Silas Newton was the main informant (or misinformant) concerning the supposed saucer crash at Aztec, New Mexico in
1948, made famous by Frank Scully in his book Behind the Flying Saucers
(1950). Thoroughly debunked by J.P.
Cahn in a 1952 article in True magazine, followed by a second article in
1956, interest in the supposed Aztec crash all but disappeared. However, in
recent years interest has been building up again, largely because of Scott and
Susanne Ramseys' The Aztec UFO Incident (2012, revised 2016, http://www.theaztecincident.com/ ). I have previously published a review of the 2012 edition of that book.
The following is a guest post by Dan Plazak, a Denver geologist who
has been studying the career of Silas Newton. Dan says his main interest in the
story is not the saucers, but instead the “doodlebug” that Newton claims to
have invented using crashed saucer technology [beating a similar claim by Col. Philip J. Corso by almost fifty
years!]
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Guest Post by Dan Plazak
Aztec crash aficionados describe Silas Newton as
a multimillionaire geophysicist, who famously rediscovered the Rangely oil
field in Colorado. But the Silas Newton in the skeptical literature is a
completely different person: a professional con man without scientific
credentials, who made up the Aztec crash story for one of his con games. Which
Silas Newton is the real one?
The Aztec UFO Incident (2016 edition)
presents a highly fictionalized Silas Newton:
 |
| Silas Newton |
“Newton
was famous for finding oil.” (page 75)
A search of newspaper reports and oil-industry
literature can find no such fame, and, after all, a person cannot be secretly
famous.
“Newton’s
great success in finding oil,” (page 105);
“wildly successful in finding oil.”
(page 115)
Quite the contrary, Silas Newton drilled one dry
hole after another, until he was broke and in debt. I’m still researching his
drilling records, but the following is what I know so far, for the period starting
in 1937. For his lack of success at Rangely field in Colorado, see below. In
Kansas, Newton drilled one dry hole and at least one producer; his FBI file from
1941 mentions “three small producing wells” in Kansas, giving him about $200
per month. In California, Newton drilled 6 dry holes, and no producers. In Wyoming,
he drilled 7 dry holes, and no producers. In Arizona, he drilled 6 dry holes
and no producers. It’s no shame to drill a dry hole on a wildcat location, if
you have good reason to think there might be oil there, but Newton was the
opposite of “wildly successful”.
“Oil
companies that had abandoned oil fields were quick to lease unproductive fields
to him, only to reap embarrassment when Silas Newton returned the fields to
profitability after finding deep reserves.” (page 247)
Frank Scully started this nonsense when he
passed along Newton’s bragging that he had “rediscovered” the Rangely Oil Field
in Colorado. Newton did no such thing, and Rangely appears to have been a
financial debacle for him. Now The Aztec UFO Incident shows how myths
grow in the retelling, by changing the single Rangely Field into the plural
“fields.” Of course, the book does not name these additional oil fields where
Newton supposedly worked his magic.
 |
| Silas Newton was convicted of fraud, but escaped going to jail. |
Of
Silas Newton in the late 1940s: “The oilman was so wealthy that he had no need
to swindle anyone, and simple logic must intrude.” (page 115)
The authors support this with a newspaper
article from 1930, about 20 years previous to the period in question. And it
may have been true in 1930 (although Newton’s finances appear to have started
to unravel in 1929, with the crash), but by the late 1940s, Newton was being
dunned by creditors, and in 1952 could not afford his $5,000 bail. Page 100 of The
Aztec UFO Incident even shows an article from a Denver daily newspaper,
Oct. 19, 1952, discussing Newton’s inability to pay his bail.
Did Silas Newton “Rediscover” the Rangely Oil Field?
Silas Newton’s most touted alleged
accomplishment is the rediscovery of the Rangely oil field in Colorado.
“He
hunted for oil with instruments which had cost a fortune and were a closely
guarded secret. With them he had rediscovered the Rangely oil field, years
after the major oil companies had written it off as a failure.”
- Frank Scully, Behind the Flying Saucers (1950)
You see much the same thing repeated throughout
the Aztec UFO-crash literature. Always paraphrasing Scully: Silas Newton, the
geophysical genius, the famous oil-finder, “rediscovered” the Rangely oil field
in Colorado by using a secret geophysical device. But is it true?
To anyone familiar with the history of oil in
the Rocky Mountains, or who bothers to do even minimal literature search on the
history of Rangely, the answer is obvious: Silas Newton did not discover, or
“rediscover,” anything at Rangely field – not one thing. Let’s review the
history of Rangely oil field.
The Real History of Rangely Oil Field
Oil at Rangely was first discovered in 1902, in
the shallow Mancos shale. Despite the low production – most wells pumped only 5
to 7 barrels per day – and the remote location in Northwest Colorado, many
shallow oil wells between 400 to 700 feet deep were drilled by small
independent oil men in the years up to World War I. But Rangely oil was
handicapped by having to be trucked many miles down dirt roads to a refinery.
The road was often made impassible by snow or mud.[i]
In 1932, the California Company (the corporate
ancestor of Chevron) drilled the Raven #1A well at Rangely to explore deeper
that anyone had before. The
location was chosen not by any geophysical device, but because it was on top of
the Rangely anticline, an obvious and well-mapped geologic structure known to
be favorable for finding oil. In June 1933, the California Company announced
that it had discovered a massive oil deposit: a 600-foot thickness of
oil-saturated Weber sandstone, and the industry bible Oil & Gas Journal headlined across the top of a page: “Rangely
Dome Discovery of Major Importance; First Oil Producer in the Weber Formation.”[ii]
The deep Weber oil pool would later catapult
Rangely into the most productive oil field in Colorado, but at the depression
oil prices of 1933, the oil flow from the deep well at Rangely was not enough
to pay for the cost of deep drilling and trucking from the remote location. No
more deep wells were drilled at Rangely for the next ten years, but oil men
remembered the California Company’s discovery. And far-thinking major oil
companies bought up the oil rights over the Rangely anticline, betting that oil
would not always be cheap.
World War II required prodigious amounts of oil
for the war effort, and the well-known but previously uneconomic deep Rangely
oil was suddenly a potential bonanza. The California company began producing
its ten-year-old deep Weber well in September 1943, and the Oil & Gas Journal commented that the
event marked “the beginning of a new era” for the oil field. With a major
supply of oil assured, the road to Rangely was paved, the landscape became
dotted with oil rigs, and companies began building pipelines to Rangely. The
big winners were a handful of major oil companies which had bought almost all
the oil rights over the Rangely oil field, in anticipation of this moment.[iii]
Silas Newton at Rangely Oil Field
So, where does Newton’s “rediscovery” fit in?
What was Newton’s contribution to discovering or rediscovering the oil at
Rangely? Absolutely none. No doodlebug was used to discover Rangely, and none
was needed; it was drilled because such anticlines were obvious places to drill
for oil. Newton never even saw Rangely until nine years after the deep Weber discovery.
He was just one of the many latecomers who flocked to Rangely to see if they
could find some oil that the others had overlooked.
By his own account, Newton visited Rangely for
the first time in 1942, and tried to find some oil leases. Unfortunately for
Newton, the best part of the field was already owned by three majors: the
California Company, the Texas Company (Texaco), and Stanolind (Amoco). They all
knew that they were sitting on a bonanza, and were not interested in selling.
But Newton found John Bockhold, a small-time oil man from Kansas who had leased
about 3,000 acres along the south edge of the Rangely anticline, but needed to
sell his lease to pay some debts. Newton gambled that the deep Rangely field
would cover a much larger area, and he bought the 3,000 acres of oil leases for
$250,000, a high price at the time. But Newton talked his way into paying only
a small sum up front, with the rest to be paid from future oil production. Now
he had a sizeable oil lease; but did any of it have oil?
The Weber sandstone at Rangely is a classic
structural oil field: it is shaped like an elongate inverted bowl. The oil
floats on top of the water, so that if you drill the top of the bowl, you find
oil; if you drill too far down the sides, you find only water. Only no one yet
knew exactly how much of the bowl was filled with oil. Newton’s lease included
part of the south flank of the structure, so with a bit of luck, he would find
oil in the northernmost part of the lease. With a lot of luck, he would find
oil under a significant part of the lease.
After drilling a shallow well to the Mancos
shale in late 1943, Newton began drilling his first Weber well at Rangely in
April 1944, about the same time that the California Company started drilling
their second deep well.[iv] The California
Company’s new well started producing oil from the Weber sandstone in September
1944. But Newton had drilling problems, and in September 1945, 17 months after
he started drilling, Newton finally gave up without reaching the Weber
sandstone.[v]
Newton’s first partial ownership in a successful
deep well at Rangely was the Wasatch Oil Gentry #2-D, which started drilling in
February 1945. When the well was tested in September 1945, Silas Newton proved
himself a master of public relations. The Steamboat
Pilot in nearby Steamboat Springs printed the headline “Newton Oil Co.
Strikes Gusher at Rangely.” Beyond the fact that a couple of hundred barrels
per day is far below the “gusher” class, the Pilot article neglected to even mention that it was the Wasatch Oil
Company that actually struck oil, because the well was a joint venture between
Newton and Wasatch: For ease of drilling, Newton drilled the shallow part of
the hole with his cable-tool drilling rig, then Wasatch Oil moved on with rotary
drilling equipment, drilled the deep part of the hole, and completed it as an
oil producer. But even though he owned
only a partial interest in the well, Newton tried to take all the credit.
In August 1945, the Newton Oil Company started
drilling its second operated deep well at Rangely. He stopped drilling at a
depth of 1,838 feet. Although Newton completed the well as a gas producer,
there was no gas pipeline out of Rangely, so that the only use for gas was a
small amount used by drilling and production equipment. The well was
essentially a dry hole.[vi]
In October 1945, the Newton Company started
drilling its third deep well, and in June 1946 announced that it was a dry
hole. Up to that time, oil companies had drilled 71 wells to the Weber, and
every one of those wells had found oil. Newton’s was the first well at
Rangely to penetrate the Weber and find only water. The Associated Press
picked up the story, and newspapers across the country publicized Newton Oil
as the company that drilled the first dry hole at Rangely, breaking the string
of 71 successful oil wells in a row.[vii]
So by June 1946, after more than two years of
drilling, Newton had drilled three dry holes, and owned partial interests in
one oil well completed by another company. This was a very bad record for a
development drilling project, which should have carried minimal risk. And it
was now clear, although Newton did his best to deny it, that, at best, only the
very northern edge of his large lease was prospective for oil.
Newton then drilled four oil wells to the Weber.
Each of these produced oil, but two of them produced only at low rates. Typical
Rangely oil wells were making from 100 to 600 barrels per day, but the
Associated #1A and #1B started off making only 45 and 23 barrels per day. In
addition, all four Associated wells were at the very edge of the field, so they
had thinner sections of oil pay. The field had a partial water drive, and these
wells would be the first wells to go to water as the oil was withdrawn, and the
oil-water contact moved upward.[viii]
For reasons difficult to explain, Newton also
drilled a well that he knew, or should have known by then, was too far south to
be in the oil pay: the Newton Oil Government #14F. Newton said that he had
drilled the well based on geophysics, and loudly insisted that the Government
#14F had found oil in a new oil pay, the Dakota sandstone, although many in the
oil industry doubted him. After a lot of typical Silas Newton overblown
publicity, the well was finally put on production – and produced no oil, only a
small amount of natural gas. Essentially, this was another dry hole. In 1947,
Newton sold the productive part of his Rangely lease to Stanolind for an
undisclosed sum.
The creditors of the original leaseholder, John
Buckhold, sued Silas Newton, saying that the $67,000 that Newton had received
for selling part of the lease should have been paid to them as part of the
$250,000 purchase price. Their lawsuit was a legal success, in the sense that
the court ordered Newton to pay, but a financial failure, because Newton had
apparently already spent the money.[ix]
Newton’s record of drilling deep Weber wells at
Rangely was: four oil wells, all marginal, and all would water out quickly,
plus a partial interest in one somewhat less marginal oil well. He also drilled
four dry holes, although some of them were apparently completed in the
shallow Mancos shale, and produced small amounts of oil.
This is not a good record for a development
project of this type. If Newton had acted prudently, at least two of the dry
holes would have been avoided. Adding up Newton’s expenditures and income from
the project, he probably lost something more than a million dollars at Rangely.
That he lost money at Rangely is supported by fact that he never fully paid the
$250,000 for the lease, and the Buckhold creditors were still suing him for
payment in 1952. Perhaps not coincidentally, signs of Newton’s financial
distress started in the late 1940s, followed shortly by accusations of fraud.
Conclusions on the Rangely
field
1) Silas Newton did not in any way discover or
rediscover Rangely Field, or any of the major oil-bearing zones at Rangely. The
history of Rangely oil field is too well-documented to admit of any doubt on
this point.
2) Nor was the Rangely field discovered through
the use of any geophysical device; it was found through basic geology and the
willingness of Chevron to take a chance on drilling a deep hole.
3) Newton not only didn’t rediscover Rangely,
but also probably lost a lot of money there. He drilled too many dry holes, and
completed a few marginal producers. Five years after he sold out, he was still
being sued for money he owed for buying the oil lease.
Silas Newton’s falsehood that he had
rediscovered the Rangely oil field is easily disproven. It was believed only
because his audience – originally Frank Scully, was gullible, and also unlikely
to do any minimal literature search, which would have exposed Newton’s
nonsense. Today, Newton’s bragging imposes on the gullibility of a much larger
audience.
Did Newton find oil with
a Magnetic Detection Device?
One of the theses in The Aztec UFO Incident is that Silas Newton found oil by using a
top-secret magnetic detection device developed during World War II to find
enemy submarines. The Ramseys ask:
“How
did Scully know this [magnetic submarine detection] in 1949 when he was writing
the book, which was published in 1950, a time when all of these secret programs
were still in place?” (page 250)
Short answer: by reading Life magazine (Nov. 14, 1949: “Scientific weapons and a future war”)
First, by Scully’s own account, he began writing the book in 1950, not 1949. Second,
a cursory literature search shows that the magnetic detection of submarines
during the war was public knowledge well before Scully started writing his
book. The MAD program was publicized in such not-quite-top-secret documents as
daily newspapers, Life magazine, Flying (Jan. 1947: “The MAD cats”), Science News Letter (Aug. 14, 1948:
“Doodlebug hunts oil”), and Popular Science
(Mar. 1950: “How good is our anti-submarine defense”). The Aztec UFO
Incident creates a false dilemma by fudging Scully’s writing back one year,
and by pretending that the existence of the magnetic submarine detection
program was kept secret at least four years longer than it really was.
Scully’s knowledge of the program was sketchy at
best, as shown by his wildly exaggerated statement (page 37 of Behind the
Flying Saucers) that, using the magnetic detection, “we were able to knock
out as many as 17 Jap subs in one day.” In fact, during the entire war, no more
than two Japanese submarines ever sank, from all causes combined, in a single
day.[x]
The real question is not how Scully knew of the program, which was well known
at the time, but which grossly unreliable source told him that magnetic
detection had resulted in 17 submarines sunk in a single day?
The Ramseys' book also makes a complete hash of
the history of magnetic research during World War II. Although peripheral to
the Aztec crash, these glaring errors reflect poorly on the supposed 28 years
of research that went into the book. The book states:
1)
The anti-submarine magnetic anomaly detection device, or MADD, was invented by
the principals of GSI.
Fact: the MADD was invented by scientists at
Gulf Research, most notably Victor Vacquier,[xi],[xii]
and it is a shame for Ramsey et al to deprive him of the credit he is due. GSI (now
Texas Instruments) was contracted during the war only to manufacture the
device.[xiii]
According to Texas Instruments’ own website, their defense contracts did not
include any of their own inventions until the mid-1950s. (see: http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/company/history/timeline/popup.htm
under Defense: Overview)
2)
The MADD is known today as the Magnetron.
Fact: the MADD and the magnetron are entirely
separate things. The MADD did not use a magnetron tube; it instead used the
fluxgate magnetometer. GSI did not invent the magnetron, either. The original
magnetron was invented by General Electric engineer Albert Hull in 1920,[xiv]
and the cavity magnetron, which was used in World War II as a source of radar
waves, was invented by British scientists J. T. Randall and H. A. Boot.[xv]
3)
The MADD was kept secret into the 1950s, delaying its use in oil exploration.
Fact: Gulf Research was in the business of
selling geophysical services, and soon after the war they were promoting their
airborne fluxgate magnetometer, in essence the MADD, to oil and mineral
exploration. The wartime program and its application to oil exploration was
described in technical detail in Geophysics
(issues of July 1946 and April 1948), including a schematic of the fluxgate
magnetometer.
Geophysics, by the way, was mailed
to each member of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, in 1950 the
membership was 2,566 scientists working in the field of finding oil and gas
with geophysics. If you want to be a top scientist, you join such professional
organizations to keep up with cutting-edge developments. Of course, Leo GeBauer
and Silas Newton do not appear in the published membership lists of the Society
of Exploration Geophysicists (I searched the lists from 1937 through 1950).
Neither were GeBauer or Newton listed as members of the American Association of
Petroleum Geologists; nor of the American Geophysical Union. Some top
scientists.
Conclusions on Newton
and magnetic oil detectors
If Silas Newton was using a MADD-derived
magnetic device to find oil, he was just one of many, because the technology was
available to anyone. But whatever he was using, it obviously didn’t do him much
good, based on his overwhelming lack of success in finding oil.
The Aztec UFO Incident asserts that there is a
genuine mystery behind the Aztec UFO crash. But the real mystery posed by the
book is this: how can three authors, one of whom repeatedly brags about his 28
years of research on the topic, produce a book with so many careless errors of
fact and logic?
Dan
Plazak is a geologist in Denver, and author of a history of swindling in the
mining industry: A Hole in the Ground
with a Liar at the Top (University of Utah Press, 2007), see www.miningswindles.com. He is
currently working on a book about doodlebugs and other unscientific ways to
search for oil and minerals.
Endnotes
[i] W. Y. Pickering and C. L. Dorn, “Rangely
oil field, Rio Blanco County, Colorado,” in
J V. Howell (ed.) Structure of Typical
American Oil Fields, v.3, (Tulsa: American Association of Petroleum
Geologists, 1948) 132-152.
[ii] Tolbert R. Ingram,
“Rangely dome discovery of major importance; first oil producer in the Weber
formation,” Oil & Gas Journal, 22
June 1933, p.119. Graham S. Campbell, “Weber pool of Rangely field, Colorado,”
in Guidebook to the Geology of Northwest
Colorado (Salt Lake: Intermountain Association of Petroleum Geologists,
1955) 99-100.
[iii] “Old Rangely well
opened after 10-year shutdown,” Oil &
Gas Journal, 7 Oct. 1943, p103. C. R. Thomas, “Rangely, one-time shallow field,
now Rocky Mountains’ most active area,” Oil
& Gas Journal, 24 Nov. 1945, p.90-96.
[iv] “Rangely field promises
to become an active area,” Oil & Gas
Journal, 30 Mar. 1944, p.132.
[v] Oil Reporter (Denver) 25 Aug. 1945, p4.
[vi] Oil Reporter (Denver), 25 Oct. 1945.
[vii] Rangely oil field of
Colorado has first failure,” Pampa (TX) Daily
News, 14 June, p.6 c.4. “Rangely gets first dry hole in Weber,” Oil & Gas Journal, 29 June 1946,
p.149.
[viii] Oil Reporter (Denver),
25 Mar. 1947, p.6, 29 July 1947, p.10, 26 Aug. 1947, p.10.
[ix] Charles Roos, “Newton
oil firm due to answer contempt action,” Denver
Post, 16 Oct. 1952.
Capt. S. W. Roskill’s
multivolume The War at Sea lists
every Japanese submarine that sank during World War II, including dates, locations, and identification numbers. (London:
HM Stationary Office, 1960, 1961) v.3 part 1 p.373-374, part 2 p.470-471.
[xi] M. N. Nabighian and
others, “The historical development of the magnetic method in exploration,” Geophysics, Nov.-Dec. 2005, v.70 n.6
p.37ND.
[xii] M S. Reford and J. S.
Sumner, “Aeromagnetics,” Geophysics,
Aug. 1964, v. 29 n.4 p.483.
[xiii] Caleb Pirtle III, Engineering the World: Stories from the
First 75 Years of Texas Instruments (Dallas: Southern Methodist University
Press, 2005) 28-30.
[xiv] Albert W. Hull, “The
magnetron,” Journal of the American
Institute of Electrical Engineers, Sept. 1921, v.40 n.9 p.715-723.
[xv] S. S. Swords, Technical History of the Beginnings of RADAR
(Institution of Electrical Engineers, 1986) 258.
