Frank Scully

Journalism Career

Frank Scully (April 28, 1892 – June 23, 1964) was an American journalist, author, and humorist best known for his 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers, which became the foundational text for modern crashed-UFO mythology. A Columbia University journalism graduate, Scully built a respected career as a reporter for The New York Sun and as a regular columnist for Variety magazine, where he gained influence covering entertainment and cultural topics. His journalism credentials and established platform made him uniquely positioned to amplify UFO narratives to a broad American audience—a role he embraced with particular intensity from 1949 onward.

Behind the Flying Saucers

In 1949, Scully's friend Silas Newton, a Denver oilman, approached him with an extraordinary claim: three saucers carrying crews of tiny humanoid beings had crashed near Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948, and the U.S. Air Force had recovered them while concealing the evidence. Scully, intrigued by the story, began publishing accounts in Variety columns, which generated significant reader interest. The narrative expanded into Behind the Flying Saucers, published by Henry Holt and Company in September 1950.

The book was an immediate commercial success, selling approximately 60,000 copies before its credibility collapsed—and according to later sources, eventually reaching over 10 million copies in various translations worldwide. Scully's account of the Aztec crash, complete with descriptions of recovered bodies and exotic materials, provided a detailed crash-retrieval narrative that would resonate throughout UFO culture. The book presented Scully's sources—particularly a mysterious figure calling himself "Dr. Gee" (later identified as con artist Leo A. Gebauer)—with apparent authority, lending mainstream legitimacy to claims that would otherwise have circulated only in fringe circles.

Exposure and Legacy

In the mid-1950s, San Francisco Chronicle reporter John Philip Cahn exposed Newton and Gebauer as sophisticated con artists running a fraud scheme. The pair had fabricated the Aztec story to sell purported alien technology samples to credulous investors. Scully's central sources were entirely fictitious, and his crash narrative was a hoax constructed to benefit criminals. The revelation damaged Scully's reputation but did not erase his cultural footprint—Behind the Flying Saucers had already established the template for crashed-saucer stories that would dominate UFO discourse for decades.

Historical Significance

Although Scully was deceived, his work proved historically consequential. He transformed the crashed-saucer concept from rumor into a commercially viable narrative structure, demonstrating that mainstream publishing houses would engage with UFO claims and that American readers hungered for such stories. His social network included prominent contactees and UFO figures, including George Van Tassel (organizer of the Giant Rock UFO conventions), George Adamski, and Albert K. Bender, positioning him at a nexus of early UFO culture. Scully's role as a respected journalist who lent credibility to UFO claims—however misplaced—illustrated the ease with which hoaxes could infiltrate mainstream discourse and the enduring appeal of extraterrestrial contact narratives in post-war America.