The Lonnie Zamora Incident, Socorro

Friday, April 24, 1964. About 5:45 in the afternoon. Socorro police officer Lonnie Zamora was chasing a speeding car heading south. Then he heard a roar. He saw a flame in the sky to the southwest, some distance away. The town's dynamite shack was out there. He thought it had exploded. He dropped the chase and drove toward it.

The flame was "bluish and sort of orange too," a funnel, narrower at the top than at the bottom. Slowly descending. From a hilltop he looked south. About 150 to 200 yards away sat "a shiny type object." At first it looked like a car turned upside down. It was like aluminum, whitish against the mesa background, but not chrome. Two legs angled outward from it to the ground.

Beside it stood two people in white coveralls. "One of these persons seemed to turn and look straight at my car and seemed startled." They appeared normal in shape. Possibly small adults. Or large kids.

On the object was red lettering of some type, about 2 1/2 feet high. Then came the roar. "Noise was a roar, not a blast, not like a jet." A blue-orange flame burned underneath. The object rose straight up, about 20 to 25 feet in six seconds. Then it went very fast in a straight line, clearing the dynamite shack by about three feet. No flame now. No smoke. No noise. It seemed to get small, and vanished toward the airport area.

State Police Sergeant Sam Chavez arrived to find Zamora sweating and very pale. Together they found burning brush and marks in the ground. That evening, Army Captain Richard T. Holder and FBI agent D. Arthur Byrnes Jr. reached the scene. They reported four irregularly shaped depressions, their diagonals crossing at right angles. There were small footprint-like marks too.

Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Project Blue Book's science consultant, arrived on April 28. He called Zamora "basically sincere, honest, and reliable." An FBI memo of May 8 described him as "well regarded as a sober, industrious, and conscientious officer and not given to fantasy." Blue Book checked for helicopters, aircraft, balloons and missile range activity. It found none. The verdict was unidentified. Major Hector Quintanilla wrote: "This is the best-documented case on record, and still we have been unable, in spite of thorough investigation, to find the vehicle or other stimulus that scared Zamora to the point of panic."

Then came the doubts. In 1968 Stirling Colgate, president of New Mexico Tech, answered a letter from Linus Pauling: "I have good indication of student who engineered hoax. Student has left." Anthony Bragalia found that letter in 2009. Colgate later described the craft as "A candle in a balloon. Not sophisticated." Philip J. Klass argued the town staged it for tourists. Others proposed a lunar lander test, or a mirage of the star Canopus.

Kevin Randle and others reject the hoax idea. They point to other witnesses and to Hynek's view that Zamora was incapable of hoax. Zamora never changed his story.

Lonnie Zamora died in Socorro in 2009, aged 76. The arroyo is still largely unmarked. Murals tell the story instead. And Hynek's words still follow the case: "one of the most authenticated landing sightings on record."