The Lonnie Zamora sighting did not happen in a vacuum. For nearly 17 years, people had been sighting, reporting, and discussing flying saucers and then UFOs. There had been magazine articles, books, documentaries, and movies. Some of those movies, such as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers , were said to have been based on books, but only the words flying saucers had any relevance to the book on which it was based. The point is, by 1964 nearly everyone had heard of flying saucers or UFOs, but, of those, few thought it related to alien visitation and even fewer cared.
It is said that the modern era of UFO sightings began with Kenneth Arnold, a Boise, Idaho, businessman. Though I could argue it began years earlier with the Foo Fighters of World War II, for most Americans it started on June 24, 1947. Arnold, a private pilot, was on a business trip when he diverted, according to him, to a search mission that involved a lost military aircraft. As he flew over the area in Washington state, in the distance, in the direction of Mount Rainier, he spotted nine objects in a loose trail formation flying at high speed with an undulating motion. When he landed in Yakima, Washington, he told the reporters who had somehow heard about the sighting of the strange craft and were interested in what he had seen. He described the objects as moving with a motion like that of saucers skipping across the water. The shape, however, according to drawings that Arnold completed for the Army within days of the sighting, showed objects that were more heel shaped than saucer shaped. In later drawings, Arnold elaborated, showing objects that were more crescent shaped with a scalloped trailing edge than those heel-shaped things he had sketched earlier.1
Arnold’s sighting didn’t gain front-page status immediately, but stories about it appeared in newspapers a day or two later. It was, at that time, the story of an oddity without any real speculation about what he had seen. Arnold claimed later that he thought he had seen some sort of the new jet aircraft rather than something from outer space. This was the same sort of thing that Zamora had thought after the landing in Socorro. It was a black project and not an alien spacecraft.
According to the Project Blue Book files, Arnold wasn’t the only person to see strange objects in the sky that day in that area. Fred Johnson, who claimed to be a prospector, reported watching five or six disc-shaped craft as they flew over the Cascade Mountains somewhat north of Arnold’s location. He said the objects were round with a slight tail and about 30 feet in diameter. They were not flying in any sort of formation that he could see and, as they banked in a turn, the sunlight flashed off them suggesting a metallic surface. As they approached, Johnson noticed that his compass began to spin wildly. When the objects finally vanished in the distance, the compass returned to normal.
After learning of the Arnold sighting, Johnson wrote to the Air Force on August 20, 1947, saying:
Saw in the portland [sic] paper a short time ago in regards to an article in regards to the so called flying disc having any basis in fact. I can say am a prospector and was in the Mt. Adams district on June 24th the day Kenneth Arnold of Boise Idaho claims he saw a formation of flying disc [sic]. And i [sic] saw the same flying objects at about the same time. Having a telescope with me at the time i [sic] can asure [sic] you there are real and noting [sic] like them I ever saw before they did not pass verry [sic] high over where I was standing at the time. plolby [sic] 1000 ft. they were Round about 30 foot in diameter tapering sharply to a point in the head and in an oval shape. with [sic] a bright top surface. I did not hear any noise as you would from a plane. But there was an object in the tail end looked like a big hand of a clock shifting from side to side like a big magnet. There [sic] speed was far as I know seemed to be greater than anything I ever saw. Last view I got of the objects they were standing on edge Banking in a cloud.
It is signed, Yours Respectfully, Fred Johnson.2
Johnson was eventually interviewed by the FBI, whose report contained, essentially, the same information as the letter that Johnson had sent to the Army. The FBI report, found in the Blue Book files, ended by saying, “Informant appeared to be a very reliable individual....”
Johnson’s sighting becomes important because it corroborates what Arnold reported and comes from an independent source. Of course, the problem here is that Johnson did not contact anyone about his sighting until after information about Arnold and what he had seen had been published in the various local and national newspapers. You can say that he was a contaminated source and the first line in his statement confirms that.
Even with the possible corroboration for Arnold and with Arnold’s aviation experience, the Air Force eventually decided that Arnold had been fooled by a mirage, and, in the end, that was how they labeled the case.3 Later others would suggest a formation of pelicans and some of the pictures of pelicans in flight resemble, to a great degree, the motion that Arnold described and the illustration that he had drawn.4
After the Arnold sighting, others began to report what they had seen to the various news agencies. In the days after Arnold, hundreds of people in the United States and thousands around the world mentioned similar sightings, with newspapers keeping a count of which states and which countries were involved. The importance here is that Arnold’s sighting was the springboard for the news coverage that would follow.
Typical of those sightings was one made by the crew of a commercial airliner on the July 4th weekend. Captain Edward J. Smith was flying a United Airlines DC-4 near Emmett, Idaho, when his first officer, Ralph Stevens, reached down to flash the landing lights, thinking he saw another plane coming at them. Smith wrote:
My copilot…was in control shortly after we got into the air. Suddenly he switched on the landing lights. He said he thought he saw an aircraft approaching head-on.
I noticed the objects then for the first time.
We saw four or five “somethings.” One was larger than the rest and for the most part…right of the other three or four similar but smaller objects.
Since we were flying northwest—roughly into the sunset we saw whatever they were in at least partial light. We saw them clearly. We followed them in a northwesterly direction for about 45 minutes.
Finally, the objects disappeared in a burst of speed.5
According to the Project Blue Book file, Smith said that they never were able to discern a real shape. He said that he thought the craft were flat on the bottom and seemed to be irregular on the top. The objects seemed to be flying at their altitude and followed them for 10 to 15 minutes, but remained in sight longer than that.
The Air Materiel Command (which later had responsibility for investigating UFO sightings) opinion was that the event had occurred at sunset, which meant changing lighting conditions that were ideal for “illusionary” effects. The objects could have been birds, balloons, other aircraft, or pure illusion, though every member of the crew saw the same thing. The source of the objects was never identified.
The number and type of sightings continued to grow throughout the next couple days, with opinions about the source of the objects also growing. No one had a firm grasp on what was being seen or where they were coming from. In 1947, some of the suggestions were that they interplanetary as opposed to interstellar craft mainly because people were simply not thinking in terms of craft from planets beyond our solar system.
The number of sightings, which is to say the number that were reported, dropped significantly on July 9 when the Army and the Navy began a concentrated effort to suppress the stories. That just meant that sightings were no longer printed in the newspapers or reported on the radio. It didn’t mean that the flying saucers had gone away, only that the reports of them were no longer considered news or more accurately were no longer reported because of the intervention of military authorities.6
For the next several years there would be a periodic report or someone would ask, “Whatever happened to those flying saucers?” Donald Keyhoe, a retired Marine Corps major, kept the story alive with periodic magazine articles and his claims that the Air Force knew more than it was letting on. He claimed there was a cover-up, but not many people were interested in his opinions or believed that the flying saucers were of any real importance—that is until July 1952.
The Washington Nationals, as the sightings became known, began on July 19, 1952, but the country didn’t learn about them until July 22. On that first Saturday night, July 19, pilots and crews of various airlines made multiple sightings of lights in the sky over Washington, D.C. Returns seen on the radars at Washington National Airport, Andrews Air Force Base, and Bolling Air Force Base suggested that weather-related phenomena were not the cause but that something tangible had invaded the airspace over Washington.7
Capital Airline officials said that they had learned from the airport radar operators at Washington National Airport that they had picked up unknown objects on their radars. Airline officials then asked the pilot of Capital Flight 807, Casey Pierman, to keep an eye out for anything unusual. Pierman said that he was between Washington and Martinsburg, West Virginia, when he and his crew saw seven objects flash across the sky. The lights were traveling at tremendous speed, and would move up and down and then suddenly slow until they were hovering. Pierman said, “They were like falling stars without the trails.”8
The crew of another Capital Flight, Flight 610, reported that a single light followed them from Herndon, Virginia, to within 4 miles of National Airport. About the same time, an Air Force radar installation was tracking eight objects as they flew over Washington, D.C. This would be the only time that a military radar would track the objects, according to the documentation available.
One week later, almost to the hour, the UFOs were back, and the same crew who had watched them on the Washington National radar that first Saturday night was watching them again. This time interceptors were launched to identify the lights and the Pentagon’s officer responsible for liaison between those investigating UFOs and those in Washington, D.C., Major Dewey Fournet, was present, as was the official Pentagon spokesman about UFOs, civilian Albert Chop.9
The sightings began at about 8:15 p.m. when the pilot and a member of the National Airlines flight crew saw several objects that they later described like the bright glow from the end of a cigarette. They were high overhead and they believed the objects were moving about a hundred miles an hour.
About an hour later the ARTC (Air Route Traffic Control) asked a B-25 crew in the area to investigate several radar targets that were near the aircraft. The crew saw nothing. They did report that every time they were told they had flown over one of the objects, they noticed they were over the same section of the Potomac River. Some would later consider this observation relevant.
Captain Edward Ruppelt, who was then chief of Project Blue Book, was told about the sightings, and he called Fournet, who lived close to the airport in Washington. Fournet, and eventually Chop, arrived at the airport’s radar facility. Once the fighters were called in, Chop chased the reporters from the room citing the classified nature of the communications and procedures during the intercept. Reporters thought it was bunk, and Ruppelt would suggest the same thing years later, suggesting that ham radio operators with the right equipment would be able to listen to the radio traffic between the fighters.10
The radars were still “painting” the unknowns, showing them moving about 100 miles an hour and then streaking away at 7,000 mph. At 11:00 p.m. two fighters were scrambled from Newcastle Air Force Base. When interviewed years later, Fournet said, “The reports we got from at least one of the fighter pilots was pretty gory.”11
This seemed to refer to the intercept attempt by Lieutenant William Patterson, who had been vectored toward one of the fast-moving targets. He spotted four white glowing lights and chased after them. He said that they were very brilliant blue-white lights.12 They turned toward him and surrounded his aircraft. He called for instructions but received no clear reply. After a moment or two, the UFOs pulled away.
Chop added one point that was interesting: “The minute the first two interceptors appeared on our scope all our unknowns disappeared. It was like they just wiped them off. All our other flights, all the known flights were still there.”13
As had happened the week before, as the sun came up, the unknown targets vanished from the scopes. There were a few anomalous targets remaining, but the radar operators identified them as weather related, meaning they were temperature inversions and the operators paid little or no attention to them.
Although there was a call to identify the objects quickly, including one from the White House, the answer finally supplied was unsatisfactory. The Air Force suggested it was the result of temperature inversions that had been over Washington on the nights that the radar showed UFOs. The one thing the sightings did was bring UFOs back into the public’s attention. Newspapers, radio broadcasts, and even television mentioned the sightings.
By the end of the summer, with the Olympics as well as the presidential race catching media attention, UFOs no longer commanded front-page coverage. They disappeared except for the local angles as UFOs were still being seen and reported around the country. And, as had happened before, they slowly drifted back into obscurity.
It was claimed, for a time, that the sightings in Levelland, Texas, and then at White Sands Missile Range hours later, were the result of the Sputnik II launch, but that information had not been made public until later that day, and no one in Levelland had heard the news. The first report was made by Pedro Saucedo, who called the Levelland sheriff, Weir Clem, to say that his pickup truck had been stalled when a large, glowing object had lifted off from a field near him. The object had a blue-green glow that faded into a red that was so bright it hurt to look at it. The UFO sat near the highway for about three minutes. Saucedo said that he felt a blast of wind that rocked his truck as the object disappeared in the east. Once the object was gone, his truck started and he found a telephone to call the sheriff.14
The spot where Pedro Saucedo’s truck was stopped by the glowing UFO. Photo courtesy of the author.
Over the next few hours, witnesses in 13 separate locations in the area around Levelland and Lubbock, Texas, claimed to have seen the glowing red object that stalled their cars, dimmed their lights, and filled their radios with static. Typical of these sightings was that of Jim Wheeler, who saw a bright red object sitting on the road. He later told the NICAP investigator, James A. Lee, that the UFO was so bright that it cast a glow over the whole area.
As Wheeler approached the object, his headlights dimmed and his engine sputtered to a stop. As he started to get out of his car, the UFO rose into the sky. As it disappeared in the distance, the lights came back on and he was able to start his car. He called the police as soon as he could.
Ronald Martin told a similar story. He saw a red, egg-shaped object sitting on the road some 4 miles east of Levelland. As he drove closer, his headlights dimmed and finally went out. His engine stopped. He said the same things that Wheeler had said. When he started to get out of his car, the object lifted off rapidly. When it was gone, he could start his car and his headlights came back on.
The highway leading to Levelland, Texas, where the majority of the sightings were made on November 2-3, 1957. Photo courtesy of the author.
Even the sheriff, who ventured out to search for the object, saw it. In 1957, he said it was a streak of light in the distance, but he later suggested to friends and family that he had been much closer and had seen a great deal more. He said the Air Force investigator on the case, S/SGT Norman Barth, who came from Reese Air Force Base in Lubbock, had asked him to keep the details quiet.
In fact, family members suggested that Clem had told them that the day after the sightings, on a ranch outside of town, a large, circular burn mark had been found. Although this information was gathered decades after the fact, there is some documentation in the Project Blue Book files that provide a point of corroboration. There is a quote from Sheriff Clem made during his interrogation by the Air Force representative. He said, “It lit up the whole pavement in front of us [Clem had a deputy sheriff with him] for about two seconds.”15
Two hours after the sightings in Levelland, military police at White Sands reported that they had seen an object land close to them. Glenn Toy was one of those MPs who said that he was patrolling up toward the Trinity Site where the first atomic bomb was detonated, not all that far from Socorro.16 Toy provided a sworn statement to his commanding officer on the day of the sighting. Toy said:
At about 0238–0300 Sunday Morning [November 3, 1957] I, CPL X [Toy] and PFC Y [Wilbanks] were on patrol in Range Area when we noticed a very bright object high in the sky. We were proceeding north toward South Gate and object kept coming down toward the ground. Object stopped approximately fifty (50) yards from the ground and went out and nothing could be seen. A few minutes later object became real bright (like the sun) then fell in an angle to the ground and went out. Object was approximately seventy-five (75) to 100 yards in diameter and shaped like an egg. Object landed by bunker area approximately three (3) miles from us. Object was not seen again.17
Twelve hours later another patrol at White Sands, in a similar location, reported that they watched a UFO. Although the Air Force interviewed three of the four witnesses, they suggested the men were young, inexperienced soldiers who might have been caught up in the hysteria of the UFO sightings. Their reports shouldn’t be taken seriously and in fact, the Air Force decided that one team had seen the moon and the other had seen Venus.18 But Toy said that he got a very good look at the UFO. “It landed right across the road from us,” he said.19
The next day, the Levelland sightings hit the front pages and sparked a serious debate between the Air Force, who claimed that only three witnesses had seen the object in Levelland, and Donald Keyhoe, who claimed there were nine witnesses. Neither was right, but Keyhoe was closer to the actual number.20 That became a major point of contention as the Air Force attempted to discredit the information that Keyhoe was publishing about these sightings.
In what might have been an important report as it would relate to the Socorro landing seven years later, a man, James Stokes, was burned by the close approach of a UFO. Stokes said that it was after 1:00 p.m., as he was driving between Alamogordo, New Mexico, home of Holloman Air Force Base, and El Paso, Texas, his radio began to fade out. He reached over to turn up the volume, but the radio was dead. At this point the engine began to sputter and finally died, and he saw other cars up ahead, all of them stopped with the drivers outside, pointing up at the sky. Stokes then saw the large, egg-shaped object that was coming toward them from the northeast. He said that it had a mother-of-pearl color; it was over the Sacramento Mountains and heading, more or less, southwest when it suddenly turned and passed over the highway. It made another sharp turn and again crossed the highway. It began to climb swiftly and finally vanished, not over the horizon, but apparently upward, into space.
Stokes said that when the object passed overhead, he felt some sort of pressure and a wave of heat. While standing there, Stokes took some notes so that he would have an accurate memory of what happened and what he had seen. He talked to two of the other witnesses, one man named Duncan and the other Allan D. Baker, who might have worked at the White Sands Proving Ground. According to Stokes, Duncan was from Las Cruces and had taken some pictures of the object, but searches for these men failed. The pictures have never surfaced, even with the publicity surrounding the sighting at the time in that area.
Once the UFO had disappeared, Stokes got back into his car. The engine started with no trouble and Stokes continued on to El Paso. On his return, the first thing he did was call his superior at Holloman, Major Ralph Everett, whose attitude seemed to be that it hadn’t happened at Holloman, and because Stokes hadn’t been on duty, and there was nothing in the inventory that could explain the sighting, there was no reason for Stokes not to say anything about what he had seen to those who asked.21
For several days, the sightings in Levelland and elsewhere were on the front pages of newspapers around the country. There was a large spike in the number of reports made to Project Blue Book. By the middle of December, the reports dwindled and the flying saucers fell from the front pages.
On April 18, 1962, according to Project Blue Book files, there was a radar sighting from Nellis Air Force Base just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, but the information contained in that file mentioned nothing about eyewitnesses. The project card gave a brief summary of the sighting and then noted, “No. Visual.”22
The problem for the Air Force was that the Las Vegas Sun reported on April 19, 1962, the day after the radar sighting, in a banner headline on the front page “Brilliant Red Explosion Flares in Las Vegas Sky.” That article suggested dozens of eyewitnesses and even named some of them. In the lead paragraph, Jim Stalnaker, a reporter for the newspaper, wrote that a “tremendous flaming sword flashed across the Las Vegas skies last night and heralded the start of a search for a weird unidentified flying object that apparently had America’s Air Force on alert.”23
Stalnaker reported that Frank Maggio, a staff photographer, had seen the object. According to the newspaper, Maggio said that a series of bright explosions broke up its trail across the sky. It was a visual sighting of a bright light that seemed to be related to the radar tracks recorded out at Nellis.
That same article mentioned Sheriff’s Deputy Walter Butt, who was in charge of the department’s search and rescue team. The consensus seemed to be that the object was heading toward the east and there had been a final explosion near Mesquite, Nevada, on the Utah border. Butt took his team into an area between Spring Mountain and Mesquite, but nothing else had been reported to the newspaper.24
Butt said that they had searched the area in jeeps and, when the sun came up, had used airplanes. They didn’t find anything of importance, except some ashes that he thought were probably part of a campfire started some weeks earlier by a hunter. When no one reported any missing aircraft, and they had run up against the fences of part of a Nellis gunnery range, they called off the search.25
At the AEC’s Nevada Test Site was another man who also saw the object in the air. He said that it looked like a nuclear explosion but added quickly that it came from the wrong direction for that answer to be valid.
In Colorado Springs where the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) is located, the information officer, Lt. Col. Herbert Rolph, said they had one report of a sighting as far away as New York.26
There is a handwritten note in the Project Blue Book files affecting all this. Lt. Col. H.C. Showers at the command post called “FTD [Foreign Technology Division] of the following event reported to the war room at the Pentagon.”
The log entry said:
General [Laurence S.] Kuter (NORAD) took off and was climbing through 10,000 [feet] when he saw a “meteor” [quotes in original document] come out of orbit as 0319Z 19 April. He described the object as cherry red, clear green, with a long white and red tail. He estimated object near Colorado Springs and [the] AF Academy. USAF indicated reports coming in from Idaho, Utah, Arizona, ‘OCD’ 28th and 29th (??) Regions, Navy Aircraft, B-52 crew and DC-8 pilots. All reported alike in shape, color, and general direction of travel...south to north. An “Air Force Colonel” [quotes in original] reported that object [over] the western range—but there was no noise. Denver center [FAA flight center] reported at 0332Z that after 10–15 minutes after the first reports the trail could still be seen. No radar pick up reported as yet. Visual sightings only.”
About 50 minutes later, just after midnight the command post got another report, this time from Lt. Col. James Howell, who wanted to report “numerous reports to the FAA and AFLC [command post] on the above sighting. It was observed in Los Angeles, Col. [Colorado], Montana; Kansas; Utah.”
The Air Force, which had received most of the sighting reports, believed that one object was responsible for all the sightings. Officers at Stead Air Force Base near Reno, Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas, and at NORAD, all drew the same conclusion. The reports from Utah and Reno, Nevada, describe sightings made within 15 minutes of each other when corrected for the time zones and the fact that some of the sighting reports were filed using Greenwich Mean Time.
The Air Force file for the Nellis Radar sighting puts the incidence some 16 minutes after sightings in Utah and northern Nevada, but the official spokesman at Nellis said the Air Defense Command was alerted by the fire trail seen at approximately 7:20 p.m., or within a few minutes of the Utah sightings.
On September 21, 1962, Major C.R. Hart of the Public Information Office, responding to a letter from a New York resident, claimed that “the official records of the Air Force list the 18 April 1962 Nevada sighting to which you refer as ‘unidentified, insufficient data.’ There is an additional note to the effect that ‘the reported track is characteristic of that registered by a U-2 or a high balloon but there is insufficient data reported to fully support such an evaluation.’ The phenomena reported was not intercepted or fired upon.”27
Reports in the Project Blue Book files clearly show that fighters had been launched and intercepts had been attempted. It could be argued that Major Hart did not have access to those reports and he had written only what he had been told. He wasn’t lying or covering up, he just didn’t have access to all the facts. He just didn’t know.
His explanation also left something to be desired. He wrote that “track is characteristic of that registered by a U-2 or a high balloon.” A balloon track would be made at the whim of the wind, reacting to the winds aloft, and a U-2 would have a track that showed intelligent control. A balloon track would look nothing like the track of a high-flying jet.
There is a variety of documentation of the sighting from the newspapers in the region including the Las Vegas Sun, Los Angeles Times, Deseret News and Telegram, Salt Lake Tribune, Eureka Reporter, and Nephi News-Leader . Additional documentation, including the reports created at the time, can be found in the Project Blue Book files.
The relevant point here, however, is that this sighting, though not gaining a national audience, was widely reported in the region from west Texas to Los Angeles. It demonstrated the Air Force interest in UFOs, suggested that something might have exploded, and with the information about the radar sighting, suggested something real.
This was the UFO world as it existed in 1964. In the 17 years before the landing in Socorro, there had been periods of extensive UFO coverage, and the idea of alien visitation had evolved to the point where there were millions who believed it. There were those who thought that many of the UFO sightings could be explained by black, government projects, and the idea of UFOs was used to hide that information. This theory has been grabbed by skeptics and even the CIA to explain away those sightings that are nearly impossible to explain.
When Lonnie Zamora saw the object landed in the arroyo south of Socorro, one of the things he thought was that it could be a government project. Sam Chavez believed this explanation as well. It was an idea that was pursued by those who investigated the case and one that was not found to be true.