I have said in the past, and others have said in the past, that the problem with the Socorro landing is that it was seen by a single witness. Though it is true that Lonnie Zamora was a police officer and nearly everyone who was asked said that he was an honest man who was not prone to practical jokes and embellishing tales, it is also true that a good UFO case becomes a great case if there was more than a single witness.
But it turns out that this isn’t actually a single-witness case. There are hints of other witnesses who remain unidentified to this day, and there are the names of two men from Dubuque, Iowa, who said that they had seen the craft as they were approaching Socorro late in the day on April 24, 1964. There are a couple of names of men who might have seen the same thing as it lifted off. Throw in a couple of people who are known as “audio” witnesses, and the case becomes a little stronger.
Opal Grinder was on duty as manager at the Whiting Brothers Gas Station on the main north–south highway through Socorro late on the evening of April 24. A car, described later as a light green Cadillac, stopped at the station. These were the days before self-service, when those working at the station pumped the gas, washed the windows, checked the oil, collected the money, and often engaged drivers in a bit of conversation while all this was going on. The car held five people: the driver, his wife, and three children. They were apparently on their way home, and Grinder said that he thought they were from Colorado.1
The driver, who had obviously stepped out of the car, told Grinder, “Your aircraft sure fly low around here.” He said that an aircraft had nearly taken the roof of his car.
They were on the south side of Socorro, north of the airport and driving north on Highway 85 (later the route of Interstate 25) when the aircraft flew over them. The driver thought the craft was in some kind of trouble because he had seen a police car pull off the road and head in the direction of the craft.
Grinder thought the man might have seen a helicopter, but the man said it was not like any helicopter he had ever seen. Ray Stanford suggested the man and his family had seen an egg-shaped object that had smooth aluminum sides and seemed to be a little larger than his car. It was silhouetted against the setting sun. Stanford, in fact, added dialogue from the wife to the husband, suggesting she had pointed it out to him. However, in the various statements attributed to Grinder and in the affidavit he signed sometime later, there is no mention of the description or the craft or any additional details of the sighting from the driver or his family.
Grinder didn’t understand the significance of what he had heard until the following Tuesday, when the then twice-weekly Socorro newspaper, the El Defensor-Chieftain, published Lonnie Zamora’s story. Then a search for the witnesses began, but they hadn’t used a credit card for the purchase, and although Grinder’s son had overheard the conversation, he didn’t add much to it, other than saying that he thought the car had Colorado plates.
Dr. J. Allen Hynek also interviewed Grinder a day or so after the article appeared in the newspaper. Grinder told him the same story that he had given to everyone else when they asked. He added a couple of details, telling Hynek that the tourist had said, “Your planes fly awfully low here—one of them liked to knock me off the road just about when I was passing your sign coming into town.” Grinder also said that he didn’t pay much attention to the man because he (Grinder) was hurrying so that he could get to the bank before it closed at 6:00 p.m.2
The Air Force learned about the driver’s sighting from the local newspaper and other media sources. Colonel Eric T. de Jonckheere, who was the deputy for technology and subsystems, wrote on May 28, 1964:
News media and persons connected with various UFO organizations such as APRO [the Lorenzens] and NICAP [Ray Stanford] received word of the sighting and sent investigators to the scene. Newspaper accounts of the sighting had been much distorted with reports of little men running around and a rocket ship blasting off into space. The account of the sighting carried in the El Defensor & Chieftain (sic) dated Tuesday 28 April 1964 and the account by UPI representative in the Albuquerque Journal, 27 April 1964, are essentially correct. As a result of wide news coverage and public interest in the sighting Captain Hector Quintanilla, Project [Blue Book] Officer directed TSgt David Moody to assist in the investigation for the Air Force. Sgt Moody contacted Major Connor, the Officer at Kirtland AFB responsible for unidentified flying object investigations, and accompanied him to Socorro.3
The El Defensor and Chieftain [sic] carried an article indicating that an unidentified tourist traveling North on US 85 saw the UFO just before it landed. He also observed the police car heading up the hill toward the spot where the UFO landed. If this is true, the UFO not only disappeared in the direction of White Sand’s (sic) but also came from the same direction. A telephone call to Mr [sic] Opal Grinder of Whiting Brothers Service Station indicated that he was the source for reporting that an unidentified tourist had observed the unidentified flying object. He verified that the information in the news article was correct.4
Whoever the tourist and his family were, they never came forward to tell exactly what they had seen, which seems strange given the national coverage of the story as noted by Colonel de Jonckheere. In fact, in a teletype message the Secretary of the Air Force Office of Information noted, “Numerous inquiries concerning Air Force investigation and evaluation of recent UFO sighting at Socorro, New Mexico, 24 April, continue to be received fron (sic) news media, from office of the President, and members of Congress.”5 This reinforces the idea that this was a big story at the time and that there might have been some pressure put on the Air Force to carry out a proper investigation. But it might also suggest something as simple as the tourist and his family didn’t want to be subjected to the type of scrutiny suffered by Zamora. They might have wanted to avoid the Air Force investigation and the accompanying spotlight brought by the news media as well as the comments about their sanity, integrity, and intelligence from their neighbors and the rest of the country.
Ben Moss and Tony Angiola, when I spoke to them, said there were additional witnesses in the Socorro case. They said that three people had called the Socorro Police Department to complain about low-flying aircraft and the noise they were making at about the time Zamora was giving chase to the speeder. If true, this would be some confirmation of the Socorro landing. I asked if they had checked the police records for additional details and confirmation and verification of the story. The short answer from them turned out to be “no.”6
That, however, was not the final answer. The Project Blue Book files contain a short report signed by Captain Richard T. Holder, who had been involved with the investigation from the very beginning on April 24. In that report he wrote, “Upon arrival at the office location of the Socorro County Building, we were informed by Nep Lopez, Sheriff’s Office radio operator, that approximately three reports had been called in by telephone of a blue flame or light in the area. Initial sighting was made by Officer [redacted but clearly Zamora] at approximately 1750 [5:50 p.m.].”7 Although the police department did not log the calls, or even write down the names of those people who had made the telephone calls, it does supply some confirmation of the sighting by somewhat independent sources. It is not as valuable as it might have been if the names had been obtained and interviews conducted, but it does confirm that others in the area had seen the object, or rather the blue flame in the sky, at about the time Zamora began his chase. We do not have the names, but we have documentation that the telephone calls were made.
Stanford, in his book, mentioned a telephone call that had been received by one of the Albuquerque television stations slightly before 5:30 p.m. The witness said that there was a shiny oval or egg-shaped object at a low altitude heading to the south, or toward Socorro. It wasn’t moving very fast and the witness said that it resembled no conventional aircraft. Because it looked like nothing the caller had ever seen, he reported it to the television station.8 Once again, the reporter from the station who provided Stanford with the information failed to get the name of the witness and Stanford doesn’t supply the name of the reporter. It does suggest how these sorts of reports, of strange aerial phenomenon, were treated in 1964. It just wasn’t important enough to even write down a name in case someone else called in with similar information.
There were also what Stanford refers to as auditory witnesses. According to him, he was in a restaurant in Socorro with radio reporter Walter Shrode on the evening of Wednesday, April 30, when he learned of two women who lived on the south side of Socorro. According to Stanford, Shrode introduced him to the women, who said that they believed what Zamora had said. Under Stanford’s questioning about that, both women said they hadn’t actually seen the object, but they had heard the roar from it. Not only that, the women claimed that their neighbors had heard the object as well and they had heard it twice. They had heard two different roars: when it landed and when it took off again, about a minute later. The women were not named in his book; Stanford said that they did not want their names reported publicly.9
Given the passage of time, it seemed that the need for anonymity might have passed. The names might yield additional evidence and, even after more than half a century, additional witnesses might be found. Unfortunately, Stanford failed to record their names and at this late date doesn’t remember who they were. He told me they had been middle-aged at the time and doubted they were still alive.10
It would seem that if these two women had heard the roar, others would have, too, as they claimed. They suggested that their neighbors had heard it as well. Stanford said that he learned from the Socorro sheriff’s office that hundreds had heard the roar of the craft landing and taking off. For some reason, he didn’t attempt to talk to any of those people. Even if they hadn’t seen a craft or the flame, it would have been valuable to have the confirmation from the independent sources.11
Robert Dusenberry, who worked for the Socorro Electric Corporation, said that he and two friends were in a car near the landing site late that Friday evening. They apparently saw the object as it took off. Jerry Clark learned of this in an interview that he conducted in 1995 with former law enforcement officer Ted Jordan. Dusenberry had not told anyone about his sighting until he talked to Jordan about it many years later.12 This is important because there is a name associated with the information, so that it is not just another anonymous source. Jordan, in 1964, was a senior patrolman with the state police.
In a report that might be related to the case, but that was somehow overlooked by most of those investigating the Zamora sighting in 1964, is the story told by a master sergeant who was driving south from the Stallion Range Center at the White Sands Missile Range sometime between 8:00 and 8:30 p.m. He said that he spotted a blue light with orange at the bottom that seemed to be in the mountains west of his position, which would have put him south of Socorro about two or two and a half hours later. As the glow from the flame got brighter, his car engine died and his electrical system failed. The sergeant was a master mechanic who said that he had checked out his car to ensure it was in perfect working condition not long before the sighting. He got out of the car and watched the blue glow until it began to fade. His car then started again, apparently without him having to start it himself. When he arrived at his destination, he inspected the car again carefully but could find nothing wrong with it. Jerry Clark learned about this from Richard Holder when he interviewed him in 1995.13
Ray Stanford suggested there was another large group of witnesses who had never come forward publicly. He said that nearly every member of the law enforcement establishment in Socorro had seen UFOs and suggested that some of them had seen the one Zamora reported, but they had also seen how Zamora had been treated by the news media and by the “official” investigators either from White Sands, the FBI, or the Air Force. They wanted no part of that. Privately, they opened up to Stanford, though there is some evidence that they were known to those investigating the case but were never interviewed or never gave official statements.14
From the documentation available, it is clear that Zamora called State Police Sergeant Sam Chavez, asking him to come alone to the scene, but hadn’t told him what was happening.15 In an interview conducted the next day by Walter Shrode of local radio station KSRC, Zamora said, “From the time I saw this object, which I didn’t know what it was, I placed a call to Sgt. Chavez of the State Police, called him to come out there and help me on this. And he said, ‘Yes, I’ll be right there, in about two minutes.’”16
When Zamora called him, Chavez had to turn a prisoner over to another officer and then got into his car to head out. He hurried out to the location that Zamora had given him, making a wrong turn that delayed him slightly. Unlike Zamora, Chavez said that his car had no trouble getting up the first hill and he stopped near Zamora’s parked car.17
Shrode, in the interview, asked, “And he arrived just about two or three minutes after the object had taken off and left?”
Zamora said, “Well, the object was still about a couple of (unintelligible) up there when he arrived.”
Zamora seemed to be saying that the object was still visible when Chavez arrived. But he also seemed to suggest that Chavez hadn’t seen it. The Hobbs, New Mexico newspaper reported, “Zamora said that he called for help and State Police Sgt. Sam Chavez was on the scene within two minutes. By then the UFO was flying off towards the mountains. ‘If he [Chavez] had just paid attention he would have seen it,’ Zamora said.”18
According to one newspaper report, “The flame was spotted about 5:45 p.m. by other persons too. A sergeant with the New Mexico State Police said he saw the object on the ground in the desert.”19 Though the description—that is, of a sergeant with the state police—matches Chavez, it is also true that the police officer who saw the object on the ground was Zamora. This is most likely a mistake by the newspaper reporter and not confirmation that Chavez saw the craft. There simply is no evidence that Chavez was there before the object took off and, if he was, that he saw the object.
Stanford, on the radio in 2016, said that Chavez had confirmed to him that he (Chavez) had arrived after the object had taken off so he didn’t get a good look at it. By the time he arrived, the craft was high in the sky, just about to disappear from sight when he saw it. Unfortunately, there is no record of this to support this claim. Statements by Zamora seem to suggest Chavez arrived in time to see the object, but Chavez himself left no verbal or written record about it. Stanford reinforced the idea that it was because the others had seen how Zamora had been treated and they had no desire to experience the same thing. They kept their mouths shut, and that included Chavez. The ridicule directed at Zamora might have been reduced with a second witness to the craft, even if it had been high in the sky before he saw it. And it would have added one more name to the roster of witnesses.
On the other hand, Zamora did try to alert other police officers in time to see something. Zamora called the police department’s radio operator, Nep Lopez, and told him to look out the window. Unfortunately, the orientation of the office and the trees and terrain prevented Lopez from seeing anything at all. Coral Lorenzen, as did Hynek, reported that as the object took off, Zamora had called the police station to tell them about the object, but no one there had seen anything unusual.20
The best confirming witnesses (by that I mean the ones who told their story within days of the sighting and whose names were attached to it), were Larry Kratzer and Paul Kies. I learned of them when I was researching another UFO sighting and saw their story that had appeared in the Dubuque, Iowa, Telegram–Herald on Wednesday, April 29, 1964. It was one of those serendipitous things that pop up when researching UFOs. Others had also found the tale, but I wasn’t aware of that.
According to what Kies told the Dubuque newspaper, he and Kratzer were in New Mexico, on Highway 60 a mile east of Socorro early in the evening, about 5:45 p.m. when they saw something shining in the distance.21 Kratzer said, “We saw some brown dust, then black smoke—like rubbish burning—then a fire. The smoke hid the shiny craft as it flew away.”22 The object was hovering about 20 feet off the ground when they first saw it and then skimming away, across the desert.
Kies told the newspaper reporter that federal agents had cordoned the area and that government sources had denied they had any craft like that which Zamora had described. Both added some details and then mentioned that the exhaust of the craft had melted a pop bottle. These statements are problematic because they had only seen the craft in the air and had not been to the landing site to either see the cordon or the melted bottle. It suggests that they had either heard news broadcasts that gave some detail or had seen newspaper articles about the landing before they talked with the reporter from the Dubuque newspaper.
Ralph DeGraw, a UFO researcher living in Iowa, interviewed both men about their sighting about a decade and a half later. On May 11, 1978, he sat down with Paul Kies and recorded his conversation. The story shifts slightly from what had been reported in the newspaper more than 14 years earlier, but not enough to be worrisome given the passage of time and the way that memory works. He said that they were returning to Iowa after having left a boat in Quemado, New Mexico, because of car trouble when they had been there earlier. DeGraw said:
[I]t was approximately 5:00 p.m. (Iowa time, or 4:00 p.m. New Mexico time)...when they reached a point approximately 1 mile southwest of Socorro. Suddenly Kratzer who was driving, pointed out of cloud of dust followed by black smoke which appeared to be ahead and slightly to the right of their position.... Kies estimated that it was about 1 mile distant and was coming from the ground...as they watched, a bright, shiny “reflection” appeared within the smoke... they continued on toward Socorro and that they moved at such an angle that the “reflection” was no longer visible. Kies was not sure whether he had seen the reflection of sunlight (which was now low in the western sky) falling on the object on the ground or whether the object itself was emitting light. However, at the time, he felt that there must have been a junk yard in that area and that someone was burning tires and cutting up wrecked cars.... He at no time thought anything about UFOs.23
They continued into Socorro and stopped at a Chevron station to hook up the trailer lights. This was not the station managed by Opal Grinder, who had talked about five tourists in a Cadillac. Kies was driving Kratzer’s 1964 Corvette, which would never be mistaken for a Cadillac. Kratzer thought he might have said something to the station owner about what they had seen but he didn’t remember. Unlike Opal Grinder, that station employee never came forward, which suggests that Kratzer didn’t say anything to him or what he said didn’t connect with the story told by Zamora. With the lights hooked up, they continued crossing New Mexico, and somewhere near the Texas/Oklahoma border they heard a news report about the flying saucer landing.
Once they had arrived in Dubuque, they decided to tell the newspaper, because the Zamora story was still making headlines. DeGraw noted that they said the newspaper didn’t get the facts straight, saying the men had seen the craft on Saturday rather than Friday and that they had been east of Socorro when they were west, driving east.
Kratzer had a little better description of the object than the one given by Kies. According to DeGraw, Kratzer said the UFO was a round or egg-shaped object that ascended vertically from the black smoke. He said that it was difficult to estimate size and distance given that the sighting had occurred so long ago. He couldn’t tell how far away it was but thought that it was a half mile to a mile distant and flying at about a thousand feet.
DeGraw reported, “After climbing vertically out of the smoke, Kratzer said the object leveled off and moved in a southwest direction, disappearing in black smoke which he said was coming out of its underside.”24
He also said that the craft was silver with a row of round, darker, mirror-like windows. And he said there was a red “Z” on the right side of the craft. There were about four windows visible on the side facing them and he believed that they circled the craft.25
Kratzer’s statement, then, does not match the information that we have about the case. Zamora is the main source for the descriptions of the craft; he was the one who got closest to the object on the ground and he had the best opportunity to see it. He described that craft as having a smooth surface with no windows or signs of a hatch, even though he believed that the creatures had returned to the interior of the craft after they spotted him and he heard sounds like a hatch being closed. He did not describe the symbol as a red “Z,” and you have to wonder how Kratzer would have seen it from the distance of more than a half mile if his estimate of the distance is accurate. Kratzer’s statement doesn’t even match that of Kies, who was with him in the car. Kies seemed to have seen less but according to the article, Kies was driving at the time.
Does this mean that we should reject both their statements about what they saw?
Clark mentions that there were problems with the testimony but just notes it, to let the reader decide what to think. It is clear from the article that appeared in the Dubuque newspaper that both men had heard of the sighting before they talked to the press, and Kies confirmed that when DeGraw interviewed him. I know of no investigation that attempted to determine if they had been in New Mexico at the time of the sighting, and, if they were, no one learned if they were in a position to see the object. Given the time that had elapsed prior to that interview—nearly a decade and a half—it is unlikely that any useful evidence would have turned up to prove that they were in New Mexico on that Friday in 1964.
I will note here that they couldn’t have been aware of the Opal Grinder story, given the timing of their interview with the Dubuque newspaper. Grinder didn’t come forward until the Tuesday after the sighting, and Kies and Kratzer were interviewed by the Telegraph–Herald in time for the Wednesday edition of the paper. Their story, as told to DeGraw more than a decade later, certainly suggests they knew the country around Socorro: where the highways lead and the best route from Socorro back to Iowa in 1964. Unless they had studied a map prior to DeGraw interviewing them, this is an interesting fact.
In the end, we are left with a number of alleged witnesses who did not leave a record of any kind. We don’t know who the Colorado tourists were, but we do have the secondhand statements from Grinder about what they had seen. We don’t know who the people are who called the police about the blue flame in the sky, but we do have some documentation to suggest this is true in the signed report by Holder and found in the Project Blue Book files. We don’t know who the women were who told Stanford about hearing the roar and suggesting that their neighbors had heard it as well. We have nothing from any of the law enforcement personnel who were on duty that night, though we do have, again, secondhand information to suggest that some of them might have known more about the sighting and that some of them might have seen more than they were willing to tell either the official investigators or the civilian researchers.
Originally, like so many others, I had said that this was a single-witness case, but as we can see, it is much more than that. There is documentation to support additional witnesses, there is testimony to support that as well, and we do have two firsthand accounts from Kies and Kratzer. Unfortunately, their testimony leaves something to be desired, but it is on the record in the days that followed Zamora’s sighting. There is, of course, the possibility that they were making it up because of what they had heard on the radio and read in the newspapers, though that seems unlikely, given the timing of all the events. Besides that, they were interviewed by DeGraw 14 years after they made their original statements and if they had made up their report that was the opportunity to correct the record. They did not do that.
We are not quite back to where we started with only Lonnie Zamora as the witness. We have added to the testimony, though the additions are not as solid as I would like. Besides, there is another aspect to the case: physical evidence. Zamora said he saw something on the ground and there were landing traces from it, on the ground, seen within minutes of the departure of the craft. That adds another dimension to the story and suggests that what had landed was not an illusion, was not a hallucination, but something real and heavy enough to leave its footprints.