there's a lot of documents about this, to try and grab this guy and get those photos, but they never...
What you're saying is very important there, Frank.
If they tried to get the photographs, if they existed, blocked and stopped and removed, you're saying there's a paper trail that explains that process?
Yes, there's a couple of the documents relating to this incident are found in the book and to show that the government was spending resources to try and locate these photographs.
Now, if there was absolutely nothing to be done about Aztec, they wouldn't care if anybody had photos for sale.
Who would care if someone photoed a Frisbee at that time?
I don't know if the Frisbee was available in 1950-51 or not.
Anyway, that's another story.
I first saw one when I was a kid, probably in the very early 70s.
So I'm not sure when they were around in America.
But look, the documents, that's fascinating, isn't it?
If you can find documents and you found some of them that suggest that the government was trying to remove possible evidence, was making a whole lot of effort about this, exactly as you say, why would they bother doing it if there wasn't something in the case?
Now, let's also consider that somebody said, well, it was a V-2 rocket that crashed.
They were testing rockets at White Sands Proving Ground.
No, the V-2 wouldn't have made it all the way up there to Aztec.
It didn't have the range.
It was made for going from Pinamunda to London, and that was it.
And so we have the idea of a crash, an aircraft crash, that would have been recorded, even if it's just a crash of a trainer.
Film is taken, black and white photos are taken, reports are filed, and these all go to Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, and they're on file.
You can find them.
There is nothing to talk about a crash or a forced landing or anything else anywhere in the Aztec area during that period.
Okay.
It just doesn't exist.
And what about, which is strange in itself, what about the accounts of those people who supposedly saw this?
Now, they would have described the beings, presumably.
How did they describe the beings?
The beings were described as little guys.
I'm using Stanton Freeman's words.
But the little guys, they were about three to four feet tall, hairless, and they appeared to have been burned somehow.
In other words, their skin was very dark, dark brown.
And that was how they described them.
And they were wearing one-piece suits of cloth that didn't have any rank insignia or anything on them.
But the suits themselves were not burned.
And there were 14 to 16 of them.
There's no description that we can find of the fingers or that they had large eyes and they had, I say they were hairless, and they didn't appear to have a nose.
They had nostrils and a slit for a mouth.
That sounds very, very much the same as Roswell.
Very familiar.
Very familiar.
Okay, the documents I think are where the future of this thing lies.
Will you be trying to get hold of any more paperwork about this?
I can tell you, I so much admire Scott Ramsey and Suzanne Ramsey.
This guy is a bulldog researcher.
He never quits.
He never stopped looking.
He and his wife have flown to 29 states to look up witnesses, to find documents.
And they were the first to discover that the Frank Scully archives existed in Laramie, Wyoming, at the university there.
And there were wire recordings.
You wouldn't remember wire recordings, but I've seen a wire recorder before tape recordings.
Even though the BBC used them in wartime, they recorded on pieces of wire rather than tape.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
But there are wire recordings that are stored at the University of Wyoming in Laramie.
And they have been transcribed onto CDs, and they include Silas Newton, the guy who first made the lecture.
Now we come to the reason why Frank Scully wrote his book.
University of Denver, 1950, spring, March.
Silas Newton comes out on stage at the university to speak to a basic science group, Science 101 or whatever it was, and he tells them about a flying saucer that was recovered in New Mexico, less than 500 miles from Denver, which would have been Aztec.
And we have that full recording of his lecture.
It's amazing, great quality sound, and I've listened to it more than once.
And I think that it's possible that those will be made available to researchers if they want to listen to this.
Well, I'd be very keen to hear them.
I'd be very keen to put them on here.
What is, I should have asked you this at the beginning, what is the dynamic between you and the Ramseys?
There are four people, aren't there, involved in this book.
You are but one.
Well, aside from the fact that I really like these people, for some reason, we have formed an excellent team.
Like I say, I so much admire Scott and Suzanne and their research abilities.
My skill lies primarily in writing.
I'm a word guy.
People ask me, what do you do?
I don't say I'm a professor.
I say I write stuff.
And so Among the three of us, we have put together what we think is, and we hope, is one of the best flying saucer books ever written.
We've got the footnotes, we've got the chapter notes, we've got all this kind of thing that many flying saucer books never rose to the level.
So we'd like to set the bar a little higher for research in the future.
What kind of feedback have you been getting about it so far?
Well, so far it's mainly positive.
There's one fellow who lives in my town here in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and he grew up in Aztec and never heard about the Aztec incident.
And he is a skeptic.
And he and I sit down and he tells me all the things that are wrong with the research.
And we have a very good time talking.
We get along very well.
I think that he is very necessary to the ongoing research.
You need skeptics.
You need people who challenge you and say, well, I don't think this is right.
And you have to go back and make sure that you have the dots on the I's and the crosses on the T's.
Sounds to me like you're already working on edition two.
You know, the first book came out in 2012.
There were a lot of holes in it, and it was privately published.
It's become a collector's item now.
But this new book by Career Press is, we think, the almost state of the art.
But, you know, as a journalist, you'll appreciate this.
The minute you see your stuff in print, you find an error.
Absolutely.
That goes for audio as well.
You know, when you record something, the moment I put out one of these podcasts, I then think, did I really say that?
Yeah, exactly.
So it's a never-ending story, isn't it, really?
It's a work that is...
There's a bridge in Scotland.
The Fourth Bridge had to be closed recently for some important works.
But they start painting it, and then they get to the end of it, and they painted it, and then they have to start again at the other end.
They have to go back to the beginning because it's a constant process.
Same with anything to do with research, I think.
I think you've described it very well.
Well, I wish you well painting the fourth bridge then, Frank.
And it's nice to talk with you.
And we coped with the vagaries of technology.
Please tell me what happens about this.
Let me know about the reaction to it.
If there are any updates, if you get hold of those sound recordings, if there's any new evidence, you know, we need to do this again.
I've got your email, and I'm still excited about this incident, and I hope we have many more years to work on it.
If people want to know about it, want to know about the book, want to know about you and the Ramsey's and the investigation and the research, is there a one-stop shop?
Well, you can go to my website, frankthair.net, or you can go to Aztec 1948, the Aztec incident of 1948.
There's a website for the book, and you should be able to find it there as well.
But we, both myself and the Ramseys, welcome any kind of email questions, and we love to talk to people about this.
I don't think we're going to get tired of it anytime soon.
I can tell that just by talking with you.
You know, the one thing about being a journalist, and first of all, I trained, it's the way they used to do things.
If you wanted to go on the radio, you first of all had to train as a print journalist.
So I went on a course where I had to write newspaper copy first for six months, and then I did six months of radio.
But it was six months of writing newspaper copy.
And sometimes you get a great story, and then they'd sit you down and make you talk about it.
And because a great story is a great story, you know, as journalists, we still, it doesn't matter how old we are, how young we are, we get excited.
And to be able to tell the story that you've written is not easy, is it?
No.
And of course, as a journalism professor, I teach you have to learn to write print news before you can write broadcast news.
You're so very right.
Oh, we need to talk about that one of these days.
Frank Fayer, thank you very much and Happy New Year.
Happy New Year to you, Howard.
The Voice and the Thoughts of Frank Fayer on the Aztec UFO incident all the way back in 1948.
Fascinating story.
Fascinating case.
Fascinating man.
I'll put a link to him, the book and his work on my website, theunexplained.tv, and you can check it out there.
Also, if you'd like to leave a donation or send a message to me, you can do that through the website, follow the links there, and it'll happen for you.
Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster, for his work through 2015 and now starting 2016.
And I will have some news about this show coming soon.
Hopefully, the guest on the next edition should be, my fingers, you can't see it, but my fingers are crossed here, should be David Icke.
So it'll be a great welcome return for David.
And we have a lot of ground to catch up on.
Until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
Please, in 2016, stay safe, stay calm, and please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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