Zamora was so shocked by what he saw that he asked to see a priest before releasing his report to the authorities. Quite simply, he believed he saw an alien craft. Everyone came down to look into this one. Within two hours, army intelligence from White Sands Proving Grounds was there, along with an FBI agent. Hynek arrived the next day. Air force intelligence also investigated, as did Kirtland AFB and Blue Book Sergeant James Moody. The CIA had a file and probably investigators as well. Among civilians, NICAP and APRO were there, and also, a bit later, debunker Philip Klass. (During APRO’s investigation of Socorro, Blue Book’s Sergeant Moody told the Lorenzens, “you get lots of cases that we don’t.”) Everyone but Klass thought the case was among the most legitimate and compelling of all UFO encounters.
There were several reasons for such an assessment. For a week after the event, Zamora was subjected to an almost continuous barrage of interviews by the many investigators on the scene. He impressed everyone with his honesty, his genuine puzzlement and even shock, and his extremely detailed report. No one questioned his integrity or ability to discern what he claimed to have seen. Other reasons were the deep landing marks left by the legs of the craft, as well as a charred area where it had taken off. These traces forced Hynek into writing about this as a “real, physical event.”
Much of the scrutiny Zamora received centered over his description of the beings he saw, and of the strange insignia he saw on the side of the craft. He later refused to discuss these elements of the story because, he said, he was asked to keep quiet about “some things” he had seen.
In a 1966 classified article for
There is no doubt that Lonnie Zamora saw an object which left quite an impression on him. There is no question about his reliability.... 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 a thorough investigation, to find the vehicle or other stimulus that scared Zamora to the point of panic.
Publicly, Quintanilla debunked and even ridiculed the story. Philip Klass came into town years later and decided the whole thing was a tourism-related hoax. No one took Klass seriously, and no evidence for a hoax ever emerged. Hynek later wrote that the case strongly affected him. It also forced NICAP to reconsider its position on occupant sightings. Henceforth, occupant reports were viewed as credible, even in this conservative bastion of UFO believers.
Lonnie Zamora’s sighting of aliens in Socorro is generally considered among the most compelling and interesting UFO encounters ever. Certainly, it was a fascinating close-range sighting, backed by strong physical evidence and personal testimony. Zamora’s experience, however, was not unique. Such sightings were reported with great frequency over the years in South America and were a major event in Europe in 1954. Many of those encounters were equally well substantiated. What made the event at Socorro special was merely that it took place in America. The focus of American researchers on the event as the “classic” alien sighting has more to do with native provincialism than anything else.
The final chapter to the Socorro story occurred during the summer. On July 31, 1964, Ray Stanford and Richard Hall visited NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center at Greenbelt, Maryland, in order to have the lab there analyze metals on a rock from the landing site. Dr. Henry Frankel, head of NASA’s Spacecraft Systems Branch, directed the analysis and agreed to Stanford’s request that only half the rock’s metal be scraped off. Frankel declared that some of the particles looked like they had been in a molten state when they got onto the rock.
When the rock was returned to Stanford, it had been scraped clean. “There was nothing, not a speck of the metal left,” said Stanford. On August 5, he phoned Frankel, who told him that
the particles are comprised of a material that could not occur naturally.... This definitely strengthens the case that might be made for an extraterrestrial origin of the Socorro object.
Frankel instructed Stanford to phone again in a week, after he had time to analyze the metal further. On August 12, Stanford phoned Frankel’s office but could only reach Frankel’s secretary, who said he was unavailable. Stanford called again the next day—no luck. He called yet again on the seventeenth, and was told by Frankel’s secretary that “Dr. Frankel is unprepared, at this time, to discuss the information you are calling about.” Stanford tried to reach Frankel again on the eighteenth and nineteenth, both times without success. Amid failure, he had the virtue of persistence.
