The Austell Alien, still preserved in the Georgia Crime Lab.It was a hot night on July 8, 1953. Police officer Sherley Brown and his partner were doing a routine patrol down a rural highway near Austell, Georgia when up ahead they saw a pickup truck stopped in the middle of the road. They pulled over to investigate. What they found was the most unusual scene they would ever encounter during their entire careers as officers.

Three frightened young men were waiting nervously by the side of the road. And lying there on the tarmac in front of the truck, illuminated by the vehicle’s headlights, was a bizarre two-foot tall creature that looked for all the world like a space alien.

The young men spilled out a strange tale. They said they’d been out in their truck “honkey-tonking” around, when they came over a hill and suddenly found themselves careening towards a flying saucer that was ‘glowing red all over.’ Three small aliens were outside the craft wandering up and down the highway. The boys jammed on their brakes, but couldn’t avoid hitting one of the aliens. The other two spacemen made it to the ship and blasted off.

At first the officers weren’t sure whether to believe the tale, but they couldn’t deny the physical evidence that backed it up: the long skid marks on the highway, and the body of the alien itself lying lifeless in the road—a hairless, two-foot tall humanoid creature with eerie, round, dark eyes.

Hours later, word of the capture of an extraterrestrial leaked out to the press, and the sleepy Georgia county found itself at the center of a media frenzy. Reporters from Atlanta descended on the small town, and news offices from around the country flooded the switchboard of the police station. Even representatives from the Air Force arrived to assess the situation.

A local veterinarian proclaimed that the body did indeed look like “something out of this world.” But when officials from the Georgia Crime Lab showed up a day later, they soon deduced that the alien was nothing more than a shaved Capuchin monkey whose tail had been cut off.

When confronted with this expert opinion, the boys quickly confessed. They explained that it had all been nothing more than a prank inspired by a bet made during a card game. One of the boys had wagered his friends that he could get himself featured in the local paper within a week. So to win the bet he had bought a monkey at a local petshop, gave it a lethal dose of chloroform, shaved its hair, and chopped off its tail. The result was a creature that looked decidedly alien.

The good news for the young man was that he handily won his bet. He was profiled not only in local but also national papers. The bad news was that the police fined him $40 for obstructing the highway.

The boys dropped out of public view after this, but their caper has lived on in Georgia lore, remembered somewhat ambivalently by locals as the Great Monkey Hoax of 1953.

References

• Jack Warner, “Monkey mayhem 45 years ago, pranksters briefly were able to convince some folks they had found an alien in Cobb,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 30, 1998.

Categories

• Era
  • 1950-1976
• Extraterrestrial Life