“It’s very rare to have multiple witnesses, multiple sources of information, confirming an incident like this,” Preston Dennett, author of “UFOs Over Arizona: A True History of Extraterrestrial Encounters in the Grand Canyon State,” recently told local channel 12News.

In a previous interview with AZ Central, Dennett called the occurrence “one of the best-verified UFO crashes in the United States.”

A local institution, the Mohave Museum of History and Arts even boasts an exhibit on the crash, which locals — and more recently podcasters — have been trying to get to the bottom of for years.

Bigger than Roswell?

Harry Drew is one of those locals — the area historian created a documentary on the extraterrestrial mystery a number of years back.

Drew told 8NewsNow that witnesses described seeing eight UFOs — also called unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) modernly — in the night sky, engaged in what appeared to be a kind of battle. Ultimately, he said, three crafts went down.

The crash occurred around the same time as a nearby Nevada nuclear test series codenamed Operation Upshot-Knothole, declassified military documents show.

Consistent with other global sightings of UFOs near spiked points of radiation, an atomic bomb was detonated two days ahead of the incident, according to the report.

During the night in question, one craft was burned up when it collided with a mountain, another was found intact in the desert with no damage, and a third crash-landed near a small reservoir, which the military and a team of scientists camped around to recover, Drew claimed.

Although much of the researcher’s theory has been debated in the UFO world — he also believes experimental radar brought the crafts down — Dennett corroborates a military response of 40 officials to one of the sites.

“The object was described as metallic, 30 feet wide and three and a half feet high, oval-shaped with portholes,” Dennett said in 2016. “Inside were two to four, four-foot tall humanoids, deceased according to most sources, with large eyes and wearing metallic suits.”

The pilot appeared to have died in the crash.

What did the government know?

In the many years to follow, Dennett has traced the incident through old reports and government documents. He uncovered a frequent code name used for one scientist: Fritz Werner.

“We now know him to be Arthur Stansel,” Dennett said recently.

“It was [Stansel’s] job to basically determine the speed of this object as it came down, based upon the gouge it made in the soil, and he estimated it was about 1200 miles per hour.”

The project was top secret — scientists arrived on a blacked-out bus so they wouldn’t know where they were. An Air Force Colonel impressed the importance of staying quiet on the group.

However, 20 years later Stansel signed an affidavit confirming his presence at the mystery site. Dennett claims the government took the craft into secret custody, according to information of a claim revealed 50 years after the fact.

“These craft are scooped up, taken to various Air Force bases, scientific labs, and studied intensely, intently to figure out exactly what we can figure out about how they work,” he said.

And, while this may all seem like an excellent plot for a sci-fi thriller, the eye-raising reports appeared to be further legitimized after a former intelligence officer recently went public with a text conversation he had with an unidentified “senior” government official in 2020.