AZTEC,.

The story first reached the public through Variety columnist Frank Scully's 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers, which claimed the US military had recovered a 99.99-foot disc and the bodies of 16 small humanoids. Scully's principal sources — Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer — were later exposed in a 1952 True magazine investigation by J.P. Cahn as oil-prospecting con men, and the case was largely dismissed for decades.

Beginning in the 1980s, researcher William Steinman and later journalist Scott Ramsey, William Ramsey and Frank Thayer reopened the file. They located dozens of long-time Aztec residents who claimed to have witnessed unusual military activity in Hart Canyon during the spring of 1948 — convoys of trucks, cordoned areas, and oilfield workers told to leave the mesa. Their 2011 book The Aztec Incident: Recovery at Hart Canyon attempts to rehabilitate the case using these later witness accounts.

The case remains contested. Skeptics including Curtis Peebles and Karl Pflock note that the original Scully sources were demonstrably fraudulent and that no contemporaneous documentation supports a crash. Proponents counter that the Newton/GeBauer fraud may have been a deliberate counter-intelligence smear and that the later witness pool is independent of the original story. No declassified US government document confirms the Aztec event.

Aztec is therefore best treated as a culturally important early disc-crash narrative whose evidentiary base is weak. The town hosts an annual UFO symposium, and the case continues to attract serious researchers — but a careful reader should weigh the contested provenance against the appealing parallels to Roswell.