16 Alien Bodies Crashed HERE… And We Just Found Evidence
American Alchemy with Jesse Michels
This episode investigates the 1948 Aztec UFO crash in New Mexico, exploring claims of a massive spacecraft recovery and a subsequent government-l
Key takeaways
- Researchers Scott and Suzanne Ramsey have invested over $500,000 of their own money into investigating the Aztec crash site.
- Eyewitnesses described a 100-foot seamless craft containing approximately 16 charred bodies in blue jumpsuits.
Main topics
- The 1948 Aztec UFO crash
- Government cover-up allegations
Notable quotes
The Wikipedia page literally calls it Aztec crashed saucer hoax.
Conclusion
The episode concludes that while the 'hoax' label is widely accepted,
Transcript preview
Speaker 4 (0:00) On March 25th, 1948, something crashed in the New Mexico desert. Speaker 4 (0:08) An 100-foot flying saucer, complete with 16 charred alien bodies, seen by multiple eyewitnesses from different vantage points. We have four of them on record. The Speaker 3 (0:21) UFO came from that direction over there, but it was making this sound, like almost whistling. Speaker 4 (0:27) Welcome to Aztec, Roswell's younger, weirder, scarlet-lettered sister. It might be the most overlooked crash in UFO history. Speaker 3 (0:36) Some people were talking about it in the news. They got calls from the military. Stop. Don't say anything more. They were out there taking Speaker 4 (0:43) pictures. With more evidence attached to it than any other in the United States. And certainly more than the almighty Roswell. We Speaker 5 (0:51) look over at the mesa and there's this red light. And we're like, oh man, what is that? Someone's out there. Well, then all of a sudden... Speaker 4 (0:58) But for reasons we'll get into, very few people, even many die-hard UFO believers, want to touch it. Aztec was the first case that was written about. It was viciously, viciously smeared. The Wikipedia page literally calls it Aztec crashed saucer hoax. Speaker 4 (1:18) But what if the hoax was manufactured? Never before seen FBI documents, CIA disinformation agents, break-ins, and a cover-up that keeps going till today. In this episode, we'll take you deep into Heart Canyon, where we'll stand on the exact spot where witnesses claim that 16 alien bodies were laid out while a Baptist preacher prayed over them at the request of the military. My old friend Chris Ramsey from the incredible YouTube channel Area 52 joins the investigation. We'll follow the bizarre trail of dead and uprooted trees allegedly left behind by the craft and its recovery. We'll even examine a polished marble that was found six inches deep at the crash site decades earlier, a piece we send out for testing and get results on by the end of this episode. And the craft itself sounds straight out of Star Trek, with an upper deck, seamless construction, even hieroglyphic writing. Apparently, many of the scientists who studied it could only stay inside for 20 minutes at a time before experiencing bad side effects. Speaker 4 (2:29) But this isn't just a story about a crash. It's about the town of Aztec itself and the strange, uninvited visitors that apparently never stopped coming. Speaker 1 (2:39) Looked like a surgeon had taken it off, but no blood. What was your first instinct? That a human had done it or that something else? That something else had done it. Where Speaker 4 (2:47) the government once detonated an atomic bomb underground to blast open natural gas reserves. Speaker 8 (2:53) Three, two, one. And Speaker 4 (2:57) right next door is Farmington, where back in 1950, half the town watched hundreds of silver disks swarm across the sky, an event that came to be known as the Farmington Armada. The first day, there were a few. The second day, there were too many to Speaker 7 (3:14) count. We might potentially be standing exactly where... alien bodies were laying at rest. To Speaker 4 (3:26) give us the tour on the town, the crash site, and get us clued in on the entire history, we had the best tour guides in the world, Scott and Suzanne Ramsey. Speaker 6 (3:35) It's one of the most comprehensive cases that exist. It's multidimensional, not just one level of I saw this or somebody told me this. We feel confident after all these years and a lot of money, a lot of time, that it actually occurred. Speaker 7 (3:51) Would Speaker 2 (3:51) you be willing to say how much you've spent in total? We've spent over half a million dollars. Speaker 4 (3:56) Wow. This North Carolina-based couple took the mantle from famed UFO researcher Bill Steinman. At least twice now, Aztec researchers set to meet with the Ramseys to share their research ended Speaker 1 (4:10) up dead. Chris Evans meets with Alice Scully and becomes aware that there's real documentation around the Aztec crash. wants to urgently meet with you guys and then what happens next? Speaker 2 (4:21) He died the day that he was coming to see Susanna. Speaker 6 (4:25) No Speaker 2 (4:26) way. And when we got the news, Speaker 6 (4:27) it was like somebody punched us. Speaker 4 (4:31) If things couldn't get any stranger, when we finally reached the crash site ourselves, someone was waiting for us. A stranger with curious ties to the Air Force. He showed up at Hart Canyon, which is very obscure and hard to get to, at the same time we did. He also seemed to know a lot more about all of us than he let on. Without further ado, the UFO crash at Aztec, New Mexico with this week's amazing American alchemists, Scott, and Suzanne Ramsey. Our trip doesn't start in New Mexico. It starts in Mooresville, North Carolina. This is where Scott and Suzanne live. The Ramseys are the picture of persistence. They've poured over a half a million dollars of their own money over decades trying to get to the truth on Aztec. And when I say they are trying to get to the truth, These are researchers that love when misconceptions get debunked. He Speaker 6 (5:55) started out to prove it or disprove it, and that's always been our philosophy. I didn't care. If it shows true, fine. If it doesn't, that's fine too. But at least you can put that to bed. Speaker 4 (6:06) Scott and Suzanne were literally brought together by the Aztec case. Scott was the first to learn about it while on a business trip in 1988. He was in Denver but got delayed due to weather problems, so he took a trip to Farmington, New Mexico to meet a potential customer. While waiting on that meeting, he overheard a couple of Navajo men sitting there talking about going hunting by the old quote-unquote crash site. He said, oh, I'll buy the old crash Speaker 2 (6:35) site. Speaker 8 (6:35) The wreck is outside Aztec. Aztec? What did you find out there? Speaker 2 (6:39) So I probed it a little bit and said, you know, what are you talking about crash site? Oh, it's an old wives' tale. Who knows? UFO crashed out there, late 40s, early 50s. Who knows? So it's like folklore? Well, kind of. You think it happened? I don't know. People think it did. This is the turn. You miss it, you keep driving. Really, because I wanted to hear where this crash site was. From that point Speaker 4 (7:02) forward, Scott was hooked. he started his own vigilante research efforts. Suzanne was born in South Dakota to a mother who was obsessed with UFOs, an obsession sparked by the first book on Aztec, Behind the Flying Saucers, by Variety columnist Frank Scully. Suzanne's mother was so inspired by Scully that she moved the entire family to Flora Vista, a suburb of Aztec. She went to work for a local radio station, where in 1999, she ran into Scott, who was quickly becoming one of the deepest researchers on the UFO incident. The rest was history. They've never given up on this case. They have a shipping container worth of data, documents, and artifacts at their place in North Carolina, and they've probably been to the Aztec crash site over 100 times. Their primary income isn't through UFO research and whatever little money they've made by selling books. pales in comparison to what they've spent. Suzanne runs a root beer company she calls Uncle Scott's that she named after Scott. And Scott himself literally has a business which fabricates components for the national labs all over the country. Name me another person who works directly with PhD physicists at Los Alamos, but has also amassed more information than anyone on the planet about a UFO crash in his spare time. And he's done it without a clearance. Speaker 4 (8:38) Now it was time to go directly to the scene of the crime. Welcome to Aztec, New Mexico, population 6,800. UFO crashes? Maybe one, depending on who you ask. For a town where an 100-foot flying saucer supposedly came down, they're weirdly low on alien merchandise. Meanwhile, its older sibling, Roswell, built an alien empire with its own gravitational pull. It has a UFO museum, gift shops, streetlights with alien eyes. even a glow-in-the-dark spacewalk with a wormhole you can walk through. And that's all due to a saucer that crashed into pieces in 1947 100 miles away. Unlike the UFO mecca Roswell has created, Aztec has done practically nothing. Speaker 6 (9:22) Roswell and the folks of Roswell have embraced it as an opportunity to celebrate it, and it's a financial benefit to them. There's nothing wrong with that. That's what they've chosen to do. Speaker 6 (9:36) The fact that it was professed to be a hoax, I think, sheds some shame on it, and it embarrassed people to even be associated with it. Here's the tipping point. Aztecs, right here. And if they would politicize, well, not politicize, if they would advertise that and do that, you would go, meow. Speaker 8 (9:59) It is a little bit odd, but there are some people that you know just you know want to shut it down I Speaker 3 (10:04) kind of don't have an opinion about it one way or the other. I think it's interesting something happened Speaker 4 (10:11) So what repelled Aztec from its own biggest story? What left the residents split between Speaker 2 (10:17) believers and skeptics? We get a lot of people that email us from Denmark, from Sweden, from Germany, from South Africa. Hey, we're going to fly to Albuquerque, you know, going to JFK, JFK to Albuquerque, then we're going to drive up to Aztec. Can you give us the coordinates? And we, yeah, great, tell us how you liked it. We've never had a negative feedback. Not according to here, to the crash site, where we just spent the whole day. You ever been out there? Speaker 6 (10:47) I've been out there once. Speaker 2 (10:50) I think next Speaker 6 (10:51) time that they crash, they just need to make it more convenient for us. That's the only thing that I would wish. Speaker 7 (10:57) How are you feeling? I Speaker 1 (10:59) feel like it feels kind of trippy energy, like interesting energy around. A lot of people say that. Speaker 7 (11:05) Yeah. Do you guys still get that feeling coming here? Speaker 6 (11:09) It's exciting for Scott and I every time that we come here, but then for somebody new to see it and experience it, and you're certainly taking the time to actually live it. Speaker 4 (11:21) And how is anyone sure that this didn't happen when Scott himself has talked to four direct witnesses and countless others with second-degree connections? There was probably Speaker 2 (11:32) 16 or 18 witnesses. Speaker 1 (11:34) How many have you spoken to directly? Speaker 2 (11:37) Let's see, Doug Nolan, Ken Farley, the preacher, the preacher's son, one other gentleman. So Speaker 1 (11:44) yeah, if you were to kind of add up, you know. The people you've had direct contact with and people where maybe you interviewed a second degree connection that you felt was trusted. Son, Speaker 2 (11:55) daughter, granddaughter. Yeah, quite a bit. Would that move it over Speaker 1 (11:59) eight, over 50 percent? Oh, Speaker 2 (12:02) yeah. We might be at 75 percent. Speaker 1 (12:05) Wow. Yeah. Speaker 4 (12:07) Here is the best account of what those witnesses say actually happened. Speaker 4 (12:18) Cuba, New Mexico, about 100 miles south of Aztec on Old Highway 44. It's the night of March 24th, 1948. A part-time cop named Manuel Sandoval ends up at the Hotel Cafe with a New Mexico Highway patrolman named Andy Andrews, swapping notes over Speaker 2 (12:40) coffee and pie. They would meet for coffee at the little restaurant, and they'd have pie and coffee and talk about things that were going on, and the subject of UFOs came up just about every night. Speaker 1 (12:52) Mrs. Herrera called in lights again last night, third Speaker 4 (12:55) time this week. Weird lights cutting across the sky. Speaker 2 (12:59) Next time I see one of those things, I'm going to follow it. In that truck, it can't catch a tractor. Speaker 4 (13:12) So when a disc comes wobbling low over Cuba that night, Sandoval does the thing he'd been saying he would do. He goes after it all night. It doesn't really glide. It flutters like a leaf. Speaker 4 (13:31) 80 miles up that same road, rancher Valentin Archuleta walks out before sunrise to let his sheep out to pasture. His family has worked this land since the late 1700s, when they settled here under a Spanish land grant. Generations later, his granddaughter still farms those same fields. Speaker 3 (13:52) His full name was Talisfoto Valentin Archuleta. He was an awesome... Awesome grandfather, very respected in these parts. He was a Bataan Death March survivor. The Speaker 8 (14:03) Death March. The forced march of the American prisoners by the Japanese, which caused many to die. These were the troops the general had in mind when he returned to the Philippines. Speaker 4 (14:14) From the west, he hears a swoosh, like a vacuum imploding. Then, a sonic boom. Speaker 3 (14:24) So he looked up and he saw it. Speaker 3 (14:28) and he saw it hit right here. Speaker 4 (14:31) The disc clips the mesa right across the road from his ranch, throwing sparks down the cliff face and starting to wobble. Then it somehow restabilizes temporarily, but continues to lose altitude, dropping north toward Hart Canyon. The streak that the craft left on the cliff can still be seen there to this day, and Scott Ramsey put himself in serious danger just to find this mark. If Speaker 2 (14:59) you want to, you can hang by one hand and pretend you have a broken rib. Oh, you're there. There, go down. Come down here. It Speaker 7 (15:09) would be more interesting to just grab like a scoop of whatever's in that groove. Speaker 2 (15:12) My concern from a scientific point would you contaminate the groove with whatever you're doing. No one else Speaker 7 (15:18) is doing anything. You might as well just grab a sample and have it tested. Speaker 4 (15:24) Whatever he just saw flying across the sky, he knew exactly who to call. Speaker 3 (15:29) He calls the Air Force and he says, hey, one of your planes crashed over here. You need to come get it. Speaker 4 (15:36) It takes three tries before anyone at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque takes Val seriously. So he Speaker 3 (15:43) goes back down to Mercantile, hey, I told you one of your planes had crashed over here. And that's when everything got started. Speaker 4 (15:52) About eight miles away, 19-year-old oil field worker Doug Noland is picking up his supervisor, Bill Ferguson. They work for El Paso Natural Gas. Speaker 7 (16:03) Morning, Fergie. Change of plans. We're not going south? Brush fire out on Hart Canyon near the tanks. How near? Near enough I'd like to be there already. Speaker 2 (16:10) Brush fires around oil tanks are not a good thing. Speaker 2 (16:15) The oil tanks are fine. Speaker 8 (16:17) Then what the hell are they looking at? Speaker 4 (16:19) Doug and Bill crest the rim of the Mesa. And there it is. Speaker 4 (16:26) A flying saucer, a hundred feet across. What looks like dull aluminum, just sitting there in dirt with no stands or landing gear, resting on its belly at a slight 12 degree tilt. It's completely seamless with no Speaker 2 (16:42) rivets, bolts, or weld marks. It looked like a very gentle landing. The craft was not dented, torn up, anything like that. Speaker 6 (16:50) When you look at exactly... Which direction and how it traveled, it was due north exactly. And this is actually due north exactly from the Archuleta Ranch. So it would be much easier to just land here. And as we've talked about, it was more of a soft landing than a crash. Speaker 4 (17:13) Meanwhile, coming up the canyon road is Manuel Sandoval, our cop from Cuba, New Mexico. He spots the work trucks parked at the base of the mesa. So he starts climbing up the hillside. Around the same time, two ranchers pull up, an older couple, Mr. and Mrs. Knight. Speaker 4 (17:32) Five miles away, in Cedar Hill, 20-something-year-old Ken Farley is picking up his friend. He had just come back from visiting an aunt in Durango, Colorado, and now the two were about to hit the road for San Diego to see some friends. Speaker 8 (17:48) There's been trucks going up that old road all Speaker 4 (17:49) morning. Police car went up too. Somebody might be hurt out there. Let's go. Speaker 2 (18:00) I said to Doug, well, how many people can you identify? And he went through the list. He said, but there was a group of guys, two or maybe three on the western side of the mesa that didn't really have a lot to do with us. Well, that was Ken Farley and his buddy. 50 years later, dying of Speaker 4 (18:20) a lung disease in Phoenix, Ken Farley could still describe the craft in perfect Speaker 2 (18:25) detail. At the end, he said, And around the center section of the craft, there were three brass or copper or gold lines that ran all the way around it. Well, that fit perfect with Doug Dolan. Speaker 4 (18:42) And then all of a sudden, Doug, for reasons I deeply respect, climbs on top of it. Speaker 4 (18:51) Mrs. Knight isn't too thrilled about that. Speaker 8 (18:54) Get down off of that thing! You don't know what it is! Speaker 4 (18:56) Decades later, Doug still remembered Mrs. Knight, giving them hell about getting near that damn saucer. Speaker 2 (19:03) Doug, not being that familiar with all the locals, I said, how did you know the Knights? Why didn't they were telling us to stay the hell away from the craft? And I asked Bill Ferguson, who are they? Bill Ferguson said, well, they're... telling us to stay away from the craft. There are ranchers out here, so they know it doesn't belong here. Up on the hull, Doug and Bill study what Speaker 4 (19:25) look like portholes around the dome of the craft. From a distance, they look like mirrors. Then they spot a perfectly round hole in one of them, about the size of a quarter, punched clean through the glass. Doug was specific about that hole for the rest of his life. Doug puts his eye in the punctured porthole. he sees two small figures slumped over a panel. Speaker 2 (19:52) Fergie. What? There's people in it. Speaker 4 (20:04) Then Bill grabs a fire pole and pokes it through the hole in the porthole, trying to nudge awake the craft's inhabitants. He must have hit a button or triggered something, because at that exact moment... a hatch door from the belly of the craft drops open, with the whole gang watching. For a second, no one moves. According to Doug, he and Bill enter the craft. The interior is clean with nothing burned or damaged. They find the two figures still slumped over the control panel, both wearing one-piece blue suits with no insignias. And they're small, only three to four feet tall. Then Doug hears someone shouting from the upper deck of the craft. Most reports say there were 14 to 16 of them, all charred or burned in the same blue jumpsuits. Speaker 4 (21:22) Before we dive into this wild episode, I want to give a huge thank you to one of today's sponsors, Dose. Dose for your liver is an extremely high quality drinkable supplement. It tastes absolutely delicious. It helps you feel your best. And all you have to do is take it once a day. As you might know, I love nerding out and finding the best new health and wellness hacks. And it's super easy to overlook the biggest internal organ in your body. the liver. It's your body's most metabolically active organ. It runs over 500 functions every single day. It processes everything you consume. It filters it daily. And it supports your energy levels and your digestion. What I appreciate most about Dose is that they actually have serious research behind it. Two double-blind, placebo-controlled studies showing positive impact on liver enzyme levels and liver function. Having data like that is very rare in the supplement space, and it's the reason I was fired up to work with them. No pills you have to swallow and no icky taste. Just a two-ounce shot that tastes like tangy orange juice. New customers can save 35 % on your first month of subscription by going to dosedaily.co slash jesse or entering jesse at checkout. Again, that's d-o-s-e-d-a-i-l-y dot c-o. slash Jesse, or J-E-S-S-E, for 35 % off your first month subscription. I want to thank Dose so much for sponsoring the show. Now back to today's episode. Most reports say there were 14 to 16 of them, all charred or burned in the same blue jumpsuits. Speaker 2 (23:13) My only theory, and that's all it is, is perhaps that hole, like I said earlier, may have been a... Speaker 2 (23:23) A weapon of .50 caliber, rifle, machine gun, whatever, when it was flying over Los Alamos, and maybe mass decompression. Speaker 7 (23:32) Possibly some type of gas within the chamber that as soon as it was breached by a spark would ignite some type of instant explosion that just like, at the same time, you know. Or Speaker 1 (23:44) maybe electromagnetic damage before they understood how to describe, you know, that. Sure, yeah. Or electrical charge or something. Electrical charge. Speaker 1 (23:54) Meanwhile, Speaker 4 (23:55) Baptist minister Solon Brown is cruising down the highway outside Aztec when he sees the mass of cars Speaker 2 (24:02) at Hart Canyon. He was a roaming Baptist minister that was in charge of many churches. And he went out there to open up the First Baptist Church in Mancos, Colorado, which is maybe 40 minutes drive from the crash site. He pulls over. Speaker 4 (24:21) Solon walks up to the opening of the saucer and leans in. Speaker 4 (24:27) but doesn't go inside. Years later, he said he saw a few of the beings, maybe three, slumped over some kind of table or panel, an account that's notably consistent with all of the others. And Speaker 2 (24:42) he was shocked that they were so childlike. Not really the typical alien described to us. They were more childlike. No hair, one-piece blue jumpsuits, no insignias, no anything to give rank, serial number. Then the group sees something that's Speaker 4 (25:00) almost as strange and futuristic as a flying saucer. A helicopter. Speaker 2 (25:06) I think Ken was the first one to tell me about the helicopter. He said all of a sudden a very small helicopter showed up and kind of circled around the crash site and then took off to the northeast. They all admit seeing the helicopter. I mean, that was one very consistent story. And Doug said, I didn't know what was more spectacular, this disc laying on the mace or a helicopter. And I said, what are you talking about? Well, helicopters just came out in 48. In 1948? Speaker 4 (25:35) most people had never seen one in real life. And now here's one circling Speaker 2 (25:39) right over their heads. But just over the years, the consistency in the story, what the craft looked like, they all talked about the hole in the porthole. They all talked about the same time the military showed up. Speaker 4 (25:57) The rest of the story sounds like the familiar UFO crash retrieval playbook. The military swarms the scene, seals it off from the public, and threatens the witnesses to keep quiet. Speaker 2 (26:10) They all agree that nobody had any insignias to identify who they were. Not Army, Marine Corps, whatever. The guys in the military were not young guys. Most look like they're in their Speaker 4 (26:24) 30s or 40s. Mature, gruff, and extremely well-trained. Speaker 2 (26:30) Moving precisely and deliberately. Doug laughed and said it was like a bunch of drill sergeants, you know, talking to you at the same time. And they seemed to know exactly Speaker 4 (26:39) how to secure a site and pull off a recovery. Roswell was less than a year earlier, and everyone knows how badly they botched that operation. But this time, the military knew exactly what it was doing. Oh, Speaker 2 (26:54) yeah, they learned a lot in eight months. Roswell, they did a press release, put it on the front page of the paper, and then, of course, came up and denied it and came up with a weather balloon theory after that. No, Aztec was well-oiled. You weren't out here today. There's nothing out here. There never was. When the military tells Ken to beat it, Speaker 4 (27:14) he doesn't listen. Speaker 2 (27:16) Ah, he mouthed off and said, you guys don't have any jurisdiction, and I'm not in the military. You can't tell me what to do. And I think he got the butt of a gun in his gut for talking that way. Speaker 2 (27:34) By this time, the military had started pulling bodies out. There were 14 to 16 bodies at the crash site. And one of the military members said, well, you know, basically, Father, we're glad you're here. Can you give these bodies last rites? And he said, well, I'm not Catholic. I'm a Baptist preacher. But I'd be more than happy to say a prayer over them. And by the way, what happened? And they said, we really can't get into details. May your souls find the peace they deserve. and rest in eternal peace. Speaker 1 (28:04) And then was told to leave, Speaker 2 (28:06) which Speaker 1 (28:07) he did. And the bodies, if they didn't look like what you'd typically expect in an alien, you know, some of the aliens that we see depicted, greys Speaker 2 (28:15) and Speaker 1 (28:15) stuff, are childlike. What exactly did they look like? Children. Speaker 4 (28:22) By mid-morning, the military pretty much owns that mesa. No one can get through. Speaker 4 (28:29) Two girls on horseback try to pass, but are stopped by plainclothes