On August 20, 1964, Stanford received a phone call from Thomas P. Sciacca, Jr., of NASA’s Spacecraft Systems Branch. “I have been appointed to call you,” said Sciacca,
and report the official conclusion of the Socorro sample analysis. Dr. Frankel is no longer involved with the matter, so in response to your repeated inquiries, I want to tell you the results of the analysis. Everything you were told earlier by Dr. Frankel was a mistake. The sample was determined to be silica, SiO2.
By now, these games had become monotonously depressing. How could one hope to obtain confirmation of any sort within such a setting, against such forces?29
SOCORRO AFTERMATH: A YEAR OF UFOs
Depending on one’s choice of sources, 1964 was either a very active year for UFOs or business as usual. UFO reports to NICAP and APRO shot way up. Blue Book, on the other hand, tallied only twenty official unidentifieds (including the Socorro incident) for the year. Then again, it received about five hundred reports and had long since mastered the art of fake explanations. Most of Blue Book’s unexplained cases continued to be of the lights in the night sky type. Without a doubt, however, the Socorro case heralded a new spate of UFO sightings in the U.S. and sparked new media coverage. A large number of landing, electromagnetic (EM), and occupant cases were reported throughout the summer and fall, several quite vivid in detail, and at least one describing high-pitched voices. The air force investigated several of these cases. 30
Just two days after the Socorro sighting, and about two hundred miles north, Orlando Gallegos near La Madera, New Mexico, saw a metallic, oval-shaped object on the ground about two hundred feet away. He saw blue flames circle the bottom of the machine, which was silent and about the length of a telephone pole. The local police captain, Martin Vigil, reported scorch marks and four imprints at the site. Another New Mexico sighting occurred on April 28, near the town of Anthony. According to many witnesses, including police officer Paul Arteche, a reddish, round object hovered at a low level, then took off swiftly toward the west.31
On April 30, 1964, according to APRO, the pilot of a B-57 bomber from Holloman AFB, Alamogordo, radioed to his control tower that he was watching an “egg-shaped, white” UFO with markings that matched the one at Socorro. As he continued to observe the UFO, it landed on the base. Both Lorenzens claimed that they got this story from a very reliable source. Others, too, had heard the story, including a ham radio operator who claimed to have monitored the exchange between the pilot and control tower. A journalist called Holloman about it and received a denial. But Jim and Coral Lorenzen were adamant that they had three “entirely independent, unconnected sources of information” for this story. Shortly after the incident was said to have occurred, an airman walked into an Alamogordo clothing store and blurted out an incredible story of a UFO being parked in a hangar at Holloman AFB, under heavy guard. A day or two later, he returned to the store to insist he had made a mistake. There was no such thing as an alien spacecraft at Holloman, he said. An incredible story; can it be believed? The story
UFO sightings increased through May, especially in the western U.S. Several multiple-witness sightings that month occurred in the small town of Rio Vista, California. On May 5, in Comstock, Minnesota, a farmer saw an oval object rise from a field and fly into the clouds. It left a depression and imprints. A boy in Hubbard, Oregon, reported a silvery object, about ten feet long, resting on four legs in a wheat field on May 18. It made a beeping noise, rose about twenty feet, then ascended vertically. Flattened wheat was found at the site.33
Two incidents at White Sands Proving Ground occurred in the latter part of May 1964, neither case going to Blue Book. On May 22, a UFO was tracked on radar; a week later, on the twenty-ninth, two objects “moving leisurely across the range” were tracked on radar. This time, witnesses saw them visually as football-shaped.34
Blue Book unknowns, meanwhile, were more of a joke than anything else. Consider these two from May 26. The first, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, took place at 7:43 P.M. by an RAF pilot and ex-Smithsonian satellite tracker, who saw a thin, white object fly straight and level for about four seconds. The other took place in Pleasantview, Pennsylvania, at 11 P.M., when a man saw a yellow-orange light in a field, then chased it down the road for two miles. Such unknown cases were surely nothing to get excited about. Perhaps the entire point.
THE DAM BREAKS
