Mr. Scully, Meet Dr. Gee
The everyday citizens of Quito were fooled, but every once in a while, a hard- bitten journalist is as credulous as the general public. In the summer of 1949, author and Variety columnist Frank Scully became the victim of a saucer hoax perpetrated by Leo A. GeBauer and alleged Denver oilman Silas M. Newton. In addition to his work as an entertainment journalist, Scully had done a series of books about fun in bed during convalescence, and a collection of celebrity- author profiles. He had no scientific training.
Scully included a squib in his Variety column about GeBauer and Newton’s astonishing adventure: the pair had been present when a dome-shaped saucer crashed outside Aztec, New Mexico, on March 25, 1948. The men approached the wreckage and discovered sixteen small, humanoid corpses peculiarly dressed in antiquarian clothing. (A 1950 FBI report reveals a claim of eighteen tiny corpses.) Presumably in no hurry to become laughingstocks, GeBauer and Newton kept their story to themselves. But near an Arizona proving ground not long after, the pair discovered a second crashed saucer, with another sixteen alien bodies.
A third crash, at Paradise Valley near Phoenix, left two more humanoid corpses. (Some accounts suggest that the military came upon the saucers first, and that GeBauer and Newton arrived later.) Scully told the pair’s story in a popular 1950 hardcover, Behind the Flying Saucers. Information about the small corpses discovered in the 1947 wreckage at Roswell had not yet seeped deeply into the national consciousness, so Scully’s book—perhaps the first dedicated to the saucer phenomenon—was a sensation.
The 1951 reprint edition issued by Popular Library enjoyed sales in seven figures.
Frank Scully identified Silas Newton by name but referred to Leo GeBauer as “Dr. Gee.” The book’s grasp of science is vague but intriguing, with special attention given to unearthly alloys, magnetic propulsion, and supposed magnetic fault zones in the American West; the last, Scully offered, might explain why these sophisticated ships crashed. Scully further claimed that the FBI held more than two hundred pages of classified documents related to the crashes.
From the outset, many people had doubts about Newton and Dr. Gee. A freelance writer named J. P. Cahn looked into the tale and exposed it as a fraud in “The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men,” an article published in the September 1952 issue of True magazine. Newton and GeBauer, Cahn wrote, were con artists who had hoped to excite interest in sales of New Mexico oil rights by convincing investors that extraterrestrial technology guaranteed quick removal and refining of the black gold, with plenty of money for all.
In “Flying Saucer Swindlers,” an August 1956 follow-up piece for True, Cahn elaborated on Silas Newton’s credentials, which dated back to 1931 and included pinches for grand larceny, interstate transportation of stolen goods, false stock statements, and conspiracy. No charge against Newton had ever resulted in trial.
Meanwhile, Leo GeBauer’s past included a suspended sentence for a violation of the Federal Housing Act. Separately and together, Newton and GeBauer had perpetrated swindles in a dozen states. In one particularly absurd con, GeBauer found a mark in Denver and displayed an “oil-finding” machine—a box with an antenna protruding from each end. GeBauer explained that the marble-sized metal balls at the tip of each antenna were plutonium. If true, GeBauer and half of Denver would have been as radioactive as Bikini Atoll. (This particular con cost the eager victim more than $28,000.) The FBI arrested Newton and GeBauer in October 1952.
The pair came to trial in November 1953, charged with fraud and conspiracy. (During the course of the trial, Newton let slip that he hadn’t paid income tax for twelve years. A day later, an agent from Internal Revenue was among those seated in the gallery.) Newton and GeBauer earned convictions, and although they looked at thirty-year prison sentences, they received probation, with the caveat that they pay back the many thousands of ill-gotten dollars, plus court costs. At the time of Cahn’s second magazine article, neither man had paid a cent.
Silas Newton persevered for another twenty years with uranium swindles and other felonious schemes. The FBI maintained a file on Leo GeBauer until at least 1969, noting that a mark threatened to hurt Leo unless he got his money back.
Frank Scully denied having been the victim of a hoax, and eventually dismissed Behind the Flying Saucers as just one book of many with which he had been involved. In Armour Bright, his 1963 autobiography, Scully wrote, “Frankly, by now I’m bored with the subject [of UFOs]. Besides, [Behind the Flying Saucers] is now out of print, and what author stimulates interest in a book that can’t be had for love or money?” In other words, Scully could no longer make a buck off the title, so as he saw it, the question of truth or hoax was pointless.
UFO Crash at Aztec, a 1987 book by William S. Steinman and Wendelle C. Stevens, painted GeBauer and Newton in good lights, claiming that Washington crushed the pair for revealing UFO secrets. Some sources that describe UFO crashes in New Mexico at the time of GeBauer and Newton’s Arizona claims suggest that the con men may have stumbled onto real saucer incidents without realizing it. Could the government have wanted to deep-six the New Mexico accounts? One way to do that would be to encourage attention to the patently false GeBauer-Newton claims.
Frank Scully never wrote a second book about UFOs. Original hardcover and paperback editions of Behind the Flying Saucers are desirable collectors’ items, and the book still has life as a historical curiosity. A trade-paper reprint issued in 2008 by Conspiracy Journal has the original 1951 Earl Bergey paperback cover painting, as well as added text by Stanton Friedman, Scott Ramsay, and other latter-day experts.
And yes, FBI agent Dana Scully of X-Files fame was named for the Mr. Scully discussed here.