There is no other sort of case in the realm of UFOlogy that gathers as much attention and scrutiny as those incidents in which one of these mysterious craft have seemed to have actually crash landed upon our planet. The most notable of these for many is perhaps the Roswell, New Mexico incident, which has gone on to firmly entrench itself into the lore of great UFO events. Yet, there are others as well, and indeed one of the more popular of these supposed UFO crashes happened in the very same state as Roswell, and is sometimes mentioned in the same breath, generating just as much debate and controversy.

The story of what has been commonly called “The Other Roswell” supposedly begins in March of 1948, when an unidentified craft reportedly came down from the sky to make a controlled landing/crash at the remote desert moonscape of Hart Canyon, near the small outpost town of Aztec, New Mexico. The object was supposedly then witnessed perched atop a mesa by oil workers Silas Newton and Leo Gebauer, who were trying to put out a brush fire in the area at the time. What they saw was beyond anything they had ever seen, described it as being an immense metallic disc around 100 feet in diameter, composed of some sort of lightweight but very powerful metal that showed no signs of seams, joints, screws, or nails, or even damage, and which held within it a single portal in its side. The strangest things of all was that when the workers peered into the window-like opening they claimed to have seen strewn about within were at least 16 charred bodies of what looked to be miniature humanoid beings of some type, seemingly killed by the impact of their descent. The men called the local police, who arrived on the scene to be just as flabbergasted as they were, and it was as they stood about with mouths agape the military then predictably moved in to cordon off the area, allegedly telling them they were not to speak of the event.

As is often the case with such incidents, the military then went about whisking the craft and its occupants off, and the two oil workers apparently could not keep their mouths shut about it, because they soon relayed their account to a journalist by the name of Frank Scully. In 1949, Scully would print a whole series of articles on the incident in Variety Magazine, going on to also mention it heavily in his 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers. It was at this point where the story would enter the annals of great UFO incidents, and also accrue quite a bit of controversy that has continued to this day.

Shortly after Scully’s book was published, doubt was thrown onto the whole thing, when the two original witnesses were exposed as having been not oil workers, but con men who had concocted the whole thing as a scheme to make money selling “alien technology” that they had retrieved from the craft that would supposedly detect il in the landscape. It worked out perfectly for them, as the remote area was so isolated that no locals had apparently reported anything out of the ordinary, the two police men who had reportedly been on the scene were not available for questioning, and of course the military wasn’t talking. It basically came down to the word of the first two witnesses, and they could make up whatever story they liked. The idea is that they scammed Scully, who believed it to be a genuine account, in order to get publicity and get the account out into the wild. Indeed, some of this technology the men had supposedly found had been passed on to J.P. Cahn of the San Francisco Chronicle, who had it tested to find out that it was just normal aluminum, and around this time others who had been swindled in the past by the man began pointing fingers, and both Newton and Gebauer would concede that it had all been a hoax. It seems pretty cut and dried so far, but it would prove to be anything but.

In the 1980s, the case began to gain traction again, with many in the UFO community deciding that it was perhaps not a hoax after all, and that maybe something fishy was going on. This reached a crescendo with the research of UFOlogists Scott and Suzanne Ramsey, who spent over decades tracking the story down and hunting down clues that they would include in their book The Aztec UFO Incident. One of the first things they point out is that the whole idea that this was all orchestrated by two con men may just be a red herring, with Scott Ramsey having said of this:

Gotta remember that from 1952 until about 1986, no one would touch the Aztec incident. It was poisoned. No UFO researchers would touch it because it was considered to be a hoax hoisted off on the public by con men. This was taken apart in our book. We realized the government engineered that story to sink Aztec, and they were willing to ruin the lives of two, three people, to make sure it got covered up. You cannot refute the evidence that we have put in this book.

They also draw attention to an FBI document called the “Hottel Memo,” written by Guy Hottel, the head of the FBI field office in Washington in 1950, directed to J, Edgar Hoover and a part of which which reads:

An investigator for the Air Force stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico. They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50-feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but were 3 feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suite of speed flyers and test pilots. According to Mr. ——— (redacted) informant, the saucers were found in New Mexico due to the fact that the Government has a very high-powered radar set-up in that area and it is believed the radar interferes with the controlling mechanics of the saucers. No further evaluation was attempted by SA ——— (redacted) concerning the above.

At the time, many people thought that this was strictly referring to Roswell, but there have been some, including the Ramseys, who think that it was more directed towards the Aztec Incident. They point out various other pieces of evidence to support their plight, such as an incident in which a man was approached for selling photos from the alleged crash, with the government converging upon him in Denver, Colorado to purchase them for a good sum of money. Ramsey has said of this:

Just as the buy was about to go down, the FBI and Army CID – that’s Counter Intelligence Division – stepped in. And they specifically in that FBI report say the gentlemen was trying to sell pictures of the Aztec flying saucer. The bottom line on that one is the government took the Aztec saucer very seriously. If there was no Aztec saucer, they would not be been willing to pony up a bunch of money to buy some photos, whether they existed or not.

The alleged Aztec UFO crash site today

Numerous other pieces of evidence that they put forward seek to paint the Aztec crash as being far more than a hoax, and worthy of serious follow-up. They state that the witnesses were actually 100 percent believable, and that something strange did indeed go on out in those badlands back in 1948, and that it was simply covered up to a remarkable degree to be swept under the carpet. Scott Ramsey has said of it all:

The witnesses were all 100 percent certain. That what they saw that day was not a conventional aircraft, nor was it a prototype Air Force design that strayed off course and crashed on the high plains of New Mexico. Based on clear witness memories, there is no doubt that they saw a landed flying saucer from origins unknown.

I honestly think in 1948, this is right after World War II. We’re only three years after World War II. The Cold War was going on. I think our government was absolutely smart in not letting our enemies know that we had recovered one, two, three, maybe four flying saucers. Why would we let the Russians know that that kind of technology was there? We were better off to make it look like a hoax, ridicule the people that saw it. You know, we had to make them the town drunk. We do that and move on. Take the technology and try to figure it out because if we’ve got it, God bless, it’s a lot better than if they have it.

Personally, I wish that the government would come clean and tell the American people more of the truth of the story, not just of Aztec but of all the other many UFO cases. I think the public is ready to handle the truth. In today’s world, I think we’re ready to handle the truth. Might not have been the case in 1951, or 52, or 53 right after World War II, but I think the public can handle that today.

In the end, they claim that this really did happen, and that the witnesses were sincere, but that it was totally buried by the nefarious government. Is that what happened? Whether any of it is true or not, the whole incident has made the area of Aztec, New Mexico a tourist mecca for UFO enthusiasts, with an annual UFO festival and the supposed crash site even delineated and marked with a plaque, which you can visit to this day. However, there is nothing left out in this eerie desert landscape to hint at what may or may not have happened on that fateful day back in 1948. We are left to wonder, did something not of this world really touch down in this remote wilderness to be whisked away and totally covered up, or is this just a hoax and bit of media sensationalism? We may never know for sure, but the incident at Aztec, New Mexico has certainly gone on to be an oft-talked about UFO case, and still serves to stir up debate and wonder.

Over the last few days there has been a significant amount of online debate about alien abductions, mind-altering technologies, and the possibility that some alien abductions may have been the work of the CIA and not of extraterrestrials. In his December 19, 2019 article (titled “Vallee Declines to Substantiate Claim of CIA Simulating UFO Abductions”) Jack Brewer wrote the following: “Dr. Jacques Vallee declined to attempt to fully substantiate the assertion contained in his book, Forbidden Science – Volume Four, that he secured a document confirming the CIA simulated UFO abductions in Brazil and Argentina. ‘I felt a duty to call attention to the issue,’ Vallee explained in a Dec. 17 email, but chose not to share the document or address pertinent questions surrounding its circumstances.”

Jason Colavito said at his blog: “A few months ago, Jacques Vallée, the longtime UFO researcher and scientific advisor to space-demon-hunting billionaire Robert Bigelow, published the fourth volume of his diaries, Forbidden Science, covering the 1990s. In that book, Vallée made the shocking allegation that the CIA staged fake alien abductions in Latin America and that there were documents that supported the allegation: ‘I have secured a document confirming that the CIA simulated UFO abductions in Latin America (Brazil and Argentina) as psychological warfare experiments.'”

And, there’s my own article on this subject, here at Mysterious Universe. The article is titled: “Simulated Alien Abductions: the CIA, a Hot Hooker, and Secret Experiments.” As I say: “There’s a distinct possibility (maybe, even, a probability) that this all relates to a very weird and highly controversial affair that went down in Brazil way back in the 1950s. Antonio Villas Boas was a Brazilian man who claimed, in late 1957, to have had wild sex with an equally wild babe from the stars, after having been kidnapped and taken on-board a UFO. An early alien abduction? Yep. Or maybe not. In the late-1970s, UFO researcher Rich Reynolds had contact with a man named Bosco Nedelcovic, who had links to the world of intelligence, who spent time working in South America, and who claimed that the Villas Boas affair was not what it appeared to be. He told Rich that, in reality, Villas Boas was the unwitting player in a new and bizarre experiment. According to Nedelcovic, the UFO that Villas Boas saw over his family’s property was really a helicopter. Not only that, Villas Boas was supposedly hit by some kind of mind-altering aerosol spray that quickly placed him into an altered state, after the pilot of the helicopter flew right over him and at a low level. As for the girl from the stars, she was said to have really been a hooker, a girl hired to take Villas Boas on the closest encounter of all. But, it was all a ruse: a mind-bending event designed to fabricate a UFO incident.”

All of this brings me to another famous alien abduction case: the October 11, 1973 alien abduction of Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker at Pascagoula, Mississippi. The case has become a classic in UFO research circles. It’s a little-known fact, though, that just a few miles from where Parker and Hickson were taken is a stretch of land called Horn Island. It looks pleasant and inviting, which it is. But, that wasn’t always the case. When the Second World War was still raging, Horn Island was home to top secret research in the fields of chemical- and biological-warfare. Less than a decade later, the U.S. Army’s Chemical Corps used the island for its early research into hypnosis, mind-control, and psychedelics – in essence, to see how the human mind could be altered, and radically so, too.

The history books state that all such work on Horn Island was halted in the 1960s – amid rumors that some of the locals ended up in altered states of mind after being accidentally hit by powerful aerosol-based hallucinogenic substances carried by the wind. But try asking the locals about when things really ended and you’ll get a very different response. There are tales of the Army secretly employing the use of BZ in the area, in the early 1970s. And what might BZ be? Known as “Buzz,” it’s a powerful, mind-mixer, the official title of which is 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate. Graphic hallucinations are typical. As are states of unreality. Cognitive dysfunction soon sets in. As does incapacitation. H.P. Albarelli, Jr., in his 2009 book, A Terrible Mistake (on the controversial death of a bacteriologist named Frank Olson, who was an expert in the field of mind-altering drugs, including LSD) states the following: “In Mississippi, Olson made one visit, along with several other researchers, including Dr. Gerald Yonetz, to Horn Island, ten miles off the small town of Pascagoula, Mississippi.”

The city of Pascagoula, Buzz, alien abductions, Frank Olson at Pascagoula, and more all make for a heady brew, indeed.

Well, well, well. Yet more proof that, if nothing else, the universe has a deep and savage sense of irony. “Swamp gas” went from a dismissive write-off of UFO encounters to a ubiquitous running joke among the UFO community and public at large. Even if you know absolutely nothing about UFOs you know they’re all either balloons or swamp gas. Now a new study has found that phosphine, the toxic chemical that makes swamp gas so nasty, is a definite indicator of anaerobic life (life that doesn’t use oxygen) and could be one of the best signs of extraterrestrial life. It all comes full circle, eventually.

Phosphine is a foul-smelling, highly flammable, and generally unpleasant toxic gas found in dung piles and in putrid bogs and swamps. It might also be the best biosignature of alien life. According to a press release from MIT, researchers found that there are only two ways phosphine can be produced. In the intensely high-pressure storm systems of gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, and by anaerobic life. According to the researchers, finding phosphine on a rocky alien planet would be a definite indicator that there was life there.

Lead author of the new paper, MIT researcher Clara Sousa-Silva says:

“Here on Earth, oxygen is a really impressive sign of life. But other things besides life make oxygen too. It’s important to consider stranger molecules that might not be made as often, but if you do find them on another planet, there’s only one explanation.”

Clara Sousa-Silva and colleagues at MIT have amassed a database of over 16,000 possible alien biosignatures. Most of these biosignatures are unreliable and could be the byproduct of other forces besides life. But Sousa-Silva has spent the last 10 years studying phosphine in particular, and now concludes that phosphine would be a definite indicator of life.

Phosphine exists on Earth in bogs, swamps, and other unpleasant places.

Phosphine was discovered in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn in the 1970s. Due to its composite elements, phosphine is a molecule that won’t come together by chance except in the high-energy, high-pressure, violent storms that swirl through gas giants.

Sousa-Silva wondered if phosphine was could be produced here on Earth, specifically by life on Earth. Sousa-Silva says:

“So we started collecting every single mention of phosphine being detected anywhere on Earth, and it turns out that anywhere where there’s no oxygen has phosphine, like swamps and marshlands and lake sediments and the farts and intestines of everything. Suddenly this all made sense: It’s a really toxic molecule for anything that likes oxygen. But for life that doesn’t like oxygen, it seems to be a very useful molecule.”

Sousa-Silva and her team spent the last several years trying to figure out if anything besides life can create phosphine. They found that, on a rocky planet like Earth, there are no forces powerful enough to create the molecule besides life. She says:

“At some point we were looking at increasingly less-plausible mechanisms, like if tectonic plates were rubbing against each other, could you get a plasma spark that generated phosphine? Or if lightning hit somewhere that had phosphorous, or a meteor had a phosphorous content, could it generate an impact to make phosphine? And we went through several years of this process to figure out that nothing else but life makes detectable amounts of phosphine.”

Finding out aliens smell like a putrid swamp wouldn’t be great for our ego as a species.

Sousa-Silva and her team determined that if phosphine was produced by alien life on some faraway rock, it would be detectable even if it was at the quantities produced here on Earth. That means that although phosphine is an indicator of anaerobic life, detecting it may lead researchers to an alien ecosystem as varied as ours. Or at least a big swamp.

Now the real question is when UFO and alien sightings were first being dismissed as swamp gas, were they really being dismissed? What if the aliens have actually been swamp gas this whole time.

As a follow-up to the current controversy concerning Jacques Vallee and bogus alien abductions in South America, I thought I would share with you a couple of cases that suggest such things haven’t just been performed in South America. Consider the following: On May 5, 1980, Myrna Hansen was driving to her Eagle’s Nest, New Mexico, home from a trip to Oklahoma with her young son. Hansen suddenly found herself in a nightmarish world. Under hypnosis she recalled a classic alien abduction in which she was taken on board a UFO, undressed, and subjected to a physical examination. While on board, she also witnessed a “struggling cow sucked up into its underside in some sort of ‘tractor beam.’” More controversially, Hansen stated that after the abduction, she had been taken to an underground base, had seen “body parts” floating in vats, and felt that some sort of “device” had been implanted in her body so that the aliens could monitor and control her thoughts.

When details of Hansen’s description of the underground base were relayed to Kirtland Air Force Base security personnel, they immediately recognized that Hansen was describing a fortified, highly classified section of one of its facilities: the Manzano Weapons Storage Complex, which, at the time, was the largest underground repository of nuclear weapons in the Western world. I find it highly unlikely that aliens would have abducted Hansen to Kirtland Air Force Base (to say the least!), but maybe a military unit – engaged in a faked alien abduction scenario – might have done exactly that.

An example of a case of alleged alien abduction that appears to have been part of a sophisticated mind-control operation is described by Alison, a woman from Arizona, who lives on a ranch not too far from the city of Sedona. From the age of twenty-seven to thirty-one, Alison was subjected to at least five kidnappings that bore all the hallmarks of the classic alien abduction scenario. On each occasion, she was in her living-room, either reading or watching TV, when her two pet dogs – Lucy and Summer – began to act in a distressed fashion, pacing around the room and whimpering. At that point, things always became a blur, and Alison would later find herself in a different part of the house with several hours of time having passed. She would always awake feel groggy, and with a pounding headache and dry mouth.

For days after the weird experiences, she would dream of the moment when things would begin to go awry – which always resulted in a complete loss of electricity inside the house, a deep humming noise emanating from outside the large living-room window, and powerful and intensely bright lights enveloping the room. In her semi-conscious state, Alison would see small shadowy figures scuttling around the room. They would then carry her outside onto a small craft where she was subjected to a gynecological examination and some form of nasal probing. She would then be returned to another part of the house and the aliens would leave. It was only after the aliens had departed that the intense humming noise would cease.

On what Alison believes to have been the fifth abduction, however, the mysterious humming sound abruptly came to a sudden halt, only a few seconds after her cosmic visitors had entered the room. At that point, Alison recalled – significantly, not in a later dream on this occasion but in real time – she began to slowly regain her senses. And, very surprisingly, so did the aliens. In their place was not a group of frail-looking bald-headed, black-eyed “Grays,” but a number of large and burly men wearing what looked like suspiciously like black military fatigues. According to Alison, the men then suddenly started to back away slowly. And, as Alison began to regain her senses, one of them held his hand up “as if to say ‘stay where you are,” and continued to do so until they had exited the ranch house. Alison made her still-slightly-groggy way to the living-room window – just in time to see the group men jump climb aboard not a state-of-the-art extra-terrestrial spacecraft, but instead a very terrestrial-looking black helicopter. At a height of several hundred feet, a powerful lamp was suddenly turned on by someone aboard the helicopter that lit up the dark sky around her property.

Today, Alison has cast aside her ufological beliefs, and firmly believes that as a result of a combination of subliminal hypnosis, mind-altering technologies, and perhaps even non-lethal weaponry designed to temporary disable her nervous system and bodily movement, she was ingeniously made to think she was an alien abductee. But that in reality, she was merely the guinea-pig for the testing of sophisticated weaponry designed to affect and manipulate both mind and body. These are just two examples of several dozen similar cases I have on file. They all suggest that at least some alien abduction events are nothing of the sort. They are far more down to earth in nature.

In a new article posted at his The UFO Trail blog (titled “Vallee declines to Substantiate Claims of CIA Simulating UFO abductions“) Jack Brewer wrote, on December 19: “Dr. Jacques Vallee declined to attempt to fully substantiate the assertion contained in his book, Forbidden Science – Volume Four, that he secured a document confirming the CIA simulated UFO abductions in Brazil and Argentina. ‘I felt a duty to call attention to the issue,’ Vallee explained in a Dec. 17 email, but chose not to share the document or address pertinent questions surrounding its circumstances.” As you’ll see from the information contained in the link above, Vallee and Brewer had an interesting discussion about all of this – although at this stage it appears not to have been resolved, in relation to what the “document” is and how all of these matters relate to those “simulated UFO abductions in Brazil and Argentina.”

There’s a distinct possibility (maybe, even, a probability) that this all relates to a very weird and highly controversial affair that went down in Brazil way back in the 1950s. Antonio Villas Boas was a Brazilian man who claimed, in late 1957, to have had wild sex with an equally wild babe from the stars, after having been kidnapped and taken on-board a UFO. An early alien abduction? Yep. Or maybe not. In the late-1970s, UFO researcher Rich Reynolds had contact with a man named Bosco Nedelcovic, who had links to the world of intelligence, who spent time working in South America, and who claimed that the Villas Boas affair was not what it appeared to be. He told Rich that, in reality, Villas Boas was the unwitting player in a new and bizarre experiment. According to Nedelcovic, the UFO that Villas Boas saw over his family’s property was really a helicopter. Not only that, Villas Boas was supposedly hit by some kind of mind-altering aerosol spray that quickly placed him into an altered state, after the pilot of the helicopter flew right over him and at a low level. As for the girl from the stars, she was said to have really been a hooker, a girl hired to take Villas Boas on the closest encounter of all. But, it was all a ruse: a mind-bending event designed to fabricate a UFO incident.

Like it or not, but the fact is that Villas Boas’ own words suggest strongly that he was indeed taken on-board a helicopter. Read Villas Boas’ very own words carefully. The craft, he said, was “like an elongated egg.” On the top of the craft there was, “something which was revolving at great speed and also giving off a powerful fluorescent reddish light” (rotor-blades? Probably, yes). As the craft took to the skies, it made a loud noise, “a sort of beat” (which is a perfect description of the noise associated with a helicopter). Put all those factors together and it sounds very much like Villas Boas was hauled aboard a helicopter. And not onto a flying saucer.

As the Washington Post noted Nedelcovic was “…a linguist with the American Defense College at Fort McNair and a tenacious promoter of building a Utopian society that blended elements of socialism and free market capitalism.” The Post further noted that Nedelcovic died of prostate cancer on December 25, 1999 at the Northern Virginia Hospice. As you will see from this link, Nedelcovic had correspondence with the CIA. Other correspondence between Nedelcovic and the CIA exists, but it is not online – at least, the bulk of it isn’t. For the record, Nedelcovic also told Rich Reynolds that he knew of other simulated/faked cases of alien contact. One of them, said Nedelcovic, involved a man named Arthur Bryant, who claimed a Contactee-type close encounter in April 1965. Bryant died just a few years later from a particularly aggressive brain tumor. The inference was that Bryan’s exposure to microwave-based technology of a government agency had caused the tumor. You can read the whole story in a very strange, but highly readable, 1967 book written by UFO investigator Eileen Buckle. It is called The Scoriton Mystery: Did Adamski Return? Running to slightly more than 300-pages in length, the book is essential reading for those who may want to pursue this whole saga further. It’s pretty rare and not cheap to buy. It will be interesting to see where all of this is going to lead, given the breaking news from Jack Brewer and the words of Jacques Vallee.

One final thing: Rich Reynolds told me a couple of days ago that Jacques Vallee was the first person that he (Rich) mailed the Nedolcovic material to. For the record, that was decades ago. So, while I don’t want to make too many assumptions or guesses, I do think that the document that is being discussed here at Mysterious Universe and at The UFO Trail blog is one of two things: (A) the “document” is something we haven’t seen before; or (B) it’s the package of material that Rich sent to Vallee years ago – and which is very interesting, but which has been discussed in the UFO research community for a number of years. If it’s a CIA document, that is being discussed, it’s a potentially big thing. If, however, it all traces back to Nedelcovic (who is long dead) then it’s down to the claims he made, and which should be pursued.