Plains of San Agustin
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 📍 Place
Contents 7
| Type | Place |
|---|---|
| On the Timeline | 1 event, 2011 |
The Plains of San Agustin are a high, flat basin in Catron and Socorro counties, west-central New Mexico, south of US Highway 60. They are best known today as the site of the Very Large Array radio telescope.[1] In UFO lore they are the claimed site of a second flying-saucer crash in 1947. That story rests on the second-hand accounts of the late soil-conservation engineer Grady "Barney" Barnett, first published in the 1980 book The Roswell Incident.[4][5] Because the plains lie about 150 miles west of the Corona debris field, the Barnett story became a long-running point of conflict among Roswell researchers.[4][5]
Geography
The plains lie about 50 miles west of Socorro and 25 miles north of Reserve. They run about 55 miles from north-east to south-west and are 5 to 15 miles wide.[1] They are ringed by the Luera Mountains and Pelona Mountain to the south, the Tularosa Mountains to the west, the Mangas, Crosby, Datil and Gallinas Mountains to the north, and the San Mateo Mountains to the east. The Continental Divide runs close to their southern and western edges.[1]
Geologically, the basin is a graben, a block that dropped about 4,000 feet between parallel faults within the Mogollon-Datil volcanic field. Sediment has reduced the relief to about 2,000 feet.[1] Its flat floor was formed by an Ice Age lake, Lake San Agustin. The basin has no outlet, ending in playas, and drains about 2,000 square miles.[1] The climate is cold semi-arid.[1] The Very Large Array was built there because of the site's isolation and the shielding effect of the surrounding mountains.[1] Nearby are the Bat Cave rock shelter, the prehistoric Ake Site and the ghost town of Old Horse Springs.[1]
The Barnett story
In The Roswell Incident (1980), William Moore and Charles Berlitz introduced second-hand stories that Barnett and a group of archaeology students from an unidentified university had come across wreckage and "alien bodies" on the plains, before being escorted away by the Army.[4][5] Barnett had died before any researcher could interview him. The story came from friends and colleagues including Vern Maltais, Alice Knight, Harold Baca and his boss, Fleck Danley, all of whom described him as honest and not given to tall tales.[3] Ufologists themselves noted that the story "seemed to conflict" with the account of debris recovered from a sheep ranch near Corona.[4]
Stanton Friedman and Don Berliner's Crash at Corona (1992) argued that Barnett saw a separate craft on the plains. They cited Danley's statement that Barnett's territory lay west of his office in Socorro.[3] Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt's UFO Crash at Roswell (1991) included Barnett's account but changed its dates and locations without explanation. It placed him at a second site on the Corona ranch.[5] The disagreement split the two leading UFO organisations. A 1992 conference sponsored by the Center for UFO Studies and the Fund for UFO Research tried and failed to reach a consensus.[3][5] In 1994 Randle and Schmitt abandoned the plains site as lacking evidence.[5]
Danley's memory
Much depended on Danley. Moore said in 1991 that he had abandoned the two-site hypothesis in 1985, because Danley, the only witness who put the crash on the plains, turned out to be unsure of the place.[3] Danley told Moore that Barnett had come into the office one day saying flying saucers were real, and later mentioned something about the "Flats". Only after a second interview four months later did Danley place it in the summer of 1947.[3] Randle, who interviewed Danley in May 1991, said he had no real idea when Barnett mentioned the crash, and could probably have been pushed to another date.[3] Danley also recalled Barnett mentioning Carrizozo, but not bodies.[3] Friedman said that in 1990 he was again told by Danley and others that the crash was "in the Plains".[3] Danley's wife reportedly recalled the crash as being between Magdalena and Socorro, not on the plains.[3]
The wider debate
Randle's 2015 blog post revisiting the case concluded that the story could not be fitted into a July 1947 time frame. In the comments, supporters proposed crash dates ranging from 30 May to 5 July 1947.[2] The author Art Campbell, in UFO Crash at San Augustin, argued that the Harvard archaeologist Herbert Dick's party, camped near Bat Cave from 1 July 1947, saw a glowing object crash and were sworn to silence. Sceptics replied that no field notes or reports from any archaeologists record such a discovery.[2] Randle also noted that people in New Mexico call several flat areas "the Plains", including one north of Capitan, so Barnett's reported words may not point to San Agustin at all.[2] The researcher Karl Pflock concluded in 1994 that "no flying saucer or saucers crashed in the general vicinity of Roswell or on the Plains of San Agustin in 1947".[6]
The earlier version of this article said Randle had argued that the 1947 diary of Barnett's wife, Ruth, does not fit the story. That is not covered in the parts of the sources read here.
Gerald Anderson and other claims
The earlier version of this article said that in 1990, after watching Unsolved Mysteries, Gerald Anderson came forward claiming that as a five-year-old he and his family had found a crashed saucer and its crew on the plains. It said his story was later challenged, and that archaeologists named in it knew of no crash. Apart from Anderson's name appearing alongside Barnett's in the title of the 1992 conference report, these details are not covered in the sources read here.[4]
In 2011 the ufologist Chuck Wade listed seven alleged New Mexico crash recoveries between 1945 and 1948, citing military sources. One was a 32-foot craft on the plains on 1–2 July 1947.[7] See Chuck Wade's seven New Mexico crashes. None of these claims has been confirmed.
On the UAP Timeline
- Chuck Wade's seven New Mexico crashes (26 March 2011) — A researcher presents claims from military sources about UAP crash recoveries.
References
- Plains of San Agustin — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- Kevin Randle, "The Plains of San Agustin Crash", A Different Perspective (Feb 2015) · kevinrandle.blogspot.com · archived copy
- Patrick Gross, "Fleck Danley interview", UFOs at close sight · ufologie.patrickgross.org · archived copy
- The Roswell Incident (1980 book) — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org
- Roswell incident — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org
- Karl T. Pflock — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org
- UAP timeline published with Michael Shellenberger's 2024 congressional testimony, entry for 26 March 2011 · oversight.house.gov
Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Plains of San Agustin”, “The Roswell Incident (1980 book)”, “Roswell incident”, “Karl T. Pflock”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
This page was last edited on 29 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
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