Magnetic
Engineering and Aztec
4/2013
In my book, Alien Radix, there is a paragraph
about Frank Scully’s 1950 book, Behind the Flying Saucers. I state that
the book is a god awful mess, but also state that the 1948 UFO recovery story of a
UFO in Aztec, N.M. is likely to be a true event. My criticisms of this book certainly are not
the same as any of its other criticisms by any other reviewer, and I believe
their criticisms to be inaccurate, unresearched, and unfair. One of my
criticisms is that it reads like a tabloid article in its style (which reduces
its believability). My other criticism is about its emphasis on magnetism as
the motive force for UFO propulsion. Having just read The Aztec Incident: Recovery
at Hart Canyon c 2011 by Scott and Suzanne Ramsey, I felt agitated enough
by its references to “magnetic engineering” to write this blog opinion piece. The
Aztec Incident is a very good book and makes me more sure about my initial
conclusion that the Aztec incident really did happen. The Ramsey’s book may not
hit a home run, but it did register an extra base hit in my opinion. The
authors racked up a lot of expenses (~$500k) in the 2+ decades of research that
it took to do their book, and it sounds like these expenses were mostly for travel
and lodging. The “strongest” artifact remaining to the general public that
shows that this really did happen is a 39” square concrete pad which is surmised
to have provided a solid base for a lift crane used when the saucer was being
removed by the crash cleanup crew. I wish that some of that travel money had
been used to do a deeper analysis of that slab. Other artifacts, not from the
saucer, but probably from the personnel who removed it, were buried rifle
magazines and K-ration boxes, but these could have been from hunters who were
using military surplus gear. These artifacts were buried 18” deep which seems a
lot deeper than any hunter would likely dig to bury his garbage. The other
compelling verification to the story is just how well the independent first,
second and third hand witnesses’ stories all agree in their detail. It is
really impressive.
William S. Steinman’s book on Aztec, co-authored
with Wendelle Stevens, UFO Crash at Aztec A Well Kept Secret, c 1986, reveals
that its author, Steinman, found above ground human-type debris at
Aztec, such as a welder’s gauge and a rebar support frame in his 1982 visit to
the site. Unfortunately, none of this debris apparently remains at Aztec,
especially rebar from the site because Ramsey says that rebar is date coded.
Steinman has a photo of the rebar in his book, but must not have taken a
sample. The time span between Steinman’s visit to the crash site until Ramsey’s
first visit was about 17 years, so souvenir hunters may have removed the above
ground stuff during that interval, or equally likely, the government, induced
by Steinman’s book, made another clean up trip to the site to clean up the area
even more. Another possibility is that each author was at a different site. The
only reason to mention this possibility is that Steinman mentions a 4’ high x
5’ x 6’ monolith made of concrete at the site which he believed to be a marker,
and which Ramsey did not mention (I do not have his book in front of me anymore
and I am writing this from memory.) Steinman also mentions that the site is
surrounded by a barbed wire fence which Ramsey also does not mention, but which
easily could have been removed during the interval of their visit. Ramsey
mentions (as I recall) talking to Steinman about the debris burial and Steinman
confirms that he, too, found debris buried at 18” depth, but his book mentions
only a 6” depth. Anyhow, Steinman’s book make a good case for the Aztec
incident being real just as Ramsey’s book does. This crash probably did happen.
Our government is now expert at handling UFO crashes, so much so that now I am
sure that there have been several crashes that have occurred without anyone in
public even knowing about them.
The person who placed the Aztec saucer into the
public consciousness was Silas Newton through Scully’s book. Scully’s book
follows his story closely. Both men firmly believed that the saucer story was
true until their dying day, as is shown by their unpublished works which were
dug out and read by the Ramseys. Newton was accused of being a swindler because
he lost a law suit about an invention which was supposed to detect oil. One of
the investors in this invention was induced by journalist named J.P. Cahn to
file this lawsuit which Newton ultimately lost under very suspicious
circumstances. All the rest of the customers that bought the invention (about
34) were satisfied with its performance but they were not allowed to testify.
It appeared to be a setup to discredit Newton to tell what he knew about the
saucer but was mainly implemented because Newton would not reveal the source
names for the saucer information that he had publicized not only in Scully’s book
but also in a lecture at a Colorado university
.
But back to magnetism. Silas Newton’s invention was
known as a doodlebug. It may have used seismic echo analysis or magnetic anomaly
detection to find oil. The invention may have used technology from WWII
submarine detectors which at the time of 1950 was still classified. The
developers of this technology were the founders of a company which later became
Texas Instruments. It is believed that Newton worked with these technocrats to
come up with his own doodlebug invention. The Ramseys also speculate that in
working with these people he got to know them quite well (Newton was an
excellent golfer too, so maybe he golfed with them) and they told him that they
were knowledgeable about the 1948 Aztec landing; i.e. they had worked on
analyzing it for the government. Mind you, this is in 1948 and 1949. In the
early days of UFOs, the government and its scientists had no idea as to what
propelled these things. Undoubtedly and inevitably, magnetism was thought to be
a good candidate. After all, that rotating outer rim is highly suggestive of
the motion of electric motors and generators, both of which are magnetically
based. What better people could they hire to investigate the saucer than a team
of already-security-clearanced submarine detection expert scientists who were
experts in magnetic anomaly detection? My guess is that these guys talked to Newton
about the disc before it slowly dawned on the UFO intelligence agents and other
scientists after a few more years that UFO propulsion was probably due to a source
other than magnetism. Interestingly, a few months after Scully book was
published, Wilbert Smith of Canada convinced his government to fund Project
Magnet which was based on Smith’s belief in magnetism as the motive force for
UFOs. At that time, Smith was already very much aware of Scully’s book. So, as
you can see, magnetism, which we all would agree is a pretty neat and
mysterious phenomenon, had its proponents early on in the UFO story.
One of Smith’s project justification memos in 1950
mentions that he had extracted 50 milliwatts of power from earth’s magnetic
field, which is an amount which he found “promising.” Because earth’s magnetic field is so weak, it
is curious that Smith did not know that sufficient power for the obvious UFO
high energy operation could not be extracted from it. On an even larger scale,
the 1996 NASA tether STS-75 project proved this. This is the project in which a
10+ mile long tether cable in orbit above the earth broke, and this apparently
attracted a lot of UFOs. At least, that is what a lot of people think, but this
was refuted by scientists, and their explanations were upheld even on the
pro-UFO “UFO Hunters” TV show. What most people do not concentrate on is that
this was an experiment to extract power from earth’s magnetic field by
deploying a 13 mile long conductor 160 miles up in a low earth orbit. Its
orientation was positioned to cut through earth’s magnetic field at 17,500
miles per hour. When any conductor is moved through a magnetic field, a voltage
is generated across that conductor, and the size of the voltage is proportional
to the strength of the magnetic field and the speed of the conductor as it cuts
through the magnetic flux lines. When the conductor had been almost completely
deployed, it broke and this is what most people remember, along with the “UFOs”
that gathered around it (which are thought to be ice crystals attracted by the
charge on the cable.) But before it broke at about the 10-12.9 mile length, it
was generating 3500 volts and “up to” 0.5 amperes. These readings show that it
was only generating up to 1.75 kilowatts, which might be enough to power some
satellites, a toaster, etc. but hardly enough to power a UFO. By 1958, Wilbert
Smith had authored several papers on gravity, indicating that he likely had
realized that his initial 1950 hypothesis was wrong, and that gravity was a
more likely suspect, or so it appears. Nowadays, every modern book that I have
seen that dares to discuss the motive force of UFOs believes that it is
gravity, not magnetism, that is key. Books by Paul R. Hill (Unconventional
Flying Objects, c 1995), Robert L. Schroeder (Solving the UFO Enigma
c 2011), Robert Ferrell (The Science
Behind Alien Encounters c 2012), and Paul LaViolette (Secrets of
Antigravity Propulsion c 2008) are but a few examples. Having said all of
this, it must be pointed out that magnetism, or at least electromagnetism, may
still lie at the heart of artificial gravity field generation as the means by
which such fields are achieved.
Scully’s book talks about magnetism too much,
especially when viewed from a more modern perspective than he had. It is so
obviously wrong that it weakens the real truth of the primary storyline; i.e. a
UFO really did land at Aztec, N.M. in 1948. The Ramsey’s book, on the other
hand, had to talk a lot about magnetism in order to establish the
linkage between magnetic detection, oil detection, submarine detection, and
classified information because it this linkage that makes sense of oilman
Newton’s learning about the UFO from a group of scientists whose specialty is
magnetic anomaly detection. In the sixties, a typical college electrical
engineering curriculum (Wilbert Smith was an electrical engineer) did not have
a “magnetic engineering” major; instead it had a power major, and I assume the
same was true in the twenties and thirties which is when these scientists went
to college. In the 60’s electrical engineering curriculum, the closest one
could come to “magnetic engineering” was a very few courses in transformers,
electric motors and generators, and Maxwell’s equations. A physics course would
teach the student about permeability, BH loops, and basic magnetism. Somewhere
it states in Ramsey’s bio that he owns a company that produces “magnetic wire”,
which I assume means “magnet wire” which is a wire coated with a thin, tough,
flexible electrically insulating coating suitable to use the wire for relay,
transformer, and toroidal windings around a magnetically permeable core. So he
must know something about magnetism and about the current thinking in ufology
that magnetism is probably NOT the source of UFO propulsion. I kind of wish
that he had addressed this in the book, but it is probably not a big deal.
I recommend that you read the Ramsey’s book.
