Landing case of 24 April 1964 at Socorro, New Mexico. Patrolman Lonnie Zamora broke off pursuit of a speeding car when he heard a roar and saw a flame to the south-west, and found an egg-shaped white object standing on legs in an arroyo, with two small figures in white beside it and a red insignia on the hull. The object lifted with a roar and left; the ground carried four wedge-shaped impressions and burnt brush.
Why it is the case the file cannot lose
J. Allen Hynek investigated for Project Blue Book, which listed it as unidentified and never revised that, making it one of the small set of Blue Book unknowns with a single, sober, on-duty police witness and physical trace evidence in the same file. Hynek regarded it as one of the best cases on the record. The counter-case is a student hoax out of the nearby New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, argued most persistently by Philip Klass and never demonstrated: no participant has ever come forward and no apparatus has ever been produced.
Where it sits
It arrives on this site through the case lists in Imminent, where it is one of the historical events read off classified servers. It belongs with Delphos Ring 1971 and Ubatuba as one of the few cases that left something behind for a laboratory rather than only a witness.
Connections
Project Blue Book · J. Allen Hynek · Philip Klass · Delphos Ring 1971 · Ubatuba · Imminent · Five Observables