THINK ABOUTIT CRASH REPORT

1948: Dreamy Draw area, Arizona, UFO Crash

On a hunting morning in Paradise Valley, Arizona, in the late 1940s, businessman and pilot Selman Graves climbed a hill for a better vantage and saw, off in the direction the Air Force had just declared off-limits, “a large, aluminum, dome-shaped thing” about the size of his friend’s house, ringed by tents and men moving about. At the time he took it for an observatory dome and thought no more of it — until years later, reading Frank Scully’s notorious Behind the Flying Saucers, he became convinced he had glimpsed a crashed craft from another world. From that recollection, relayed to researcher Timothy Good in 1987, grew the Dreamy Draw legend: a hundred-foot domed disc, twelve small gray bodies, flatbed trucks hauling the wreckage to Muroc, and a flood-control dam supposedly built years later for the sole purpose of burying the saucer in plain sight. It is one of the American Southwest’s most enduring crash tales — and one with no verifiable craft, no named bodies, and a tangle of sources that runs straight back through a famous hoax.

Date: 1948 (also reported as early October 1947 in the Graves account — see notes)

Sighting Time: Morning (Graves observation)

Day/Night: Day

Location: Paradise Valley / Cave Creek area, near Dreamy Draw, Arizona (north of Phoenix)

Urban or Rural: Rural (at the time)

No. of Entity(‘s): Reported variously — 2 bodies recovered on-scene in one account; 12 small gray bodies “inside the craft” in another

Entity Type: Gray (small)

Entity Description: As claimed: small gray humanoid bodies, all dead; numbers and details vary between tellings (2 vs. 12), with no examination record or named witness to the bodies

Hynek Classification: None — this is a crash-retrieval legend, not a Close Encounter; there is no verified observation of a proximate object with physical effects on a witness. (The distant “dome” Graves reported is unconfirmed as a craft.)

Duration: Not applicable

No. of Object(s): 1 (claimed)

Description of the Object(s): As claimed: a disc-shaped craft about 100 ft in diameter with a dome on top, “aluminum”-colored; in the Graves account a large dome-shaped object roughly house-sized seen at distance, surrounded by tents and personnel. Said to have been trucked to Muroc AFB, dismantled into six sectors, studied at North Edwards into the 1970s, and later moved to Nevada.

Shape of Object(s): Disc with dome

Size of Object(s): ~100 ft diameter (claimed)

Color of Object(s): Aluminum / metallic (as claimed)

Distance to Object(s): Graves’s observation was from a hilltop at some distance

Height & Speed: Not applicable (crash claim)

Number of Witnesses: Selman E. Graves (distant daytime observation) plus unnamed/unverified parties in the recovery and cover-up portions; no named witness to the bodies or craft up close

Special Features/Characteristics: Distant “aluminum dome” with tents and moving personnel; Air Force area restriction that morning; reported flatbed trucks leaving the area; claimed altered topographic maps relocating Cave Creek Road; the Dreamy Draw Dam cover-up legend (dam allegedly built to bury the craft); a reported “humming” beneath off-limits ground; explicit entanglement with Frank Scully’s “Behind the Flying Saucers” and its “Dr. Gee” composite source

Case Status: Insufficient Data (crash-retrieval legend; no verifiable craft or bodies; sources include the discredited Scully chain and Anton Anfalov)

Source: Selman E. Graves account to Timothy Good (1987); Frank Scully, “Behind the Flying Saucers” (1950); Anton Anfalov (as cited on the record); associated Dreamy Draw Dam urban legend

Summary/Description: Reports describe a 1948 (or, per Selman Graves, early-October-1947) crash of a domed, disc-shaped craft roughly 100 ft across in the Paradise Valley / Cave Creek area near Dreamy Draw, north of Phoenix. Graves, a businessman and pilot on a hunting trip, reported seeing from a hilltop a large aluminum dome the size of a house surrounded by tents and men, which he took at the time for an observatory; reading Frank Scully’s book years later, he reinterpreted it as a crashed craft and gave his account to Timothy Good in 1987. Various tellings claim 2 to 12 small gray bodies recovered, wreckage trucked to Muroc AFB and dismantled in six sectors, altered topographic maps, and a cover-up via the later construction of Dreamy Draw Dam. No verifiable craft, named body-witnesses, or physical evidence exists, and the lineage runs through Scully’s discredited account and the problematic Anfalov source.

Related Cases: 1948 Aztec, New Mexico crash | 1947 Roswell incident | 1950 Crash Near Del Rio, Mexico | 1949 Death Valley, California crash

DETAILED REPORT

The Dreamy Draw crash is best understood as a regional crash-retrieval legend assembled from a distant daytime observation, a famous hoax, and a later cover-up folklore tradition — not as a documented event. Its most concrete element is the testimony of Selman E. Graves, a businessman and private pilot. By his account, on a hunting morning in Paradise Valley (which he placed in early October 1947), he and companions found their planned hunting ground north-west of their position newly off-limits, the Air Force having restricted the area and barred the firing of weapons. Graves and two others went instead toward some mine shafts and a small hill, from which he could see across the valley. In the direction they had meant to hunt, he reported a “large, aluminum, dome-shaped thing” about the size of his friend’s house, surrounded by “pitched buildings, tents, and men moving about.” At the time, he and his companions assumed it was an observatory dome and thought little of it.

The reinterpretation came years later. Reading Frank Scully’s 1950 book “Behind the Flying Saucers” — and specifically its Paradise Valley material — Graves came to believe the “observatory dome” had been a crashed extraterrestrial craft, the same one Scully described. He pursued his own inquiries, reportedly met at least one of Scully’s sources, and eventually put his account on record through researcher Timothy Good in 1987, offering a fuller but admittedly speculative narrative: that his host that morning, an ex-military man named Walt Sayler, had likely found the craft while scouting the hunt and alerted the military; that flatbed trucks Graves saw leaving the area carried away two alien bodies; that a local legend held a man had stored the bodies in his freezer until the military arrived; that topographic maps were later altered to relocate Cave Creek Road away from the crash site, with originals said to be unavailable; and that a government “renovation” project years later bulldozed the site for the purpose of destruction rather than excavation.

The most popular layer of the legend concerns Dreamy Draw Dam itself. In this telling, the flood-control dam was built specifically to bury a craft too large to move covertly — concealment “in plain sight” — with the surrounding recreation area’s abundant “No Trespassing” signage and a reported persistent “humming” beneath off-limits ground offered as supporting folklore. The record’s harder claims — a 100-foot domed disc, twelve small gray dead occupants, wreckage trucked to Muroc AFB, dismantled into six sectors, studied at North Edwards into the 1970s, and later moved to Nevada — appear in the summary tradition and, on this page, are tied to Anton Anfalov, a source whose Soviet/CIS-area attributions are widely treated with caution in the research community.

The evidentiary problems are fundamental and compounding. Graves’s firsthand observation was of a distant object he himself initially took for an observatory; its identification as a crashed craft is an after-the-fact reinterpretation prompted by reading Scully. And Scully is the legend’s poisoned well: “Behind the Flying Saucers” was built on the accounts of Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer — con men exposed by San Francisco Chronicle reporter J.P. Cahn — and its key “scientist” source, “Dr. Gee,” was a composite/fiction. The page’s own text concedes Scully’s sources were dubious while arguing genuine information might be “sifted” from disinformation; that is a hopeful posture, not corroboration. There is no recovered craft, no named witness to any body, no examination record, no verifiable altered map, and no physical evidence for the dam cover-up. The numbers themselves are unstable (two bodies vs. twelve). What remains is a vivid, layered legend rooted in a misidentified distant object and propagated through a discredited book and a problematic catalog source.

RESEARCHER’S NOTES

The Observatory That Became a Saucer — Dreamy Draw and the Architecture of a Crash Legend

• Classification Basis: No Hynek Close Encounter category applies, and the CE-II label sometimes attached here is a category error: there is no verified observation of a proximate object leaving physical traces on a witness. Graves’s distant “dome” was, by his own initial judgment, an apparent observatory; the crash, bodies, and recovery are claims, not witnessed close-encounter events. The correct log is a crash-retrieval legend, with Case Status Insufficient Data.
• Source Chain Assessment: The chain is compromised at multiple points. The popularized “100-ft disc / 12 gray bodies / Muroc / North Edwards / Nevada” core is tied on this page to Anton Anfalov, a problematic-tier source. The narrative spine traces to Frank Scully’s “Behind the Flying Saucers” (1950), a documented hoax built on the con men Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer and the fictitious composite “Dr. Gee,” exposed by J.P. Cahn of the San Francisco Chronicle. The most grounded element — Selman Graves’s account via Timothy Good (1987) — is a credible relaying of a genuine memory, but the memory is of a distant unidentified object reinterpreted decades later under the influence of Scully’s book. Good is a serious researcher; that lends the relaying credibility, not the underlying crash claim.
• The Ruppelt Quote — Handle With Care: The legend leans on a quote attributed (via Scully’s wife) to Project Blue Book’s Edward Ruppelt, that Scully’s book “was the closest to the truth.” This is hearsay-of-hearsay, undocumented, and inconsistent with Ruppelt’s own published skepticism; it should be treated as unverified folklore, not as endorsement.
• Pattern Context: Dreamy Draw is a textbook example of how Southwest crash legends accrete: a real, mundane-seeming observation (a distant dome and a military area closure — itself unremarkable in 1947–48 Arizona) becomes the seed; a famous published hoax supplies the crash-and-bodies template; and a local cover-up tradition (the dam, altered maps, off-limits humming) supplies the conspiratorial scaffolding. It shares DNA with Aztec (the same Scully source), Roswell, and the broader “buried craft beneath a government facility” motif. Its value to the archive is as folklore and as a case study in legend formation, not as evidence.
• Physical Evidence and Evidentiary Weight: There is none. No craft, no body, no examination record, no verifiable altered map, no engineering anomaly at the dam, and no contemporaneous documentation of a crash. The body count is internally inconsistent (2 vs. 12). The single firsthand witness saw a distant object he first judged to be an observatory. Under any honest weighting this cannot approach Unexplained; it is held as Insufficient Data, with the explicit notation that its principal sources (Scully; Anfalov) are discredited or problematic, and that it is retained for its documented place in Southwest UFO folklore.

The Dreamy Draw crash is a legend with a long shadow and a hollow center. Strip it to what can actually be attributed and you have one man’s distant glimpse of an “aluminum dome” he took at the time for an observatory, reinterpreted years later as a saucer after he read Frank Scully’s “Behind the Flying Saucers” — a book long since exposed as resting on con men and a fictitious “Dr. Gee.” Around that seed grew the rest: a hundred-foot disc, a dozen gray bodies whose count won’t stay still, flatbeds to Muroc, altered maps, and a flood-control dam supposedly built to bury a spaceship. None of it is corroborated by a craft, a named body-witness, an examination, or a document, and its catalog sourcing runs through the problematic Anfalov line. The archive logs it as a crash-retrieval legend, Case Status Insufficient Data — retained not as evidence but as one of the American Southwest’s most instructive examples of how a crash myth is built, layer by borrowed layer.

Paradise Valley, Early October 1947

Selman E. Graves, a businessman, and a private pilot would witness part of the incident while on a hunting trip with friends.  It is from Graves who would speak of his encounter to UFO researcher, Timothy Good in 1987, along with that of Scully, that the incident reached the public in the depth and detail it finally did, and seeming to verify somewhat the encounter told by Scully.

Graves, along with four other men, as well as his friend Walt Sayler, whose property they had all converged for the morning, were planning to hunt in Paradise Valley. More specifically a particular region north-west of their present location.

Sayler, when arriving back home, late to greet his guests, would inform them that their planned hunting destination was unfortunately off-limits to them as the Air Force had “restricted the area” and would not permit the firing of weapons.

Graves wished to explore near mine-shafts and on a small hill, in a similar direction but promised not to fire their guns. He and two others left the main group in order to do so. When arriving at their destination, their vantage point would offer the three men a bird’s eye view of the entire surrounding area. He could see his friend’s house. He could also see, in the direction they were originally planning on hunting a “large, aluminum, dome-shaped thing!” which was “roughly the size of the house!”

Graves would also describe a scene of “pitched buildings, tents, and men moving about!” At the time, the men were keen to explore the area around the mines, thinking the spectacle they could see to be nothing more than “an observatory dome!”

A Fuller Picture?

When Graves read Frank Scully’s book years later, and in particular the Paradise Valley incident, he instantly recalled the “observatory dome” he had witnessed and how in fact it was a crashed vehicle from another world – the same one described by Scully in “Behind The Flying Saucers”.

He managed to meet with at least one of Scully’s sources during his own investigations into the encounter, and when he finally put the incident on record through Timothy Good, he could offer a fuller, although speculative at times, version of events.

From Graves’ perspective, it was likely Sayler who had found the crashed craft while inspecting their planned hunt that morning. Being that Sayler was an ex-military man, it was also likely, according to Graves, that it was he who alerted the military to its presence and then did his utmost to keep his guests away from the area.

Graves also recalled seeing military “flatbed trucks” leaving the area, and although he did not think anything at the time, he now believes this is how the two alien beings “left the scene”.  Interestingly, one “local legend” of the encounter tells of a “local man” storing these alien beings in his freezer until the military could arrive. If Graves’ theories are true regarding Sayler’s involvement, then perhaps that “local man” is also Sayler?

Graves would also speak of “topographical maps” of the area that “suddenly changed” when updated following the incident. The updated versions essentially moved the original location of the Cave Creek Road – the area of the downed craft. When Graves enquired as to how to obtain an original map, the reply was, a copy no longer existed.

Graves would also speak to Good about a project designed to literally “cover-up” any evidence of the craft.

Dreamy Draw Dam

One particular urban legend of sorts is that of Dreamy Draw Dam,  which some believe came into being with the sole intention of covering over the crash site. The area is now a recreation area, although the legends state the ruined craft was simply too large to move – certainly in any kind of covert way – so the decision would go ahead to “conceal the wreckage” by building over it. Essentially hiding in plain sight.

Graves would state that several years after the incident, a government project to renovate the area. During the course of this project, they would go to the crash site and “dig it up with a bulldozer!”

Graves claimed to have witnessed this operation. According to him, there was no “methodical” digging over as you would expect from a professional project. The aim here was simply, “destruction!” Furthermore, again based on claims by Graves, this type of “project” is a favorite tool of those whose job it is to conceal such downed mammoth craft as the one apparently sitting under the Dreamy Draw Dam.

Interestingly, given that the area is for the public’s recreation, there are an abundance of signs informing the public certain areas are off-limits to them. “No Trespassing” and warnings of “Fines and Imprisonment” are aplenty. According to one local resident who got as close as he could to one of these “off-limit” areas, a persistent and unexplainable “humming” sound was coming from underneath his feet.

Check out the video below. It looks at the legends that surround Dreamy Draw Dam, and whether or not it really conceals a crashed UFO.

“Hot-Bed” Of Activity

While we will look a little further at Frank Scully and how genuine or authentic his accounts and theories might be, the areas in and around Arizona are an absolute hot-spot of UFO activity. The deserts and rural areas of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Colorado are awash with strange UFO sightings, claims of top secret alien-government bases and strange (often reptilian) beings.

One of the most famous sightings, not just in recent times but throughout history, is the Phoenix Lights incident of 1997. Thousands saw the spectacle first hand, while millions more witnessed it on their television sets across the world. Now, in the age of the Internet, it is perhaps one of the most viewed pieces of footage online.

The reasons for why such activity is so rampant are as varied as the sightings themselves. Some believe the crashed crafts of the 1940s are attracting further crafts of the same intelligent control. Others argue that the recent sightings are likely the result of reverse-engineered technologies by the military in top secret test flights.

Or, if the claims of recovered alien beings – sometimes alive beings – then perhaps the sightings of top secret bases beneath the ground in the south-western states of America, bases that contain both humans and “non-human entities”, should go under more serious investigation.

Check out the video below, a recent news broadcast that looks at the UFO crash in Paradise Valley in a little more detail.

Dr. Gee and Overall Credibility

Scully’s credibility, or more to the point, the sources he would use, are regularly put under scrutiny. Consequently, many of his encounters are easily dismissed by even enthusiastic UFO researchers. However, many maintain Scully’s genuine nature and overall credibility, and while some of his sources may indeed be guilty of feeding disinformation to him, you have to ask the question as to why “the powers that be” would feel the need to do that in the first place?

Of course, as muddy as that makes the waters as far as Scully’s case studies go, it is important to remember that within the bits of disinformation will be valuable and genuine information that needs to be sifted out.

It is an interesting approach by those who wish to play the UFO card close to their collective chests that are worth bearing in mind when assessing how authentic individual UFO researchers and investigators might be.

Incidentally, one of Scully’s “informants” would go by the name of “Dr. Gee” and was in fact “several prominent scientists” who, for purposes of his published work and for their anonymity, had their accounts told by this made up “person”.

Regarding Frank Scully’s credibility, perhaps it is best to give the last word to his wife, who relayed a comment about her husband by Captain Edward Ruppelt during an interview in the late-1970s. Ruppelt – recently retired as head of Project Bluebook –  would state, “of all the books published about flying saucers, your book was the one gave us the most headaches because it was the closest to the truth!”