The Paul Villa Flying Saucer Photographs

Paul Villa was a mechanic living at 601 Niagara N.E., Albuquerque. He was born Apolinar Alberto Villa Jr. on September 24, 1916. He said his contacts began long before 1963. Telepathic messages since the age of five. A first physical meeting in 1953, at Long Beach, California.

Sunday, June 16, 1963. Villa said the "Space People" sent him the meeting place by telepathy. It was a prearranged meeting, held "for the specific purpose of taking pictures." He drove there alone in his pickup truck, to a spot near Peralta, some 15 miles south of Albuquerque.

There stood a landed flying saucer. He estimated it at about 70 feet in diameter. He was told it was a "mother ship for its 9 remotely-controlled monitoring disks," each 14 inches across, able to pick up pictures and sounds from any area and relay them to TV panels on board.

The ship "posed and hovered close to the surface between 2 and 4P.M." Villa took shot after shot, the trees in the foreground. Two frames showed the craft in a vertical position, on its side. The point, he was told, was to show that the Space People had created an artificial gravity within the craft. One later summary adds that it hovered above his truck and lifted it three or four feet into the air for a few minutes.

Nine occupants came out through a hermetically sealed door, four men and five women. They ranged in height from seven to nine feet and were well proportioned. Some were blond, some were red-headed, "like polished copper," and some had black hair. They said they came "from the galaxy of Coma Berenices, many light years distant," and spoke many languages as well as communicating telepathically. One caption says Villa talked with them for 90 minutes, but he did not photograph them.

Seven colour photographs came from that afternoon, shot on Kodacolor 120 film. In 1965 Gabriel Green published the story in UFO International, the magazine of the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America. According to the Blue Book file, UPI sent the pictures to hundreds of newspapers worldwide.

Project Blue Book opened a file. In August 1964 the Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base examined Photo #7. A leafless branch on the left seemed to pass behind the object. So the object sat between the branch and the camera. The estimate: 20 inches in diameter and 7 inches high. "If humanoids were inside of this alleged Flying Saucer, they would have to be less than 7 inches tall." The Air Force called it a hoax, "probably perpetrated by individuals for financial gain."

Ground Saucer Watch, under William Spaulding, later said computer enhancement revealed the strings holding the saucer, tied to the surrounding trees. Patrick Gross pointed to branches above the saucer in every picture, "very conveniently placed to hang a model saucer on a string." On Metabunk, posters compared the shape to hubcaps and a VW engine cooling fan. One spotted the truck's wing mirror reflected in the underside.

Villa reported more meetings. Easter Sunday 1965 near Bernalillo. 1966 near Algodones. Timothy Good met him in 1976 and wrote about him in Alien Base. In 2024 the photographs resurfaced in a Goddard Space Flight Center collection at the US National Archives, reported by John Greenewald of The Black Vault. How they got into Goddard's files is still unknown.