It is the chilling 1964 mystery that places an idyllic desert town on the alien map. That incident left a decorated police officer terrified, and residents baffled.
There were more questions than answers. Was it really visitors from space? A wild university student prank involving stolen dynamite? Or a top-secret military test that went wrong?
‘SHINY TYPE OBJECT AND MEN IN WHITE COVERALLS’
On April 24, 1964, Lonnie Zamora, a decorated police officer, claimed he saw a roaring flame in the sky south of Socorro, New Mexico.
When he investigated the area, Zamora came face-to-face with what he swore was an otherworldly encounter. In Project Blue Book—the U.S. Air Force’s legendary UFO investigation unit—the police officer described seeing a ‘shiny type object… oval in shape’ sitting in the desert.
Even more startling, Zamora swore he saw ‘two people in white coveralls’ standing near the shiny object.
Before he could get near it, the strange vessel fired up its thrusters, hovering 15 feet off the ground before fleeing at breathtaking speed—leaving the surrounding desert bushes burning in its wake.
“There was not one iota of evidence that it was a military craft,” American writer Jerome Clark later told ABC News Unsolved Mysteries.
The mystery sent ripples beyond the American Southwest. Astronomer J. Allen Hynek raced to the scene, puzzled by the strange pod-like landing tracks and scorched earth.
THE SECRET ‘MOON LANDER’ LOGS
UFO buffs insisted aliens had landed, but military records tell a vastly different story.
In 1995, Air Force insider Bernard ‘Duke’ Gildenberg claimed he discovered secret logs from the nearby White Sands Missile Range (WSMR).
The military logs revealed that on the exact day Zamora saw his ‘flying saucer,’ top-secret tests involving a NASA Lunar Surveyor, a spider-like craft designed to land on the Moon, were conducted.
A heavy-duty helicopter lifted the bizarre vehicle simulating the low gravity of the lunar surface. To an unsuspecting police officer, the surreal sight of a tethered moon-craft and suit-wearing NASA engineers would have looked entirely otherworldly.
HOAX, THE OTHER WILD THEORIES
The plot thickens even further.
A 1965 letter from Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling revealed that Stirling Colgate, president of New Mexico Tech at the time, had in his possession a handwritten note saying a “renegade student had engineered a massive hoax” before leaving town.
Meanwhile, a former student named Bruno later made a jaw-dropping confession. He claimed that he and a buddy were using stolen sticks of dynamite from a shack to launch 55-gallon steel drums high into the air. They ran for their lives after Zamora discovered their stunt.
A resident, Dorothy Landoll, also recalled that the town’s acting police chief believed Zamora did not see an alien spacecraft but the early prototype of Apollo’s Lunar Excursion Module (LEM). In July 1969, NASA successfully launched the first crewed mission to the Moon.
FREE PUBLIC TALK BY NMT PROF
What really happened on that afternoon in the New Mexico desert?
No one knows whether Officer Zamora encountered NASA’s secret moon lander, an explosive stunt, or something otherworldly. But one thing is clear: he saw something real—and the story of the Socorro UFO lives on.
On August 15, Dave Thomas, a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and president of New Mexicans for Science and Reason, will shed light on the startling revelations during a free public talk, “My Physics Professor Caused the Roswell Incident!,” at the Socorro Public Library on Saturday, August 15th at 1 p.m.
