A Report On UFO AZTEC 99
An Anniversary Symposium

By: Bill Hamilton

The crashed saucer tale that started with Frank Scully's book, Behind the Flying Saucers, published in 1950 was celebrated this year on the 51st anniversary of the legendary event. The story recounts that a large flying disc came down in a controlled descent to land on top of a mesa overlooking Hart Canyon near Aztec, New Mexico on March 25, 1948. Almost nine months after the celebrated Roswell event, the recovery of this disc by the Interplanetary Phenomena Unit has long been discounted as a hoax perpetrated by Scully's sources. There are residents of Aztec who think the event really happened as recounted by a few first-hand witnesses who have now come forward and spoken in confidence to investigators.

LeAnne Hathcock, the City of Aztec Librarian, had invited me to give a presentation at the anniversary symposium to be held at the old courthouse in downtown Aztec. My wife and I started our drive on a Thursday to overnight in Kingman, AZ. The next day we drove through the land of Petrified Forest and Painted Desert of eastern Arizona. Dark clouds loomed over the Land of Enchantment, New Mexico as we approached the border and drops of rain began to fall. It seemed a long drive from Gallup through the Navajo Indian Reservation on our way to Farmington. We saw signs of poverty everywhere and Indians hitchhiking Route 666 (the Devil's highway).

Farmington is a busy town with narrow streets and endless fast food and liquor stores along the main street. It was in 1950 when numerous flying discs were seen cavorting in the skies over Farmington. Were they looking for their crashed brethren in the wild country below? We stopped to eat, then pushed on toward Aztec, another ten miles. Aztec is a small town hoary with western history. We pulled in to the quaint Stepback Inn, a Victorian-style hotel where the speakers stayed for the weekend.

It was Friday night and we headed out to look for the Aztec Civic Center, site of the banquet that would kick off the weekend's event. After being misdirected, we found our way to the banquet hall where at least a hundred people gathered to honor the guests who had arrived from different points of the compass. There were seven of us at the guest table up front. Ted Loman and Wendelle Stevens had come from Tucson. Lawyer Peter Gersten had come from Sedona. Our young newcomer, Joe Firmage of U.S. Web was there. Next was Jan Aldrich of Project 1947. Then, sitting to my left, keynote speaker Dr. Edgar Mitchell, sixth man to walk on the moon. I sat on the end with a chance to strike up a conversation with Edgar. This was my opportunity to tell him about the article I had written when I was a teenager predicting that man would land on the moon in ten years and would experiment with ESP from the moon to the earth. I wrote this article in 1959 before John F. Kennedy had made it a national goal. I often wondered whether I was using ESP myself in this penned augury.

Dr. Mitchell spoke eloquently about our role in the Cosmos and mentioned both the opportunities and dangers that we all face in the future. He explained how the scientific paradigm had shifted over the last few years and how we have evolved a cosmological view of life. Life, even intelligent life as we know it is now considered to be ubiquitous throughout the universe and will arise anywhere there are suitable environmental conditions. Mitchell also spoke about the theorem of "non-locality" in quantum physics, a concept of remote interaction not limited by the transference of information at the limiting speed of light. He stated how he came into the field of ufology through the back door of consciousness studies that he had been engaged in for some 30 years. He is convinced now that we will find intelligent extraterrestrial life and, most likely, that it has already found us. Mitchell measured his words carefully. He was even cautious about making any supporting or denying statements concerning abductions, but, at one point during a panel discussion, stated that no non-terrestrial elements have yet been found in so-called "implants".

On Saturday morning the symposium was kicked off by another talk by Edgar Mitchell followed by a question-and-answer dialogue with the audience. After Mitchell, Joe Firmage took center stage and with a slick computer-displayed slide presentation told the

audience about how he went from a strict Mormon upbringing into a study of Physics on a scholarship. After his second year of Physics he took a change of course that proved a right move for him. He entered the world of Computer Science and the Internet to become one of those new breed of Internet Entrepreneurs who makes more than a million bucks with a lot of hard work and imagination. He had always wondered about life elsewhere and those reports of strange objects in our skies, but had put it out of his mind when he had heard that the flying discs violated our laws of physics. Only later, with new theories about engineering the vacuum zero-point field, thus mastering the forces of gravity and inertia, did he realize that flying saucers were possible.  Joe has spent his time writing an evolving book called, Kairos, the Word is Truth, and takes a truly eclectic view of the future. Joe appears to be a modern Renaissance Man with interests in several fields of study that are parts of an integral whole. He seems to be optimistic and feels that he should pursue the truth wherever it may lead regardless of the popularity of his position. In other words, Joe has joined the rest of us whakos who believe in something greater than material experience.

Ted Loman, the UFO Arizona television personality was there to host a panel discussion Saturday afternoon and present a festival of UFO videos. Wendelle was there to present a collection of his slides on UFO pictures taken around the world. Wendelle was also co-author of UFO Crash at Aztec with William Steinman. Steinman declined to attend as he no longer publicly pursues UFO research. Stevens explained how Steinman had been stalked and his personal life disrupted by UFO research. Jan Aldrich explained how he has utilized his experience with historical records to initiate Project 1947, an attempt to build a complete-as-possible historical base of reports before, during, and after 1947 so that researchers will have a database of information to research and evaluate the evolution of the phenomenon. Jan had many interesting released military reports from the early years. Peter Gersten is on a crusade to file several law-suits on various Federal and military bureaucracies in order to bring into court the drama of UFO incidents. One of these suits will concern the Phoenix Lights. In this he hopes to call witnesses and experts and force the government to make a statement in response. Peter has set up an organization called CAUS (Citizens Against UFO Secrecy) in order to accomplish these objectives. CAUS also has a presence on the World Wide Web.

I was there to present a scenario on the Reverse Engineering of Alien Astronautics which has become a hot subject since the release of Colonel Philip Corso's book, The Day After Roswell. I presented not only reports of military-initiated reverse engineering of flying discs, but that which has been experimented with by inventors and scientists as well as the recent foray by NASA into experiments with rotating superconducting ceramic discs and antigravity. I also presented the details of the crash-retrieval event of 1953 near Kingman, Arizona as an example of the detailed examination and analysis that Air Force engineers and contractors were engaged in during a crash-retrieval event. The real physical evidence unavailable to civilian researchers and investigators is allegedly in the possession of military authorities and has been highly classified in ongoing projects and operations.

The highlight of this event in Aztec was a trip that several of us made on late Saturday night to the alleged designated crash site on a mesa overlooking Hart Canyon. We took two four-wheel drive trucks down the canyon road by New Mexico oil fields where we also witnessed a herd of deer grazing. When we parked up on the mesa we had to walk a dirt path past a barbed wire fence to arrive at the location where a plaque had been erected in memoriam to the occupants of an extraterrestrial spacecraft that had landed on the side of a slightly rising area of land that had a few mesquite trees scattered around. North of us rose the snow-capped San Juan Mountains of Colorado and south were wooded hills off in the direction of Los Alamos where the 100-foot disc was taken as it was trucked off the site after being disassembled. Wendelle pointed out a twisted Mesquite to me proclaiming that he had to take a hefty force to twist the trunk of such a hardy tree. It was easy to imagine that legendary day in 1948 when this huge craft came from the starry sky to alight on that mesa engaged in some sort of auto pilot though the occupants had died from a mysterious decompression of their cabin. We were there to ponder the fate of these visitors to our world and there to wonder whether the story was true, but the hills were not talking and neither are silent witnesses who know the truth.

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