Synchronicity with Silas Newton

From the Pittsburgh Press, 1 August 1930... synchronistic proof that I was fated to make a documentary about Newton's Aztec hoax, two decades before he perpetrated it and almost four decades before I was born!

Paul Kimball

Kevin Randle on The Other Side of Truth

Veteran researcher / author Kevin Randle joins me for a wide-ranging discussion about the Roswell UFO incident, and Randle’s work over the past two years with the ”Dream Team” (Tom Carey, Donald Schmitt, Anthony Bragalia, Chris Rutkowski, David Rudiak, and Kevin), who have been re-examining the evidence for and against the crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft near Roswell in July, 1947. I challenged Kevin to make the his best case for the crashed spacecraft scenario, and then we dug deeper to see how well the evidence has held up over the past thirty years. The answers may surprise people familiar with Kevin’s long-held view that the Roswell incident was indeed a crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft - particularly his admission that despite his own personal belief that an extraterrestrial spacecraft crashed in New Mexico in 1947, when we examine the evidence as it exists today, "We really can't get to the extraterrestrial. We can eliminate practically everything else that you care to mention, but that still doesn't get us to the extraterrestrial."

Towards the end of the episode, we briefly discuss the other famous / infamous crashed spacecraft story from the late 1940s, the Aztec incident, and why both of us agree that it was a hoax / con.

This episode was recorded on 23 August, 2013.

Download this episode directly here, or listen to it at The Other Side of Truth podcast here.

Subscribe to The Other Side of Truth.

Paul Kimball

The Hottel Memo

I weigh in on the ufological story du jour in a piece I was interviewed for in today's International Business Times.

The Hottel Memo: Why Some Believe It

By Jesse Emspak

April 12, 2011 11:19 PM GMT

A memo written sixty years ago has created a minor storm as some take it as proof that the government is covering up the existence of aliens. To some, it's more interesting in the way it shows why people believe things.

The saucer prop used in the 1951 film "The Day The Earth Stood Still" is pictured here. A recently publicized memo from the FBI is seen by some as proof of alien visitations.

The memo was written by Guy Hottel, special agent in charge of the Washington field office. It describes an "air force investigator" who said another person reported finding a crashed spacecraft in New Mexico. The informant (whose name is redacted) also said that alien bodies were found in it. The informant says that the craft was disabled by "high powered radar" in the area.

Paul Kimball, a Halifax, Nova Scotia-based documentary filmmaker who has done extensive research on the UFO phenomenon, calls the furor surrounding the memo - billed by news outlets such as the Daily Mail as proof of a government cover-up - as interesting to sociologists as it is to people interested in aliens.

He says one reason that such documents from the 1950s engender such interest is precisely that people were afraid at that time. "It was a fearful society," he said. "The cold war was just beginning."

Another reason people tend to believe in government conspiracies, he said, is that in the years since there have been very real instances of the U.S. government attempting to cover things up, or fool the public. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, which precipitated the Vietnam War, is just one example. The Watergate break-in and subsequent revelations only served to make such paranoia seem even more reasonable.

Kimball added that this does not mean that governments don't cover things up or engage in conspiracies - just that they are usually much less elaborate than in popular depictions.

The Hottel memo, he said, is probably the result of a hoax. The memo itself surfaced decades ago, in 1977. But the hoax began decades earlier.

The Hottel memo was the end of a long chain of tale-telling. The memo repeats a story from the Wyandotte Echo, a legal newspaper in Kansas City, Kansas in January of 1950. An Air Force investigator read the story (and pasted into a memo himself. Such practices were common in the days before scanning documents was possible and memos had to be typed out). He then sent it on to Hottel.

The news story draws from the account of a Rudy Fick, a local used car dealer. Fick got the story from a two men, I. J. Van Horn and Jack Murphy, who said they got the story from a man named "Coulter" -- actually a radio station advertising manager named George Koehler. Koehler got the story from Silas Newton. Kimball said that a combination of his own research and others has established pretty well that the unnamed informant is Newton himself.

Silas Newton was a con man, who had a partner, Leo A. Gebauer. Newton and Gebauer were peddling "doodlebugs" -- devices that could supposedly find oil, gas, gold, or anything else that the target of the con was interested in finding. The two claimed that their doodlebugs were based on alien technology.

Ben Bradford, a New Mexico-based researcher who writes for the Skeptical Inquirer, also said the informant was probably Newton, who told his story to as many people as he could. He said the big question that arises, assuming the alien story was true, is where the spaceships or alien bodies are. "A conspiracy theorist will always say they covered it up," he said. "But you have to figure out what to do with three 50-foot long spaceships."

When the original scam was hatched, Newton and Gebauer went to someone who was predisposed to believe the story, a gossip columnist named Frank Scully. "You wouldn't go to Edward R. Murrow with something like this," Kimball said. Kimball studied Scully's background, and found he was a man with a strong distrust of government generally. A conspiracy story would naturally attract him - and it did, resulting in a book.

Kimball adds that there really are UFO cases worth investigating. But they are often drowned out by hoaxes like the one that resulted in the Hottel memo.

Kimball notes that the combination of a fearful society, and the need for an ordered world, is partly what drives both believers and non-believers. (He says he is neither). Conspiracy theorists, he said, need to have some way of ordering the world. He likens it to the 9/11 truth movement, which posits conspiracies that would require thousands of people to all keep silent. "They are the kind of folks who can't believe that bad things happen to good people," he said. "So there has to be a conspiracy."

The Aztec hoax - Ufology's Dracula.

If there is an afterlife, I have no doubt that Silas Newton is having a good laugh at it all.

Paul Kimball

Aztec: 1948

Of all the films I've made, this is one of two that I wish I could do over again, primarily because it helped resurrect the Aztec UFO hoax, which should have stayed dead and buried (same reason for the other I would do over, Do You Believe in Majic). I learned a valuable lesson - a documentary filmmaker doesn't necessarily need to take a neutral stance, particularly when what he's being told is nuts. As the years have gone on, I've realized that even-handedness is about presenting the truth, and not about treating both sides as if they are equally valid when they clearly are not. But I was young(er) and less experienced back then, and didn't want to be seen as anything other than fair. Mea culpa.

Still, it's nice to see my old friend, the late Karl Pflock, who I think covers the Aztec hoax as well as it could be covered. He also brings up the Farmington Armada, which is the one case from the Aztec region that people should discuss, but it's just not sexy enough, because it doesn't have a crashed flying saucer and 16 dead little aliens.

The film was shot for less than $15,000 (and piggy-backed on the production of Do You Believe in Majic), which shows in the production value at points, and the reliance on interviews, but it's something of which I'm proud.

Alas, it would be nice if the distributor's write-up actually reflected what was in the film. Instead, the write-up is clearly designed to sell the film to the "aliens are here / crashed flying saucer" crowd, which is somewhat disingenuous, given the fairly even-handed point-of-view the film takes. Marketing in the film industry has absolutely nothing to do with truth.

A couple of other things:

The film was shot in 2003. Still no results from the core sample that Scott Ramsey took and was having analyzed.

None of the documents that Scott showed me referenced a flying saucer crash at Aztec. None. Not even remotely.

He never did give me the name of the anonymous witness he refers to in the film. When he says he told me about him, it was just what this guy had allegedly told Scott. I was never given the opportunity to confirm any of what this person supposedly said, or even that the person actually existed, despite requesting to do so.

Finally, here's an interesting anecdote from the production, which my crew members still find amusing. We were doing some filming down near Socorro, at a wildlife sanctuary (where Scott said there might have been a flying saucer crash...), and across the road were two guys, who had parked their van and gotten out with binoculars and a camera. Most of the time they were looking at various birds, but every now and then they would look over at us, something I've gotten quite used to over the years - if you have a large video or film camera out, people tend to stare, and wonder what you're filming. Anyway, after a few minutes, Scott came over to me and told me he thought the two guys might be government agents following us! He made a big deal about taking down their license plate number, and said he was going to get a friend to "run" them. Then he suggested that we turn our camera around, and start filming them. I politely refused, and a minute or two later told my guys to pack up. We had what we needed (just some b-roll that was never going to be in the film), and I was a bit weirded out by Scott, not for the first time. I'm saving the rest of the stories for the Aztec chapter of my memoirs!

For my views on the Aztec hoax, I encourage everyone to type "Aztec" into the search engine for this blog, which will take you to all of the posts I made after the film was released.

Paul Kimball

Karl Pflock on the Aztec UFO hoax

Here is the late Karl Pflock summarizing the 1948 Aztec UFO hoax. This is a re-edited clip from parts of my 2004 documentary on the Aztec saga, Aztec 1948.



The hoax lives on through the efforts of a few modern researchers who mean well, but who have let the will to believe overwhelm their critical faculties.

My own take on the Aztec hoax can be found in this blog's archives, mostly in March and April, 2005... or by typing "Aztec hoax" into the search engine.

As for Karl, he was one of the best UFO researchers of the past thirty years, and his insight is sorely missed by anyone genuinely interested in the truth about the UFO phenomenon, and by those of us who were fortunate enough to count him as a friend.

Paul Kimball

Crashed Flying Saucers and Radar

Proponents of alien crashed flying saucers at Roswell and Aztec, such as Stan Friedman, have speculated that perhaps advanced radar systems brought the spacecraft down. Indeed, in this clip from the doc I made about the so-called Aztec incident, Aztec 1948, both Stan and Scott Ramsey talk about that possibility, while Karl Pflock offers a much more reasonable and sensible analysis.



You can view my deconstruction of the silly "radar brought the flying saucers down" claims here.

Fact vs. fiction in New Mexico. Unfortunately, the ufologists supplied the fiction, the same kind you will find with Frank Feschino's wild claims of an air war in the 1950s between the USAF and aliens, which have been "shot down" by more sensible UFO researchers like Jerry Clark and Dick Hall.

Paul Kimball