Francis Joseph Xavier Scully (1892–1964) was an American journalist, humorist and longtime columnist for the show-business paper Variety. In 1949 he used two Variety columns to report that the bodies of dead extraterrestrials had been recovered from a crashed flying saucer. In 1950 he expanded the story into Behind the Flying Saucers, the book that introduced the 1948 Aztec, New Mexico crash and set the pattern for later crash-retrieval claims.

Scully was born in New York City on April 28, 1892, studied journalism at Columbia University and worked on the reporting staff of The New York Sun before becoming a Variety contributor. He married Alice Scully in 1930 and moved to Burbank, California, in 1934, where he organized an Author's League for Sinclair in support of Upton Sinclair's campaign for governor. His humor books for Simon & Schuster, beginning with Fun in Bed: The Convalescent's Handbook (1932), ran through several sequels; later came the memoir Cross My Heart (1955) and In Armour Bright (1963). He was made a Knight of the Pontifical Order of St. Gregory the Great in 1956.

Henry Holt and Company published Behind the Flying Saucers in September 1950, and it became a bestseller. Scully wrote that the saucers were craft from Venus running on magnetic force, and that the bodies of crewmen about three and a half feet tall had been found in grounded disks and turned over to Army medical experts. Kirkus Reviews called the book "rather sensational." His informants were Silas Newton, an oil promoter, and Leo Gebauer, one of whom Scully described as having "more degrees than a thermometer." The book drew notice in official circles: in a November 1950 memorandum proposing a geomagnetics study, the Canadian radio engineer Wilbert Smith noted that Scully's book and Donald Keyhoe's The Flying Saucers Are Real had appeared while he was in Washington.

The story unraveled two years later. In September 1952 True magazine published "The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men," in which the San Francisco Chronicle reporter J. P. Cahn presented Newton and Gebauer as confidence men who sold oil-detecting devices said to rest on saucer technology; a metal sample Cahn obtained from them turned out to be ordinary aluminum. The pair were convicted of fraud in 1953 after one of their victims, the millionaire Herman Flader, pressed charges, and Cahn followed with "Flying Saucer Swindlers" in 1956. Scully returned to the subject in In Armour Bright, which again included material on crashed saucers and dead extraterrestrials. He passed away in Palm Springs, California, in 1964.

Scully's sources were back under scrutiny in 2026. In a September documentary for Jesse Michels's American Alchemy, the Aztec researchers Scott Ramsey and Suzanne Ramsey examined Scully's informants, FBI records and their claim that the case was deliberately discredited. A clip from the series relayed an account that Scully's widow, Alice, had told the researcher Chris Evans that photographs of the crash still existed; none has been published. More than seventy-five years after it appeared, Behind the Flying Saucers is still the starting point for every retelling of the Aztec story, whether by researchers who defend the crash or by historians who trace it to Newton and Gebauer.