extraordinary%20encounters

82 Dead extraterrestrials
north Texas town. When the latter tale was revived
in the late 1960s and early 1970s, hopeful
investigators rushed to the scene, only to
learn eventually that no such corpse or grave
had ever existed outside the imagination of a
turn-of-the-century prankster.
Though it did not come to wider attention
until many years later, a killing of a tiny humanoid
reportedly took place in 1913 near
Farmersville, Texas. Three young brothers
were chopping cotton on their farm when
they heard the family dogs barking and then
howling. On investigating, the boys saw the
dogs attacking a strange little man “no more
than eighteen inches high and kind of a dark
green color,” one witness, an old man, recalled
in a 1978 interview. “His arms were hanging
down just beside him, like they was growed
down the side of him. He had on a kind of
hat that reminded me of a Mexican hat. . . .
Everything looked like a rubber suit including
the hat.” The dogs tore him to pieces, leaving
human-looking organs and blood on the
ground. The peculiar tale was known within
the family for decades. Though he had a hard
time believing the story, the investigator
thought there was no question of the old
man’s sincerity.
Rumors of dead aliens, however, did not
enter popular culture in any significant way
until 1947, after Kenneth Arnold’s June 24
observation of nine discs over Mount Rainier,
Washington, brought “flying saucers” into
common currency. After initial theories that
tied the sightings to secret aviation experiments
proved groundless, those who continued
to take the reports seriously slowly began
to wonder if visitors from other planets were
responsible for the phenomenon. By 1949,
rumors of recovered extraterrestrial bodies
began to see print, notably in the entertainment
industry newspaper Variety. Columnist
Frank Scully wrote that on three occasions the
previous year, beginning with an incident in
Aztec, New Mexico, in March, U.S. Air Force
personnel had recovered, at various desert
sites, the remains of crashed spacecraft and
bodies. He expanded these allegations into a
book destined for lasting notoriety, Behind the
Flying Saucers (1950). In it, he identified his
source as the pseudonymous “Dr. Gee,” said
to be a leading scientific expert on magnetism
(brought into the investigation of the recovery
because it was believed that the ships “probably
flew on magnetic lines of force”). The
dead crews, human in every respect except for
their perfect teeth and unfashionable 1890sstyle
clothes, were surmised to be of Venusian
origin. A subsequent exposé in True magazine
revealed that “Dr. Gee” was veteran confidence
artist Leo GeBauer. With his longtime
partner-in-crime, Silas Newton, GeBauer had
concocted the tale to sell bogus oil-detection
devices allegedly tied to advanced interplanetary
technology.
As a result of the episode, even persons otherwise
sympathetically disposed to the idea of
space visitation were deeply skeptical of
crash/retrieval claims. Still, the claims circulated
in a significant body of saucer folklore,
only a little of which surfaced in the UFO literature.
In 1952, Jim and Coral Lorenzen of
the newly formed Aerial Phenomena Research
Organization (APRO)—which would prove
among the most influential and durable of all
UFO groups—spoke with an airman who
swore that four years earlier he and others
from a military-scientific team had been dispatched
to a New Mexico crash site. There he
had seen a disc and learned that dead, little
men had been taken from its cabin. Not long
afterward, a “young meteorologist” told the
Lorenzens that in 1948, while visiting Wright
Air Development Center (soon to be renamed
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) in Dayton,
Ohio, he had spoken with an old friend, an
air force man. The friend, in Coral Lorenzen’s
words, showed him “space suits ranging from
three to about five and a half feet in height
and diagrams of a circular ship that bore a
strong resemblance to a ‘flying saucer.’ He said
that people who laughed about flying saucers
were going to get a big jolt some day—these
suits had been taken off the bodies of men
who had apparently perished in the crash of
their saucer-shaped ships” (Lorenzen, 1962).