The La Madera Landing: Orlando Gallegos and the Blue Flames in the Creek Bed

Spring 1964. On April 24, at 5:45 p.m., police officer Lonnie Zamora reported a landing outside Socorro, New Mexico. There was blue flame, four landing depressions and scorched brush. About 31 hours later, in the mountain village of La Madera in Rio Arriba County, it seemed to happen again.

About 1:00 a.m. on Sunday, April 26, 1964, Orlando Gallegos, 35, was at his father's ranch house near the Rio Vallecitos. Accounts call him a Standard Oil employee in Santa Fe, or a truck driver. He went outside to chase horses out of the yard. A bluish glow caught his eye.

Something sat on the ground in the creek bed. Gallegos said it was shaped like a butane tank, as long as a telephone pole and about 14 feet in diameter. It looked metallic, with blue flames shooting out of holes in its sides toward the bottom. He heard no noise. As he watched over the next minute, the flames subsided.

He went back inside to tell his family. According to Coral Lorenzen, they ridiculed him. When he went outside again, the object had gone.

New Mexico State Police went out that evening. Capt. Martin E. Vigil led, with patrolmen David Kingsbury and Albert Vega. Lorenzen quoted state police as saying "the ground was still smoking 20 hours later." The burn was described as two overlapping circles about 20 feet across, as a scorched circle 10.5 to 12 metres wide, and in a Denver Post caption as a "32-by-49-feet burned spot." There were four rectangular, V-shaped depressions about 12 by 8 inches.

A Santa Fe New Mexican reporter found a melted pop bottle in the burn area. One only 5 feet away was unaffected. Vigil was convinced "something was there." He judged the burning came from "extreme heat of short duration," not a fire that had smouldered for days.

Project Blue Book saw it differently. The Air Force wrote it off as someone burning trash plus Gallegos drinking, and the summary sheets list the case as "insufficient information." J. Allen Hynek was reportedly refused authorization to visit the site, though no Air Force document confirming this has surfaced. The FBI wrote a three-page report of its own.

Many researchers kept the case open. NICAP's 1964 chronology places La Madera on James E. McDonald's list of Blue Book unknowns. Brad Sparks catalogues it as case 1561. In 1964 Coral Lorenzen of APRO said "the scorched area and the landing indentations are about the same" as at Socorro. The case later appeared in her 1966 book and in Jerome Clark's The UFO Encyclopedia.

The timing cuts both ways. Coming two days after Socorro, La Madera can be read as contagion, or as corroboration. Ufology writers have generally taken it as corroboration. In 2009 David Rudiak gathered the press, FBI and Blue Book details in a comment on Kevin Randle's blog. In 2026 the Santa Fe New Mexican named La Madera again, alongside Luis Lopez and Polvadera, among the landings reported around the time of Socorro.

No photograph of the object is known. What remains is a burned patch of ground by Vallecitos Creek, and one man's account of blue fire in the dark.