Socorro's famous UFO story a hoax?
Former NM Tech President calls "bull" on Socorro's "Zamora UFO sighting"
Socorro's sighting from 1964 is often referred to as the "Zamora incident" or the "Zamora sighting", so named because Socorro policeman Lonnie Zamora was one of the key eyewitnesses to the UFO. A document has recently surfaced indicating that the New Mexico Tech president at the time, Dr. Stirling Colgate, claimed in a 1968 letter to Dr. Linus Pauling (yes, the same Linus Pauling who won not one, but two Nobel Prizes!) that he knew that the incident was a hoax and that he had "good indication" of the student who "engineered" it. The short note was handwritten on a letter received by Dr. Colgate from Dr. Pauling in which Pauling asks Colgate what he knows of the UFO sighting. Colgate scrawled his terse reply on Pauling's letter, and then mailed it back. This document recently surfaced, and Dr. Colgate's statement has been verified by email; he stands by his claim that the sighting was a college prank.
The full story... and the controversy rages on!
This story originally broke on this popular UFO site. From the comments that have been posted in response to the article, it's clear that the document from Dr. Stirling to Dr. Colgate, in which Colgate claims to have first-hand knowledge that the incident was a college prank, is not convincing many of the die-hard UFO believers. Looking at this from a fairly neutral stance, we must say that while the letter would appear to be fairly strong evidence that something may be amiss with the Zamora incident, it's nevertheless still second-hand information. We suspect the Zamora incident was not in the realm of the supernatural or the extraterrestrial, but this letter alone will certainly not change the minds of those who are convinced of its veracity. Frankly, there are probably stronger grounds on which to debunk the Zamora incident, but this letter may be a piece of the puzzle. It certainly adds yet another wrinkle to this decades-old controversy!
Or maybe a Surveyor Test?
I'll be talking about the Socorro 1964 Incident (and the Socorro 2009 UFO sighting, too!) at the Enchanted Skies Star Party, Thursday Oct. 15th at 2:30 PM. I'll talk some more about this "hoax" hypothesis, but there are other possibilities, too, including balloons, and even a Surveyor test. (It turns out that Hughes was doing "helicopter" tests with early versions of the lunar Surveyor on April 24, 1964, just south of Socorro at the north end of WSMR.)
There's an article on the Socorro sighting at the New Mexicans for Science and Reason website, here.
Cheers, Dave Thomas
P.S. Viva Drupal!
The "hoax" story
Anthony Bragalia (who maintains the site www.ufocon.blogspot.com) cites a letter written by former Tech president Dr. Stirling Colgate to Linus Pauling, mentioning that he thought the event "was engineered by a student who has left the college." Without intending any disrespect for Dr. Colgate, I would have to say that in terms of the way we like to amass evidential arguments for things in the field of UFO studies, this is hearsay, and essentially unsubstantiated.
Bragalia also claims to know of a couple of former Tech students who, though not at Tech in 1964 and not directly involved in any 1964 hoaxing, have stated that there was a kind of "hoax culture" at the college and even a secret student-hoaxer society where people often attempted to make bogus flying saucers etc. That may well be, but none of this does anything to assail the mountains of solid evidence built up by researchers to the effect that, on the contrary, the Socorro incident was a real UFO event. (Bragalia's citations, one John Shipman and one Thomas Jones, people who were at Tech years after the Socorro event, only say that there was a culture of prankster activity at the college, but there is still no bead drawn on anybody in particular who is supposed to have hoaxed Lonnie Zamora in the gully outside of town.) In particular, researcher Ray Stanford wrote the book Socorro Saucer in a Pentagon Pantry about the years of work he has done on this case, having been the only private investigator accompanying Dr. Allen Hynek and others of Project Blue Book at the time of the initial Air Force investigation. I too have done serious work on the case myself, primarily in the form of a study of the radioactive half-life of the radiation field associate with the landed object in the arroyo. There is far, far too much solid evidence for the truly anomalous nature of this case for Bragalia or anyone else to dismiss it as a "student hoax" on the basis of hearsay.
Besides, anyone might claim now, half a century later, that they hoaxed the event, but one must ask why they wouldn't have come forward with such an admission earlier, decades earlier even, when it's well known that hoaxers love to boast about their exploits. No, the hoax story doesn't hold up. My intuition is that some student told Dr. Colgate that he had hoaxed the event, but that it wasn't true that he really did. Let's face it-- had the Lonnie Zamora experience been a hoax, it's the sort of thing an inveterate hoaxer would wish he had done! But wishing doesn't make it so. Also if one is supposed to believe that a bunch of student pranksters fooled professional, experienced military analysts (analysts who by 1964 had already worked on several UFO retrieval cases) I'd have to say-- fat chance. This case is one of the best-attested cases on record, with Lonnie Zamora's and two state police officers' direct testimony and all manner of other evidence. It's really too bad Bragalia has wasted everyone's time with this "hoax" nonsense. (I speak here as an independent investigator, not as State Director for New Mexico MUFON.)
-- Dr. Don Burleson