“It’s just amazing how fast without social media it got around,” Rabin said. “The mysterious flying ship ‘scouting’ Las Vegas Monday night turned out to be a hubcap, sources close to the ‘ship’ revealed Tuesday afternoon,” the lede read. On June 14, 1967, a mere 24 hours after the hoax had gone as viral as something could go in the ’60s, the Las Vegas Review-Journal ended it. “When the government got involved, started calling, wanting to talk to us,” Rabin said, “I told my father what was going on, and he thought, at that point, maybe it was going too far.” That plan did not work out - the jig was up in just one day - but because of Rabin’s father.Īmid pressure from the government for interviews, McDonald, Genovese, Small and Rabin called off the prank. In fact, we captured it,” touting the not-so-unidentified-flying-object.
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Talking about their plan to reveal their “saucer,” the 17-year-old Bishop Gorman High School students decided they would bring the hubcap along to a TV interview to say, “Yeah, we saw it. “I’m gonna carry this as far as I can go,” Genovese said he thought at the time of the prank, because, “we’re 17 years old.”Ī representative from a local TV station and UFO enthusiast Frank Edwards, as well as a colonel from Nellis Air Force Base, reached out to the boys, they claimed, hoping to get the scoop on their extraterrestrial spacecraft, Genovese said. The panic that ensued from those not in on the joke did not immediately put a damper on the group’s sense of humor. When they saw the paper, they laughed even harder.” “They kinda laughed,” Genovese said of his parents’ reaction when he told them the truth. It was the talk of the town, and the teens had some explaining to do, starting with their parents - perhaps more terrifying at the time than extra terrestrials. “They were really concerned about this alien invasion.” “They were thinking about leaving town for the weekend,” he recalled, his friends laughing in the background. Rabin remembered overhearing people talking about how scared they were in the break room of the old Sands hotel-casino, where he worked at the pool. Small, who shares his father’s name, said his dad came to him where they worked at the Fremont hotel-casino, saying “Rich, what did you do? Everybody thinks it’s me.” “My dad picks up the morning paper, and that’s what’s on the headlines,” Genovese said. The foursome’s collective imagination was good enough to conceptualize a tall tale to go along with their phony photo, but not good enough to foresee what would happen after handing their evidence over to local reporters. “Everyday it’s, ‘What can I do to have fun?’ ” “When you’re 17 years old, you want to have as much fun as you can,” McDonald said. The photo was too good not to show somebody. The stretch of road is now covered by houses, they said, and its name disappeared.īut their memories are still around. On what they called Bubbling Wells Road, then a dirt road about a mile from Valley High School, the boys set up their photo shoot, tossing the hubcap “like a Frisbee,” and snapping a photo.
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Hearing stories of alien encounters and spooky hovercrafts are commonplace for Nevadans, and this group of friends stoked the urban legends after learning how to fabricate a UFO photo from a science magazine. “But it was a hubcap,” he said with a smirk. That it was a flying object is true, Genovese said.
(The former home of Rat Pack-era big bandleader Antonio Morelli’s is of particular significance to Small, who says he, his father and his brother helped build it around 1959.) They met there, they said, because the Mid-Century Modern home is connected to Las Vegas, just like them. “We shook up the whole town,” Rabin proclaimed earlier this month outside of the historic Morelli House, where the 65-year-old friends reunited.
Now in their mid-60s, Richard Small, Gerry Genovese, Michael McDonald and Syd “Bill” Rabin gathered to reflect on the day they bamboozled the valley. The photograph and accompanying commentary came from four teenage boys. The June 13, 1967, front page of the Las Vegas Sun screamed: “MYSTERIOUS FLYING SHIP ‘SCOUTS’ LAS VEGAS AREA.”Īnd the evidence? A black-and-white Polaroid photo of a spiraling, metallic flying object. Judging by the headline, an alien invasion seemed imminent 48 years ago. (Courtesy, Cahlan Research Library, Nevada State Museum) The Sun published a photo by Jerry Genovese that turned out to be a hoax. This negative image taken from microfilm shows of the Las Vegas Sun on June 13, 1967.
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