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History of flying saucer hoaxes

Background
On June 24, 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold reported that he saw a string of nine, shiny unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier at speeds that Arnold estimated at a minimum of 1,200 miles an hour. Historians would later chronicle over 800 "copycat" sightings that were reported after the Arnold story was published.

Twin Falls and Woodward hoaxes of 1947
On July 11, it was reported that a disc had been recovered from Twin Falls, Idaho by federal authorities. FBI agent Guy Bannister reported the 30.5-inch disc appeared similar to "cymbals used by a drummer in a band", painted gold and held together by bolts. That same day, it was reported five people in Woodward, North Dakota had constructed a hoaxed saucer.

Maury Island (1947)
In mid-July, original UFO witness Kenneth Arnold On July 29, conducted an interview with a supposed-witness to "what is now known as the Maury Island Hoax". The story was later retold in Gray Barker's 1956 book "They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers," which helped to popularize the image of "Men In Black" in mainstream culture.

Supposed-witnesses Crisman and Dahl claimed to Arnold that they were harbor patrolmen on a workboat near Maury Island and that they saw six doughnut-shaped objects in the sky. According to Crisman and Dahl, one of the objects dropped a substance that resembled lava or "white metal" onto their boat, breaking a worker's arm and killing a dog. Dahl also claimed he was later approached by a man in a dark suit and told not to talk about the incident. While even the claim that Crisman and Dahl were harbor patrolmen is now believed to be false, Arnold was convinced by their story and contacted an Air Force intelligence officer, who flew in along with another from California. The officers concluded the metal objects were aluminum and not of interest. They did not reveal this to Arnold, however, to avoid embarrassing him. The officers then died in a crash on their way back to California.

The FBI then proceeded to investigate this case, and concluded that Crisman and Dahl's sightings were a hoax. In their files, they noted that Dahl stated that "if questioned by the authorities he was going to say it was a hoax because he did not want any further trouble over the matter." The files also detail a few alternate stories communicated by Crisman and Dahl to local newspapers and other media outlets, and conclude that they had contacted a variety of publications "in the hope of building up their story through publicity to a point where they could make a profitable deal with Fantasy Magazine, Chicago, Illinois."

Bodies at Aztec (1948)
During the late 1940s and early 50s, Silas Newton and Leo A. Gebauer traveled through Aztec, attempting to sell devices known in the oil business as "doodlebugs." They claimed that these devices could find oil, gas and gold, and that they could do so because they were based on "alien technology" recovered from the supposed crash of a flying saucer. When J. P. Cahn of the San Francisco Chronicle asked the con-men for a piece of metal from the supposed alien devices, they provided him with a sample that turned out to be ordinary aluminium. In 1949, author Frank Scully published a series of columns in Variety magazine retelling the crash story told to him by Newton and Gebauer. He later expanded these columns to create "Behind the Flying Saucers", a best selling book that influenced public perceptions about UFOs. Four years later the hoax was exposed in True magazine. After the article was published, many victims of the pair came forward. One of the victims was the millionaire Herman Flader, who pressed charges. The two were convicted of fraud in 1953.

Hangar 18 (1974)
In 1974, Robert Spencer Carr named "Hangar 18" at Wright-Patterson Field as the storage location of bodies from the Aztec "crash". In the 1980 film Hangar 18, a crashed alien spacecraft is recovered from the US Southwest,  taken to an air force base in Texas and installed inside Hangar 18 for study.

Amid a public coverup, investigators who enter the ship find it to have been manned by a crew of two, both now dead. Symbols on the control panels match those used by ancient Earth civilizations; the ship's computer reveals extensive surveillance footage of power plants, military bases, industrial plants and major cities worldwide. Upon autopsy, the aliens' physiology shows they and humans underwent a similar evolutionary process. The researchers determined that the aliens have been to Earth before and that human beings are, in fact, their descendants.

Bodies at Roswell (1989)
On September 20, 1989, an episode of Unsolved Mysteries about the Roswell Incident. That episode also included second-hand stories of "Barney" Barnett seeing alien bodies captured by the Army. Mortician Dennis had called the show's hotline claiming to have knowledge of the events.

Dennis claimed to have received "four or five calls" from Air Base with questions about body preservation and inquiries about small or hermetically-sealed caskets; he further claimed that a local nurse told him she had witnessed an "alien autopsy". Dennis's stories of Roswell alien autopsies were the first account to allege alien corpses at the Roswell Army Air Base. Pflock observed that Dennis's story "sounds like a B-grade thriller conceived by Oliver Stone."

In September 1991, Dennis co-founded a UFO museum in Roswell along with former RAAF public affairs officer Walter Haut and Max Littell, a real estate salesman. Dennis he appeared in multiple documentaries repeating his story.

Randle deemed Glenn Dennis one of the "least credible" Roswell witnesses. Randle said Dennis was not credible "for changing the name of the nurse once we had proved she didn't exist." Scientific skeptic author Brian Dunning concurs that Dennis cannot be regarded as a reliable witness, considering that he had seemingly waited over 40 years before he started recounting a series of unconnected events. Such events, Dunnings argues, were then arbitrarily joined together to form what has become the most popular narrative of the alleged alien crash. Some prominent UFOlogists including Karl T. Pflock, Kent Jeffrey, and William L. Moore have become convinced that there were no aliens or alien spacecraft involved in the Roswell crash.

Alien autopsy (1995)
The alien autopsy film is a 17-minute black-and-white film supposedly depicting a secret medical examination or autopsy of an alien by the United States military. It was released in 1995 by London-based entrepreneur Ray Santilli. He presented it as an authentic autopsy on the body of an alien recovered from the 1947 crash of a "flying disc" near Roswell, New Mexico. The film footage was allegedly supplied to him by a retired military cameraman who wished to remain anonymous. In 2006, Santilli admitted the film was not authentic.