Mural receives finishing touches

One local business owner believes Socorro has the potential to become a popular tourist destination. The drawing factor? Aliens.

With the completion of the mural dedicated to Lonnie Zamora on his California Street storefront, Joe Torres hopes it can begin the momentum of starting a festival to commemorate Zamora and that fateful day in 1964 when he reported seeing Aliens.

In 1964, the Chieftain reported: City Policeman Lonnie Zamora, a highly reliable source, saw a four-legged, egg-shaped object, and two persons in a gully a mile south of the courthouse shortly before 6 p.m. Friday. He saw the object rise straight up and take off, and disappear beyond Six-Mile Canyon to the west. Some of the evidence of the landing and takeoff remained in the gully. There were four shallow holes where the object apparently landed on its legs; there were burned greasewood and seared clumps of green grass; there were two round, very slight depressions. No footprints were found.

Torres remembers at that time everyone in Socorro flocked to the site to take a look, “My parents went there when it was still smoking, the burn marks and everything was there, the whole town was there.”

It’s important for Torres to honor Zamora, who was taunted and ridiculed at the time, “but he always stuck to his guns, his story never changed,”

Torres is happy to share the story with anyone who stops by his shop, San Miguel Pottery Land.

“I like letting people know about it because they’ll take pictures, but until they see the mural on the side, they never knew. They know about Roswell, but they never knew about Socorro,” Torres said. “I just wish that Lonnie could see it, because it was hard for him and I think he would be proud of the mural,”

Torres said he’d like to see a statue in honor of Zamora in the plaza, “because he was a man who believed what he saw and stayed with it, that should be honored. Hopefully Lonnie gets what he deserves.”

The mural was commissioned by Socorro Native muralist B.J. Lesperance.