Have you ever heard the story about when Cobb County police were presented with the body of an extraterrestrial 70 years ago?
The tale was among the headlines featured in Monday’s A.M. ATL, a free newsletter on weekday mornings from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
In July 1953, a report of an unidentified flying object in the skies around Atlanta made local and then national news. Subsequently, three residents had an even bigger story to share: They’d seen “three creatures” in pursuit in the UFO, and even more amazing, Edward Watters said they had the body of one of them.
However, the front page of the July 10, 1953, edition of The Atlanta Constitution carried the headline: “Monkey-Hoaxer Pays a $40 Fine; Surprised Any Folks Were Fooled.”
To read more on the story, in addition to the AJC’s top headlines from July 10, 2023, you can check out a preview of our morning newsletter: A.M. ATL online.
And if that’s not enough to satisfy your historical curiosity, here’s the captivating opening of the 1988 story by the AJC’s Jack Warner making the 45th anniversary of the monkey-man hoax. (And that’s where the photo with this article comes from.)
It was on a dark night 45 years ago that Cobb County police Officer Sherley Brown found the butcher, the barbers and the space alien in the middle of Bankhead Highway, touching off a furor that flashed around the world.
The world was at the height of the flying saucer era; just the night before, citizens from Grant Park to the Naval Air Station in Marietta watched a huge, multicolored, cone-shaped object fly at a stately pace over the area.
On the morning of July 8, 1953, Brown recalls, “It was still dark and we were on Bankhead Highway near the village of Leland when we found them.” There were, he said, three young men beside a dilapidated pickup truck, waving frantically at him and his partner. In the road was the 2-foot-tall corpse of a gangly, humanoid creature.
“They told us they had run up on this little red spacecraft in the middle of the highway,” Brown said. “They said they saw three of these little men come running to the ship and jump on it. One of them didn’t make it before the spaceship took off, and they ran over it. There were scorched circles on the pavement where the ship had been.
“They weren’t drunk,” he said. “They acted scared, about how you’d be if you’d run up on a space alien.”
Within hours, word of an alien landing was flashed around the world. Telephones rang incessantly at The Atlanta Constitution and The Atlanta Journal and in television stations. The media descended upon Cobb County, along with two Air Force investigators.
The creature, Brown said, was “so strange, and it looked so realistic.”
It certainly was strange, and it was unquestionably realistic, but it was no space traveler. It was a mere monkey from Midtown, bereft of hair and tail.
For the information of those not in it at the time, the world was a vastly different place in 1953. Television was a novelty, not a fixture found in every home. People were more easy-going, and more trusting of one another. If some good ol’ boys said they found a man from Mars in the middle of the road, and they weren’t drunk, people tended to believe them. After all, with so many flying saucer sightings, the discovery of a spaceman seemed only a matter of time, and one with only one head, two legs and two arms, and only 2 feet high, might almost be welcome.
Brown is the only one of the human participants in the event who could be found 45 years later. He is 72 now, still living in Marietta.
The mastermind of the monkey business, barber Edward Watters, was 28 at the time. Watters, fellow barber, Tom Wilson, 20, and butcher Arnold “Buddy” Payne, 19, could not be positively traced. Cobb police spokesman Robert Quigley, after extensive research, reported the department’s records don’t go back that far. The isolated portion of two-lane Bankhead Highway where they set up shop is now a busy five lanes and has been renamed Veterans Highway.
The monkey, still very strange, still crouches in a jar of formaldehyde at the State Crime Lab at GBI headquarters in Decatur. Acting Crime Lab Director Terry Mills has repeatedly saved it from periodic house-cleanings.
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