What happened
Late on a Friday afternoon, Socorro police sergeant Lonnie Zamora broke off chasing a speeding car when he heard a roar and saw a funnel of blue-orange flame descend south of town. Thinking a dynamite shack had blown up, he drove up a rough track to the edge of an arroyo. There, he said, sat a whitish, aluminium-like object shaped like a letter O, standing on legs, with two small figures in white coveralls beside it. When he got closer the figures were gone, a loud roar began, and the object rose on a flame, then sped away low and fast toward the southwest. State Police sergeant Sam Chavez arrived minutes later to find smouldering brush and four wedge-shaped imprints. Army Captain Richard Holder and an FBI agent examined the site that evening, and Blue Book sent its astronomer consultant, J. Allen Hynek, within days. Zamora also reported a symbol on the hull, which investigators asked him to keep quiet. Blue Book never explained the case.
The official explanation
Blue Book found no aircraft, helicopters or unusual radar activity and left the case unknown. Skeptic Robert Sheaffer proposed a prank by New Mexico Tech students, and the institute's then president, Stirling Colgate, later wrote that he believed it was a candle in a balloon. Philip J. Klass suggested a scheme to boost local tourism, and Steuart Campbell argued for a mirage of the star Canopus. Others have suggested Zamora saw a test of an experimental lunar-landing or VTOL vehicle from the nearby White Sands range; the Blue Book file shows the Air Force queried contractors about lunar landing gear but found no matching flight.
The anomalous case
Zamora was a sober, well-regarded officer with no history of sensational claims, and the trace evidence was examined within an hour by a state police sergeant, an Army range officer and an FBI agent. Captain Holder reported no sign of fakery at the site, and the Black Vault's review of the file notes several townspeople phoned the police about a bluish flame at the same time. In his report to Blue Book chief Hector Quintanilla, Hynek wrote that a prank theory would require Chavez and the FBI agent to be in on it, that no tracks or paraphernalia were found, and that the object reportedly flew across a strong south wind, which hardly fits a balloon. Blue Book checked military and contractor programmes, including lunar-lander hardware, and found nothing flying that day. It remains one of the few landing cases the Air Force itself never explained.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Project Blue Book file: Socorro, New Mexico, April 1964 official, archive.org
Sources
- Lonnie Zamora incident Wikipedia
- The Vault Files: The Socorro UFO Landing Incident, April 24, 1964 The Black Vault
- Project Blue Book case file, Socorro, New Mexico, 1964 U.S. Air Force via Internet Archive
Witness reports elsewhere
These archives can't be republished here, so we link to them instead.