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AZTEC - By Michael McClellan, 1974

The obituary columns of our daily newspapers alphabetically list the demise of individuals who, unless celebrities, are noteworthy of no more than an inch or so of space declaring that their existence of being had departed its mortal shell. The shell decays and disappears. For a brief moment in time, lives are disrupted - however, soon return to normal. Death temporarily takes a back seat. Mortal matters take precedence over memories.

Back in 1973 and 74, one of my group’s investigators (Mike McClellan) investigated the Aztec case as it was then being espoused by a charismatic charlatan named Professor Robert Spencer Carr. Carr’s story would later become the format of the modern Roswell Myth. Many of today’s UFO enthusiasts are far too young to recall Professor Carr, while somewhat older saucer fans seem to conveniently ignore and forget his presence and questionable contribution to UFOlogical history.

Here’s the rest of the story as Mike reports it, with my commentary that may serve to “clarify” how the Roswell myth developed, took specific form and grew into the thriving New Mexico tourist and entertainment industry it is today. We might also keep in mind that for some individuals the city of Roswell is a saucer Mecca of sorts, and small packets of authentic Roswell soil are now being offered to the faithful for just $9.95 plus shipping from Staten Island, New York.(?)

However, Mr. McClellan has left us a valuable legacy of in-depth researching and investigation into the Aztec Hoax, as well as the key to the Roswell Myth’s birth. For those who read on, the story isn’t very pretty, however, it is factual and may be something of a revelation to the objective saucer aficionado.

          --- Matt Graeber 

Probably the most famous and remembered death is that of Jesus Christ's. From that point historians may argue over the second most important death in the world. Most likely they would never be in agreement. Or is it possible that the second to the thirteenth important and historical deaths may have occurred very recently? Even in our century? In fact, could they have occurred twenty-seven years ago? According to Robert Spencer Carr, a retired professor, they may have.

At a press conference in 1974, Carr revealed information which either surpasses all other news of our day or is the fantasy of an imaginative mind comparable to Isaac Asimov or Gene Rodenberry (Star Trek).

My primary encounter with Carr's story was while I was stirring coffee and listening to an excited secretary speak about a spaceship which had reportedly crashed in a desert area. Lifeless alien occupants had been removed from the craft and preserved. She had heard the story on the radio and, while not sure of the details, thought that it recently occurred.

Robert Spencer Carr was a kindly old gent who looked very much like a Kentucky Colonel. He had the ability to tell his story so convincingly; he appeared on numerous syndicated radio and TV talk shows. He also lectured at quite a number of universities throughout the country and caused something of a stir in the UFO community too.

With the intention of reaching the crux of the story, I began an investigation. If there was any hint of truth to the account it must be the news story of the century. This, according to Carr, who has known of the incident for some twenty-five years during which time he been an undercover investigator for the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP).

Fearing possible ridicule, embarrassment, and loss of credibility with students and associates, which would jeopardize his position, he decided to remain silent until he recently retired as a professor of mass communications at the University of South Florida. Carr says the year was 1948, the month February, the day probably the 13th.


Three radar stations were tracking an unknown at 90,000 feet altitude. The stations were located at Edwards Air Force Base California, Colorado, and Northern Colorado.(1)  The object was making 18,000 knots per hour which is really quite fast even in those days. It stopped at about 10,000 feet where it went out of control, circled, and fluttered helplessly to the ground.

Because three radar stations were involved, triangulation was possible and showed that the object had touched down three miles west of Aztec, New Mexico, south of the Colorado line. The landing was a soft one, the craft being on automatic pilot. A tripod extended from the craft and the extraterrestrial ship came to rest on the desert.

Law enforcement officers, including local sheriffs, rushed to the scene. (According to Carr, the old timers there remember the incident very well.) The lawmen, guns drawn, approached the thirty foot saucer-shaped disc and looked inside the craft. That moment could have only been electrifying as the officers saw through a hole the size of a thumb in the dome of the craft. Twelve little men slumped over their instruments.

The aliens had died from decompression, probably due to the hole; a death probably similar to that of the recent Russian cosmonaut's misfortune. Shortly after the landing, military aircraft began appearing in the area. The roads to the area were cordoned off by air police. Residents from as far as Farmington, New Mexico, journeyed to the area, their curiosity aroused by the unusual number of planes.

As one can immediately see, this story has elements quite similar to that of the Roswell UFO Incident which, at the time of Mike's writing, were not yet revealed to Stanton Friedman by Retired Major Jesse Marcel who was the Intelligence Officer at the Roswell Army Air Force base in 1947.

Officials managed to get the door of the spacecraft open and the twelve bodies were removed. They were all males, their weight ranging from eighty to ninety pounds. Their build was fairly muscular and solid. They had light hair of varying shades, their eyes were blue. They all wore the same dress, a blue uniform with no insignia.

Carr's descriptions of the aliens are not a carbon or should I say Xerox copy of the Roswell extraterrestrial cadavers, but there are some similarities. In both incidents the aliens were not described as “Greys”.

The alien bodies were loaded aboard an airplane and flown to Edwards Air Force Base as was their saucer. They were later moved to Wright Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, where Carr alleges they remain. One of the bodies was selected for autopsy and six surgeons were flown in from Washington, D.C. A middle range specimen was chosen and his organs laid out on a table.

This scenario also has Roswell similarities which include the unexplained ability of the military to load a spacecraft which is reportedly wider in diameter than the opening of any then-existing aircraft's side, rear cargo, or bomb-bay doors However, in the Aztec scenario, the craft was said to have been disassembled.

The blood type was "O" and the genes and chromosomes would have matched with those of Earth women. Verification of the incident is not offered by Carr. He was at his job in Florida some years back when he overheard a biologist (who was a member of an elite inner circle of knowledgeable) read a report to Carr's chief describing characteristics of the aliens. The biologist, incidentally, is now deceased.

Carr has spoken personally with an officer who was present in Aztec when the extraterrestrial bodies were removed from their vehicle. The officer reportedly assisted with the measuring, weighing, and loading of the little men.

A military nurse who was present at the autopsy told Carr, when he spoke with her, that she knew of no reason why she should take the secret to her grave. She was seventy-three years old when she made her revelation to Carr. Unfortunately, Carr is unable to reveal the names of the people with whom he had spoken. Their identities cannot be revealed, since doing so would cause them irreparable damage.

The introduction of the” mysterious nurse” in Carr's story predates the report of a similar person in the Roswell "star-eyewitness" Glen Dennis' story.

Luckily, Carr was a security guard who spent three or six months of his service guarding hanger #18 at Wright Patterson. (On one radio interview Carr stated three months. He told me six months.) Carr told Mike thes sergeant's name at Wright Patterson was Arthur Bray. Bray is a retired Master Sergeant; He was with the Air Police prior to his retirement in 1970 and was an eyewitness to the storage of the bodies. Carr related that Bray, "had the key to the (hanger) door and let people in and out."

Bray fled to Canada and subsequently returned to a Midwest State. Unluckily, the only Arthur Bray there turned out to be an Army man who retired in 1940. He had no knowledge of the incident and was never stationed at Wright Patterson.

Mike spent quite a bit of time and money on this investigation and I came across an Arthur Bray of Canada in late 1974 who was a UFO researcher. When I asked him about being a sergeant at Wright Patterson he just laughed and said he was unaware of Carr's use of the name Arthur Bray in his saucer story. The Canadian Mr. Bray and I shared investigative data on a UFO/Pickup truck pursuit case that reportedly occurred in Ottawa on the night of Nov. 8th,1973. The case received wide publicity in the U.S. and Canada. Mr. Bray was the first researcher to interview the witnesses.

In addition, says Carr, there are several hundred other people who have the inside information. They consist of academic men, anthropologists, aeronautical engineers, Army intelligence officers, electronics experts, metallurgists - so the list goes. Again, no names are available and Professor Carr is the only individual who has dared to surface with the incredible story.

An impressive list of unidentified individuals such as a team of archaeologists ( performing a dig in the desert) are said to have been eye witnesses to the Roswell craft and the alien bodies.

Truman was most assuredly informed of the incident but, according to Carr, never came to see the space craft or its occupants. What he actually knew is moot, since he is no longer available for comment. Moreover, Carr stated that Eisenhower saw the ship and its occupants in April after his inauguration. As Carr relates, Eisenhower was at Palm Springs, California. And used a golf outing as a ploy, he boarded a helicopter and was flown to view the remains.

The President decided the American public was not yet ready for a disclosure of such gravity and the discovery remained top secret.

This, too, smacks of the Roswellian folklore so many have come to know and embrace as fact. But, in one account, Truman did view the craft and the alien bodies; and Eisenhower was the one who feigned a golf outing and disappeared for 12 hours to not only see the aliens; he allegedly made a deal with living extraterrestrials at nearby Muroc, Air Force Base. His alleged twelve hour absence from the prying eyes of reporters was attributed to a bogus emergency visit to a dentist's office.

Carr advises that forty reporters knew of Eisenhower's flight, and were there to see him leave in the helicopter. Apparently, he feels that the presence of the reporters and their witnessing of his departure gives credibility to his yarn. The names of the reporters have not yet been revealed. Even if they are we have proof that Ike took a ride in a helicopter, nothing more.

The bodies are now in cryonic suspension, a sophisticated form of freezing, somewhere in Wright Patterson.

Where did Carr acquire his original information? As he explained, he received a manuscript of a book prior to publication from Frank Scully. Scully was a writer for a magazine "Variety" and devoted an entire chapter of his book, "BEHIND THE FLYING SAUCERS" (published in 1950 by Henry Holt and Company) to the incident. By his own words, Carr says the Frank Scully story is true. Let us briefly examine Scully's story.

In 1949 Scully relates that he had learned of a man whom he elects to call "Dr. Gee". The name is a pseudonym, the reason for which we shall later learn. Dr. Gee was a government scientist engaged in magnetic research. His credentials consisted of several degrees from higher institutions among which were Armour Institute, University of Berlin, and Creighton University.

Dr. Gee told Scully the story of the first flying saucer to land in the United States. (One had landed in the Sahara Desert before this.) He knew firsthand because he was called upon by the government and assigned to go to the crash site and examine the space craft, together with several other magnetic scientists.

The UFO had been detected by two telescopes, its position determined, and its touch-down site estimated. It was found east of Aztec, New Mexico, in a high-plains area which was very rocky.

The scientists decided to observe first and watch for two days. Nothing appeared to happen inside the craft, and the men felt that approach was safe for further investigation. No door was apparent, and the outer skin had no markings. There was, however, a broken porthole. The porthole appeared to be glass, but when the scientists examined it closely, it was different from any other glass known in this country.

The scientists rammed a pole through the defective porthole and looked inside. They counted sixteen bodies. They ranged in height from thirty-six to forty-two inches. As the scientists probed and prodded, they touched a knob which caused the ship's door to spring open. The little bodies were removed and laid out on the ground. One scientist remarked that their dress was similar to the 1890's style.

The bodies were perfectly normal, not being midgets. Their skin, however, was charred a dark color, resembling that of chocolate. The bodies must have been burned, speculated Gee, by air rushing in through the defective porthole or by some other propulsion or pressure malfunction. They were killed by burns or the bends. Dr. Gee said that the point in space at which the little men met their fate had not been determined.

Gee thought the little men probably came from Venus. That was more likely than Mars because inhabitants of Mars would probably be three or four times larger than humans. He said that some of them had been dissected and, except for their size, they appeared to be perfectly normal human beings. Age was judged to be thirty-five to forty years, according to Earth standards. Their teeth were in perfect condition with no cavities or fillings.

Their clothing was dark blue with metal buttons. There were no insignias on the sleeves or caps. Food wafers were found in the ship and given to guinea pigs. The animals seemed to thrive on them. Water was also found, however, it was twice as heavy as normal water. The doctors noted that some water in Norway was similar.

  (1)  The number of fundamental errors about Radars here is quite revealing.  It is also worth noting that these exact same errors were repeated again in Frank Kaufmann's story of his heroic actions during the Roswell Incident to Randle and Schmitt!

a) Search Radars of the late '40s had, under ideal conditions, a maximum range of detection of perhaps 250 miles.  Tracking Radars, only 39 miles.  Under no circumstances would it be possible for a WWII era radar in California, or "Northern Colorado", to "track" a target over New Mexico.

b) The term "Radar" is an acronym for RAdio Detection And Ranging.  A Single Radar Set is all you need to determine Azimuth, Height, and Distance!  The idea that you need 3 Radars and use "triangulation" determine the location of a target is ridiculous in the extreme!
      ....(Bruce Hutchinson, editor)
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