Electric Razor or Blade?
The weather often grows sultry in Atlanta, Georgia, and drives people to do odd things. Spring and early summer of 1953 brought numerous reports of UFOs.
Apparently encouraged, on July 7 a pair of young Atlanta barbers shaved a dead rhesus monkey. (Many accounts give an erroneous date of July 8.) As darkness fell, Edward Watters and Tom Wilson cut off the animal’s tail and then gathered the forlorn little body into a car. They drove with friend Buddy Payne to Highway 78 in nearby Mapleton, where all three men scorched the tarmac with blowtorches to simulate saucer exhaust. Watters gave the monkey an artful singe, and then called police. He claimed to have accidentally run his car into the creature after narrowly avoiding a red flying saucer that straddled the road. Two other creatures quickly entered the saucer, he said, and flew off (leaving a blue glow), but the car struck the third creature and killed it.
The monkey corpse ended up at a local newspaper, where a reporter called the FBI. That agency asked the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI) to investigate. A Department of Defense document that was declassified in 1965 tersely relates, “This animal was first examined by a local veterinarian who stated that he had never seen such an animal before.” A subsequent examination by an Emory University zoologist identified the creature as a monkey. The zoologist dryly remarked, “If it came from Mars, they have monkeys on Mars.” Authorities eventually confirmed that the whole story was a hoax resulting from a ten-dollar bet between Watters and Wilson, predicated on a challenge by one or the other that he could not get his picture in the paper. Although the pair had to pay a forty-dollar fine for obstructing a highway, they received some big-league national attention when Life magazine sent a photographer to snap pictures as the pair soberly displayed their “alien.”
