It was a hot night on July 8, 1953. Police officer Sherley Brown and his partner were doing a routine patrol down rural Bankhead 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 — Ed Watters (a barber, 28), Tom Wilson (a fellow barber, 20), and Arnold 'Buddy' Payne (a butcher, 19) — 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 "honky-tonking" around, when they came over a hill and suddenly found themselves careening towards a small flying saucer that was 'glowing red all over.' Three small aliens were outside the craft wandering up and down the highway. The young men said they 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.

Ed Watters later told the press, "They all jumped for it. Two of them made it. I hit the other one. The red object turned blue and sailed away at a very fast speed."

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 nearby 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 then Dr. Herman Jones, head of the Georgia state crime laboratory, arrived on the scene. He confiscated the creature and took it to Emory University to be examined by two anatomy professors, Drs. Marlon Hines and W.A. Mickle. The professors quickly determined it to be of terrestrial origin — a Capuchin monkey made to look alien by cutting off its tail and removing its fur with depilatory cream.

Dr. Hines commented that if the creature "came from Mars, they have monkeys on Mars." Dr. Mickle added, "If it's from outer space, they haven't invented anything new."


When confronted with these expert opinions, the young men confessed. They explained it had all been nothing more than a prank inspired by a bet made during a card game. Ed Watters had wagered his friends $10 that he could get himself featured in the local paper within a week. To win the bet, he had bought a monkey at a local petshop, gave it a lethal dose of chloroform, removed its hair, and chopped off its tail. The result was a creature that looked decidedly alien.

Watters won his bet. He was profiled not only in local but also national papers. However, he ended up in the red because the monkey cost him $50, and 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 by locals as the Great Monkey Hoax of 1953.

As for the shaved monkey, it still remains in a jar at the Georgia Crime Lab, brought out on occasion for the benefit of curiosity seekers and reporters writing about strange stories from the past.