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The city of Laredo, Texas started life as a humble village before becoming the capital of the short-lived Republic of the Rio Grande and going on to become the 10th-most populous city in Texas and third-most populated U.S. city on the Mexican border. Mostly known for its international trade with Mexico, large Hispanic population, and ties with major transportation companies, it is mostly just a typical large Texas city. Yet in 1948 a strange series of events would unfold in the region, involving the military, a crashed UFO, and alien bodies.

On July 7, 1948, the Distant Early Warning [DEW] line early warning radar, which is a series of radar installations to provide a warning of enemy attack by air, allegedly began tracking a large, unidentified object travelling at speeds in excess of 2,000 mph, entering U.S. airspace over Washington state to head south directly towards the Texas region. Two F-94 fighter jets were purportedly scrambled at Dias Air Base in Texas to fly up and identify and possible engage the mystery unknown object, but when they approached it proved to be evasive, making a 90-degree angle turn towards eastern Texas without slowing down. As the fighters continued their pursuit, the object began to display erratic behavior, slowing down, speeding up, and wobbling in flight, apparently experiencing some sort of trouble before going down in Mexico approximately 30 miles south of Laredo, Texas. Although no visual identification of the object was made at the time, it was now apparent that this was no meteor and no normal aircraft.

A recovery team was purportedly put together immediately to head towards where the object had disappeared from radar, in order to cordon the site off and investigate just what had gone down, telling the Mexican government that it had been a top-secret U.S. “Special Test Vehicle” that had experienced a malfunction. When they arrived, it was immediately clear that this was no experimental aircraft, but rather a perfectly circular object measuring about 90 feet in diameter and about 28 feet in thickness at the center, with a smooth metallic surface and no obvious seams, windows, doors, or portals. A special, high-security clearance photographer on the scene from White Sands Missile Test Center in New Mexico would describe the object to UFO researcher Willard McIntyre, then with the Ohio UFO Investigators League (OUFOIL) and also involved with a group calling itself the Mutual Anomaly Research Center and Evaluation Network (MARCEN), who would say of it:

What that team observed and photographed was an unearthly-shaped craft made up of earthly-looking debris. The basic structure looked as if it could have been built by earthly hands. Things were badly burned by the time the photographers got to the site, but they noticed a complete absence of any type of wiring, rubber, glass, plastics, wood, or paper products. Our source noticed what was some supportive structures, which were held together by what appeared to be conventional bolts but when “the mechanics attempted to unscrew them with wrenches, they would not turn at all. They had to be eventually chiseled off and the metal was very hard, The Army was using carbide and diamond drills and diamond saws for the final disassembly. There appeared to be two kinds of metal involved. The first and most abundant could not be cut by the oxyacetylene cutting torches brought in. The second immediately began burning when the cutting torches were used on it.

The structural skin of the craft was apparently blown away in the explosion when the device crashed as the whole valley was littered with fragments of what appeared to be foil, very much like our cigarette packages, only much harder. You could not bend the material. Before anyone could leave the site, the MPs searched them and confiscated all fragments that had been collected. As best the source could ascertain, the craft was nearly perfectly circular and was about 90 feet in diameter and about 28 feet in thickness at the center and tapering off to about 5 feet thick at the perimeter. There appeared to be 5 or six levels in the center of the craft and they were told some sort of instrumentation and machinery were removed before they had arrived. No propulsion system or mechanism was apparent to the source.

Making it all even stranger was that there among the wreckage was allegedly found the badly burned body of an alien entity, which was photographed, of which McIntyre would say in his report:

There was only one body, and it was badly burned at that, still in the structure. Our source photographed it in place in the structure as best he could with the intense heat from the still smoldering remains and the burning hot sand. After they had taken photos of the entire scene and attempted to use multiple flash guns and a tripod to record the overall scene from a nearby hillside, The Air Force crash and rescue firemen on the scene dragged the body from the craft and put it on a nearby bank so they could photograph it away from the intense heat. During their briefing, before photographic work began, one of the team members asked what this was and where it came from. The commander told him not to ask. An Army Captain who assisted them said the little fellow we were photographing did not come from this Earth. They only saw and photographed one body but rumors were floating around the site that two or more creatures had been blown out of the vehicle and were captured and taken away injured severely but still alive. Our source said he had no confirmation of this aspect of the case.

The body they photographed was 4′ 6” long. Its head was extremely large for the body size by human proportions. The eyes were gone from the fire but the eye sockets were much larger than in humans and were almost wraparound as if to give 180-degree vision. There were no visible ears or nose but there were openings where ears and nostrils would have been in humans. There were no lips and the mouth was just a sort of slit with no teeth or tongue. There were two legs of normal proportions with short feet having no discernible toes. The two arms were longer than in humans and the hands had four claw-like fingers each with no apparent thumbs. The arms and legs appeared to have joints in approximately the same places as in humans. As soon as a complete set of 8″x1O” prints were made, Commander Smith took them and left for Washington with the photo people never saw him again. The source of the two photos furnished claimed he had 40 negatives in all showing this crash scene.

McIntyre, who claims to have been sent a glossy print of the charred remains of the head and torso of the entity by the photographer and later another showing a burned body lying in vegetation on a hillside, goes into great detail on the medical examination of the creature and its anatomy during the autopsy, of which there was unfortunately no photographic documentation.

There were two Army doctors that arrived on the morning of July 8th and they made a superficial examination of the body. Cur source listened to them while taking photos of their work. There was no teeth or tongue in the mouth and no apparent duct connecting the mouth to any part of the digestive system. There was no reproductive organs visible by human standards. The most remarkable thing he overheard was that no stratified (sic) muscle fiber was discovered in any of the extremities. The tissue, which was gray in color was extremely smooth and the doctors compared its consistency to the tissue of a human female breast. They said that the bone structure in the extremities too was more complicated than in humans and speculated that motion may have been accomplished through the supporting bones instead of muscles. The entire abdomen was encased by a rib-like structure all the way to the hips. The doctors were amazed that the right arm extremity had a metallic joint at the elbow, No external examinations were made at the site.

The hands each had four digits, longer than human fingers, and they tapered to an almost claw-like appearance at the tip. There were no opposing digits like thumbs. There was no visible evidence of toes and the feet came to a blunt point. The body appeared to have been clothed in a metallic-like material, most of which had been burned away. The doctors said there was no evidence of hair growing on the head or other areas of the body as they found no immediate evidence of hair roots. The only fluid found in the apparent veins in the extremities was colorless with a slight green cast and a strong sulfurous odor. Our source noticed a strong sulfurous odor and an ozone smell when working around the burning structure.

After this, the photographer was sent back to White Sands and told in no uncertain terms to never speak of what he had seen, although not before secretly removing 40 negatives from the file, making duplicates and putting the originals back. He would sit on these for decades before finally reaching out to McIntyre with his information and photos in 1979. The alien body itself was apparently shipped off to somewhere unknown, allegedly to a base in San Antonio, Texas. In the meantime, the photos got out into the wild and were mostly dismissed as a hoax, despite claims that they had been examined by Kodak and found to be untampered with. Ufologist Ron Schaffner, of the former Ohio UFO Investigators League (OUFOIL), would find many inconsistencies with the case, including locations and dates, as well as point out various red flags in the photos themselves, finally concluding:

The above case comes down to just two possibilities. Either the claim is valid as an extraordinary event, or it is a hoax. The simpler explanation clearly favors this to be a hoax.Onecould argue that ET uses some of the same hardware as “Earthlings.” Maybe you are thinking, “Why go through all this trouble with a hoax?” or, perhaps, “The source was confused on some of the finer details.” I could also interject that maybe there is a clandestine movement within the United States to cover-up this episode. Perhaps this is disinformation, a ruse to hide facts regarding another covert operation. As I previously stated, I cannot prove nor disprove these statements. What we will say is that the above incident could not have happened with the information given. Our investigations indicate this to my satisfaction. This was a photograph of a light aircraft crash and its dead pilot. Whether it was military or not is still an issue open for debate. This report is meant to be more of an educational tool for researchers. In the future,you may be presented with a similar account. As an objective investigator, you should pursue every avenue at your disposal, much like we did. Bear in mind, that not all the crash saucer stories have this many errors. It may take time to weed out all the evidence, pro or con. After all, the first step to definingUfology as a worthy study is to collect all the trash and dump it from the database.

The Laredo UFO crash and alien body retreival has been much discussed and there is little to show that it ever really happened at all. It is all based on an anonymous statement made to a UFO researcher and some disputed photographs, and as such it immediately inspires doubt even as it stirs up wonder. UFO crash stories continue to be at the forefront of UFO weirdness, but like many of the others, this case is lost in speculation and uncertainry, with little to verify any of it. What happened that day out near Laredo? Was there anything to this at all, and if there was then where did the craft and body actually go? We may never know for sure.

MU*