The name was popularized by conspiracy theorist Robert Spencer Carr in 1974, who claimed the hangar was located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio; the USAF denies the existence of this hanger.
In 1966, UFO conspiracy book Incident at Exeter featured a one-sentence mention of a crashed saucer tale about alien bodies in an Air Force morgue at Wright-Patterson Field.
[1][2] The passage served as the inspiration for the 1968 science-fiction novel The Fortec Conspiracy about a UFO cover up by the Air Force's Foreign Technology Division, the unit charged with studying and reverse-engineering other nations' technical advancements.
[3][4] On October 11, 1974, science-fiction author and UFO conspiracy theorist Robert Spencer Carr conducted a live radio interview where he publicly claimed that alien bodies recovered from the Aztec, NM crash were being kept at "Hangar 18" at Wright-Patterson.
[10][11] Decades later, Carr's son recalled that his father had been a habitual liar who often "mortified my mother and me by spinning preposterous stories in front of strangers... [tales of] befriending a giant alligator in the Florida swamps, and sharing complex philosophical ideas with porpoises in the Gulf of Mexico.