Socorro's UFO incident still unexplained

By Valerie Kimble

For El Defensor Chieftain

   Little did Socorro patrolman Lonnie Zamora know that a single incident recorded almost 40 years ago would change his life, and the city's, forever.

   Around 5:45 p.m. on April 24, 1964, Zamora was in his patrol vehicle in hot pursuit of a speeder when he heard something that sounded like an explosion.

   The five-year veteran patrolman stopped chasing the fleeing vehicle to investigate what he thought might have been the detonation of a shack of dynamite.

   Zamora followed a narrow, gravel road beside a small arroyo, and radioed in that he was going to check on what looked like it might have been an overturned vehicle.

   He drove further on the gravel road and then exited his patrol vehicle to get a better look.

   What Zamora described next has been chronicled and analyzed by UFO experts around the world. Most reports refer to an egg-shaped object supported by legs, and the presence of two beings described as children or small adults.

   A loud roar and the flash of a bluish flame sent Zamora to the ground for cover before he jumped up and ran to the other side of the gravel road.

   Zamora heard a whirring sound and watched the object rise out of the arroyo; the "legs" he had seen earlier were no longer in view.

   Not long after the object's disappearance, he was joined by State Police Sgt. Sam Chavez who had overheard Zamora's radio dispatch. The two officers began to scour the area for clues.

   And thus began an investigation into one of the most widely circulated UFO stories ever, one that propelled tiny Socorro into the center of the unidentified flying object universe.

   Dave Treseder, a teen-age disk jockey at local station KSRC-AM, found himself answering telephone queries from people with prestigious-sounding titles.

   The city itself was inundated with visitors from the military to the merely curious.

   Zamora, meanwhile, was at the center of the maelstrom. It would be difficult to find a UFO aficionado who has not heard of him, or tried to get in touch with him, to hear from the eyewitness himself just what he saw in the desert south of Socorro on that April afternoon.

     Lonnie Zamora, now long retired from the city, declined an interview with El Defensor Chieftain regarding this article. "I just don't talk about it any more," he said.

   That was not the case initially. An article in the Feb. 9, 1965, issue of El Defensor Chieftain reported that "the Socorro part" of a documentary on Unidentified Flying Objects had been completed" with Zamora as one of the principals.

   The Chieftain quoted the executive producer of the project as saying that "Zamora's unchanged and straightforward account was similar to 16 other verified UFO sightings in various parts of the world."

   The newspaper reported that several other residents had been interviewed for the documentary including Mayor Holm O. Bursum Jr., State Police Sgt. Chavez, City Clerk Raymond L. Senn, Steve Torres Jr., Mrs. Howard Terry and Mrs. Vince Cardinalli. Walter Shrode, then owner of KSRC radio, conducted the interviews.

   In its June 29, 1965, issue, the Chieftain ran an article and editorial announcing the publication of "Anatomy of a Phenomenon: Unidentified Objects in Space -- A Scientific Appraisal" by Jacques Valle.

   The article included the following quote: "On April 24, 1964, Officer L. Zamora saw a bright object which landed on four legs two miles out of Socorro, New Mexico. It has been argued, and even 'categorically stated' that the Socorro object was not interplanetary, but very probably one of the experimental devises recently developed by the U.S. for the exploration of the moon and planets."

   However, Valle went on to say that "a good report is 100 percent unexplained."

     The fascination with the unexplained, and the inexplicable, continues, as evidenced by the number of web sites detailing the Socorro UFO landing of 1964; one, by Chris Lambright, that bears the words, "Socorro the Zamora Sighting" and a black-and-white image of Zamora in a police officer's uniform.

   "Of all the evidence that could be presented to support the contention that what Lonnie Zamora saw was something totally unexplained, perhaps nothing is more compelling than (an article written by Hector Quintanilla Jr., former head of the Air Force's Project Bluebook)."

   Lambright quoted from Quintanilla's article, written for a formerly classified CIA publication called "Studies in Intelligence" from the fall of 1966:

   "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."

   Not all saucers have caused such controversy. Witness this news account in the Nov. 16, 1980, issue of the Chieftain:

   "The U.S. Air Force has a Flying Saucer operating from this base, the public relations office recently revealed. Johnson Base personnel are quite proud of their Flying Saucer. He is T/Sgt. Abner Saucer Jr. of the 13th Bomb Squadron."