In UFO conspiracy theories, "Hangar 18" is the name given to a building that allegedly contained UFO debris or alien bodies. The name was popularized by conspiracy theorist Robert Spencer Carr in 1974, who claimed the hangar was located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio; the USAF denies the existence of this hanger.
In 1980, a film titled Hangar 18 was released, loosely based on Carr's stories.
Earlier UFO conspiracy theories
In 1966, UFO conspiracy book Incident at Exeter featured a one-sentence mention of a crashed saucer tale about alien bodies in an Air Force morgue at Wright-Patterson Field.[1][2] The passage served as the inspiration for the 1968 science-fiction novel The Fortec Conspiracy about a UFO cover up by the Air Force's Foreign Technology Division, the unit charged with studying and reverse-engineering other nations' technical advancements.[3][4]
Robert Spencer Carr
On October 11, 1974, science-fiction author and UFO conspiracy theorist Robert Spencer Carr conducted a live radio interview where he publicly claimed that alien bodies recovered from the Aztec, NM crash were being kept at "Hangar 18" at Wright-Patterson.[5][6] The claim garnered substantial press attention, and led to official denials.[7] The Air Force explained that there is no "Hangar 18" at the base and noted Carr's claims bore a close similarity to the 1966 science-fiction novel The Fortec Conspiracy.[8] During the interview, Carr also relayed a tale of Senator Barry Goldwater requesting and being denied access to a restricted area. Reached for comment, Goldwater admitted to having requested a tour and been denied, but Goldwater said he'd never heard any rumors of alien bodies.[9]
By September 1979, Carr's claims included a surgical nurse who witnessed an alien's autopsy.[10][11]
Decades later, Carr's son recalled that his father had been a habitual liar who often "mortified my mother and me by spinning preposterous stories in front of strangers... [tales of] befriending a giant alligator in the Florida swamps, and sharing complex philosophical ideas with porpoises in the Gulf of Mexico. It wasn't the tall tales themselves that hurt so much but his ferocious insistence that they were true.... They were dead serious, and you had by God better pretend you believed them or face wrath or rejection."[12]
By the late 1980s, Bob Lazar's claims about Nevada's "Area 51" were also circulating in conspiracy theories as a supposed repository for alien debris, ships or bodies obtained by the US government.[relevant?]
Film adaptation
In November 1979, local papers reported that Roswell was being location-scouted for an upcoming film titled Hangar 18.[13] That film, which dramatized Carr's claims, was released in 1980; It was later described by Thomas E. Bullard as "nascent Roswell mythology", while the film's director James L. Conway later described the film as "a modern day dramaticzation of the Roswell incident".[14][15]
The hip hop group Hangar 18, active from 2001 to 2009 took their name from the mythical hangar.
Animated sitcom The Simpsons features a sight gag reference to the mythical Hangar 18 in the ninth episode of the seventh season "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming", where soldiers open the gate and discover an alien with a glowing probe before closing the gate.
References
^Fuller 1966, pp. 87–88: "There have been, I learned after I started this research, frequent and continual rumors (and they are only rumors) that in a morgue at Wright-Patterson Field, Dayton, Ohio, lie the bodies of a half-dozen or so small humanoid corpses, measuring not more than four-and-a-half feet in height, evidence of one of the few times an extraterrestrial spaceship has allowed itself either to fail or otherwise fall into the clutches of the semicivilized Earth People."
^Disch 2000, pp. 53–34, "Even the Roswell case [...] has its component of science-fictional fraud. Robert Spencer Carr became famous, briefly, in the '70s when, in a radio interview, he concocted the still-current story of aliens' autopsied and kept in cold storage at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio. Carr."
^"Goldwater, contacted at his home in Phoenix, told The Enquirer he had indeed made such a request, 'But that was at least 12 or 15 years ago. Good God. That's so long ago I can't remember. The answer was negative, but I was an officer so I followed orders. What's this business about 12 little men? That's a new one on me.'" source[permanent dead link]
^Peebles 1995, p. 244 "Stringfield described the evidence Carr had collected on the Aztec "crash." Carr said he had found five eyewitnesses to the recovery. One (now dead) was a surgical nurse at the alien's autopsy. Another was a high-ranking Air Force officer. Two others were aeronautical engineers who described the UFO's structure and systems. The final witness was an Air Force enlisted man who had been a guard." citing Stringfield (Sept 1979) Retrievals of the Third Kind, part 2