The Trinity UFO Crash Claim

July 16, 1945. The first atomic bomb was tested at Trinity Site in the New Mexico desert. About 20 miles away, west of San Antonio in Socorro County, lay the Padilla ranch. The witnesses said what came next happened 30 days after the bomb.

An August morning, after a thunderstorm. Reme Baca, 7, and José Padilla, 9, rode out on horseback to find a cow about to calve. A brilliant light. A crunching sound shook the ground. "It was not at all like thunder." Smoke rose a couple of canyons down. The boys found a gouge in the earth as long as a football field. At its end lay a circular object, "cockeyed and partially buried."

Baca later called it avocado shaped. About 25 or 30 feet long, 14 feet high, a dull metallic color, with a hole in its side. Inside, strange creatures moved "as if they were able to will themselves from one position to another in an instant." Padilla remembered them running back and forth, looking desperate. "They were like children." Baca described heads like a praying mantis, big bulgy eyes and needle-thin arms, and a high-pitched sound like jack rabbits in pain. The boys watched for half an hour to forty-five minutes. They left as it was getting dark.

Two days later they returned with Faustino Padilla, José's father, and state policeman Eddie Apodaca. No beings were visible. Then the Army came. A Sergeant Avila spoke of an "experimental weather balloon." Soldiers brought road building equipment, a crane and a semi-truck with a low-boy trailer. Four soldiers guarded the wreckage at all times. "Don't tell anyone about this," Faustino warned. The boys kept pieces anyway. A "memory foil" that returned to its shape when folded. A bracket Padilla said he pried from inside the craft.

The story first appeared in print in late 2003, in Ben Moffett's two articles for Socorro's Mountain Mail. In 2021, Jacques Vallée and Paola Harris published Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret. Then Congress. The defense bill for fiscal year 2023 ordered a report on the government's UAP record, beginning January 1, 1945. Many read that date as a nod to Trinity, though the law does not name the case. The New York Times asked: "Did Aliens Land on Earth in 1945?"

Investigator Douglas Dean Johnson went to the records. A taped call with Roswell author Tom Carey, less than a year before publication, held a different story. It was "about a year since the bomb." The boys went in a pickup truck. The craft was a disc. Apodaca, Johnson found, was with the Army in Europe in August 1945. He did not become a state policeman until 1951. The bracket was common aluminum with metric dimensions. Padilla's claimed service in Korea and the California Highway Patrol left no record. His son Sammy said it plainly: "My dad is a pathological liar."

Brian Dunning of Skeptoid called it "a literal hoax, made up by people who knew they were making it up." Vallée defended his method, saying he used Baca's recorded data only "when it could be compared and verified against other statements of fact." In a 2024 edition, he said Baca had told the Carey version as fiction.

Reme Baca died in 2013. The story still travels as "Roswell before Roswell," the phrase used when it reached Tucker Carlson Tonight in January 2023. It endures as a tale of a bomb, a desert and two boys on horseback.