Hangar 18 — Robert Spencer Carr and the 1974 Broadcast

Hangar 18 — Robert Spencer Carr and the 1974 Broadcast

Robert Spencer Carr

Robert Spencer Carr (1909–1994) was an American science fiction author who had contributed stories to pulp fiction magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. He was not a professional UFO researcher and had no documented military or government connections that would give him privileged access to classified information.

On October 11, 1974, Carr conducted a live radio interview in which he publicly claimed that:

• Alien bodies recovered from a 1948 flying saucer crash in Aztec, New Mexico were being kept at "Hangar 18" at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
• He had a high-ranking military source who had seen the bodies of twelve alien beings while autopsies were being performed on them
• The government was concealing two flying saucers of unknown origin within Hangar 18

The broadcast attracted substantial press attention and led to official Air Force denials — which themselves served to amplify the story, as denials of specific claims tend to do in the UFO research context.

Credibility Problems

Carr's claims were widely doubted within the UFO research community as well as by the general public. His son subsequently stated that his father was a habitual fabricator who regularly invented elaborate stories and insisted on their truth to family and strangers alike. His son's characterization — that Carr invented preposterous stories "in front of strangers" with "ferocious insistence that they were true" — is the most comprehensive challenge to Carr's credibility.

The Air Force's response noted that Carr's claims bore a close similarity to the 1968 science-fiction novel The Fortec Conspiracy — a novel explicitly about a UFO cover-up at Wright-Patterson involving the Foreign Technology Division. The proximity of Carr's claims to this prior fictional treatment raises the question of whether he had simply relocated a fictional scenario into a claimed factual assertion.

The Name "Hangar 18"

Despite Carr's credibility problems, his October 1974 broadcast is credited with introducing the specific designation "Hangar 18" into popular UFO discourse. Prior to Carr's broadcast:

• Wright-Patterson's role as a potential storage site for Roswell materials had been discussed in UFO circles
• The "Blue Room" designation had appeared in some accounts (including Goldwater's attempted access)
• But the specific name "Hangar 18" had not been widely applied

Carr's broadcast gave the legend a specific, memorable name — and names, in legend formation, are powerful. The specificity of "Hangar 18" (rather than "a building at Wright-Patterson") made the claim feel more grounded and more verifiable, even as the specific claim remained unverified.

Relationship to the Aztec Incident

Carr specifically connected Hangar 18 to the Aztec, New Mexico UFO crash of March 1948 — an incident involving an alleged 100-foot disc with 16 occupants, now the subject of three decades of research by Scott and Suzanne Ramsey. The Aztec connection is significant because:

• It predates Carr's broadcast by 26 years, providing an origin event that Carr's claimed military source could plausibly have witnessed
• It connects Hangar 18 to a documented controversy (the Aztec incident) with its own evidentiary record
• The Ramsey research has established that an anomalous military operation did occur in Hart Canyon in March 1948, and that whatever was recovered was transported — consistent with Wright-Patterson being the destination

Whether Carr's source had genuine knowledge of Aztec-related materials at Wright-Patterson, or whether he simply connected two existing legends in a new configuration, cannot be determined.

The 1980 Film

The 1980 film Hangar 18 — a science fiction/thriller loosely based on Carr's claims — dramatized a UFO cover-up centered on a storage facility at an Air Force base. Director James L. Conway later described the film as a modern-day dramatization of the Roswell incident. The film's release brought the Hangar 18 concept to a mass popular audience and firmly established it as a cultural reference point.