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This Project Blue Book file on the Socorro, New Mexico sighting of 24 April 1964 compiles an Air Force record card and a large set of press clippings. The clippings cover policeman Lonnie Zamora's report of an egg-shaped object with four landing marks and scorched brush, plus J. Allen Hynek's investigation and follow-up reports from La Madera, Edgewood and elsewhere. An Air Force summary says soil and brush analysis found no foreign material, radiation or propellant, that the case remains open, and that later related sightings were explained or found to be hoaxes.
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It surely would have leaked by now. He told me of an elaborate hoax that was played on one of the geologists at Ohio State University when he taught there. The students had it in for this guy and contrived an explosion in and the crater which it produced nearby town was reported then as a meteorite crater. It had everybody excited for a while and would have succeeded except who got away with it were so pleased with themselves that they began to brag a bit and got caught. I do not believe that the Socorro high school students could have kept a secret this long. Furthermore, it would seem that any youngsters that hated Zamora sufficiently to have gone to all this trouble to perpetrate a hoax would now be very envious of the glory he is getting in a movie and all the publicity he has received and would certainly burst his bubble right now. Finally, there is the matter of the tourist who reported a strange object to Oelgrinder. This could not very well have been part of the hoax since the tourist was a complete stranger just passing through. Furthermore, if Zamora is to believed at all, the object rose vertically and took off horizontally to the west and was observed as it passed well over the dynamite shack and disappeared over the pearlite mill. This is entirely too big a hoax for high school students to perpetrate. Perhaps I spent too much time on this matter, but the letter was a very convenient device for re-discussing the whole situation. Sgt. Chaves indicated that Menzel should have been a science fiction writer. Actually Lyle Boyd has done some of this, and I believe also Menzel has. I left Albuquerque in the late morning on Saturday and arrived in Socorro abbut 1:00 P. M. Raynor, Shrode, and I visited the site and took some more samples, particularly of the sap, and I took a few more pictures, particularly of the dynamite shack to show Menzel. Then I went back to the radio station
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