Frank Scully
Frank Scully (1892–1964) was an American journalist and author, best known in UFO research circles as the author of Behind the Flying Saucers (1950), the first major popular book to claim that flying saucers had crashed in the United States and been recovered by the government — specifically, in the case of the 1948 Aztec, New Mexico crash.
Background
Scully worked for decades as a columnist for Variety, the entertainment industry trade publication, establishing himself as a widely-read entertainment journalist. He was also known for his personal courage: severely ill with tuberculosis in his younger years, he had lived and worked from a wheelchair for much of his adult life while maintaining a prolific writing career. His established credibility as a serious journalist — not a UFO sensationalist — made Behind the Flying Saucers a significant cultural event when it appeared, and gave the book's claims an initial plausibility that pure UFO enthusiasts could not have generated.
Behind the Flying Saucers
Behind the Flying Saucers was published in 1950 and became a bestseller, presenting claims — drawn primarily from oil businessman Silas Newton and an unnamed scientist referred to as "Dr. Gee" — that the US government had recovered multiple crashed flying saucers in the American Southwest, including one near Aztec, New Mexico, and had retrieved the bodies of small humanoid occupants. Scully's book introduced to popular culture several claims that became standard elements of UFO crash retrieval lore, including the recovery of non-human bodies and the reverse-engineering of exotic technology.
Author Frank Scully (right) and confidence man Silas Newton (center)
Newton had heard the account directly from "Dr. Gee" — later identified as Leo GeBauer, a scientist and electronics expert — and presented it publicly in a lecture at the University of Denver in 1949, subsequently connecting with Scully to bring the account to a wider audience. The Aztec crash account described a craft approximately 100 feet in diameter that had landed or come to rest on a plateau near Hart Canyon, outside Aztec, New Mexico, in March 1948. The occupants were described as humanoid beings approximately three to four feet tall, found dead inside the craft. The craft and bodies were alleged to have been recovered by the United States Air Force and transported to secure military facilities.
Scully's book predated the major Roswell books by nearly three decades, making Behind the Flying Saucers the founding text of the crash retrieval genre in popular literature. Leonard Stringfield, the researcher whom Richard Dolan has called "the OG of crash retrieval research," later described crash retrieval accounts as having been largely avoided by serious UFO researchers in the wake of the Scully debunking — a chill that lasted until Stringfield himself resumed systematic collection of crash retrieval testimonies in the 1970s.
J.P. Cahn investigation
The book's credibility was severely damaged by a 1952 investigation by journalist J.P. Cahn, writing in True magazine, who argued that Silas Newton and "Dr. Gee" (later identified as Leo GeBauer) had perpetrated a fraud involving worthless oil-detecting devices on investors, and that the flying saucer story was part of their confidence scheme. Newton and GeBauer were subsequently prosecuted and convicted for fraud in a separate oil shale investment matter. Scully maintained the validity of his claims despite the controversy.
What made the Cahn debunking notable beyond the fraud prosecution is that Cahn reportedly characterized his own takedown as having been done on instruction from above, and later reportedly admitted to associates that he had "labeled [it] a hoax" due to reporting on Newton and GeBauer's business dealings rather than on the core flying saucer claim itself. The fraud prosecution concerned an entirely separate matter — an oil shale investment scheme — and the conflation of Newton's personal credibility in that context with the validity of his flying saucer account has since been characterized by revisionist researchers as a deliberate strategy to discredit the story by association.
Reassessment
Later researchers, including Scott Ramsey and UAP investigators, argued that Cahn's debunking was itself a retaliation operation — that Newton and GeBauer were prosecuted specifically because they had leaked information about the Aztec crash retrieval, and that Cahn's focus on their oil-scheme side business was a deliberate deflection from the core flying saucer claim. In a separate discussion, Richard Dolan described the Aztec case as "a hell of a strong case" and credited Scott and Suzanne Ramsey for having "shown that definitively," while noting that UFO researchers of the 1950s "ran away from it" after the debunking.
Karl Pflock, a former CIA officer and UFO researcher, investigated the Aztec case and found the evidence for Newton's personal fraud more persuasive than the revisionist exculpation — concluding that Scully was genuinely deceived rather than a participant in deliberate disinformation. Pflock's analysis did not resolve the question of whether the original UFO claim had any basis, noting the logical independence of Newton's personal dishonesty from the question of whether a crash had actually occurred.
Scott Ramsey, who spent over two decades investigating the Aztec case, located multiple witness testimonies, contemporaneous documentation, and government records consistent with a significant event near Hart Canyon in 1948, and argued that Newton was essentially a secondary figure who had learned of the event through his own government contacts — making the fraud conviction irrelevant to the underlying crash claim. Ramsey's research was published in The Aztec UFO Incident (2016), which includes names, dates, and document references extending far beyond Scully's original account.
Significance
Scully's book established the template for virtually all subsequent crash retrieval literature: government recovery of a disk-shaped craft, retrieval of humanoid occupants, transportation to a classified Air Force facility, and suppression of all witnesses. Elements of his account — particularly the small humanoid bodies, the magnetic propulsion system described by GeBauer, and the involvement of personnel from multiple military branches — recur in later crash retrieval accounts with sufficient specificity that some researchers treat them as independent corroboration rather than derivative borrowing. Dolan has cited Stringfield's subsequent documentation of over fifty independent crash retrieval accounts as evidence that Scully was describing a real program, not a fabricated one: the pattern of military recovery and suppression is too consistent across too many independent witnesses to have been conjured from Scully's book alone.
See also
Sources
- Severson, Thor (October 14, 1952). "Little Men Due Soon: Flying Saucer Landing Forecast". The Denver Post. Photograph by David Mathias. Denver, Colorado. ＋