Published in the German magazine Neue Illustrierte just after the success of the Wiesbaden photo in April, 1950 under the title "Der Mars-Mensch" -The Martian Man.
1st April, 1950 Wiesbaden, Germany
Wilhelm Sprunkel, journalist of the Wiesbaden daily newspaper "Wiesbadener Tagblatt", in Germany, set up an April's Fools prank for the 1st April, 1950, issue. He had read a flying saucer story in some other newspaper and decided the matter was ideal for such a prank. what he did then was contact the liaison officer of the Wiesbaden US Army base and explained that he needed to take a photo of two soldiers for a flying saucer prank he was planning. At the time German civilians dressing up in a US uniform might have caused a few problems.
Obviously the liaison officer was a bit worried and asked his superior if this was okay and he was told it was! In fact the approval came from the US Army headquarters in Heidelberg.
Photographer Hans Scheffler took photos of his son Peter, aged 5, walking between two soldiers. He then produced a collage and over-painting of an alien over his son's image. The weird alien apparently had only one foot resting on some sort of small disc, a big head with some sort of "Y-shaped nose and two large eyes. "It" was also equipped with what was meant to be a breathing apparatus.
Schefflerworked hard and also made a photograph of a flying saucer wreck and a photograph of the saucer flying above Wiesbaden.
The hoax story was published in the newspaper on 1st April, 1950. The story told of a huge flying disc that flew over Wiesbaden and crashed in a nearby wood in Bleidenstadter Kopf. Readers were told thatvthey should remain confident about the matter, since the crew-member was in a secure place, at the Neroberg hospital in the city,and the military had "reinforced radar surveillance",
The alien, who would float on a rotary disc, was walked around near the hospital everyday between 2 and 3 p.m. so that he could get acclimatised to our gravity and the breathing apparatus was also furnished by the military.
The hoax apparently had some local success and was believed by another newspaper who repeated the account! . A female journalist wanted to buy the photographic rights for publication in another newspaper and Sprunkel took over 20 minutes to convince her that it was just a prank.
The matter was then completely forgotten until 1977 when an FOIA request for FBI UFO documents showed that some anonymous person had sent the photograph of the "alien" to the FBI and claimed the space visitor had been photographed in New Mexico. Cue author William Moore hearing about it and he put it in his Roswell book.
When German ufologist Klaus Webner saw the poor photocopy of the picture in Moore's book in 1981, he explained that he knew about this prank as he had found the newspaper article in their archive and gotten the explanation first hand from Sprunkel and Scheffler.
BUT no. The UFO believers were not having that but, it is true and I wrote at least two articles on this in the 1980s -with the help of CENAPs Werner Walter.
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