Socorro landing

Socorro landing

Type	Case (close encounter of the third kind with physical traces)
Also known as	Socorro incident; Lonnie Zamora incident
Date	About 5:45 p.m., Friday 24 April 1964
Place	Gully about a mile south of the courthouse, Socorro, New Mexico
Witness	Sgt. Lonnie Zamora, Socorro Police (died 2 November 2009, aged 76)
Reported	White, egg- or "O"-shaped object on legs; two small figures in white coveralls; red insignia; roar and blue-orange flame on take-off
Traces	Four shallow depressions; burned greasewood and grass
Blue Book verdict	Unknown
Proposed explanations	Student hoax; Surveyor lander test; hot-air balloon; mirage; tourism hoax
On the Timeline	1 event, 2003

The Socorro landing, also called the Socorro incident or the Lonnie Zamora incident, took place on the evening of 24 April 1964 near Socorro, New Mexico. The police sergeant Lonnie Zamora reported seeing a shiny object and two small figures in white coveralls in a gully. The object then rose with a roar and a blue and orange flame and flew away. It left shallow depressions and scorched brush, which other officers saw within minutes. Project Blue Book listed the case as "unknown". Its director called it the best-documented case on record, and leading ufologists, including J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée, counted it among the best ever recorded. Skeptics have proposed a student prank, a lunar-lander test and other explanations, and none has been confirmed.^[1][2][4]

The sighting

At about 5:45 p.m., Zamora was on Park Street, chasing a speeding car several blocks ahead of him south of Socorro. Near the old U.S. 85 road he heard a blast or roar. He "saw a flame in the sky to southwest some distance away", between half a mile and a mile (0.8–1.6 km) away. Thinking an aluminium shack used to store dynamite had exploded, he gave up the chase and headed up a very rocky dirt road towards the building and a perlite mill. It took three tries, driving very slowly, to get his car up the road to the top of the mesa overlooking the gully.^[1][2][3]

Glancing out of his window, he saw a shiny object "to south about 150 to 200 yards" (140–180 m) away. At first he took it for an "overturned white car ... up on radiator or on trunk". He described it as "like aluminum—it was whitish against the mesa background, but not chrome", and shaped like the letter "O". Two days later he told the radio interviewer Walter Shrode that from that distance it looked like an egg, about the size of a car. Beside it he briefly saw two people in white overalls, whom he later described as "normal in shape—but possibly they were small adults or large kids". The local paper reported that one of them, his back to Zamora, turned his head and looked straight at him. To Shrode, though, Zamora said he would not call them people: he saw "something white, white coveralls", and could not identify them as human beings.^[1][2][3]

Zamora radioed the dispatcher, Nep Lopez, that he would be "checking the car down in the arroyo". When he stopped on the mesa top, opposite the place in the gully, he saw the object again, gleaming in the sun, but the figures were no longer outside. He got out and walked towards it. Then he heard the roar again and saw flames beneath the object, with dust flying around it. Believing it was about to explode, he dropped to the ground about 50 feet from it and covered his face with his arm. When nothing exploded, he looked up. The object rose straight up about 20 feet, level with his car on the mesa. It flew due west in a straight line about two miles to the perlite mill, staying low, then climbed very rapidly over Six-Mile Canyon, became a speck and disappeared. He radioed Lopez again, asking him to look out of his window for the object. When Lopez asked what it looked like, Zamora said, "it looks like a balloon".^[1][2][3]

The Air Force's more detailed account for Project Blue Book describes the figures as clearly humanlike in white suits. It describes the vehicle as smooth and white, with no windows or doors, shaped like a football or an oval, on legs. Its only marking was a red insignia about two feet high: an inverted V with three lines beneath it.^[3]

Physical traces

Zamora asked New Mexico State Police Sergeant Sam Chavez to meet him. When Chavez arrived and asked what the trouble was, Zamora led him to some burning brush. Undersheriff James Luckie, the dispatcher's 20-year-old son Pablo Lopez and State Patrolman Ted Jordan arrived soon after. All of them saw the landing depressions and the still-smouldering bushes within ten minutes of the incident. Chavez and Luckie said the burned clumps of green grass and greasewood were still hot. Zamora said the shallow holes in the ground were where the object had landed.^[1][2]

Early the next morning Chavez escorted the publisher of El Defensor Chieftain, Lewis Reddell, and its editor, Ted Raynor, to the site. Raynor photographed the depressions and the burned plants. His pictures, among the few photographs of a reported UFO landing site, later appeared in dozens of publications and in the Blue Book report, seldom credited to the paper. The paper reported that the object had landed astride a narrow, rocky dry wash, and that officers had circled the four leg marks with stones. The holes were about a foot long and six inches wide, made not by a hard impact but by a heavy object settling slowly and not moving. Two greasewood bushes and clumps of green grass seemed to have been seared all at once by an extremely hot flame, and one greasewood had broken branches. There were also two round, very slight depressions, and no footprints were found. The military later took samples of the burned earth. By Sunday afternoon hundreds of curious visitors had trampled the scene, leaving virtually no marks. The skeptic Philip Klass later noted the odd lack of symmetry in the pad prints, which would make for a very unstable craft.^[2][4]

The tourist

The Chieftain reported that an unidentified tourist travelling north on U.S. 85 had seen the object just before it landed. Opal Grinder, manager of the Whiting Brothers service station, said the man stopped and remarked on the low-flying aircraft around the area. When Grinder said there were many helicopters in the vicinity, the man replied that it was a funny-looking helicopter, if that was what it was. He said it had flown over his car, headed straight for the gully, and that he had seen a police car heading up the hill. Klass later wrote an unpublished paper arguing that claims of other witnesses were not plausible.^[2][4]

Investigation

By Saturday the incident had been reported to White Sands Missile Range, through its up-range commander Captain Richard Holder, who lived in Socorro, and to Kirtland Air Force Base. Military and Blue Book investigators headed for Socorro. On Tuesday 28 April the Chieftain broke the story under the headline "Evidence of UFO Landing Here Observed". It called Zamora a highly reliable source who had seen "a four-legged, egg-shaped object" and offered readers three possibilities: a top-secret U.S. aircraft, an advanced craft of another power, or a scout ship from another planet. The paper hit the streets at about the time Air Force investigators arrived. The FBI came out and verified the burn marks, and Air Force investigators checked the site for low-level radiation.^[2][3]

Hynek, the astronomer who was Blue Book's scientific consultant, arrived on Wednesday 29 April. He visited the site with Zamora, talked to him at length and interviewed others. He found the site so trampled that little of scientific value could be obtained. The Chieftain's headline said Hynek felt Zamora's account was solid, not a hoax. On a second visit on 15 August 1964, he said the case was becoming "one of the classic cases", that the Air Force was very interested and that nothing had discredited the investigation. Blue Book listed the case as "unknown", one of 701 unexplained cases among the 12,618 it investigated. Its director, Major Hector Quintanilla, wrote that there was no doubt Zamora saw an object that left quite an impression on him, and no question about his reliability as a serious officer and "a pillar of his church". Zamora was puzzled by what he saw, Quintanilla said, "and frankly, so are we. This is the best-documented case on record."^[1][2]

The symbol and sketch

About two weeks after the sighting, a Socorro Junior High student, Ricky Baca, drew a charcoal sketch of the craft under Zamora's direction. Baca had no red pencil, so Zamora drew the insignia on a piece of paper and Baca added it in red at home that evening. The sketch, approved by Zamora, was published in the Chieftain about a month after the sighting, without the symbol. Hynek had asked that it be left out so as not to influence other reports. The local historian Paul Harden believes many other versions of the symbol in UFO literature are later fabrications. Baca still had the original sketch in 2008.^[2]

Explanations

A Surveyor lander test

One suggestion is that Zamora saw a test of a lunar landing device by personnel from White Sands Missile Range. In 1964 NASA was testing an early engineering model of Surveyor, the robotic lander built by Hughes Aircraft that reached the Moon in 1966. Researchers found records that a model was carried by helicopter that day, though earlier in the morning. Dave Thomas, president of New Mexicans for Science and Reason, argues that the lander slung from a very small Bell helicopter would have looked white and round. He suggests the figures were project workers in suits and the red symbol resembled a Hughes logo of the period. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid called this a terrible explanation. Holloman Air Force Base and the test range are about 150 km from Socorro. No experimental craft had ever been flown into a populated town to be tested. Surveyor was a tripod of aluminium trusses, nothing like an egg or a car, and could not take off at all.^[1][3][4][5]

A student hoax

The skeptic Robert Sheaffer has argued that the incident was a hoax by students at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (New Mexico Tech). The theory rests on a 1968 letter found among the papers of the chemist Linus Pauling. In a postscript Pauling asked the physicist Stirling Colgate, then president of New Mexico Tech, what people there thought of the Zamora case. Colgate scrawled back that he had a good indication of the student who engineered the hoax, and that the student had left. The UFO researcher Anthony Bragalia publicised the note in 2009. In 2012 email exchanges with him, Colgate described the object as "A candle in a balloon. Not sophisticated." A former psychology professor, Frank Etscorn, told Bragalia that one of his students in the 1980s had found a participant who admitted his role but would not give details or his name. Dave Collis, a 1965 freshman, said a professor told him in confidence that the sighting was a hoax by "Techie" students. A rear-projection device was also said to have been stolen from the college that day, though it would have been of little use in full sunlight. No hoaxer has ever been named.^[1][3][4]

Supporters of the theory note that Zamora had worked in the New Mexico Tech machine shop before joining the police. He had a reputation among students for being rigid and impatient, and there was some antagonism between them. The campus Energetics Lab had plenty of pyrotechnics to produce the noise, flames and burned scrub, and white lab suits were readily available. Dunning suggested a speeding driver could have lured Zamora to the spot and another vehicle towed the balloon away. He thought hoaxers would have kept quiet once the prank drew in federal agents and the armed services. Sheaffer considers a student prank, with Zamora as victim, more plausible than a hoax by the town. He admits, however, that it is hard to see how hoaxers could have left the scene before Chavez arrived minutes later.^[3][4]

Other explanations

Philip Klass visited Socorro in 1966 and interviewed Zamora and others. He was puzzled that scientists at New Mexico Tech showed so little interest in what might be the first genuine alien encounter, on their doorstep. One local suggested he "nose around a bit" and told him the town wanted to attract tourists. In his 1968 book UFOs—Identified Klass concluded that the case was a hoax to put Socorro on the map, probably involving Zamora, the mayor and a few others. The skeptic Steuart Campbell argued that everything Zamora and the other witnesses saw and heard was "almost certainly" a mirage of the star Canopus. The engineer Larry Robinson suggested an early propane-powered hot-air balloon, then an unfamiliar technology. The British ufologist James Easton pointed to classified CIA hot-air balloon flights by Raven Industries launched from the Rio Grande north of Albuquerque. In 2003 the CIA denied his request for records about them because they were still classified.^[1][4]

Myths

Some debunkers claimed the landing occurred on land owned by the mayor, Holm Bursum Jr., which would support the tourism theory. Harden found that in 1964 the parcel belonged to the Delia Harris estate and was bought in 1968 by the Richardson family, and that Bursum never owned it. Another myth holds that all the Socorro newspapers reporting the landing mysteriously disappeared. In fact the issues survive in bound volumes in the Chieftain's archives and on microfilm at the Socorro and New Mexico Tech libraries. A few weeks after the incident, motorists between Magdalena and Socorro reported shadowy figures with round lights roaming the desert. The state patrol found them, and after a tense confrontation they turned out to be a Bureau of Land Management survey crew.^[2]

Legacy

In 1965 the California producer Mike Musto filmed a UFO documentary in Socorro, Phenomenon 7.7, named for the 7.7% of reports judged unexplained. When he asked the city and the Loma Theater for $25,000 to premiere it there, Mayor Bursum refused. Even UFO enthusiasts considered it a flop, and the strings holding up the saucer shots were said to be embarrassing. In 1966 the chamber of commerce president, Paul Ridings, proposed developing the site for tourists. Volunteers built stone walkways and steps into the arroyo from the mesa top, a rock path around the "landing site" and some wooden benches. These were built about a quarter-mile (0.4 km) from the real spot, partly because the real site, where vegetation had not grown back, was rumoured to be radioactive. Other popular spots behind the old drive-in theatre or along High School Road are also wrong. In 2012 the city officials Ravi Bhasker and Pat Salome commissioned the local artist Erika Burleigh to paint a mural about the incident on a spillway facing Park Street. The city has considered placing a marker at the site.^[1][2][5]

Zamora remained with the police for about eight more years. He then worked for the city in other jobs, including managing the town landfill, until he retired. After the initial investigations he seldom spoke about the incident and never sought attention. No one questioned his sincerity or honesty, and Harden called him probably the world's best-known Socorroan, largely because of his character and integrity. He died in Socorro on 2 November 2009, aged 76. Visitors still come to Socorro every month looking for the site.^[1][2][3][4]

On the UAP Timeline

• Socorro rock analysis (3 May 2003) — Kit Green says rock from the 1964 Socorro landing was analyzed at NASA Goddard.

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Lonnie Zamora incident”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.