Flying Saucers UFO Reports

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

Closer examination revealed unidentifiable white object and what appeared to be two "small adults" who, apparently startled by Zamora's appearance, took off with "ear-splitting roar."

the markings on the object, this under instructions from Army Intelligence. But the Lorenzens already had secured this information and did not press the already put-upon patrolman. That afternoon, as the Lorenzens were leaving town, they saw Zamora back on his job, "standing by the door of a car which was pulled to the curb in front of his prowl car. He had his ticket book in hand, and his pen poised. Business as usual." (ARPO Bulletin, May, 1964)

But business as usual was not to be the case either for Zamora or for the town of Socorro in the next several days. The account had been given international news coverage and had attracted interest from scientists, investigators and the curious. The Air Force sent out a major from its Kirtland Base in Albuquerque and followed this up with their consulting scientist, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, head of the Astronomy Department at Northwestern University.

To Dr. Hynek has fallen the difficult task of having to minimize the importance of certain sightings in keeping

with the Air Force policy of looking upon all UFOs reports as "errors, hallucinations or hoaxes." At a closed hearing of the House Armed Services Committee, in April 1966, Dr. Hynek acknowledged that this hypothesis for the Air Force had been "very successful," but it could stand in the path of research for "if one digs too intently for coal he is apt to miss diamonds. . . . And in dealing with truly puzzling cases, we have tended either to say that, if an investigation had been pursued long enough, the misidentified object would have been recognized, or that the sighting had no validity to begin with." (The UFO Investigator, NICAP, May-June 1966.)

But at the time of the Socorro incident, "digging for coal" was the adopted approach and one of Dr. Hynek's first questions was Why, if the UFO had been seen, had it not been reported on radar "in an area that is infested with radar."

The APRO investigators were the ones who pointed out that the radar station in that area was not in operation at