Socorro, New MexicoApril 1964

At about 5:45 p.m. on April 24, 1964, Police Officer Lonnie Zamora of the Socorro, New Mexico Police Department was pursuing a speeding car south of town when he heard a loud roar and saw flames rising in the southwestern desert. Concerned that a nearby dynamite shed might have exploded, he broke off the pursuit and drove toward the noise.

Climbing a low hill, Zamora reported seeing an egg-shaped object resting on landing legs in an arroyo about two hundred yards away. Two small figures in white coveralls were standing next to it. As Zamora approached, the figures appeared to notice him and quickly entered the object through an opening on its side. Within seconds the object lifted off with a loud roar and a burst of flame, then went silent and accelerated horizontally over the desert toward the southwest.

Zamora radioed the incident to dispatch and to Sergeant Sam Chavez of the New Mexico State Police, who arrived at the landing site within minutes. The two men documented physical traces in the arroyo: four shallow but distinct rectangular depressions in the ground arranged in a quadrilateral pattern, charred and broken creosote bushes near the depressions, and patches of soil that appeared to have been scorched.

Project Blue Book dispatched its chief, Major Hector Quintanilla, and its civilian scientific consultant, the astronomer J. Allen Hynek, to Socorro within days. Hynek interviewed Zamora over multiple sessions and reported that the officer was a calm, credible, and apolitical witness who had no apparent motive to fabricate. Quintanilla's investigation looked into possible Lunar Surveyor lander tests, classified Air Force projects, and student pranks from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology located in Socorro. None of these explanations matched the evidence to Quintanilla's satisfaction.

Zamora reported a red insignia on the object's side. At Hynek's request, Zamora sketched a different placeholder symbol for any public discussion, so that investigators could screen out hoaxers who might claim to have seen the same craft. The actual symbol Zamora drew remained sealed in the case file. The Air Force's final classification of the Socorro case was "unidentified," and Quintanilla in his later memoir described it as the single most baffling case he handled during his Project Blue Book tenure.

NARA's catalog entry for this case does not currently include digital scans. The incident remains one of the small set of Project Blue Book cases listed in the program's final tally as truly unexplained, and is widely cited in the program's historical literature as the strongest single witness account in its files.