The Green Fireballs over New Mexico

Late November 1948. Around Albuquerque, people began reporting "green flares" in the night sky. Within weeks the reports were coming from Sandia Base, Kirtland Air Force Base and Los Alamos. An FBI memo would count "at least nine dates in December 1948."

December 5, 1948. 9:27 pm. An Air Force C-47 crew saw a green light rising from the ground on the eastern slope of the Sandia Mountains. Captain Goede said it "started low…arched upward a little, then seemed to level out." It did not arch downward, as meteors usually do.

Eight minutes later, Pioneer Airlines Flight 63 was at 9,000 feet. Captain Ernest Van Lloyd saw a light that was "pale green with a pale green trail." It "was coming straight at him." He tried to take evasive action. In Ruppelt's telling of that night, it looked "as big, or bigger, than a full moon."

Three nights later, OSI agents Neef and Stahl were airborne in a Beech T-7. A brilliant green light passed about 2,000 feet above them. It lasted about two seconds. Then it burned out and dropped off with orange fragments.

Dr Lincoln LaPaz directed the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico. December 12, 9:01 pm. On Highway 84 near Starvation Peak, he saw one himself. A bright green fireball crossed from east to west, its path "almost exactly horizontal." He described its colour as a green "such as I had never observed in meteor falls before." It lasted "almost exactly two seconds." Then it broke into fragments, "still bright green." There was no sonic boom. LaPaz took a transit bearing and scratched an arrow into the road surface.

January 30, 1949. 5:45 pm. The brightest fireball of all was seen across New Mexico and western Texas. Within two hours LaPaz had interviewed over 100 eyewitnesses. Nobody reported any sound. Searches on the ground and from the air found no fragments.

On February 16, 1949, Los Alamos held a secret "Conference on Aerial Phenomena." Edward Teller said: "It certainly sounds like everything else but meteors." Bradbury added: "We essentially have to believe what we are told." An Army G-2 memo had already raised foreign "sensing shots," radiological warfare and secret US experiments as possibilities. A radar watch at Los Alamos detected no unusual targets. A dust collector at Socorro caught "large amounts of unusual microscopic copper spherules."

The Air Force turned to cameras. Project Twinkle ran stations at Vaughn and Holloman AFB from April 1950 to March 1951. A 1950 memo noted that "fire balls have ceased abruptly as soon as a systematic watch was set up." The final report, written by L. Elterman in November 1951, found no indication that they were "anything but natural phenomena."

Sceptics point to bright meteors. Stephen Hughes later proposed ball lightning set off by fireball meteors. Robert Hastings suggested fallout clouds from secret atomic tests. Los Alamos scientists told Ruppelt about a theory of unmanned test vehicles projected into the atmosphere from a "spaceship." LaPaz argued that the fireballs were too vivid, too flat, too low and too silent to be meteors. In 1951 he told TIME: "I just don't know what to make of it." The conference transcript was officially released on 10 July 2026. The green fireballs remain unexplained.