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This 217-page Project Blue Book desk file on the 24 April 1964 Socorro, New Mexico sighting by policeman Lonnie Zamora comes from the Rob Mercer collection. It contains the Blue Book record card, which carries the case as unidentified pending more data, along with Foreign Technology Division messages and resumes and a narrative of the sighting. It also holds inquiries about lunar modules, helicopters and VTOL craft, soil and radiation findings, and a letter by J. Allen Hynek rejecting Donald Menzel's hoax hypothesis.
“Lonnie Zamora”45 pages
He had gone into this thing quite thorou&~ly and in a quite sedate and unexcited manner. His story, published Tuesday, April 28 , 1964, is an excellent summary of the sighting. It includes one point not mentioned previously: "At least one other person - an unidentified tourist traveling north on US 85 - saw the UFO just before it landed in a gulley. Opel Grinder, manager of Whitting brothers' Service Station on 85 North, said the man stopped at the station and remsrked that aircrafts flew low around here. Grinder replied that there were many helocopters in this vicinity, and the tourist said, "It was a funny looking helocopter, if that's what it was." The man said further · that the .object had flown over his car. It actually was headed straight for the gully where it landed moments later. The tourist also commented that he had seen a police car heading up the hill. This was apparently Z8mora's .car. I believe that we can dispense with the rash of other reports that sprang up immediately thereafter. This was the case near Santa Fe, the case in Montana, the girl with scorched eyes because she looked at a flying saucer in Albuquerque, and others. But, it is essential .that the Socorro case be given the treatment. I also questioned, while in Socorro, my old friend, Dr Jack Whothmen, President of the New Mexico School of Mines, who said he knew of no geophysical or other types of experiements going on in the area at the time. ~e, as the rest of the townspeople, were puzzled by the event, but. the general underground slull of opinion was that it would turn out to be some device which the government still ~ad under raps. Not one person whom I talked with in the least, by either implication or inuendo, challenged Zamora's veracity. F~ally, the drawings which Captain Hilder and his associates made, when replotted according to scale, (already enclosed with the report of Captain Holder, already sent to you) which indicate that the diagonals between the markings intersected perpendicularly. It would appear essential that for this case to be fairly closed out, if the interpre- tation is that of a new device and its dimensions be shown to match the markings found on the ground; that is, that the device finally selected as the culprit, be indeed capable of producing the marks observed • .I left Socorro shortly after noon on Wednesday April 29th, Major Conner and James Ray having come down late that morning to pick me up. We had a late lunch enroute to Albuquerque. In Albuquerque, I had the opportunity to talk with Mr .Arthur Burns , of the FBI, who added nothing new to the situation but confirmed the general reliability and stability of Mr Zamora. He also was of the opinion that the marks might well have been fresh ones. I also called the mother of the young glr~whose eyes were alledgedly burned by having looked too long at a flying saucer, and found that the name of t he Doctor who treated her and Who had confirmed the burns,~s a Dr Best of Albuquerque. Major Conner indicated that he would investigate further. That is all. 7Rob Mercer
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 217 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.