So Supernatural - ALIEN: The Lonnie Zamora Incident

Episode Date: May 27, 2020

In 1964, 30-year-old police officer Lonnie Zamora witnessed a strange egg-shaped aircraft landing in the New Mexico desert. After more than 50 years of investigation by the Air Force, FBI, and independent UFO researchers, it still remains unidentified. 

It's become sort of a truism that every UFO sighting has a natural explanation. It's a helicopter or a military test site or a meteor or a flock of birds or, if nothing else, a hoax. But if you really look into it, there's got to be an answer somewhere, right? That's what the Air Force thought when they got a report of a flying white egg-shaped object in the desert near Socorro, New Mexico. There was physical evidence that the object landed. Multiple reliable witnesses, top military personnel leading the investigation. Every possibility was double-checked and triple-checked. And yet, more than 50 years later, no one has any idea what it was. This is Supernatural, and I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.

This week, we're looking at the case of a truly unidentified flying object known as the Lonnie Zamora incident. There's a certain stigma around reporting a UFO sighting. If you look into eyewitness accounts, you hear the same thing all the time. They didn't want to come forward because they knew how ridiculous it would sound. Even if you never suggest that what you saw was extraterrestrial,

people are still going to think that you're either lying for attention or you're delusional. No one knows this better than Lonnie Zamora. Lonnie was a 30-year-old police officer who took his job very seriously. This was in Socorro, New Mexico, which had a population of less than 6,000. So most of the time, all Lonnie was really doing was catching speeders. But he did it with a passion that made him a sworn enemy of the local teenagers. So a little before six o'clock on the evening of April 24th, 1964,

Lonnie was out on his regular patrol on the south side of town when he hit the jackpot. A black Chevrolet flies past him at a speed that has to be over the limit, and the driver is a teenager who Lonnie thinks he recognizes. So Lonnie throws it into drive and takes off. He follows the black Chevy down the street heading south all the way to the edge of town. The Chevy doesn't slow down. Either the driver doesn't notice the patrol car right behind him or he just doesn't care.

Lonnie is really having fun now. He keeps chasing the car down a little road that leads through the desert toward the old rodeo complex about a mile south of town. And then, about a minute into the pursuit, he hears a roar. It starts as a quiet rumble and then gets louder and louder. It doesn't sound quite like an explosion, but it's coming from the direction of a dynamite shack a little bit to the west, so Lonnie is afraid that the shack might have blown up. As much as it pains him, he has to give up the chase and let this speeder go.

He turns onto a gravel road and starts heading west toward the dynamite shack, and right then he sees something on the horizon. He's driving right into the setting sun, so it's kind of hard to see it clearly, but it looks like a tall, narrow cone of blue and orange flame. It's hard to tell how big it is or where exactly it's coming from because the bottom of the flame is behind a hill. So Lonnie turns off the road and starts driving directly up the hill to get a better look at this thing. But halfway up, his tires spin and he gets stuck. He backs up and tries it again, but no luck.

He backs up again, and by this point, the roar has finally stopped. When he finally makes it to the top of the hill, there's nothing to see. The flame is gone and the noise is gone. So he gets back onto a gravel road heading west, keeping an eye out. And then he spots something in the arroyo on the other side of the hill. It's a shiny white oval shaped object that at first glance looks sort of like an overturned car that's maybe standing on its radiator. And there are two figures next to it in white coveralls. And one of them actually looks up at him and seems surprised. Lonnie figures that they must have had an accident. So he rushes down to help them.

As he's driving, he radios the dispatcher and tells them that there's been a crash. Lonnie finds a spot to park, puts the radio mic back on its slot, not really paying attention to what's happening outside. Then the moment he gets out of his car, he hears another loud roar starting up. Lonnie turns towards the object and it is rising straight up into the sky. There's a blue and orange flame coming out of the bottom. From up close, this is definitely not an overturned car. It is a big white oval with no windows, no doors, and from the roar it's making, Lonnie thinks this thing is about to blow up. Lonnie turns and bolts out of there. He bumps his leg on his car fender and his glasses actually fall to the ground,

but he just leaves them there and keeps running. Every time he glances back, the object is rising higher. He jumps over the side of a hill and crouches to the ground, scared for his life. But then the roar just stops. He slowly turns around and peeks over the hill and he sees the object zooming away. It's flying in a straight line, maybe 10 to 15 feet above ground level. Lonnie runs back to his car and picks up his glasses. Now, there's no flame under the object now, no smoke, and it's not making any noise. And from this angle, he can see that there's a red symbol painted on the middle. Lonnie picks up the radio and calls the state police sergeant, Sam Chavez, and tells him to

get over here as soon as he can. He doesn't know what he's seeing, but he wants someone else to see it just to prove he's not crazy, if nothing else. Sergeant Chavez says he'll be there in two minutes. And while he's waiting, Lonnie grabs a pen and actually draws the symbol on the side of the object. It looks like this half-circle arc over an arrow that's pointing up with a little horizontal line underneath it. No letters, no words, just those symbols in red paint. Chavez gets to the scene in about two minutes as promised, right as the object is disappearing over the mountains. By the time Lonnie gets his attention, it's completely gone. But Chavez can tell that Lonnie's not bluffing about this. He is sweating and pale as a ghost.

Whatever this thing was, it scared the life out of him. They go down to the spot where the object had been to start to look around. The brush is still smoldering. There's a burning creosote brush right in the middle where the object was sitting, and smoke is still rising from it. Chavez bends down and breaks a limb off the bush, and here's the thing, somehow it was cold to the touch. Surrounding the bush, they find four small imprints on the ground, about three or four inches deep and 12 to 15 feet apart. They look like they were made by the legs of whatever craft had landed there. But apart from that, they don't see any other notable markings,

no tire tracks, no object that had been left behind. The only obvious explanation for what Lonnie saw is a military craft from the Holloman Air Force Base, which is just down the highway from Socorro. Their testing ground, which is called the White Sands Missile Range, is only about 25 miles away from where Lonnie saw the object. So they go back to the police station and Chavez calls the commander at White Sands, Captain Richard Holder. He arrives in about 20 minutes along with an FBI agent, Arthur Burns. The two of them question Lonnie and pick his brain about every little detail he can remember. He tells them the same thing that he told Chavez, the loud roar, the flame, the oval-shaped object, the two figures in the white coverall standing next to it.

He said that they were about the size of either older children or maybe small adults, but he didn't get a very good look, so it's the only description he could give. He also shows them the drawing of the symbol on the side of the object. No one recognizes it, and it's definitely not a logo from the Air Force. That much is sure. After a long interrogation, everyone fully believed that Lonnie is actually telling the truth. In the FBI report on this case, Lonnie is described as, quote, sober, dependable, mature, and not known to engage in flights of fantasy.

But Agent Burns does tell him that he might not want to mention the two people he saw to the newspapers. Since they've already got a UFO on their hands, everyone will assume that the figures were aliens, and then no one will take the case seriously. Meanwhile, Captain Holder tries to figure out if this craft belongs to the Air Force. He checks back in with the Holloman Air Force Base, but they don't have anything matching Lonnie's description. That's worrying to say the least, because if it didn't come from the Air Force, where did it come from? Holder decides to go out and look at the landing site himself. It's dark at this point, so he and Burns have to work by flashlight,

taking measurements and collecting soil samples. One thing Holder notices is that when a rocket or jet engine takes off, it usually causes damage to the surrounding area. But there's nothing like that around here. Just four small, shallow landing marks and a few burned plants. No debris, no other disturbances to the soil. And then he finds something else interesting. Along with the four imprints in the ground that Lonnie and Chavez found, there are smaller imprints that look like they were made by a ladder, along with what looked like small footprints. At some point that night, Holder calls White Sands and has them send down military police

to close off the area. They've officially got an unidentified flying object, and until they can figure out what this thing is, it's best not to have anyone walking around contaminating the scene. Of course, circling the area with military police does not make the locals any less curious, and the story is already hitting the news. The very next morning, Lonnie gives an interview on the local radio station, and he disregards the advice to not mention the two people standing beside the craft. Then he makes it worse by clarifying,

quote, I wouldn't say they were people. I just saw something in white coveralls. And just like that, everyone in Socorro thinks that Lani Zamora has seen aliens. Within hours, the story is all over New Mexico and then all over the country. Even though the investigators 100% believe Lonnie saw what he saw, the public does not.

He becomes the town laughingstock basically overnight. Other officers tease him, local kids heckle him on the streets, and the calls from reporters never stop. But as the buzz starts to build, new evidence comes out that actually validates the UFO sighting. As it turns out, Lonnie was not the only person to see it. There are more eyewitness accounts, and I'll dissect them right after this. Now back to the story. The morning after Lonnie's UFO sighting on April 24th, 1964, evidence started to emerge that he wasn't the only witness. That same evening, the sheriff's office had received three other calls from people who saw a blue flame in the sky near Socorro, New Mexico. Then there's someone in La Madera about three miles north

who had the same round white object land on his property a few hours after Lonnie saw it. Now, he let it stay there overnight because he was too scared to do anything about it. And then by morning, he said that it was just gone. There were a few other sightings, including someone who called into a TV station in Albuquerque. And those are just the sightings that were reported before Lonnie's story hit the news. There were countless more. When all of this starts coming out, less than 24 hours after Lonnie's initial report, the Air Force is hounded with calls from national newspapers, the Office of the President, even from members of

Congress. Down in Socorro, Captain Holder gets a call from a colonel who's with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the war room at the Pentagon. They have him read his report on the sighting over the phone, using a scrambler to make sure the signal is secure. Now, clearly, the government thinks they're dealing with a security breach, not an alien invasion. But Captain Holder confirms this is definitely not an Air Force craft, at least not anything from the base down here. With all this attention from the press, the Air Force has to come up with some answer. So they pass it off to Project Blue Book. For a bit of context, Blue Book was an Air Force project that started in 1952 to investigate UFOs and basically figure out whether they were a threat. After a year or so, it was clear that UFOs were not a threat to national security, and Blue Book was a massive waste of resources.

So over the years, the project was totally gutted, and any serious investigation pretty much stopped. By 1964, Blue Book's director, Captain Hector Quintanilla, only had four people on his staff. Hector himself didn't understand why the project was even still going. Every case they got turned out to be a helicopter or a balloon or a flock of birds. Until April 25th, when the Lonnie Zamora story broke. As soon as Hector gets into the building that morning, he can hear the phone in his office ringing off the hook. The operator tells him he's got 10 or 12 calls waiting. Hector can already tell this is going to be a nightmare. As he finds out, the Air Force bases near Socorro are already on the case,

and none of them have an answer to what Lonnie and everyone else saw. So, Hector checks all of the flight activity in the area, and he determines that it wasn't a helicopter or a plane. Then he calls all the weather stations in New Mexico, and it wasn't a weather balloon. He even calls the Pentagon and the White House command post. He calls every defense contractor and research organization that he can think of, and no one has any idea what might have landed in Socorro. So finally, he calls in Dr. J. Allen Hynek. Dr. Hynek has been the Air Force's scientific consultant on UFOs for nearly

two decades. He's a skeptic, but over the years, he's seen a lot of things that he was never able to explain. And as a scientist, he refuses to jump to the conclusion that UFOs are all hoaxes. He conducts his investigations fairly and sees where the evidence takes him. After a few unexpected delays and a flat tire, Dr. Hynek finally hitchhikes into Socorro by the evening of April 28th. Things are already off to a bad start. It's been four days since Lonnie's sighting and the landing site has been absolutely trampled by curious locals. And after four days of being hounded by reporters and publicly mocked as a UFO nut, Lonnie himself is tired of cooperating. It takes a half hour of convincing

before Dr. Hynek can get a word out of him. But once he warms up, Hynek actually believes him. He writes in his report that Lonnie is, quote, an unimaginative old cop of an old Socorro family incapable of hoax and pretty sore at being regarded as a romancer. They make plans to go back to the landing site the next morning and reenact what happened, but Dr. Hynek wasn't the only one who'd been out there looking for answers. Little did he know someone else had arrived in town that same night. Ray Stanford from NICAP. The National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, a.k.a. NICAP, was the main UFO research group in the 50s and 60s.

On the whole, it was a respected, science-minded group. They weren't a bunch of like fringe conspiracy theorists, but they had a serious feud with Project Blue Book, which they accused of being an Air Force cover-up. Now, for reasons that have never been quite clear, NICAP chose to send 25-year-old Ray Stanford as their man on the ground in Socorro. Now, Ray was widely regarded as kind of a crackpot, even within NICAP. He claimed that he could communicate telepathically with, quote, space people. So it's probably not surprising that Lonnie Zamora wanted nothing to do with him. He's tired of talking to the UFO crowd. He just wants this to be done. Ray calls Lonnie twice on the morning of the 29th, but

he's dodging all of his calls. So Ray finally drives down to the police station to just track him down himself. He talks to the dispatcher who tells him bluntly that Lonnie doesn't want to talk about the UFO anymore, but Ray won't give up. So the dispatcher relents and radios Lonnie, who's out at the landing site with Sergeant Chavez and Dr. Hynek. Now, Chavez is the one who answers and he says, no, do not send this guy over here while the Air Force team is working. But Hynek overhears and he says, it's fine. Let the NICAP guy come out here as long as he comes alone. So when Ray gets to the scene, Lonnie is showing Dr. Hynek the four imprints on the ground where the object landed. Hynek agrees they look like they were made by some kind of object

scraping against the ground. Socorro is a mining town, so Hynek asks if the marks might have just been made by drilling equipment way before this all started. But they're in the exact spot where Lonnie saw the object touch down. And judging by the moisture on the dirt, the marks are fresh. Lonnie points out a broken rock inside one of the imprints that looks like it was struck by the landing gear. He thinks that maybe there might still be traces of metal scrapings on the rock. Hynek doubts it, and he kind of just ignores it and moves on. But Ray is very

interested in this. If this is a true UFO, those scrapings could prove that the craft was made out of extraterrestrial metals. The problem is though, Ray's not an official investigator. There's no way the Air Force will let him take the rock from the scene. So he has to hatch a plan. All of a sudden, he tells Hynek, hey, don't you have a press conference happening soon? Like, you better get to the hotel. You don't want to be late. Kind of like rushing him off. So he walks Hynek and the others back to their cars, telling them about some UFO slides that he brought with him. By the time they all get to the hotel, everyone's totally forgotten about the rock. And while everyone's distracted at the press conference, Ray sneaks back to the landing site. The rock is still there, right where

they left it. There are a few tiny metal slivers on it, like less than an eighth of an inch long, but he thinks that it might be enough for analysis. Ray wraps it up in newspapers for safekeeping and pushes some dirt around so you can't tell that anything had been removed. Then he gets back into his car and rockets out of there with the one piece of evidence that might break this case wide open. Ray brings the rock to a doctor he knows in Phoenix who agrees to take a look. The doctor gets his magnifying glass, holds out his hand, and without thinking, Ray just drops the rock right into his palm. Now he immediately regrets it because the doctor

touched the exact spot where the biggest metal fragment was, completely wiping it off. They try using a magnifying glass and a magnet to try and find the metal, but there's just no luck. It's absolutely gone. Now there are a few other smaller slivers of metal on the metal, but there's just no luck. It's absolutely gone. Now, there are a few other smaller slivers of metal on the rock, but Ray has almost no hope that they'll get anything useful out of them. He writes to Dick Hall, who's the assistant director of NICAP, and luckily, Dick actually knows a guy at NASA who might be able to help. So he sends Ray over to the Goddard Space Flight Center in D.C. to meet with his contact, a guy named Henry Frankel.

He takes some scrapings and tells Ray that he'll call him next Wednesday once he runs some tests. While Ray is waiting around, he goes to dinner with a friend of his who's a Navy captain. He tells him about this whole saga with the rock, and the captain's like, hold on, you gave the scrapings to NASA? You are never going to get those back. If there's anything extraterrestrial about that rock, the government is going to bury all the evidence. And somehow it hadn't occurred to Ray

that NASA is a government agency, and they'd be just as involved in any kind of cover-up as the Air Force. But he still holds out hope that Dr. Frankel at least is on their side. When Wednesday morning rolls around, Ray gives him a call, and his optimism pays off. Dr. Frankel has the test results, and he says the metals embedded in the rock did not come from Earth. The story is going to take a turn for the paranoid right after this. Now let's get back to the story.

According to Ray, this is what Dr. Frankel told him on the phone about the rock from Socorro. The metal particles are a zinc-iron alloy, which, based on the charts they have at NASA, is unlike any alloy that's natural to Earth. The only possible conclusion he could draw is that the object these scrapings are from was made on another planet. Frankel promises to send the full test results to NICAP's assistant director, Dick Hall. But a week later, they still haven't arrived. So Ray calls Frankel back, and there's no answer. He tries again and again for days and then weeks, and he doesn't hear a word. Finally, someone else answers the call and tells Ray that Dr. Frankel has been taken off the project. His conclusions were incorrect.

A new analysis had been done, and they'd send those results over. When Ray finally gets a hold of the report, it says that the shiny fragments on the rock were actually just silica, a common substance that's found in everyday desert sand. Nothing extraterrestrial at all, nothing to see here. But what about those first round of results? Ray is convinced this is all a cover-up. To be fair, though, the traces of metal were so small.

It's not surprising that Dr. Frankel may have misidentified them the first time around. And it's also not that weird that he thought the metal was extraterrestrial. I mean, he works for NASA after all. But he probably meant it was from maybe a meteorite or something, not necessarily an alien spaceship. And when you really look at this critically, a second analysis could have found some results that Frankel missed the first time around. I mean, there's no reason to jump to a cover-up conspiracy. So in the end, I mean, really, this is all kind of a wash. As for the samples that were taken by Dr. Hynek and the other Air Force investigators, there wasn't much luck either. There was no foreign material in the soil samples, no radiation, no chemical trace of whatever landed there. But there was also no

gasoline or lighter fluid on the burnt brush from the center of the landing site, which strongly suggests that it wasn't a stage hoax. In his report for Project Blue Book, Dr. Hynek concludes that something definitely landed in Socorro, but he has zero idea what it was. Obviously, this is a problem for the Air Force. Blue Book's director, Hector Quintanilla, is under tons of pressure to find some answer. And this has become such a headache for him that he's not backing down now. He's gonna solve this case if it's the last thing he does. Hector personally goes down to Holloman Air Force Base, the one that's close to Socorro, and he spends four days digging around. He searches every hangar at the base, talks to everyone he can find, and there's

nothing that remotely even fits what he's looking for. So then he has another idea. Maybe this was a lunar lander. He contacts NASA and puts together a list of all of the companies and contractors that are working on lunar landing gear. He writes to all of them requesting information about their projects, and one of them looks promising. There's an unmanned craft called the Lunar Surveyor. The Surveyor has a few similarities to the UFO. It's made of white metal, it has jet engines attached, and it has slanted legs that would fit the markings in Socorro. Now, the logo for the company that makes it, Hughes Tool Company, looks kind of like the symbol Lonnie saw on the side of the object. And what's more, a prototype of the Surveyor was being tested at White Sands Missile Range, which is just down the highway

from Socorro, on the morning of April 24th. That's the same day as Lonnie's sighting. However, as good as this might look, there are a few big problems. For one, the Surveyor has three legs, not four, and its structure looks like almost like a big metal tripod. It looks absolutely nothing like a big white oval that Lonnie and several other witnesses saw. And as for the Hughes Tool Company logo, it doesn't actually appear anywhere on the surveyor. Although I guess it's possible that this was an earlier model that maybe had the logo on it.

And the fact that it was tested at White Sands that same morning actually kind of raises more questions than it answers. The very first person on the scene in Socorro was Captain Holder, who's a commander at White Sands. He would have known about the surveyor test. I mean, it's listed on the daily range log. But after checking and rechecking the records, no one at White Sands ever so much as mentioned the surveyor as a possibility. To me, that means that they must have been positive that the test made it back on schedule that morning and it couldn't have been floating around in Socorro that same evening. But then that just leaves us back at square one. If this wasn't any sort of domestic aircraft or spacecraft, what else could it be? Usually in a situation like this, the next answer is that it's a hoax.

Obviously, if it was a hoax, Lonnie wasn't in on it. But it could have been local kids playing a prank on him. I mean, remember the teenage driver who led Lonnie on the chase out to the edge of town? The two people next to the craft who he described as large kids or small adults? Now, this would be a pretty involved hoax for a group of high schoolers to pull off, but Socorro is home to New Mexico Tech, a science and engineering college. According to a student, Lonnie had a reputation for hounding the kids on campus, so a lot of them didn't like him. That same student had actually even heard from

a professor that New Mexico Tech students were behind the hoax, although he didn't name names or offer any more details. On its face, this seems like a no-brainer, but there are still a few problems to consider. For one thing, would a group of college students even be able to pull this off without getting caught? I mean, we're not talking about a papier-mâché balloon with a laser pointer attached. This object was convincing enough to scare the life out of Lonnie, a career cop who served in the Korean War. I mean, there were flames so big you could see them over the hilltops. A deafening roar that could be heard miles away. I mean, there were flames so big you could see them over the hilltops. A deafening roar that could be heard miles away.

Not to mention the thing could fly, apparently with some kind of rocket engine. It's possible that students in the engineering program could have built this, but it's not the kind of thing you put together in an afternoon. I mean, this would have taken time and resources. There probably had to be a faculty member involved. And that brings us to the next problem. There's no evidence that this was a hoax. Dr. Hynek actually looked into it while he was in town, and he couldn't find a single person who had any idea who was behind this. He spoke to professors, to students, neighborhood kids, but no one knew anything. And most of them didn't even think a hoax was likely.

One high schooler told him that if some local kid wanted a revenge on Lonnie, they would probably just beat him up. And if a student did go through the massive effort of pulling off a prank like this, they would have told someone at some point. It would be hard not to brag about this. I mean, they fooled the Air Force and the FBI and the Pentagon.

They made national headlines. There would be no better punchline than admitting that it was all a hoax all along. And yet, as far as I can tell, no one has ever taken credit for it, privately or publicly. There's also the obvious physical details, like the lack of tire tracks or footprints going to or from the landing site. And there were no materials or equipment left behind at the site. No bits of rope, no launching equipment, and of course, no trace of gasoline on the burning bush. It would have been nearly impossible to launch a UFO,

clean up everything, and disappear into the desert the minute or so it took Lonnie to park his car. Dr. Hynek concludes that the only way this hoax could have gone off is if both Sergeant Chavez and the FBI agent were involved in covering up evidence before the Air Force team got there. And really, when you add it all up, pretty much the entire town of Socorro would have had to have been involved in some way.

Now, it was suggested at some point that the town's mayor cooked up the whole thing to draw in tourists. But that sounds like a pretty flimsy story to me. I mean, the landing site was never turned into a tourist attraction, and they didn't even put a sign up. So if it's not a hoax, not an aircraft, and not a military test site, there aren't a lot of options left. Maybe it was an experimental aircraft made by some secretive engineers who were purposely hiding their work from the government. Maybe it was a foreign military craft that made it across the

border and right past the Air Force Base without being detected. Or maybe it was aliens. But whatever it was, there was no proof either way. Eventually, Hector gave up and labeled the case as unidentified. I really wish I had a better answer for you or some recent developments or anything, but that's all there is. More than 50 years later, we still have no idea what landed in the desert. As for Lonnie Zamora, he never lived down the UFO encounter. A year later, he was quoted in an Associated Press story saying, if I can just forget about it, maybe it'll go away. But it didn't. He was heckled by townspeople and fellow officers for years after the incident. He eventually left the police force to get away

from the ridicule. And when he died in 2009, the headline for his obituary in the Albuquerque Journal was, Officer Made UFO Report. It's actually, I think, really sad that we've stigmatized UFO sightings so much that even a perfectly sane, reliable witness will be seen as a conspiracy theorist. Just because something can't be explained doesn't mean it's not real. In his final report on the case, Dr. Hynek wrote, It is reports such as these to which I feel more attention should be paid. It is easy to dismiss the cases of birds, balloons, meteors, and the like, but when good citizens of average or better than average intelligence and above all sincere citizens report something puzzling, I think we have some sort of social obligation

to do as good a job on it as we can. Thanks for listening. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all Audiocheck originals.