The Aztec UFO Crash: A Book, a Fraud Case and a Canadian Government Memo

In November 1950, a Canadian government engineer named Wilbert Smith wrote his department a memo saying that flying saucers exist, and that in Washington the subject was classified higher even than the H-bomb. The memo is real, and it's held in Canada's national archive. What sent Smith asking in the first place was a book about a saucer that was supposed to have come down near Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948. This video follows that memo back to where it came from. It starts with Frank Scully's book and the two men who supplied its details, then J. P. Cahn's investigation for True magazine and the 1953 fraud conviction over an oil-finding device. From there it goes to Smith's own notes of his conversation with the physicist Robert Sarbacher, and to the letter Sarbacher wrote thirty-three years later saying that what he knew about the recoveries had come to him second-hand. Explore every name in the network: https://cnx51.com Members get our exclusive investigation videos, including THE SIGNAL, about an Air Force agent who says he fed a New Mexico businessman false information on orders: https://cnx51.com/watch If this was useful, like and subscribe for the next release. CHAPTERS 00:00 The memo 01:04 The question 01:53 Hart Canyon 02:31 The book 02:59 Denver 03:31 True magazine 04:13 The device 04:59 Back to Smith 05:38 The interview 06:49 The notes 07:41 Vannevar Bush 08:16 Sarbacher writes back 09:12 The case reopens 09:39 What it rests on SOURCE DOCUMENTS Wilbert B. Smith, memorandum, 21 November 1950. Library and Archives Canada, RG 97, vol. 182, file 5010-4, part 1. Smith's interview notes, 15 September 1950. University of Ottawa, Arthur Bray fonds. Written from memory after the interview, which may have gone through a Canadian defence attaché. Matthew Hayes, A History of Canada's UFO Investigation, 1950–1995, pp. 39–44 (transcriptions of both Smith documents): https://digitalcollections.trentu.ca/... Robert I. Sarbacher, letter to William Steinman, 29 November 1983. University of Ottawa catalogue record: https://arcs-atom.uottawa.ca/index.ph... Frank Scully, Behind the Flying Saucers (Henry Holt, September 1950). J. P. Cahn, "Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men", True, September 1952. William Steinman and Wendelle Stevens, UFO Crash at Aztec: A Well Kept Secret (1986). MEDIA CREDITS Photographs: Vannevar Bush — Office for Emergency Management / Library of Congress, public domain. Robert I. Sarbacher — CNX51 collection. Behind the Flying Saucers jacket — Popular Library 326, the paperback reprint of the 1950 Henry Holt book, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Hart Canyon — aspidoscelis / Wikimedia Commons, CC0. Oil-field footage — Cfootage, CC0, https://archive.org/details/OilDrilli... (illustrative; it doesn't show Newton's business). Further portrait provenance is in the CNX51 graph. The rooms, desks, prints, pages, lecture hall, courtroom, lab bench and concept sequences are 3D illustrations made for this film and are labelled on screen; they are not photographs of the events. No cleared photograph of Wilbert Smith or Frank Scully exists, so neither is shown. Quoted passages are read over illustrations and are not facsimiles of the documents. Maps and the network are the CNX51 dashboard; base maps are present-day USGS The National Map imagery and OpenStreetMap contributors. Music: original synth score composed for this film (CNX51); no library music or sound effects. Do you know of a record from 1948 that puts anyone in Hart Canyon? That's the one this case is missing, so tell us in the comments, with a source if you have one.