The Socorro Incident (1964): Lonnie Zamora and the Landed Craft

Late on the afternoon of April 24, 1964, Socorro police officer Lonnie Zamora broke off chasing a speeding car when he heard a roar and saw a flame descending behind a hill southwest of town, near a dynamite shack he thought might have exploded. Driving up the rough track, he saw a shiny, egg-shaped object standing on legs in a gully, and beside it two small figures in white coveralls, one of whom appeared to notice him and jump.

Zamora radioed for backup and got out of his car. The object roared, emitted a blue-and-orange flame, rose, and flew off silently toward the southwest, low over the desert. He had seen a red insignia on its side, which he sketched. The whole event lasted about two minutes.

Sergeant Sam Chavez of the state police arrived within minutes and found Zamora pale and shaken, and in the gully four wedge-shaped impressions in the soil, still-smoldering greasewood bushes, and burned grass. Photographs were taken that evening. The FBI, the Army, and Project Blue Book all sent investigators within days, and J. Allen Hynek visited twice.

Blue Book ruled out every conventional candidate it could think of: helicopters, lunar-lander tests at nearby White Sands, balloons, and hoax. The case was filed as "unidentified," one of the few landing-and-occupant reports the Air Force ever left in that column. Hynek called Zamora a sober, credible witness and Socorro one of the best-documented cases in the files.

Socorro is home to the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, and a 1968 letter from its president, Stirling Colgate, to Linus Pauling stated that the sighting was a student prank and that he knew the students involved. No student ever came forward, no method was ever described that accounts for the flame, the flight, and the traces, and Zamora, who died in 2009, never wavered. Skeptics also point to the town's hope for tourism. The case remains, by Blue Book's own classification, unexplained.