9
mechanism, etc. FinallY, it was . LaPaz's feeling that had it been a hoax,
,
it surely would have leaked by now. He ~ld me of an elaborate hoax that
there. The students had it in for this guy and contrived an explosion in
· · .,and the crater which it • oduced .
al nearby to~ was reported then as a meteorite crater. U had
T = · I ~~
everybody excit·ed for a while and waul~ have succeeded exceptA. who got away
. I
with it were so pleasedfowith themselves that they began to brag a bit and
got caught. I. do not believe that the Socorro high school students could
.have kept a secret this long. Furthermore, 't would seem that any youngsters
that rated Zamora sufficiently to have gone to all this trouble to perpetrate
a hoax would now be very envious of the glory be is getting in a movie and
all the publicity he has received and would certainly burst his bubble right
now. Finally, there is the matter of the tourist who reported s strange object
to O,elgrinder. This cou.ld not very well have been part of the hoax since
the tourist was a complete stranger just passing through. Further~more,
if Zamora is to believed at all, the object rose vertically and took off
horizontally to the west and was observed as it passed well over the dynarilite
shack and disappRXeeared over the pearlite mill~ This is entirely too big
a hoax for high school students to perpetrate.
Perhaps I spent too much time on this matter, but the letter was a very
ronvenient device for re-discussing the whole situation. Sgt. Chaves indicated
that Menzel should have been a science fiction writer. Actually LYle Boyd
has done some of this, and I believe also Menzel has.
I left Albuquerque in the late morning on Saturday and arrived in Socorro
abtut 1:00 P. M. Raynor, ~nrode, and I visited the site and took some more
samples, particUarly of the sap, and I took a few more pictures, 9articularly
of the dynamite shack to show Menzel. Then I went back to the radio station
I ,Rob Mercer