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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
The hoax ~hesia 1~, of course , one that suggests itselt immediately • . It is Quintanilla's and mr opinion that both Chavez and FBI agent Byrnes mat have been in on the hoax if we adopt t he hoax hypothesis. They testified that there were no tracks in the i mmediate neighborhood and ao that the hoa.xaters t:Ust theiT'.selves ha.ve arrived and left by balloon! Bad it been a hoax, certainly some paraphernalia s hould have been left around it the pranksters beat a r..aety retreat. These gentlemen said t r.,t nothing . ot that short 1l8.S flund. · Tbe vind vas blcVing strongly from the south, yet the object \IUS reported 1 to have gone on directly west. This would hardly fit a balloon, unless, ot course, the directions are wrong. I questioned and requestioned the pe<~ple on this point and couldn't shake them from that. Pranksters could have hidden behind the knoll directly to the south, particularly bad they lain prone. The dynamite aback is too SI!Id.ll and too tar away to have risked hiding behind it. Opal Grinder does have a high&school student ·working for him, and I talked with him at length. Teenagers generally hate Zamora's guts 1 but it 'WB.S added that they bate all "fuzz" and that _if they w.nted. to get even with Zanora, they would s imply beat him up or do something more direct, like letting the air out of his tires or something with ~~ate results rather tban resott to an involved. hoax. Opal Grinder 1 of course, would have to be 1n on .the hoax, also. He again told me t he story or the too.rist who said that he had -sighted a strange object crossing directly in front or him on the road and landing in the gully, and toward which an instant or so later, he sav a police car going. I checked out the time on that, ar.d it f'its. 0}&1 Grinder 'a wife was just preparing to get to the bank before it closed at six (apparently she takes the veek's loot to the bank on Friday's Just before they close). The sighting as you know, was supposedly at 5:45 P. M. Sorr.e ot the high school students · do have wa.lkies-talkies, but t he hoax hypothesis doea involve Chavez, Opal Grinder, and FBI agent Byrnes; the reported tourist vruld have to be mythical. Zamora knev exactly where the dynamite shack was, beca:ase this is precisely - vby he lett the roa.d when he heard the noise. He thought there had been an explosion in the dynamite shack. The dynamite shack doea not ste.nd. on legs as I rave inspected it closely and have taken photographs. The ~hack and the reported UFO rust be considered dietinot. furthermore, I doubt ver,y ~ch whether a hoax c~~ld have been kept secret this long. If a hoax comes off well, perpetrators like to gloo.t abit, and there would have been no point about getting even with Zamora if they couldn •t have gotten some kudos out of it. La Paz once told me of an instance in vhich some college students \lanted to get even with a geology professor so they planted . . a nmeteor1te" and contrived an explosion at some distant part ot t he state, and had this poor professor running around ragged claslng a meteorite. The perpetrators 1 however 1 were caught and expelled f'ro 1~ school because t hey si1nply couldn't keep t heir secret. They "confided" to friends who in turn confided to others, and there you are.Rob 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.