The Curious Case of the Flying Saucer Swindler

Thanks for tuning back into the BeX Files! TGIF. 

It’s been so much fun to see First Contact out in the world, and I’m very grateful to everyone who came to the signing or who has bought a copy (please consider leaving a review if so!). 

I was delighted to speak about the book with Kenna Hughes-Castleberry of Space.com; check out the Q&A, complete with spicy Superman takes. I also enjoyed my conversation about First Contact with Ryan and Suzanne on their podcast Somewhere in the Skies. 

Now, an update on the Search for the ExtraTERRORestrial Life, my October bracket to discover the Scariest Alien (recap here). Our first alien-on-alien tournament left eight aliens dead in the dust, and eight winners ready to face the next challenger.

The Blob fully consumed the Body Snatchers. Killer Klowns from Outer Space slurped up cotton-candy-coccooned Jabba the Hut. The Shimmer mutated Purity to its own ends. The classic War of the Worlds Martians conquered the new-age Trisolarans. The Thing could not shapeshift its way out of the jaws of the Xenomorphs. The Mimics timed out the Astrophage. Jean Jacket marked its territory over Nagilum. And the Reapers made trophies out of the Predators.

Here’s the updated bracket as we head into week 2: The Blob versus The Shimmer. Killer Klowns from Outer Space versus The War of the Worlds’ Martians. Xenomorphs versus Jean Jacket. Mimics versus Reapers. Email me at thebxfiles@gmail.com with your votes or thoughts on other candidates in the Search for ExtraTERRORestrial Life.  

Moving on to my main story this week, I wanted to give a special shoutout to Silas Mason Newton, a hoaxter I highlight briefly in First Contact and who has fascinated me ever since. 

Newton seemed to be a totally constitutional charlatan, unable to imagine a life without grift. Despite my better judgment, I am captivated by this type of inveterate trickster. Newton has the extra dazzle of being tied up in both oil chicanery and alien fraud, a marriage of two particularly juicy scams.

Up top, I will just note that Silas Mason Newton is a suspiciously good hoaxter name, evoking notes of old-money and robust genius—both of which Newton tried to project to his marks. I looked for evidence that it might actually be an alias, as Newton did go by other names, but did not find any indication it was not his birth name. Still, I want to believe… 

Newton (if that was his real name) is now most known as the co-perpetrator of the Aztec saucer hoax, based on his claim that he found a crashed alien saucer filled with dead alien bodies near Aztec, New Mexico in 1948. Because this crash was alleged to have occurred less than a year after the famous Roswell incident and in the same state, it’s often known as “the other Roswell.” This was hardly the first scam for Newton, who had been arrested for fraud multiple times, including in 1931 for trying to swindle an elderly man out his life savings.

Newton and his co-conspirator, Leo A. Gebauer, spun their alien tall tale to the author Frank Scully who was like “yup, this all checks out” in his 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers. Scully regurgitated the grift devised by Newton, who initially goes by “Mr. X” in the book, that alien technology recovered from the crash could be repurposed into “doodlebugs” that could find oil and other minerals for extraction. 

It is such a harebrained scheme, but it worked for a while, sucking in investors including the millionaire Herman Flader. But the plan started to fall apart when a San Francisco Chronicle reporter named J. P. Cahn got hold of the supposed alien shrapnel and discovered it was regular aluminum. That most trusted journalistic instinct, the bullshit detector, was activated.  

Cahn went on to publish an extensive exposé of the fraud in a 1952 issue of True magazine, writing that Scully’s “loudly bad book” was based on complete fabrication and that the “doodlebugs” being hyped at hundreds of thousands of dollars were just fragments of surplus war equipment worth a few bucks. 

“Maybe these con men didn't know a flying saucer from a hole in the ground but they used both to sucker their victims,” Cahn wrote. “They were almost $400,000 ahead when TRUE's reporter broke the amazing case of the.... Flying Saucer Swindlers.”

Newton and Gebauer were convicted of fraud for the alien hoax in Colorado in 1953. Contemporaneous newspaper articles note that Newton, devastatingly described as “a one-time amateur golf champion,” had to be hauled from Los Angeles to face charges, after which he fled the state without permission and without paying any of his fines. 

His FBI files reveals that more than a decade later, in the late 1960s, he was back to his old tricks. Newton had “salted” the Buckhorn Mine in Silver City, New Mexico, with valuable minerals to inflate the price of the site, leading to another fraud conviction. He was likely on probation for this scheme at the time of his death in 1972, according to this excellent resource from the Denver Public Library. 

Newton played a huge role in enshrining the memetic vision of dead alien bodies in crashed saucers into the broader ufological iconography. He also harnessed the age-old allure of selling superior technology from an otherworldly source, and was the latest in a long-line of shady petro-tricksters. 

While Newton was clearly a colorful character, primary sources about his life reveal snapshots of a sad drifter, living in various hotels, with an apparently dysfunctional marital history. His pre-Aztec FBI case files include rumors he had been married twice and that one of his brides “had allegedly left a sizable estate in stocks, bonds, and jewelry” but that Newton “was unable to get possession of them after her death and was very much disappointed.” Perhaps that was for the best; he only would have blown it on doodlebugs anyway.

Presumably due to growing anti-communist sentiment, Newton was described as a “good American” who was not involved in “un-American activities” in his 1940s FBI case files. This characterization is prescient in hindsight: For better or for worse, what is more American than a irredeemable fabulist selling alien oil doodlebugs?

In this way, Silas Mason Newton has earned his rank in the great and crowded pantheon of American conmen, and I can't wait for the Coen brothers to reunite to make a biopic about him.

Thanks again for subscribing to the BeX Files! More alien lore incoming next Friday.