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Project Blue Book desk file, Socorro (217 pages)

The Black Vault (Rob Mercer collection) · 217 pages · text from the file's own layer

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.

  • p. 42 …We have referred your request for information to the Project Office of Jet Propulsion Laboratory# California…
  • p. 58 …We haft a particular interest 1n the Advanced Imle.r Trans- port Systems. lOR THE COMMANDER…
  • p. 65 …The target date could be assistant once the -!0-day ' Craft De~wbed . 1 advanced several…
  • p. 100 …Conner in advance to keep things quiet. As soon as I got the reporters out of…
  • p. 164 …lt · actually · was headed advanced type of aircraft or space The policeman believed the , straight for…
  • p. 201 …the green fi~Mlmti balls and Zamora's sighting were observations ot'tests of advanced vehic…
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7
As far as lids P~ving it in for%amora, there is ample evidence that
this is~e case. But it was also pointed out to me by op!j;;inder ( sp. ? )
and his assistant and by several others, that it is a national phenomenon
fc(teenagers · to Pa.te "fuzz" and the statement by Wesley Johnston, a high
school senior who works at Opelgrinders is particularly significant • . He
sa.id that IIB.ny of the high school ljids didn 1t like Zamora, but that he,
Zamora, was not important enough to do anything atout it. He sa:i,d that
if' the kids wanted to get even with Zamora they ·would simply thrash him
or do something to his car, but that an elaborate h~ would not be the
· ~before
~they would get even with him. One sho~ re~ember~t~ the time
of the sighting there had been-no talk in the Socorro region of unidentified
flying objects. This would not hRve suggested itself as a means of getting
back at Zamol'a. Apparently the Socorro teenagers are much more direct in
their methods of reprisal for the~zz.• As far as the cardboard is con-
cerned, Menzelt's conjectures -here fall completely flat. The cardboard
was portions of very old and weathered corrugated paper from a packing box.
There are many samples of this all over the region. There is a city dump
not too far away, and when the wind, which blows tumbleweeds all over the
place, get&hold.of tome of this stuff, it scatters the papers pretty well
all over the whole region. Many of the bushes, I noticed particularly this
time, have papers caught on their underneath side. In any case, some thi~ ·
paper was still there, and I shall send Menzel a sample of what this cardboard
really looks like. I would say that the cardboard . had been there through :m.ny
rains and had suffered successive dryings. The original piece I picked u9
1;
was definite/charred, Exkx This was the piece I sent to you along with soil
samples, you will remember.
One rather interesting item is that the burning bush has recently
exuded some. sap) and one of the movie people took this to Los Angeles to
./Rob Mercer

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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.