Socorro, New Mexico
24 April 1964
6:00 P.M.
The year 1964 was marked by a strange event that occurred in the New Mexican desert.

Police officer Lonnie Zamora of Socorro, New Mexico was chasing a speeder on the outskirts of Socorro, New Mexico when he saw a bright flash of light and heard a loud roar. Knowing that there was a dynamite shack in the area in which he saw the flash, he broke off the chase and headed toward the shack.

There was a gully near the gravel road to the shack, and down in the gully, about eight hundred feet away, he saw a bright white object with two people in white coveralls standing beside it. Thinking it was a car that had run off the road and overturned, he stopped his car for a second. The two figures looked like ordinary humans, but might have been smaller than average adults. One of them seemed to become agitated when he noticed that Zamora was looking at them. Zamora radioed the Sheriff's office to report a possible accident and then proceeded down the road. After rounding a hill, he came to a flat area that offered a better view of the object. As he got out of the car, he heard a sound like a door being slammed.

The object was not a car. Zamora described it as egg-shaped, aluminum-white in color, and twelve to fifteen feet long. It sat on short legs, and there were no windows or doors visible. There was some sort of red insignia on the side that was about 2 1/2 feet tall. The two people he had seen before were not in sight.

Before he could take many steps in the direction of the object, it began to make a whining sound and to emit blue and orange flames and the exhaust from it began kicking up dust. Zamora said that he panicked and turned back to get in the car, bumping into the car and knocking off his glasses as he did so. The object was airborne by the time he had fumbled his glasses back on. It flew over the dynamite shack and then off to the southwest until it was out of sight over the mountains.

Zamora called police headquarters and asked if they could see an object in the sky. He then asked if Sgt. Sam Chavez would come to the site. Zamora then walked down to where the object had been, and noted the brush burning where the object had stood. He also sketched a picture of the object while it was fresh in his memory. The drawing showed an elliptical object sitting upright on two visible legs, with an insignia on the side. Sergeant Chavez arrived about three minutes after the object had vanished. He went to the site with Zamora and noticed four fresh indentations in the ground and several bushes that seemed to have been burned.

Within two days, the place was swarming with UFO investigators of one sort or another. Among the first on the scene were Coral and Jim Lorenzen of APRO, followed closely by Bluebook investigators T/Sgt. David N. Moody and Major William Connor from Kirtland AFB near Albuquerque. Two days later, Dr. J. Allen Hynek arrived and interviewed Chavez and Zamora for over two hours, finding that Zamora, although:

...not overly bright or articulate, is basically sincere, honest, and reliable. He would not be capable of contriving a complex hoax, nor would his temperament indicate that he would have the slightest interest in such.

Hynek wrote that Zamora and Chavez fully expected to be told that what Zamora had seen was a top-secret U.S. experimental craft. Hynek could find no evidence of a hoax and felt that it was out of the question that Zamora could have been involved in a hoax. Hynek was unable to find any such top-secret craft, and the sighting was finally listed as "unexplained."

Some negatives did appear, however. A man named Felix Phillips and his wife lived in a house just 1,000 feet from the landing site. Although they were home at the time and had several windows open, they heard nothing. Zamora, on the other hand, claimed to have heard the original landing roar from a distance of 4,000 feet and over the sound of his own car.

The marks in the ground from the "legs" were another problem. Critics said they should have been equidistant, but they were not. The critics said that an assymetrical landing gear would be unstable.

In "Watch the Skies", Curtis Peebles gives one criticism that needs further clarification. He says (I believe from Phil Klass' investigation of the case.) that:
The exact wind speed and direction is uncertain as Socorro did not have a weather station.
That's one thing. But then he says that Philip J. Klass mentions:
...the lack of any radar trackings of the object - even though the local radar picked up cars on the road...
What "local radar" is meant by Klass? If Socorro had either an air base or an airport of enough size to have radar, it would certainly have enough of a "weather station" to record wind speed and direction. If Klass means radar at Alamagordo or Albuquerque, then I question that it could pick up "cars on the road." It's a well-known fact that radar CANNOT detect low-flying aircraft. That's why military aircraft fly low to avoid radar. If anyone can explain this, please email me.

Some have theorized that what Zamora saw was an early test of the Lunar Lander that was used by the Apollo missions. However, investigation has shown that the Lander was not ready for testing at this time.

Larry Robinson made a case that the object was a hot-air balloon. That seems odd to us, but in 1964 the propane-fueled hot air balloons that we know were new and relatively unknown.

But if what Zamora saw was either one of these things or something similar, why wouldn't the people involved have come forward by now to puncture the UFO bubble? Everyone saw the Lunar Lander a few years later, so its existence wasn't top secret anymore.

If it was a hot air balloon, where are the men who were flying it? Why would they have kept quiet all these years? Somebody had to construct the thing. It seems unlikely that no one would have spilled the beans.

Whatever it was, it's one of the enduring mysteries of UFOlogy.

This article was previously published in 2000. It has been revised slightly by removing dead links and adding new ones as needed.

Loy Lawhon

Due to past abuses, I do not allow articles to be reprinted on other sites. You may use the first paragraph and provide a link to this page for the rest of the article.

Print References: • "Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma" by Jacques Vallee • "Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact" by Jacques Vallee • "The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters edited by Ronald D. Storey • "The UFO Book" by Jerome Clark • "The UFO Casebook" by Kevin Randle • "Watch the Skies" by Curtis Peebles