Socorro, 1964: a police officer, a landing, and marks in the ground

On the afternoon of 24 April 1964, Sergeant Lonnie Zamora of the Socorro police department broke off a pursuit to investigate a roar and a flame in scrubland at the edge of town. He reported finding an egg-shaped object standing on legs in a gully, with two small figures beside it, which departed with a roar as he approached.

It is among the most-examined cases in the subject, and among the few Project Blue Book closed as unidentified.

What is documented

Zamora was a serving police officer with a good reputation, on duty, who radioed in what he was seeing while it was happening. Another officer arrived within minutes. Physical marks were found at the site: impressions in the soil, and burnt vegetation.

The Air Force investigated promptly, and Hynek visited. Blue Book was unable to identify the object and the case was formally left unexplained — a designation applied to a small minority of its 12,618 cases.

The insignia

Zamora reported a symbol on the side of the object. He drew it, and the drawing has been reproduced widely — but not, in the early record, consistently, and there is a real question about which version is the original.

That matters more than it sounds. A witness who reports a specific marking is offering something checkable, and if the earliest drawing differs from the famous one, the difference is informative about how the account travelled.

The explanations

Three have been argued seriously.

A lunar lander prototype under test. White Sands is nearby and unusual craft were flown in the region. The difficulty is that no programme has ever been identified that had such a vehicle at that place on that date, and the enquiries were made at the time.

A student hoax from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, which sits in Socorro. This has been argued in detail by people with local knowledge, and it accounts for the physical traces, the timing and the departure. What it accounts for less well is Zamora — a hoax needs him to have been badly fooled at close range in daylight, or complicit.

A genuine unidentified craft, which explains everything and requires the most.

Why Blue Book could not close it

Because every conventional candidate required something the investigation could not supply: an unacknowledged test flight, a hoax nobody claimed, or a misidentification by a trained observer at close range in daylight.

Leaving it unexplained was not an endorsement. It was an admission that the project had no candidate that fitted, which for an organisation whose institutional preference was clearly to close cases is worth noting.