On April 24, 1964, Officer Lonnie Zamora of the Socorro Police Department (New Mexico) interrupted a car chase after hearing a loud noise near a dynamite storage facility. What he initially thought was an overturned vehicle soon turned into an encounter with an unknown object and two enigmatic occupants, giving rise to a UFO case that sparked all kinds of theories—many of them diverging from the original account and verified facts.
While preparing his preliminary report, Dr. Heriberto Janosch contacted engineer Kevin J. Ashley, a former student of New Mexico Tech (1973–1979). In 1981, a coworker revealed to him that he had been one of the people responsible for the incident. Based on that confession, Ashley developed his own hypothesis about what had happened, respecting both Zamora’s testimony and the data collected at the time.
Although other witnesses have yet to confirm his version, Ashley’s conclusions leave little room for doubt.
by Kevin J. Ashley *
I have been reviewing the best source for the Socorro Saucer Landing which is the account by Lonnie Zamora himself as recorded in Project Blue Book. In trying to understand what happened at which location over what duration and at what place, I have followed the description first for location and then for time. Part of the problem that some people may have in determining the locations where these events occurred is that the topography of the area of the sighting has changed considerably since 1964. To help with this problem, I have resorted to an historical USGS map published in 1960 (from photography in 1959).
Figure 1 shows a portion of this map with important locations identified. It can be noted that several structures that now exist along Highway 60, including the new Socorro High School and the General Hospital did not exist at the time of the sighting. Also Interstate Highway 25 ended north of Socorro and the main highway south of town was Highway 85. The access to Highway 85 from Park St/Old Rodeo St that was available in 1964 was eliminated when Interstate 25 was extended south of town in the late 1960’s. Several roads now in the area did not exist in 1964 as can be seen in the map, and some portions of roads, such as the steep portion of what is now Raychester Rd., have been relocated and regraded.
The Narrative
The main points of the narrative are straightforward. Officer Zamora started to chase a car he believed was speeding beginning on Park St. where it passed between the County Court House and the Old High School at about 5:45 pm on April 24, 1964. He followed the car across Spring St. and about 1/8th of a mile south of Spring St. he saw a bright flame to the southwest and heard a roar. He reported the flame as being bluish and sort of orange; however he was viewing it through green sunglasses. Thinking that it may have been the explosion of a dynamite shack in that direction, he broke off pursuit of the speeding car and proceeded to a gravel road that turned west off Old Rodeo St.
He had difficulty driving up the steep hill on the gravel road, needing to back down and try again twice, even rocking his car forward and back to get traction to get up the hill. Once he reached the top of the hill, he proceeded slowly as he could not remember exactly where the dynamite shack was. At some point he noticed a shiny object (shiny like aluminum, not chrome, and whitish against the mesa) in the arroyo below that he took to be an overturned car about 500 feet away. Close to this object he saw two people for less than two seconds before they disappeared from view. Thinking to help the persons at the perceived accident scene he drove quickly down the road to a point about 100 feet away from the object.
He radioed to headquarters that he was investigating an accident and would be out of his car. As he was getting out of the car, he dropped the mike and as he reached in to put the mike back in the slot on the radio, he heard three loud thumps like the closing of car doors. Just as he turned back toward the object in the arroyo and started to move toward the “accident”, a loud roar and flame started which frightened him very much. He again reported the color of this flame to be blue/orange, however he was still wearing green sunglasses over his prescription glasses.
He turned to run to the north past his car, which was parked heading southwest, and bumped against the fender knocking his glasses off. He continued running to the north with the intention of getting down the north slope of the ridge but just as he got to the crest of the slope, about 50 feet beyond the car, the roar stopped and he turned around. At this point he saw the object at about his same elevation moving away. He judged its height above the ground by the space between the top of the dynamite shack (which was 8 feet tall) and the bottom of the object. On this basis he said the object was moving about 10 to 15 feet above the ground surface.
He returned to the car and retrieved his prescription glasses, but not his green sunglasses, and while radioing to headquarters watched as the object lifted slowly and “got small” in the distance very fast. The last time he saw the object it was heading toward Box Canyon or Six Mile Canyon Mountain over which it disappeared.
By this time, Sergeant Chavez of the New Mexico State Police had arrived. He noted that Officer Zamora was sweating and quite pale. Together they investigated the site where the object had been where some of the brush was still burning. Sgt. Samuel Chavez pointed out some “tracks”. Officer Zamora then made a quick sketch of the object (see Figure 2).
Times, Distances and Sizes
Throughout his report, Officer Zamora attempted to estimate times, distances, and sizes. As for time, adding all of his estimated times for the various events and calculating travel times for the other distances based on reasonable speeds for the place and type of road results in a total time from when he first started pursuit of the speeding car until the object disappeared of 154 seconds not counting the time it took to get up the steep hill. If that time took five minutes, the entire event would still have taken place within 10 minutes total. While the actual times may have been longer, it is clear that his observations did not take place over a considerable period and many of his recollections are based on glances at best. In many cases, specific key details were observed for less than 2 seconds according to Officer Zamora.
Using Officer Zamora’s sketch and his estimate of the size of the insignia (2.5’ high and 2’wide) the object appears to have been about 10 feet long. He also stated that is was aluminum in color which looked whitish against the terrain. In Figure 2 I have used a color taken from a picture of an aluminum Airstream Trailer and superimposed it on two shapes that approximate the sketch drawn by Officer Zamora. If one views the figure from a distance of 12 inches, the shape on the left is what one would see of a 10 foot long object from 100 feet away. The shape on the right shows what the same object would look like from 500 feet away. I have added the “legs” noted by Officer Zamora but only in the view he said he saw them. He did not see them from his closer viewpoint.
The only time that Officer Zamora saw the insignia on the side of the object, with his prescription glasses on, was during the very short period between when he turned to go down to the “accident” site and the flame and roar began such that he ran to the north. As he estimates the time from when he dropped the mike until the object disappeared to be 20 seconds, the time he had to view the insignia would have been probably less than 2 seconds. All views of the object until it was “getting small” in the distance were without his glasses on.
Officer Zamora tried to estimate the size of the flame he saw from Park St. On the map, the distance from that location to the landing site is approximately one half mile, as he estimated. He noted that there was no object above the flame and that the flame was narrower at the top than at the bottom. In taking the width of the flame to be 3 degrees of view wide at the bottom, half that width at the top, and having a height above the hill four times its width at the top the calculated flame, at half a mile, would have been 138 feet wide at the bottom and 276 feet high. However he did mention that he was driving the car in pursuit of the speeder and could not pay too much attention to the flame. He also said that the roar lasted about 10 seconds as did the flame and was still going on when he reached the “steep hill”, however measuring from the map for that time to be correct he would have had to have been traveling at 180 mph. Clearly he was trying to be exact without figuring out the details. His recollection of this first roar is that the sound was higher in pitch when he first heard it and lower later on. This contrasts with his recollection of the second roar which started low and became higher.
Was it a Balloon?
One theory is that the object Officer Zamora saw flying was a balloon. This is in part because of his call to headquarters at the end of the sighting in which he describes the object as looking like a balloon. It is unclear how he related the flames he saw and the roar he heard to the concept of a balloon. He specifically says in his comments that he did not observe any object associated with the first flame he saw and of the second flame he states that it was under the object.
A balloon similar to those used for pleasure ballooning has a propane torch at the bottom that makes a loud noise and a flame that sends hot air into the balloon. However, the roar would not be noticeable over one half mile away as in the first sighting and the balloon itself would appear above the flame. In the second sighting, a balloon only 10 feet long would not be large enough to support two individuals and if the balloon were left to float away by itself, then the question arises as to where the people who launched the balloon went considering that the site was examined immediately afterwards.
According to Weatherspark.com, the direction of the disappearance of the object is not consistent with one of the main wind directions in the area during the months of April and May. During that time the wind is predominantly from the west and the south with wind coming from the northeast less than 1% of the time. The speed with which the object disappeared would have been dependent on the speed of the wind, but the wind speed in April and May does not exceed 18 mph 95% of the time. If a balloon was travelling without propulsion in even a brisk maximum wind, Officer Zamora could have caught up to it in his car.
Was it Explosives and a Barrel?
Another theory is that the flames and roars were the result of explosives and the “rising object” observed by Officer Zamora in the second sighting was an overturned barrel. The sounds and flames are consistent with explosives, as evidenced by Officer Zamora’s initial thought that a dynamite shack had blown up. The color of the flames would depend on the explosives involved but ANFO (ammonium nitrate & fuel oil) does produce a bright orange flame (see Figure 3).
This explanation also has the problem of where did the perpetrators go, since the site was examined immediately after the sighting by both Officer Zamora and Sgt. Chavez.
My Guess
Since everybody else has had a turn at explaining this sighting, here is my guess.
The first thing to think about is not the time, place, sounds, or object. The first thing to think about is the human experience involved. Officer Zamora went through a traumatic experience over a very short period of only a few minutes. When it was over he had a number of specific facts in his mind that made little sense. As the human mind is designed to do, he put these facts together into a sensible narrative that became a memory.
All that we who were not there can do is to try to discern which of the “facts” meet with physical constraints in time, speed, distance, and size, and also which recollections are consistent within the record.
The Chase: Officer Zamora saw a speeding car and gave chase. He does not mention whether he had his siren and/or lights going as he sped after the car. He identified the car as a new black Chevrolet possibly driven by a boy about 17. The car was three blocks ahead when he started his pursuit so he could not identify the license plate number. In pursuing this car he does not say how fast he was driving.
Taking that this was on a city street I would guess he was going at least 40 mph and possibly 60 mph. This would mean that while concentrating on the speeding car ahead and driving his car at speed, Officer Zamora saw a blue/orange flame to the southwest within about 15 to 22 seconds after he started the chase. He immediately thought that a dynamite shack located about a mile away in that direction had exploded and broke off his pursuit. (By the way, explosives storage usually will not include both explosives and detonators in the same building; however different explosives may have been stored together.)
What I Think Happened: I see no reason to doubt this recounting of a chase of a speeding car. This was part of Officer Zamora’s regular duties and he would have been very familiar with this terrain and how fast he needed to go to catch the speeding car.
The First Flame and Roar: Officer Zamora describes the flame as motionless with its bottom below the hill on the other side and its top at a height above the hill about four times the width that the flame was wide at its top. He said that the flame was twice as wide at its bottom than at its top and that there was no object above the flame. (The difficulty in his attempt to quantify the width of the flame in degrees from his perspective is discussed above.) Some “commotion” could be seen near the top of the hill at the base of flame that he could see, but he attributed this to dust on a windy day. He also noted that the speeding car in front might not have seen the flame as the view would have been blocked by being too close to the hill. He describes the color of the flame as bluish and sort of orange but also notes that he was wearing green sunglasses over his prescription glasses and that the sun was to the west which did not help his vision. (In fact on that day, this was during Daylight Savings Time, the sun set at 7:46 pm so when this sighting occurred the sun was 22.5 degrees above the horizon almost due west.)
He describes the roar associated with the flame as lasting up to 10 seconds, starting at a higher pitch and ending at a lower pitch. While in one point he states that the flame and roar were still going on when he reached the steep part of the road going up onto the ridge, he also says that he did not notice anything while attempting to go up this steep section of road, which is located at the point where he said that the other car probably could not have seen the flame. This recollection of the duration of the flame and the roar does not jive with the distance covered. From the map in Figure 1 it can be seen that the distance between when Officer Zamora said he first saw the flame and heard the roar to the point where the steep section of the road started is 0.5 miles. At 60 mph this would have taken 30 seconds so either the flame and roar lasted considerably longer or he was confused in his estimates of time.
What I Think Happened: What I think Officer Zamora saw was an explosion, as was his first instinct. I think the flame lasted less than a few seconds but the roar continued for several seconds as the sound of the explosion echoed off the surrounding hills and travelled down the arroyo, accounting for the higher pitch initially and the lower pitch from the echoes. The fact that he was driving at high speed concentrating on a speeding car that was three blocks ahead meant that he, as he said, “could not pay too much attention to the flame”. I think when putting together the recollections of the flame and the roar later he conflated the times of the two. The color of the flame is questionable and would depend on the type of explosive used and the effects of both seeing through green sunglasses and the angle of the sun. It would be interesting to experiment with these parameters to find the effects.
Getting to the Top of the Hill: Officer Zamora describes his difficulty getting up the steep part of the road. He says his wheels skidded the first time and that he had to back down and try two more times, including rocking forward and back to make it up the hill. In his statement he first says that “After the roar and flame, did not notice anything while going up somewhat steep hill…” and then he concludes saying, “While beginning third time, noise and flame not noted.”
What I Think Happened: Officer Zamora does not give an estimate of how long it took to get up the hill. I think this interlude getting up the hill was probably several minutes. This is important because it leaves time for setting up the action that caused the second sighting, whether in order to get ready to launch a balloon or set off another explosion.
First Sighting of Object: After getting to the top of the hill and onto the ridge above the arroyo on the south side of the ridge, Officer Zamora travelled slowly because he could not remember where the dynamite shack was. While he says it took only 10 or 15 seconds to reach his next vantage point, measuring from the map in Figure 1 it is clear that to reach a point that corresponds to the distance he said he was from the object he reported seeing of 150 to 200 yards, he would have had to travel about 0.3 miles which would have taken about 55 seconds at 20 mph. Again his sense of time, after the fact, is called into question.
Two important sightings take place from this vantage point. The first is the sighting of an object which he first believes to be a car turned upside down – evidently an accident which he decides to investigate in preference to finding the exploded dynamite shack. He describes this object as shiny, with two legs protruding from under it, about 3.5 feet above the ground. In a later point he says that this view was of the end of the object.
He states the object looked like an O in shape but also like a car up on its radiator or trunk. In Figure 2, the image on the right when viewed from 12 inches distance shows how large this object would have appeared from the distance he says he was viewing it from.
The second sighting is of two people close to the object that he says were wearing white overalls. He says that he only glanced at them from the distance of about 500 feet. Both sightings occurred during a period of less than two seconds. He notes that one of the people looked straight at him and was startled. He never sees these people again.
What I Think Happened: I think that what Officer Zamora saw was a car which was particularly shiny due to the low angle of the sun. The sighting of the “legs” could easily have been the tires of a vehicle, especially since he says he could see them from the end view but not the side view. I think the details he gives later about the shape of the object and the clothing worn by the people are influenced by his experience a few seconds later in the second sighting of the object. The view from 500 feet is too far to have been able to discern the details he gave, especially since the time of the observation was less than two seconds, according to his report. Figure 4 shows the relative locations of Officer Zamora’s car and the object on present day terrain.
Moving the Car Closer: Officer Zamora tells that his next action after seeing what he believed to be an automobile accident was to drive quickly along the road toward the site where he got a better view of the object. During this action he radioed to the Sheriff’s office stating this intention saying “10-44” (accident) and “10-6” (busy “out of car”). He gives this distance in his sketch as 103 feet however measuring using Google Earth the closest the road comes to the site is 150 feet. From this closer vantage point he describes the color of the car as “aluminum – it was whitish against the mesa background, but not chrome”. After parking the police car and finishing his message to the Sheriff’s Office he heard two or three loud thumps like someone shutting a door hard.
What I Think Happened: Using Google Earth, the point where Officer Zamora would have exited his car while still being on the road would have required him to travel about 500 feet which would take about 8 seconds at 40 mph. Figure 5 shows the approximate location of Officer Zamora’s car when the last set of observations took place. I think the loud thumps that he heard were the perpetrators of the explosions getting into their vehicle. The color of the car sounds like the color of an Airstream trailer but could also be a gray or silver made more shiny by the low angle of the sun.
The Second Flame and Roar: Officer Zamora tells that as he got out of the car and turned to go down toward the accident, almost immediately he heard a roar that scared him very much. He saw an object rising in front of him with flame coming out from under it and he immediately turned away from the object and ran north. As he passed the police car he bumped against the car and lost his glasses. He continued running across the road to the crest of the hill on the north side (about 50 feet) and jumped over the hill. He intended to continue running down the hill but stopped when the roar ended after only two to three seconds, however he continued to cover his face with his arms.
Without his glasses on and with his arms over his face, he says he was able to glance back after about six seconds and see the object rise in the air to about the same elevation as his car and then move quickly away from him. He judged its height above the ground from the difference in his perspective between the top of the dynamite shack and the bottom of the object. On this basis he calculated that the object was moving above the ground at about 10 to 15 feet. When travelling away, Officer Zamora says that the object emitted no flame, smoke, or noise.
He retrieved his glasses, without the sunglasses, and watched as the object lifted slowly as it travelled quickly to the southwest in the direction of Box Canyon or Six Mile Canyon Mountain and disappeared. At the same time he radioed to Nep Lopez at headquarters to ask him to look out the window and see if he could see the object moving away which he said looked like a balloon. Unfortunately he did not tell Nep which way to look so Nep did not see anything even if he had been able. He estimated the total time from when he got out of the car until the object disappeared as 20 seconds. This included at least six seconds when he did not have his glasses on.
During the few seconds between when he arrived at the second vantage point and the roar started, he claims that he made several observations including estimating the size and shape of the object, seeing an insignia in red on the side of the object, recognizing that he was seeing the side of the object as opposed to the end, and describing the color of the flame.
What I Think Happened: Right up until he got out of the police car and the roar started, Officer Zamora believed he was dealing with a car accident as evidenced by his call into the Sheriff’s Office saying so. There is no evidence that he thought what he was seeing out the window of the car was anything unusual.
I think the second flame and roar were the same type of explosion that Officer Zamora saw a few minutes earlier from the north side of the hill. In this instance an object was projected upward by the explosion with flame coming out of its bottom; however this object was not the same object Officer Zamora subsequently saw travelling horizontally. In fleeing the explosion and losing his glasses, Officer Zamora caught only glimpses of what was happening behind him, which was that the perpetrators were fleeing the scene in their vehicle.
While he was on the ridge approximately 25 feet higher in elevation than the site of the explosion, the fleeing vehicle travelled west along the arroyo to a point where an established track out of the arroyo allowed it to gain the main gravel road on which the police car sat and at about the same elevation. This track can be seen in Figures 4 and 5. From there the terrain rises about 60 feet in 0.5 miles before leveling out as the road the police car was parked on turns from southwest to almost directly west. I think that the blurry image Officer Zamora saw without his glasses and in glimpses appeared to be an oval object which he subsequently conflated with his previous views in his subsequent descriptions.
I think he came to the conclusion that the fleeing vehicle was “flying” first because he saw an object rise up during the explosion and second because from his vantage point he saw space between the top of the dynamite shack and the vehicle. In truth humans do not see in 3D. We gain advantage from stereoscopic vision from our two eyes, but when confronted with a distant scene that is essentially 2D we rely on reference points to tell us whether something in our view is above/below or nearer/farther from another object (see Figure 6.) Once he concluded from the size and position of the object relative to the dynamite shack that it was 10 to 15 feet above the ground, in his subsequent views of a vehicle driving along the road his mind placed the object about that height until it disappeared. This perception remained even after he regained his glasses. The object in his view lifted up slowly because the road was rising in that direction. And the reason the object disappeared over the horizon is that the vehicle achieved the flat spot at the top of the rise and turned both obscuring his view from below and changing the angle at which the sun reflected off the fleeing vehicle. The escape route of the vehicle is outlined in Figure 7.
As for the insignia on the object, I suspect that there was a pattern on the side of the fleeing vehicle that Officer Zamora may have caught a glimpse of just before the explosion sent him running to the north and losing his glasses. This could well have been the outline of the doors and windows of the vehicle, but it could have been the insignia of a business or even New Mexico Tech given that the perpetrators used a school vehicle.
Investigation of the Landing Site: In the last points in his description, Officer Zamora notes that while he immediately radioed to Nep Lopez at headquarters and Sergeant Chavez of the State Police to come to the site, Sgt. Chavez had already arrived and they went down to the landing site immediately where they saw some brush still burning. Sgt. Chavez pointed out the “tracks” which may have been the depressions that were subsequently reported elsewhere. No other persons or vehicles were found. Officer Zamora then got out his pen and drew the sketch that is shown in Figure 2.
What I Think Happened: A lot happened to Officer Lonnie Zamora within a 10 minute time frame, some of which scared him tremendously. As a trained observer he immediately tried to make sense of what he saw and the narrative he developed was coherent and logical. Some of the details of size and time that he estimated were not possible but the overall story held its own given that the object seen leaving the scene was “flying”. If Officer Zamora had concluded that the object leaving the scene was driving along the road, his internal story would have been far different. In his attempt to be thorough I think he added some detail that was not there, but this was not conscious obfuscation. It was simply his mind filling in the gaps to make a coherent story.
Having developed this narrative and passed it on to persons who trusted him, people who knew him were more likely to view the scene through that lens. The depressions in the ground must have come from a flying object landing at the site. The explosions and flames must have been the result of rocket motors. The fact that the object disappeared in the sky so quickly, faster than any airplane known on Earth at the time, meant it must have been extraterrestrial. The fact that the object was oval in shape when seen leaving meant that other descriptions recorded by Officer Zamora himself in his narrative were rejected in favor of a flying saucer.
Will We Ever Know?
Until someone else who was present that day comes forward with a narrative, ideally from the other side of the arroyo, the only contemporaneous record we have is from Lonnie Zamora. All in all, I have to agree with the Project Blue Book’s director, Major Hector Quintanilla, who wrote,
There is no doubt that Lonnie Zamora saw an object which left quite an impression on him. There is also no question about Zamora’s reliability. He is a serious police officer, a pillar of his church, and a man well versed in recognizing airborne vehicles in his area. He is puzzled by what he saw and frankly, so are we. This is the best-documented case on record, and still we have been unable, in spite of thorough investigation, to find the vehicle or other stimulus that scared Zamora to the point of panic.”
I have explained above why I do not think the events described could be due to a balloon. However if someone were to put forward this story I would want to know the following from them in order to understand how it all worked.
1. What route did they take to get to the site? What route did they take when they escaped?
2. What caused the first flame and roar? Was it an explosion meant to draw Officer Zamora to the site? If so, what kind of explosive was used? If not, how else was a flame of at least 30 feet in height (the depth of the arroyo plus some distance above the hilltop) generated?
3. If the exercise was a hoax, why was one of the persons sighted by Officer Zamora startled to see the police car on the ridge?
4. How many persons did it take to fill the balloon and launch it? What were they wearing?
5. What source of hot air or light gas was used to fill the balloon? Was there a flame under the balloon? What caused the roar that scared Officer Zamora so much at the launch site?
6. How did the persons escape after the release of the balloon without being seen by Officer Zamora who was watching in the direction the balloon was travelling (southwest) or Sgt. Chavez who came to the scene immediately from the east?
7. What was the location of the dynamite shack relative to the road and the landing site?
At present I lean toward the theory of explosives and a barrel, but with the object seen “flying” away from the event being the perpetrators in their vehicle as this explains both the sighting and the absence of persons at the scene after the event. However if someone were to put forward this story I would want to know the following from them in order to understand how it all worked.
1. What route did they take to get to the site? What route did they take when they escaped?
2. How many persons were involved? What were they wearing?
3. What type and color was the vehicle they used to come to the site? Did this vehicle belong to one of the perpetrators or did it belong to a business or the school (New Mexico Tech)?
4. What type or types of explosives were used? Were the charges prepared beforehand or assembled on site? How large were the charges? What type of casings, if any, were used to contain the explosives? Were the explosives in contact with the ground? Buried? Suspended?
5. How many explosions were set off in total? Did any of them involve launching a barrel by putting explosives beneath it? What kind of barrel was used and what was it made of? Did all of the explosions involve the barrel? Did they bring the barrel with them or did they find it on site? Did they take the barrel with them when they left?
6. How were the explosions detonated? Fuse? Det cord? Electrically? Radio remote control?
7. Were they surprised that the police car arrived or was this an intentional hoax played on one or more police officers?
8. Was the final explosion set off intentionally knowing that the police officer was nearby? Or was the charge already set and the explosion set off to destroy the evidence on the way out?
9. What was the location of the dynamite shack relative to the road and the landing site?
To anyone seeking to solve this mystery, I wish you luck. But as taught to us by the Father of the Scientific Method, Galileo Galilei, I urge you to reason from the evidence forward to a conclusion rather than from a conclusion backwards.
Heriberto Janosch’s Note, Preliminary Report Author
I couldn’t agree more with Kevin Ashley’s excellent analysis of the Socorro case and his explanation of the dynamited barrel. While it is true that both of us know that a student who attended New Mexico Tech in 1964 confessed his involvement in the “experiment” and provided details of how the events unfolded. As I understand it, at least two students placed dynamite under a barrel on four occasions to see how that container would fly through the air. Zamora heard the third explosion and saw and heard the fourth. Up until that point, he always thought of an explosion, a vehicle, and two people. But in the fourth explosion, he panicked, saw the barrel flying, and then, without his corrective glasses, saw the vehicle with the students drive away, which he viewed as a blur. When he finally managed to put on his glasses, the vehicle was already far away, heading up the road. It is true that the students saw Zamora before the fourth explosion, but that didn’t stop them, as he was on the other side of the creek, and they had time for one more explosion: they activated the detonator, took shelter in the car, and eventually picked up the barrel and left the area.
PLUS. The archived document contains a detailed analysis of Zamora’s account, where some contradictions in the sequence of events and the perception of the elements at the scene are observed. For example, there are doubts about the duration of the noise, the height of the object in its displacement and the interpretation of the “supports” that Zamora described under the ship. DOWNLOAD
(*) Kevin Ashley studied at New Mexico Tech from 1973 to 1979, which is the reason for his interest in the Socorro case. He holds a BS degree in Mining Engineering, an MS degree in Mining Engineering (Geostatistics) and an MBA and has 36 years of experience in the mining industry. He is also a registered professional engineer in the State of Nevada (retired). He has worked on the evaluation and development of over 50 mining projects in 18 countries involving various commodities. Since retirement he has dedicated his life to supporting causes that promote sustainable peace and development for all and to working in his community to support democracy and good governance, for example working on his county’s Civil Grand Jury and as a poll worker and poll worker trainer.
