Prior to the UFO report made by Lonnie Zamora, there had been a single sighting in New Mexico in April. The UFO was seen over Texas, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. The Project Blue Book files labeled it as “astro,” which in this case meant meteor and, given the descriptions and the wide area of the report, that doesn’t seem all that unreasonable. After Socorro there were a number of landing reports and other sightings made in New Mexico and a few in other states that were similar to what Zamora had claimed.
Within hours of Zamora’s sighting there was another landing in New Mexico, this one in La Madera, northwest of Espanola, which itself is near Los Alamos.1 According to the documentation available in the Project Blue Book files and other sources, Orlando Gallegos had gone outside to chase away some horses when he saw an object sitting on the ground about 200 feet away. He said that he was afraid to get any closer. When he first saw it, there was a ring of blue flames erupting from jets around the bottom of the object. Later he would suggest that the blue flames were tinged with orange. He heard no sound, and as he watched the flames died. Unlike Zamora, he didn’t see anyone or anything around the craft.
Gallegos returned to the house to tell his father and the rest of the family what he had seen. They either laughed at him or were all too frightened to go back to look, but Gallegos himself went back out twice to verify his sighting. He said that it appeared to be made of bright metal without windows. It resembled a butane tank that was as long as a telephone pole. Finally, he gave up and went to bed. The next morning it when he went out to look again, the object was gone.
There was more information found in the Project Blue Book file. According to an article there:
[H]e noted an unusual craft resting upon the ground in a gravel area some 200 feet distant. The UFO was reported to be the length of a telephone pole, with a circumference of 14 feet. Rings of blue flame emitted from jets about its underside....
The next morning, however, they all examined the landing area, noticing the ground to be still fumy from the previous night.
State Police Captain Martin Virgin [sic], upon checking the charred area, noticed that the rocks present within the center of that landing site were cracked, and a bottle nearby had melted. Green brush in the surrounding area had been set afire, evidently from intense heat. Four depressions and unusual “paw-prints,” resembling those of a Mountain Lion, were also seen.
The Air Force, although having sent investigators into the area, has thus far remained silent on their findings, if any.2
That next afternoon, according to Coral Lorenzen, as reported in The A.P.R.O. Bulletin , as Gallegos was heading back home in La Madera, he heard about the Socorro landing. He stopped in Espanola and told police officer Nick Naranjo about the UFO. He then told the same tale about what he had seen to State Police Officers Marvin Romero and David Kingsbury.
State Police Captain Martin E. Vigil learned about the sighting from the other police officers and in turn sent another officer, Albert Vega from Ojo Caliente, to the landing site. When Vega reported that something unusual was at the scene both Vigil and Kingsbury joined him.3 Vigil would later say:
At the time [about 7:30 pm.], the ground was still smoldering and badly scorched. Officer Vega advised that he had observed four impressions on the ground, one of which was quite clear, the others having been obliterated due to windy weather conditions. Officer Vega stated that this depression was approximately eight by twelve inches in size, about three or four inches deep, sort of “V” shaped at the bottom.
There were also oval shaped, or “cat-paw like” markings around the scorched area. These were approximately three and one-half inches in diameter.4
Vigil added some detail in his conversation with Coral Lorenzen. According to her, when he arrived on the scene he saw that the area was still hot and smoking. There was glass that looked as if it had been melted. He said that there was an area about 35 or 40 feet in diameter that was scorched and smoldering. One of the police officers, Kingsburg, took color photographs, “which ARPO obtained but which showed nothing.”5
Martin would confirm to others that there had been something out near that house. He told the United Press International, “There was definitely something there.”6
Vigil also told Lorenzen that Major William Connors, the public affairs officer from Kirtland Air Force Base who had been in Socorro, had traveled to La Madera to interview Gallegos. Interestingly, Hynek, who was in New Mexico investigating the Socorro case at the time, apparently couldn’t get permission from the Air Force to travel north to interview Gallegos.
In a letter dated April 27, 1964, Major John C. McNeill, quoted from an Officer of the Day report on the same date:
AFSC Command Post called at 1645 [4:45 p.m.] relaying a UFO report as follows: At approximately 0130 local time near Espanola, N.M. on 26 April a Ranger’s son observed an object emitting flames and noise. His father sent him back to bed. The next morning the Ranger and his son investigated the area near where the object was sighted. The grass was burned and still smoldering and there were footprints in the vacinity [sic]. They notified the state police and Kirtland AFB. The prints were similar to those reported on the 25th April at Socorran [sic], N.M. Personnel from Kirtland are at the site now.7
Doyle Akers, a reporter for the Santa Fe New Mexican , also examined the spot. He wrote:
At the scene itself the charred area was a peculiar shape, like two overlapping circles. It was about 20 feet across. Large rocks within the area showed evidence of extreme heat, while others within a few feet weren’t damaged at all. A soft drink bottle had melted with another five feet away was intact.... An attempt to set fire to a chamisa brush nearby failed.8
There was another sighting in that area about the same time that Gallegos saw his object. According to Lorenzen, “a glowing object which ‘buzzed’ two unidentified men in a car near La Madera Sunday morning. This sighting was made to State Police before the Gallegos sighting came to light.”9
Vega also remembered that he had found a group of drunken young people who had been at a dance in Ojo Caliente. According to Vega they would have passed near La Madera, but they had seen nothing. When he found the landing spot it was still smoking and he told Dick Thomas, “That area wouldn’t start burning from a match or cigarette. You’d have to have some kind of gasoline or chemical to make it burn like that. But I don’t think anybody would be out starting a fire at 1 o’clock in the morning.”10
The Air Force did investigate, and did reach a conclusion. They believed the sighting had been inspired by a fire set on a dumping ground. According to the project card in the Project Blue Book files, “Witness reported seeing an obj emitting flames. Police called to investigate. No noise. Obj stationary. Light suddenly went out. Much publicity following Socorfo [sic] sighting. Witness had been drinking heavily.... Area where light was used as a dumping area. Burned spot at this location.”11
Their conclusion: “Fire in Dump.”
In 1970, in a United Press International report, there was a quote from Emilio Naranjo, who was the sheriff in Rio Arriba County in 1964: “Our investigation showed that three or four young boys had been washing a car at the river and started a fire to burn the rags they had used. That was the flying saucer Gallegos saw.”12
There seems to be no sign of an Air Force investigation. The case file is thin, made up of copies of articles from newspapers and UFO organization publications. There are no indications of where the idea that there was a dump in the area came from; it might simply be the reference to the soft drink bottles found in the area. There are no reliable sources to suggest that Gallegos was drunk that night, no names attached to the boys washing a car and setting rags on fire, and no reasonable explanation for the case. Coming so close as it did to that from Socorro, it seemed to add a note of credibility to the La Madera case, but it also seems that much of the information missed the mainstream press of the time and the thin case files suggests that the Air Force was uninterested in the report.
The Zamora sighting did seem to inspire others. That is not to say that these new witnesses were inventing their tales, only that they were now reporting what they had seen because there was an interest in these sightings. It could also mean that there were additional unidentified craft flying around New Mexico and that, too, explains the surge in sightings.
In what was, in the beginning, a somewhat mundane sighting with a possibility of a landing has grown into something more grandiose over the years. On April 30, 1964, nearly one week after the Zamora sighting, an unidentified pilot of a B-57 bomber was on a routine mission near the Stallion Site (a site that Captain Holder headed up on the White Sands Proving Ground), when he called his mission control, asking if he was alone.
They asked, “What do you mean?”
The pilot said, “I’ve got a UFO.” He then said, “It’s egg-shaped and white.”
He couldn’t see any markings and said that he was going to make another pass at it. He turned and flew over the area where he had seen the object and reported, “It’s now on the ground.” At that point communications with the control was lost.13
There seems to be no additional information about who the pilot was, how many of the crew might have seen the UFO, and if any sort of attempt to reach the UFO was made by those on the ground. Lorenzen apparently didn’t follow up on the sighting and the case does not appear in the Project Blue Book files except as “information only.”
During that limited investigation conducted by Lorenzen, and in communication with Terry Clarke of Alamogordo radio station KALG and Arlynn Bruer, a reporter for the Alamogordo News, it was learned that an airman had told others of a UFO in a guarded hangar at Holloman Air Force Base, which is not far south of Socorro. Clarke had said that an airman shopping in downtown Alamogordo had told several people in one of the stores about the UFO. A day or two later the airman returned, saying that he had been mistaken about the UFO. He said there was nothing like that at Holloman. He had been told by officers at the base to go back and explain the situation.14
Lorenzen speculated that the airman’s tale of the UFO was probably truer than not. She wrote that she doubted the Air Force would have the ability to capture a flying saucer. She thought that the airman might have heard about the landed UFO and seen a guarded hangar on the base, and leaped to a conclusion about a UFO in a hangar. If the story wasn’t true, there seemed to be no reason for the officers at Holloman to order the airman to retract the story. If it wasn’t true, why should they care?
But the story doesn’t end there, and it gets even bigger. Rumors began to spread that the landing had not been in the desert of the White Sands Missile Range, which is co-located with Holloman, but on the base proper. The alien craft had actually landed on the airfield.
Then, in early 1973, Robert Emenegger and Allan Sandler said they had been approached by Air Force officers asking if they would be interested in a documentary on a secret U.S. government project that dealt with UFOs. When the men suggested they might be, they were shown photographs and films of UFOs and the occupants of them.15
They said they were invited to Norton Air Force Base,16 where the head of the Air Force Office of Special Investigation (AFOSI) and Paul Shartle, who was a security officer at Norton, met them. Emenegger and Sandler were told that there are been a landing at Holloman in April 1964, or maybe in May 1971; the exact date was never made clear. The landing had been by prior arrangement, suggesting there was communication between the Air Force and the occupants of the UFOs. The landing was filmed, as would be expected, and Emenegger and Sandler were promised several hundred feet of film for their documentary. Then, suddenly, permission was withdrawn. It was the political climate around Watergate that caused the trouble, at least according to the reports being made.
Emenegger told the tale of the Holloman incident in his 1974 book, UFOs Past, Present and Future :
We are in the operations tower at Holloman Air Force Base at the landing field.
We hear, over an intercom, a voice: “Check list April... Charlie four standing by.” From within the tower, we hear a control operator giving some data to a pilot: Wind, northeasterly—two knots. Temperature sixty-eight degrees, visibility ten miles and clearing.” Behind the operator’s voice, airmen are making small talk about the lousy coffee.
The day is clear. It’s about 5:30 a.m. Traffic is light; one recon plane is on the field ready for takeoff when the tower phone rings and Sergeant Mann is given a report of an approaching unidentified craft.
We shift to the radar hut. On the scope several blips appear as the radar scans to the sky. The radarman leans into his phone: “I’ll repeat it again—unidentified approaching objects—on coordinate forty-niner—thirty-four degrees southwest following an erratic approach course.”17
After watching the object, and attempting to identify it, they alerted the base commander, identified in the scenario as Colonel Horner. He wanted to know if the aircraft had been warned about entering Holloman or White Sands restricted airspace and wanted to know if Edwards Air Force Base in California had been contacted. Edwards was where many advanced design aircraft were tested.18 Then two fighters were alerted, and launched to intercept and escort the unidentified craft from the restricted area.
There was a helicopter with cameramen, a technical sergeant, and a staff sergeant who had their equipment with them and were able to take several feet of film of three unidentified objects. One of them broke away from the other two and began a rapid descent. By coincidence, there was a second crew, this one using a high-speed camera to record a test launch in the White Sands area. They exposed some 600 feet of color film of the landing.
The UFO hovered for a moment, and then touched down on three landing gear. A hatch opened and one being, then a second and finally a third stepped out. They wore tight-fitting flight suits, and had a blue-gray complexion, widely spaced eyes, and large pronounced noses. They wore some sort of helmet or head piece of a rope-like design.
All of this is a reconstruction of the “real” events that supposedly happened and part of the film footage shown to Emenegger and Sandler. It seems that some of those reading Emenegger’s book believed that the reconstruction presented was accurate, and it is possible that the landing at Holloman reported by Lorenzen in 1964 and the publication of Emenegger’s book led to the conclusion that the event had happened as described. What had begun as a landing that had no names attached to it other than those in the Alamogordo area who had attempted to verify the rumors became much more than it should have been.
But there is an addendum to all of this. Timothy Good, as he was preparing his book, Alien Contact , said that he had verified some of the information. During the syndicated program UFO Cover-Up? Live , Emenegger, interviewed for the show, had said, “What I saw and heard was enough to convince me that the phenomenon of UFOs is real—very real.” Good said that Emenegger had told him the same thing.19
Paul Shartle, the former head of security and chief of requirements for the audio visual program at Norton, said:
I saw footage of three disc-shaped crafts. One of the craft landed.... It appeared to be in trouble because it oscillated all the way down to the ground.... A sliding door opened, a ram was extended, and out came three aliens.... They were human size. They had odd gray complexions and a pronounced nose. They wore tight-fitting jumpsuits, thin headdresses that appeared to be communication devices, and in their hands held a translator, I was told. The Holloman base commander and other Air Force officers went out to meet them.”20
You might say that Shartle giveth and then taketh away. He also said, “I was told it was theatrical footage that the Air Force had purchased to make a training film.”21 The overriding fact in this is that he did confirm the existence of the film.
Later still, Richard Doty, who had been in the AFOSI, mentioned to Linda Moulton Howe that the Holloman Landing had taken place on April 25, 1964, some 12 hours after Lonnie Zamora had seen the landed craft near Socorro. This, according to Doty, had been an error on the part of the alien flight crew. The craft was not supposed to land in Socorro but at Holloman some distance to the south. Doty had now provided a third date for the landing, but Doty’s credibility suffered with his involvement in the MJ-12 controversy, questions about the end of his association with the AFOSI, the completion of his military career, and his association with Bill Moore. All that means is that his confirmation of the Holloman landing is not particularly persuasive.
There were a number of additional sightings in the hours and days after Zamora saw the landed UFO. Few of them were either reported to the Air Force or made their way into the Project Blue Book files as “information only” cases, which was a way of acknowledging their existence without having to do anything about them. For example, from The UFO Report, a newsletter that reprinted UFO information, published in summer 1964, came a sighting from Socorro that a trucker driver, Napoleon Green, and his wife had seen two egg-shaped objects about 5:30 p.m. on April 27 about 17 miles north of Socorro.
According to the newspaper article noted in The UFO Report, Green said, “I wasn’t going to report it because I didn’t want to believe my eyes.”
His wife dived beneath the dashboard after seeing the objects that were moving as fast as a jet and about half that size with one following the other. They were shining brightly in the setting sun, but there was no visible smoke. They were in sight for about two minutes before disappearing over the eastern horizon.22
In Hobbs, New Mexico, on April 28, several children said they had seen a white, circular object hovering over the city before it moved off toward the northeast.
Another report on the same day and at the same time came from two unidentified adults who were about twelve blocks from where the children had made their sighting.23
In Las Cruces, also on April 28, a state police officer, Paul Arteche, and four employees at the state port of entry on Interstate 10 south of the city, sighted a luminous object moving in a jerky motion. A private pilot said he had seen the same thing between 10:00 and 10:30 p.m.24
There were other sightings as well. Newspaper reports on April 28 included information that was sketchy at best and certainly not as spectacular as with the Zamora or the Gallegos sightings. George Mitropolis of Albuquerque said that he had seen a “silver looking” object. It disappeared over the mountains.25
According to Socorro police officer Bill Pyland, an unidentified 18-year-old girl said that she had seen a fire in the hills to the southwest of Socorro on Sunday night, April 26, 1964. She said that she approached to within 200 or 300 feet of the fire when she saw something in flames. She left the area to report it to the police who searched the area but found no sign of a fire and nothing out of place.26
The question always becomes: What inspired all these sightings? Was it a reaction to Zamora? Were there more objects flying around and therefore more sightings? Were people now looking up and therefore seeing things that they wouldn’t have noticed before? Was it that they knew where to report their sighting or that the newspapers now took those sightings seriously and reported them? Or were people seeing things that were mundane and misidentifying them? Or did it give people an idea and lead to them inventing their sightings for reasons of publicity or because they thought there was money to be made?
A number of stories were reported in the newspaper that might have had their inspiration in the Zamora tale but that were not based on reality. One that seemed to get the biggest play was that of 10-year-old Sharon Stull, who said that she had been burned by a UFO. The story was somewhat reminiscent of that told by James Stokes in November 1957. Stokes said that he was traveling toward El Paso, Texas, from Holloman Air Force Base when his radio faded and his car stalled near Orogrande, New Mexico, which is not all that far from the gate to the White Sands Missile Range.
Stokes said that he noticed other cars stopped along the side of the road and pulled in behind them. Outside there was some sort of object flying overhead, into and out of the clouds. When the object finally disappeared, his car started normally and he continued his trip to El Paso. That evening, he noticed a slight burn on his face and arms, as if he had been out in the sun a little too long. When he was interviewed later that evening by Terry Clarke and the Lorenzens, they all noticed a slight reddening of Stokes’s skin. Two days later, when he was examined at the Holloman base hospital, there was no sign of the burn. It is clear from their reporting of the incident that the Lorenzens and Clarke believed that Stokes was telling the truth about what he had seen and the burn he had suffered. Neither the Lorenzens nor Clarke found a real reason to dismiss Stokes’s sighting. Although there were other witnesses to the sighting, according to Stokes, none have ever come forward or been located.27
With the case of Sharon Stull, who was burned on the face while watching an egg-shaped craft on April 28, the same can’t be said. The Lorenzens were involved almost from the beginning, interviewed the various principals, and came to their conclusions that seemed to be the opposite of what they normally discovered.28
According to the story, Stull had come home for lunch and then walked back to school. While there with her sister Robin, she saw the white, egg-shaped object flying overhead. She pointed it out to the other children but they all seemed to be uninterested. She continued to watch it for about 10 minutes as it circled around before she headed in to class.29
When she got home that evening, Stull began to complain about some pain in her eyes. She was taken to the hospital, treated for sunburn, and sent home. Although her neck and hands had been exposed, there were no burns reported there.
Coral and Jim Lorenzen traveled to Albuquerque to interview the girl and her family. They talked to the doctor, calling him from the Stulls’ house, and learned that the burn would be about the same as that after eight hours of exposure to the sun.
Continuing the investigation, they interviewed Lieutenant Jolly of the Albuquerque Police Department. He told Jim that the other children who were cited as witnesses said that they hadn’t seen anything at all. Those other children included Stull’s sister.
Lorenzen reported that Stull’s mother seemed more interested in “parlaying her daughter’s experience into money.” Stull’s mother actually called Lonnie Zamora, questioning him about what he had seen. Lorenzen wrote:
During the conversations with Mrs. Stull, she consistently called the one TV announcer a “good friend” and the Doctor their “family doctor.” The truth of the matter was that the TV announcer had not seen the Stulls since he had got help for them in January [they had arrived in Albuquerque from Los Angeles in January without money], until the burn case came up. The Doctor had never seen the Stulls until he was called in to take case of Sharon, as a result of the “burn” from the UFO.
One thing notable during the visit with the Stulls was that the story tended to get more involved and “stickier” as the Lorenzens expressed their interest in the minute details. Mrs. Stull did all the talking, except to occasionally say to Mr. Stull, “Isn’t that right, Max?”...to which he would give an affirmative answer. The L’s [Lorenzens] had a difficult time questioning Robin (never did succeed there) and Sharon. Mrs. Stull repeatedly had suggested they not talk too much about the case, and their rights were being trod on.30
Although the Lorenzens were firm believers in alien visitation and were among the first to embrace the idea of alien abduction, they were quick to close this case. Coral Lorenzen wrote, “The whole thing was preposterous and the Lorenzens were hard put to understand the kind of people who would attempt to perpetrate such a fraud.”31
The Air Force investigation of the case doesn’t seem to have been very extensive. On the project card, they wrote, “Extensive news accounts of sighting flying saucer with green men. Witness 12-year-old girl. Supposedly burned by ray guns from obj. Seen from school yard. Noon recess.”32
This does provide an insight into the thought process among the Project Blue Book staff in 1964. Sharon Stull was 10, and she said nothing about seeing any sort of being, including “little green men,” nor anything about ray guns. Their investigation seemed to have been based solely on what Coral Lorenzen had published, what the newspapers in Albuquerque published, and what various other UFO group newsletters reported. They did write the case off as “imagination,” and in the master index as a “hoax.” This seems to be a case in which they arrived at the correct conclusion but took the wrong road to get there.
In the same Blue Book file with this tale is information about another UFO incident, which also has its own folder. Whereas the Albuquerque case is labeled as “imagination,” this one, from Edgewood, New Mexico, is labeled as a “hoax.” According to the newspapers, Don Adams told law enforcement officials that he had seen an object about a hundred feet off the ground. He said it appeared to be a fluorescent or glowing green-colored object about 25 feet long.
He said that he had driven under the UFO and his car stalled. He got out, grabbed his revolver, fired six shots, reloaded, and fired another six. The first six, he said, hit the object, but it had begun to move to the north so he didn’t know if the next six did. At any rate, the bullets apparently had no effect on the craft.
The Project Blue Book card said, “Police investigated. Witness was drunk but no arrest could be made for discharging firearm because witness was on own property. Witness regarded as unreliable and case judged to be a hoax.”
There is nothing in the Blue Book files and nothing in the UFO literature to suggest that this case was anything but a hoax. It is another example of the Air Force getting it right, though it seems they only communicated with the local police but given the information, there seemed to be no reason to investigate further.
During that same month of April, the Albuquerque newspapers reported on a man who claimed to have seen flying saucers five times. He also said that he had talked with the alien crew twice. The man, Apolinar A. (Paul) Villa said, “I don’t know why they picked me. I’m just an ordinary working man.”33
Villa did provide some predictions about the coming year, which was 1964 to 1965. He said that we should expect “large-scale” volcanic activity. More importantly, he said there would be a “catastrophic” war between China and Russia that would involve many of the Asian nations. We now know that these did not come to pass, which said something about the reliability of the information.
He said that the aliens came from the “far-distant galaxy of Coma Berenices, imaginably far distant from here.”34 That, of course, is a star cluster in the Milky Way and not a distant galaxy.
Villa did take photographs of the alien craft, and copies of those photographs were obtained by the Air Force. The photographs were taken on June 16, 1963, and analyzed by the Air Force.
Captain William L. Turner, chief of the Air Force Photo Analysis Division, wrote in his official report, “All [Villa’s] photographs have a sky background with an unobstructed view of the object. It seems unlikely that anyone photographing a UFO from several angles would have all good, clear unobstructed photographs of the object.”35
It might be suggested that Villa was just a very good photographer, or he might have been lucky, which would explain the clear shots. Turner, however, provided some other information that seemed to prove the case for a hoax. He wrote:
Photograph #7 shows the UFO at close range with a leafless branch on the left side of the print, passing behind the object. Two twigs from this branch are readily visible on the right side of the object and in good alignment with the main branch. It does not seem possible that these twigs are from the tree on the right which is further away. Therefore, the object is between the branch and the camera. The object is estimated to be 20 inches in diameter and seven inches high.36
Turner also noted that in photographs numbers 1 and 2 “the object appears to be a sharper image than the near and far trees. This indicates the UFO is between the near trees and the camera.”37
Given that the photographs are hoaxes, and given Villa’s somewhat shady background, it would seem that the Air Force analysis is once again verified. Other UFO researchers have come to the same conclusions. The newspaper reported that Villa’s home had burned down but he had no insurance, he accidentally shot himself in the arm and he had been through a bankruptcy. Though it could be argued that all these events are just bad luck, it does suggest something about the man.
It could be argued that Lonnie Zamora’s sighting inspired these other reports. Some of them actually occurred before Zamora but weren’t reported until after the media told his story. Some of them, especially that by Orlando Gallegos, seemed to hit the media about the same time. It is interesting that Gallegos reported the same sort of landing gear impressions that Zamora had seen. This one fact doesn’t seem to have been co-opted by Gallegos, because when he made his report, that facts of Zamora’s sighting weren’t widely known. Others, including the local sheriff, saw the impressions, which verifies their existence.
Other cases were just sightings of objects in and around the Socorro area or along the highway that ran from El Paso in Texas up through Albuquerque. The trouble is that once the Zamora landing had received national attention, it is impossible to determine if that inspired others to report strange things they had seen, if they began to search the sky for something to see and misinterpreted natural phenomena, or as show, some were just inspired to make up something.