This is a fantastic book. Steinman recounts how he was browsing through the "occult" section of a bookshop when he came across a misplaced copy of Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers. He bought it and became hooked on the subject. UFO Crash at Aztec is at least as much about Steinman's journey of discovery as it is about the Aztec crash. He visited the area, interviewed many people, tracked down as many people as he could who were mentioned in Scully's book.
The book could almost get a co-author from Frank Scully as various statements and articles are included by the pioneering journalist. About the only thing missing is the article Scully wrote for Albert Bender's Space Review. Also included is the chapter from the second volume of Scully's autobiography that is concerned with the Aztec crash, plus there is the complete text of the article by J. P. Cahn for True magazine, which is interesting in its own right for Cahn's interview of Silas Newton.
This is the book that first mentioned MJ-12, the enigmatic group reportedly led by Vannevar Bush. It's also the first to feature comments by Robert Sarbacher (first named in Len Stringfield's Status Report III), who was the scientist mentioned in Arthur Bray's The UFO Connection as the one who informed Project Magnet chief Wilbert Smith that UFOs were classified two points higher than the H-Bomb and that Vannevar Bush led the secret group investigating UFOs. Steinman recounts how Bray and Wilbert Smith's son spent ages going through Wilbert Smith's personal papers to find the identity of whoever provided Smith his information that followed his "discreet enquiries through the Canadian embassy staff" in his Top Secret "Geo-Magnetics" 1950 Canadian Department of Transport memo. Bray co-operated fully with Steinman and sent him materials including copies of the note pad in which Smith documented his interview with Sarbacher. Sarbacher was the man who stated that the "facts" reported in Behind the Flying Saucers "are substantially correct." Steinman provides details of Sarbacher's career.
Several articles are included by Gordon Creighton, from Flying Saucer Review, on the subject of crash retrievals. Creighton reported that, according to the first editor of Flying Saucer Review, General George Marshall told a Flying Saucer Review special correspondent that the U.S. had custody of crashed saucers and dead aliens.
The career of Eric Henry Wang is discussed, who reportedly was head of the Department of Special Studies at Wright-Patterson AFB from 1949-56, before the department was transferred to Kirtland AFB. And, on the subject of Kirtland, this book is the first to document in detail the claims of Paul Bennewitz and includes an interview with Bennewitz conducted by James McCampbell, with corrections by Bennewitz. Bennewitz that there was an alien base a kilometre underground a mesa north-west of Dulce, New Mexico, and that people had been abducted there were they had seen things such as cattle body parts in vats.
Various declassified documents are included, including the Analysis of Flying Object Incidents in the U.S. by the Directorate of Intelligence and Office of Naval Intelligence, dated Dec 1948, In the absence of the Project Sign Estimate of the Situation, this is the next best thing and it includes a list of UFO incidents beginning in April 1947 with a sighting by two employees of the Weather Bureau Station in Richmond, Virginia. Incidents involving pilots Thomas Mantell and George Gorman, later debunked by Edward Ruppelt in his Report on UFOs, are considered as involving unidentified objects here, and there is included a section, "Reports of radar intercepts point to unusual air activity which may be related to flying objects".
The final chapters of the book relate to documents concerning Project Moon Dust, Project Blue Fly, Project Pounce, Project Snowbird, Project Sigma (an effort to use telepathy to contact aliens, which was, according to a declassified document, successful in 1959, which is the year that Robert Friend stated that an experiment in telepathy occurred to contact aliens, as discussed in the book UFOs Past Present in Future and in the documentary UFOs It Has Begun), plus reports of UFOs over Kirtland AFB in 1980 and Wendelle Stevens's account of his encounters with Bill English and the contents of the controversial Project Grudge/Blue Book Report 13.
This book was a major inspiration for Timothy Good's book Above Top Secret. In his list of acknowledgements for that book Good gives special thanks to Steinman and Stevens "for the extensive use of material from UFO Crash at Aztec." In addition, the book was a precursor to the Matrix series of books by Val Valerian.
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