Death Valley, CA being encounter — August 1949

In August 1949, prospector Buck Fitzgerald told an International News Service reporter that he and his companion Mase Garney had seen a disc come down in the desert near Death Valley. Contemporary newspaper versions carry August 19 or 20 datelines. Fitzgerald estimated its diameter at twenty-four feet and its passing speed at three hundred miles per hour, figures presented as his estimates rather than measured performance. He said that two very small, human-looking men jumped from the object and ran away when they saw the prospectors. The men pursued them across a dune but lost sight of them. Extreme heat was given as the reason they could not continue far. Later UFO literature adds that the disc was gone when they returned to the landing place, a detail not equally developed in the early press accounts. The tale circulated widely in newspapers and then in books by the Lorenzens, Bowen and others. Repetition of the same wire story is not independent corroboration. No verifiable wreckage, photograph or recovered occupant accompanies it. Hatch marks the case with a hoax-related flag; the accessible material establishes an unverified press story, without documenting a confession or a demonstrated physical crash.