Aztec 1948: Jesse Michels Revisits the Other Roswell
Wikipedia calls it a hoax. Jesse Michels calls it the best-buried crash in UFO history. We went through the two-hour American Alchemy documentary on Aztec, 1948, and checked every major claim against the record.
On the morning of March 25, 1948, a hundred-foot disc with sixteen dead crew members supposedly sat on a mesa outside Aztec, New Mexico. For more than seventy years the standard answer has been one word: hoax, the work of two convicted con men. Now Jesse Michels has given the case nearly two hours on American Alchemy, walking Hart Canyon with Scott and Suzanne Ramsey, the North Carolina couple who have spent three decades on it, and with Chris Ramsay of the YouTube channel Area 52. The episode passed 1.7 million views in its first week. We watched all of it, checked every major claim against the record, and read what viewers are saying. If you want to know what holds up about Aztec and what doesn't, this is for you.
Contents
The September 29, 2026 episode of American Alchemy argues, with researchers Scott and Suzanne Ramsey, that a disc with 16 crew was recovered near Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948 and that the case was later smeared as a hoax. Documented: Frank Scully made the story famous in 1950, his sources Newton and GeBauer were convicted of fraud in 1953, and the FBI calls the often-cited Hottel memo an uninvestigated claim. The witness accounts were gathered decades later, and no contemporary records are known. A lab test shown in the episode found no iridium in an object from the site.
Frank Scully published the story of a disc with 16 crew landing near Aztec in 1948 in Variety columns in 1949 and in Behind the Flying Saucers in 1950.
Source/tradition: Scully, Behind the Flying Saucers (Henry Holt, 1950)
J. P. Cahn had a metal sample from Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer tested; it was aluminum. Both men were convicted of fraud in 1953.
Source/tradition: Cahn, True, September 1952 and August 1956
The FBI calls the March 22, 1950 Hottel memo an uninvestigated second- or third-hand claim; it does not mention Aztec.
Source/tradition: FBI, UFOs and the Guy Hottel Memo (2013)
The lab test shown in the episode found no iridium in the marble from the site, but titanium, calcium, zinc, iron and lead, among others.
Source/tradition: American Alchemy, episode of Sept. 29, 2026, from 1:40:35
On March 25, 1948, 16 to 18 people saw a disc about 100 feet across with 14 to 16 dead crew on the Hart Canyon mesa.
Source/tradition: Witness interviews by Scott and Suzanne Ramsey from about 1988; no contemporary reports known
The 1953 fraud trial was a deliberate campaign to bury the Aztec case.
Source/tradition: The Ramseys' thesis; critique by Jerome Clark (2012)
Physicist John Torrence Tate was one of nine scientists who examined the craft.
Source/tradition: The Ramseys' analysis; no documents published
VERIFIED = verifiable in scientific or official sources · TRADITIONAL = historically or culturally recorded · LIVED PRACTICE = widely practiced, experiential knowledge · NOT PROVEN = spiritual interpretation, not scientifically established.
The Episode at a Glance
| Show | American Alchemy (YouTube, about 739,000 subscribers) |
|---|---|
| Host | Jesse Michels |
| Guests | Scott and Suzanne Ramsey, researchers from North Carolina and authors of three books on the case (the first, The Aztec UFO Incident, 2012, with Frank Thayer); Chris Ramsay of Area 52 as fellow investigator |
| Released | September 29, 2026 |
| Runtime | 1 hour 51 minutes |
| Watch | “16 Alien Bodies Crashed HERE… And We Just Found PROOF” |
| Three key claims | 1. Several witnesses independently saw an intact disc on the Hart Canyon mesa in 1948. 2. The hoax label was a deliberate smear, not the outcome of an investigation. 3. A supposedly exotic object from the site, a polished marble, does not survive lab testing. |
Watch the Episode
Official video from the Jesse Michels channel.
Chapter Guide
- 0:00 – Cold open: Aztec as Roswell’s “younger, weirder” sibling
- 5:30 – Meet the Ramseys, and the overheard conversation in Farmington that started it in 1988
- 8:38 – Arriving in Aztec, a town that never cashed in on its story
- 12:19 – March 24, 1948: lights over Cuba, New Mexico, and rancher Valentine Archuleta
- 15:49 – Doug Noland finds the disc on the mesa; more witnesses arrive
- 22:59 – The bodies and Baptist minister Solon Brown
- 26:12 – The military takes the mesa; scientists, cranes and the move off the site
- 35:03 – “Erasing” the retrieval team and re-landscaping Hart Canyon
- 41:02 – Part two: Frank Scully, J. P. Cahn, Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer
- 49:10 – The 1953 fraud case and the setup theory
- 53:14 – “Scientist X” lectures in Denver and the Air Force comes looking
- 1:02:32 – John Torrence Tate and the nine men behind “Dr. Gee”
- 1:10:29 – The 4602d squadron, Wright Field and a technician’s account
- 1:16:36 – Could radar have brought it down? The FBI’s Hottel memo
- 1:25:01 – Bill Steinman, Chris Evans, Alice Scully and the deaths around the case
- 1:33:50 – A stranger at the site, lights over the canyon, cattle mutilations
- 1:40:35 – Lab-testing the marble, and an allegation of a break-in
Deep Dive: Seven Claims, Checked
The episode is built like a true-crime doc: scene, suspects, evidence. Here are its load-bearing claims one by one, what was said first, then what can be checked independently.
1. “Multiple witnesses saw the disc”
What’s claimed: According to Scott Ramsey, 16 to 18 people saw the grounded disc on the Hart Canyon mesa, roughly 12 miles northeast of Aztec: El Paso Natural Gas worker Doug Noland and his supervisor, a part-time cop from Cuba, a ranching couple, a young man named Ken Farley, Baptist minister Solon Brown. Ramsey says he spoke with four direct witnesses and many relatives. Their details line up: about a hundred feet across, barely damaged, a quarter-sized hole in one porthole, small occupants in blue one-piece suits.
Our read: The Ramseys began interviewing witnesses in the late 1980s, forty to sixty years after the date. No contemporary newspaper account of a recovery at Aztec is known, a point made by UFO historian Jerome Clark and summarized on Wikipedia. In a 2012 review of the Ramseys’ first book, Clark wrote that Aztec residents had denied “with virtually one voice” that any retrieval took place, including the sheriff at the time and the family that owned the land. And the core details, 99 feet, sixteen bodies, a controlled landing in Hart Canyon, were already in Frank Scully’s 1950 bestseller. Late memories that match a bestseller can be independent. They can also be shaped by it. The episode doesn’t raise that possibility.
2. “The military ran a textbook recovery and scrubbed the site”
What’s claimed: Eight months after Roswell, the military had learned its lesson. Men without insignia sealed the mesa, cut a road, poured a concrete pad for cranes, and hauled the craft out in sections. An Air Force tech sergeant told the Ramseys he kept personnel records for roughly 200 people so that on paper none of them were ever in Aztec. A man named Fred Reed wrote in 1999 that he was later sent to re-landscape the site.
Our read: The concrete pad and the flattened trees are real; you see them on camera. What they prove is open. Skeptics read the pad as part of the oil and gas infrastructure that dots the area; Michels counters that a nearby wellhead cap is far larger. The sergeant’s and Reed’s accounts come to us only through the Ramseys; the episode shows a letter, not service records. What is documented is the broader climate: the CIA-convened Robertson Panel recommended in 1953 that public interest in UFO reports be reduced. That doesn’t make an Aztec cover-up more likely. It does explain why so many viewers find one plausible.
3. “The hoax was really a hit job on Scully’s sources”
What’s claimed: This is the heart of the episode. San Francisco Chronicle reporter J. P. Cahn, who allegedly tried and failed to buy the story from Scully, set out to destroy his sources: oilman Silas Newton and radio man Leo GeBauer. Both had thick FBI files, GeBauer’s still heavily redacted, and the 1953 fraud trial was a “kangaroo court.”
Our read: The other side is well documented. In September 1952, Cahn published “The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men” in True magazine. He had obtained a sample of the supposedly alien metal from Newton and GeBauer; it was ordinary aluminum. Denver millionaire Herman Flader, one of their backers, pressed charges, and both men were convicted of fraud in 1953. Their business was “doodlebugs,” devices said to find oil and gas thanks to alien technology. According to Clark, Newton faced around forty legal claims over oil and gas deals when he died in 1972, and Clark faults Scott Ramsey for calling Newton a “man of science” without basis and passing over contrary evidence. That the FBI kept early files on both men is believable. It isn’t evidence of a crash. Con men get background checks too.
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See the Cosmos sticks4. “Nine top scientists were the mysterious ‘Dr. Gee’”
What’s claimed: In Scully’s book an anonymous “Dr. Gee” describes studying the craft. The Ramseys believe the name covers nine real men from Vannevar Bush’s wartime research network, six of them tied to the founding of Texas Instruments. At the center: University of Minnesota physicist John Torrence Tate, who they say was in the Southwest in March 1948 and afterward spoke of technology that would solve energy and food problems.
Our read: Tate (1889–1950) was a real and important figure: physics professor at Minnesota, for more than two decades editor of Physical Review, with stints of war-related research. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage on May 27, 1950. His link to Aztec rests entirely on the Ramseys’ analysis, travel dates, a change in his priorities, material from archive boxes sealed at his death. The episode doesn’t show those documents on screen. The other eight names were matched by the Ramseys to Scully’s descriptions. That’s a hypothesis, not a find. Michels asks descendants to get in touch, which is an honest way to test it.
5. “Radar may have knocked it out of the sky”
What’s claimed: Scott Ramsey found an old radar site on a peak near Alvarado that, by his research, protected Los Alamos. Powerful microwave pulses could have scrambled a craft’s controls. Michels points to the FBI’s 1950 Hottel memo, which names exactly that mechanism, and to modern reporting on high-power microwave weapons.
Our read: The memo is real. On March 22, 1950, Guy Hottel, head of the FBI’s Washington field office, passed along a third-hand story: three discs, each with three small bodies, recovered in New Mexico because of a high-powered radar in the area. The FBI said in 2013 that the memo “does not prove the existence of UFOs” and was a claim it never investigated. Since 2022 the informant’s name has been public, a Washington police investigator; where he got the story is unknown. Several researchers, the Ramseys included, see echoes of Newton’s tales. Note the numbers: the memo describes three discs about 50 feet across, not one at 100. The Lashup radar network dates to around 1950. Whether a powerful station was already running nearby in 1948 is Ramsey’s reconstruction.
6. “The craft ended up at Wright Field under high voltage”
What’s claimed: An instrumentation technician, working for a company tied to Eastman Kodak at Wright Field in Dayton, told the Ramseys he worked on a disc about a hundred feet across. Under high voltage it turned translucent, and a nurse limited time inside to about twenty minutes.
Our read: The witness stays anonymous. The Ramseys say they vetted him and his family; that can’t be checked from outside. Michels himself draws the parallel to Bob Lazar’s later description of walls turning translucent. You can read that overlap as confirmation, or as a sign of how UFO stories shape each other. The Wright-Patterson legend is old in its own right: in 1974, author Robert Spencer Carr claimed bodies from Aztec were kept there in a “Hangar 18,” and the Air Force replied that the base had no Hangar 18.
7. “The marble from the crash site is full of iridium”
What’s claimed: In 1999 the Ramseys dug up a small polished sphere about six inches down. An X-ray fluorescence reading at a jeweler’s reportedly showed close to 40 percent iridium, which would have pointed off-world.
Our read: This is the episode’s most honest stretch. Michels takes the marble to a friend’s materials lab, and from about 1:41 we see the result: it weighs 20.5 grams and its density is far too low for meaningful iridium. The XRF scan shows titanium, calcium, zinc, iron, lead and a little gold, and no iridium. A neutron activation test was still pending, and the lab lead called the outlook “not good.” Plenty of commenters pegged it as a ball bearing. Showing the result instead of cutting it counts in the show’s favor.
What’s New, and What Still Doesn’t Add Up
Compared with the Ramseys’ earlier books, three things are new. The Air Force sergeant who allegedly rewrote personnel files is named for the first time. The nine-scientist list around John Torrence Tate gets its first mass audience. And the marble now has a checkable lab result, which cuts against the iridium claim. The tone is new too: Michels frames Aztec as a story about restoring people’s names, not just a crash.
The numbers still don’t line up. Scully wrote sixteen crew, the Ramseys’ witnesses “14 to 16,” the Hottel memo three times three. The narration calls the craft seamless and rivetless while the AI reenactments show seams and rivets, which viewers noticed fast. And the episode’s heaviest allegation, that the best-known Aztec skeptic broke into a congressman’s office, rests on an unnamed source. Michels says himself he has no smoking gun and is speculating. We’re not repeating it. The man in question died in 2006 and can’t answer.
What the Audience Is Saying
We read the top-liked comments under the video and coverage elsewhere. The mood is enthusiastic, but not uncritical.
- On the production (YouTube, @Stoitism, 120+ likes): hard to believe something this good is free; it plays like a feature documentary.
- A local voice (YouTube, @carljacques1253): born and raised in Aztec, he says the town is split; he believes the story and says he has seen strange things there himself.
- On the reenactments (YouTube, @tammygucci, nearly 300 likes, plus others): the narrator says “no rivets or seams” while the AI animation shows exactly that.
- On the thumbnail (YouTube, @Scott-j6s): the object in the thumbnail never appears; the only artifact discussed is what he calls a stainless-steel ball bearing.
- The “Ancient Aliens” worry (YouTube, @rageagainstthealgorithm): a plea not to let the channel turn into YouTube’s version of sensational cable TV.
- Doubts about the break-in claim (UFO Feed, a UFO news site): its headline asked, in effect, why the alleged break-in isn’t easy to prove if it was caught on camera.
Even the biggest fans are asking for tighter visuals and titles. This audience is more demanding than the thumbnails assume.
Why This Matters for the “New World”
Aztec isn’t a yes-or-no case. It’s a lesson in how knowledge gets made and unmade. One word, hoax, decided for 75 years who could take a story seriously. Michels’ closing point lands: you don’t have to disprove every witness if you make a topic embarrassing enough. That cuts both ways. The opposite of a label is still a label.
At Temple of Desire, that’s the part we care about. The world taking shape right now, with congressional hearings, Pentagon UAP files released since May 2026, and people talking openly about contact experiences, needs two things at once: openness to what we can’t explain, and the nerve to send a marble to the lab and publish the result. The Ramseys say they set out to prove the case or disprove it. Suzanne Ramsey puts it plainly:
“He started out to prove it or disprove it. And that’s always been our philosophy.”
Suzanne Ramsey, 5:55
That stance is worth more than any verdict on what lay on that mesa. For your own practice: curiosity and sober judgment aren’t opposites. You can be fascinated and still ask where a story came from.
Five Questions the Episode Leaves Open
- Why is there not a single 1948 newspaper item, police note or letter mentioning a military operation near Aztec?
- How independent are witness accounts collected four decades after a bestseller that contained the same details?
- Which documents place John Torrence Tate in New Mexico in March 1948, and can the public see them?
- If Newton and GeBauer were set up, how do the Ramseys account for the aluminum sample and the long trail of fraud claims against Newton through 1972?
- Will the neutron activation results on the marble be published?
Glossary
- Mesa
- A flat-topped hill with steep sides, common across the Southwest.
- Hart Canyon
- Canyon northeast of Aztec, New Mexico; the landing site according to Scully and the Ramseys.
- Doodlebug
- Slang for supposed oil- or water-finding devices, usually with no proven function.
- Dr. Gee
- The anonymous scientist in Frank Scully’s Behind the Flying Saucers (1950).
- Hottel memo
- FBI memo dated March 22, 1950, about discs allegedly recovered in New Mexico; per the FBI, an uninvestigated second- or third-hand claim.
- Lashup
- A stopgap U.S. early-warning radar network from around 1950.
- X-ray fluorescence (XRF)
- A test that identifies the chemical elements at a sample’s surface.
- Neutron activation analysis
- A method that makes a sample slightly radioactive to identify its elements and isotopes more precisely.
Keep Reading
- Element 115 and Bob Lazar: What the Lab Data Show
- Remote Viewing and the CIA Stargate Files
- 3I/ATLAS: Comet or Alien Probe? What the Data Show
- Hessdalen Lights: What 40 Years of Data Show
FAQ
What supposedly happened at Aztec in 1948?
According to Frank Scully (1950) and researchers Scott and Suzanne Ramsey, a disc about 100 feet across with 14 to 16 dead crew landed on a mesa in Hart Canyon near Aztec, New Mexico, on March 25, 1948, and was recovered by the military. No contemporary records of it are known.
Why is Aztec called a hoax?
Scully’s sources, Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer, were exposed in 1952 by journalist J. P. Cahn: their alien metal was aluminum. Both were convicted of fraud in 1953.
Does the FBI’s Hottel memo prove the crash?
No. The FBI calls the 1950 memo an uninvestigated second- or third-hand claim. It doesn’t mention Aztec and describes three smaller discs.
What did the marble test show?
The scan shown in the episode found no iridium, but titanium, calcium, zinc, iron and lead, among others. Its density rules out a high iridium content. A further test was still pending at release.
Who are Scott and Suzanne Ramsey?
A North Carolina couple who have researched the Aztec case since the late 1980s, interviewed witnesses and published three books. They say they have spent over half a million dollars of their own money.
Can you visit the site?
According to the Ramseys, yes; they placed a marker on the mesa in 2007. It sits in remote Hart Canyon northeast of Aztec.
Sources
- American Alchemy: 16 Alien Bodies Crashed HERE… And We Just Found PROOF (Sept. 29, 2026), including chapter markers and description
- J. P. Cahn, “The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men,” True, September 1952 (archived copy)
- FBI: UFOs and the Guy Hottel Memo (2013); FBI Vault: Guy Hottel
- The Black Vault: Unredacted Hottel memo (2022)
- Jerome Clark: review of The Aztec Incident (2012)
- Wikipedia: Aztec crashed saucer hoax
- Wikipedia: John Torrence Tate Sr.; Nier and Van Vleck, Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 47 (1975)
- U.S. Department of War: PURSUE UAP file releases (since May 8, 2026)
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