Lonnie Zamora incident site

Lonnie Zamora left a speeder to chase an explosion. On April 24, 1964, the Socorro police sergeant was pursuing a car on U.S. 85 when he heard a roar and saw blue-orange flame descending toward an arroyo south of town — near a dynamite shack, he thought. He abandoned the chase, fought his patrol car up the gravel hill, and saw what he took for an overturned car: a white, egg-shaped object on girder legs in the gully, with two small figures in white coveralls beside it. One turned toward him, seemingly startled.

He radioed it in as a possible accident and drove closer — a hundred feet away when the roaring resumed and flame came from beneath the object. Thinking it would explode, he ran, bumping his leg, losing his glasses, shielding behind the patrol car — then looked up to watch it rise twenty feet, silent, the flame gone, a red insignia he later drew for investigators visible on its side. It flew away southwest.

What he left behind was physical — smoldering brush, shallow landing-gear depressions, prints other officers documented that afternoon. Project Blue Book investigated and listed the case 'unknown' — the most respected single-witness UFO case in the record, held up by Zamora's reputation as a sober, skeptical cop. The explanations proposed — a lunar lander test from White Sands, a hoax by New Mexico Tech students — have never quite closed it.

The Socorro site is the archive's unknown file — the 1964 arroyo where Officer Zamora watched an egg-shaped craft on legs lift off on blue flame, leaving scorched brush and landing prints that Blue Book never explained.