I think that goes way, way back. I remember something about Chaucer?
Only in the sense that that was certainly somewhere in the back of my mind when I came up with the name; it’s more of a play on the general ‘half man, half …’ construction (think ‘machine’, ‘beast’ etc.).
Anyway, as for the memo, it’s also mentioned in Bruce Maccabee’s 2000 book UFO/FBI Connection :
In late March, 1950, FBI headquarters received from Guy Hottel, the SAC for Washington state, a memorandum which stated that “an investigator for the Air Forces” had told Mr. Hottel that three crashed saucers had been recovered in New Mexico, along with 9 bodies of 3 foot tall aliens. It turned out that this report was based on a hoax, […]
](UFO FBI Connection: The Secret History of the Government's Cover-up - Bruce Maccabee - Google Books )
Oh, there’s more here :
On May 31st and June 1st, 1998, on the nationally-syndicated radio programs Dreamland and The Art Bell Show, noted UFO researcher Linda Moulton Howe described a secret FBI memo from March 22nd, 1950, written to J. Edgar Hoover himself. Memo author Guy Hottel, of SAC, described an investigator’s report of a flying saucer recovery in New Mexico, with mention of three saucers, three-foot tall bodies, metallic cloth, and bandaged alien bodies. The crash was supposedly due to interference from high-powered radar. But all of these elements (saucers, aliens, cloth and tape, radar site) have been firmly traced to the yarns spun by our two swindlers! William Moore even traced how the story got from Silas Newton to J. Edgar Hoover: Newton told George Koehler (employed at radio station KMYR in Denver), who told Morley Davies, who told Ford dealers Murphy and van Horn, who told auto dealer Fick, who told the editor of the Kansas City Wyandotte Echo. By that time, Koehler had become “Coulter,” just like a game of “gossip” (or a game of “pi”)! This article was picked up in the news, where it caught the interest of the OSI. The OSI agent passed the story on to Guy Hottel of the FBI, and he gave the 8th-hand story to Hoover.
](The Aztec UFO Scam )