- Socorro Landing Incident
- On Friday, April 24, 1964, police officer Lonnie Zamora sighted a landed UFO near Socorro, New Mexico.
At about 5:45PM Zamora had been in pursuit of a speeding car when heard a roar and saw a long funnel of blue-orange flame to the southwest of his position. He abandoned chase and went to investigate. At first he suspected an explosives storage shack may have blown up, but as he arrived on the scene he noticed what he presumed was an overturned car in an arroyo about 150 - 200 yards away. Two people in coveralls were outside next to it and Zamora got out of his car to lend assistance.
He had just gotten out of his cruiser when there was suddenly another loud roar accompanied by a blue and orange rocket like exhaust below what he had thought was the car. The roar was so loud Zamora feared an impending explosion. Instead, the object began to take off and Zamora retreated to take cover. As he retreated, he attempted to keep an eye on the object. The object was oblate spheroid in shape. It rose vertically out of the arroyo a few yards above the surrounding landscape, then the rocket exhaust appeared to go out, the roar reduced to a whine, and the object rapidly accelerated away in apparent silence on a southwest heading toward Six Mile Canyon Mountain.
Major Hector Quintanilla, the USAF officer who headed Project Blue Book between 1963 and 1969 thought it was possible, if not likely, that the Socorro UFO was a secret craft based on the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module ( LEM ). Quintanilla's theory makes a certain amount of sense because the craft reported by Zamora gave off a roar accompanied by a cone of flame from below the craft. This is indicative of rocket technology rather than the advanced silent propulsion employed by UFOs. Also, experimental LEM test vehicles were flown for very short periods as part of the Apollo program. Quintanilla never found any solid evidence for his theory, but remained steadfast in his opinion even after his retirement.
Proponents of the ETH suggest that because Zamora reported that the craft departed in silence, it doesn't match terrestrial technology of the day. However there is a reasonable explanation for this facet of the sighting. When the human ear is exposed to very loud sudden noises, temporary hearing loss is completely normal. Rocket and jet engines are very loud and Zamora could not possibly have been immune to this effect. So what really seemed to have happened is that the craft blasted of with enough thrust to get quickly airborne, throttled back to flight mode, and moved off into the distance before Zamora's hearing returned to normal, making it seem to have moved off in silence. Within a few minutes most of Zamora's hearing would have returned and in all the excitement this phenomenon was probably overlooked.
Proponents of the ETH also imply that no such terrestrial craft existed because none have been discovered. The answer to this is that there were craft being designed and tested that worked exactly on these principles, and Socorro was in close proximity to a rocket testing area ( White Sands ). So even if no identical craft has been found in any declassified documents, it doesn't mean there wasn't one. It's entirely possible that if this were a lone prototype for an abandoned project, that it was destroyed along with all plans, molds, and information about it. This was done with the Northrop flying wing. The only reason we know about that aircraft is because it had already been in production and flown, so there was so much information about it spread around that some records and films survived anyway.It has also been suggested that the sighting was a hoax perpetrated by a fraternity of high-tech pranksters from New Mexico Tech. Circumstantial evidence for a hoax includes pieces of charred cardboard and human looking footprints found at the Socorro site. However Zamora had reported seeing humanoid beings outside the craft, so the footprints could also have been from them. He also reported seeing the object take off in burst of flame, so burnt objects would be expected and the cardboard may have been there before the incident happened. They could also have become part of the scene after the sighting took place and before the USAF investigators arrived.
The rest of the case for a hoax rests on a bit of hearsay in a casual note between Stirling A. Colgate, President of New Mexico Tech. and Linus Pauling. The note itself is somewhat curious in that Pauling seems to have hand written the question of a possible hoax to Colgate, who then allegedly answers on the same piece of paper saying only, "I have good indication of student who engineered hoax. Student has left." So if the response was even written by Colgate, it still doesn't confirm that he knows for certain it was a hoax, or who did it or where they are. It is also possible that the scribbling is itself a hoax. No actual hoaxers have come forward and no proof has been recovered. So far, the hoax theory is nothing more than speculation by debunkers and skeptics.
Additionally, in a report for the CIA, Quintanilla stated that, "There is no doubt that Lonnie Zamora saw an object which left quite an impression on him. There is also no question about Zamora's reliability. He is a serious police officer, a pillar of his church, and a man well versed in recognizing airborne vehicles in his area." So Zamora had more than a passing familiarity with local air traffic, and as a police officer and former army serviceman, he was better prepared to handle stressful situations and less likely to jump to conclusions than the average person. He would also have been trained to make on-scene observations and accurately report them. This is not the profile of someone who couldn't tell the difference between a prank and something much more sophisticated. Lastly, the hoax theory fails to explain how mere pranksters could acquire the knowledge and resources required to build a rocket powered vehicle capable of landing, takeoff and transporting crew.
After Zamora's death in 2009, author Ray Stanford, who researched the Socorro landing case first-hand, learned from Zamora's daughter that Zamora had considered Stanford's account to be thoroughly accurate. Stanford also tells how sometime after 7:00 P.M. on April 24, 1964, FBI agent J. Arthur Byrnes, Jr., had interrogated Zamora and told him that it would be better not to publicly mention seeing the two small figures in white who had been in the UFO. The Socorro Landing Incident is often regarded as one of the best documented, yet most perplexing UFO cases. It was one of the investigations that helped persuade astronomer J. Allen Hynek , who was one of the primary investigators for the USAF, that some UFO reports represented an intriguing, unsolved mystery.
Additionally, Captain Richard T. Holder, U.S. Army, 095052, Up-Range Commander at the White Sands Stallion Site advised Zamora not to reveal the true design of the insignia Zamora had seen on the side of the UFO to anyone except official investigators. Zamora agreed that putting out a decoy symbol instead of the real one would help to identify copy-cat hoaxers, so the genuine design was kept confidential as long as possible. The real one is the Lambda with three horizontal lines through it, commonly referred to as the Hynek version.
