In 1948, a year after Roswell, another flying saucer is supposed to have come down at this town in northern New Mexico — thirty metres across, with sixteen bodies inside. The story was told by the writer Frank Scully in a 1950 book, Behind the Flying Saucers, which became a bestseller. Two years later True magazine established that Scully's sources were two confidence men, Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer, who had been selling oilmen an "alien" device for finding deposits. Both were convicted of fraud. Aztec was not put off: from 1998 the town ran an annual UFO symposium, and it became a noticeable source of income for the local library.

Read next

Baikonur and a Sky Full of Explanations

The Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Kyzylorda Region of Kazakhstan is the world's first and largest operational spaceport, long surrounded by reports and rumors of unidentified flying objects. Particular intrigue surrounds accounts by Soviet military personnel and rocket engineers describing glowing spheres, discs, and light beams observed over launch pads and ballistic missile silos.