Gossip circulated throughout the '50s that several officers from an air force base near Laredo were instructed on July 7, 1948 to cordon off a remote strip of land where an extraterrestrial aircraft had crashed. Rumored to be a large disc, it had supposedly flown over Albuquerque at around 2,000 miles per hour before crashing into the West Texas desert, where it was then recovered by government agents. One variation on the story claimed that the badly-burned inhabitant of the craft was significantly shorter in height than the average human and had unusually long arms.

In 1978, a man claiming to be a former Air Force photographer sent reporters photos of a severely burned body inside some wreckage--pictures that he claimed he was instructed to take of a wrecked experimental aircraft outside of Laredo during the summer of 1948. The singed "alien" in the photo, quickly dubbed "tomato man" by the press because of his extremely large head, is probably a human pilot who was killed when his plane crashed and burned. The pilot's noticeable lack of hair and enlarged head are thought to be a result of the fire.

Government papers now indicate that the Air Force was experimenting at that time with V-2 rockets, nicknamed "foo-fighters," hence the crashed experimental aircraft that the photographer was instructed to document. One unresolved question is whether the pilot was actually a man or a monkey; the latter would explain the rumor that the pilot was short in stature with extremely long arms.