Fake News and La Madera

The UFO community has had to put up with fake news for much more than a century. In 1897 there were a number of Great Airship stories that were printed by newspapers. The reporters and editors had to know that some of them were fake, but the interest was there, the stories were there and the bottom line is that newspapers need to make money. Hype a story that doesn’t deserve it, add details that the reporters invent and a few quotes to make the story better or just make it up completely.

Aurora, Texas in the early 1970s. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle.

I am convinced, by the evidence, or the lack there of, that the Aurora UFO crash of April, 1897, is a hoax begun by a newspaper stringer who wanted to do something for his town. Beyond the story printed in 1897, there isn’t much evidence of the airship crash, until UFO researchers became involved in the 1970s. The point here, however, is that in today’s world, this would be labeled as fake news.

To bring this closer to us, here in 2018, and keeping with the theme of the last few posts, I looked at the La Madera UFO landing. This was a sighting that took place in the hours after the Zamora sighting, and by hours, I mean something like 30 hours after the landing in Socorro. Orlando Gallegos said that just after 12:30 a.m. on April 26, 1964, he had gone outside and about 200 yards away, saw something he told Sheriff Martin Vigil, looked to be as long as a telephone pole and as big a round as a car. He said there was a bluish-white flame all around it and as Gallegos watched, the flames went out. I provided a long report on this sighting in Encounter in the Desert, for those who wish to learn more about the case.

The point here is not to talk about the sighting, but about one of the newspaper reports that appeared in the Santa Fe New Mexican on December 28, 1969, some five years after the sighting. At the end of the story written by Ron Longto, Vigil is quoted as saying, “I’m not going to speculate on just what was at La Madera that night… but I hope it never comes back.”

Dr. James McDonald

Dr. James McDonald had seen the story and wanted to check on the veracity of it, meaning the quotes attributed to Vigil, not to mention some of the facts of the case. He couldn’t get Gallegos on the telephone but he could find Vigil. In a March 12, 1970, letter, McDonald wrote:

Upon explaining the purpose of my call and citing the press story, I got a laughing but emphatic statement from Vigil, “They absolutely misquoted me.” I presumed from that he was about to disclaim everything in the story but that was not the case at all. Instead, his strong initial reaction was sensitivity to the closing sentence of the story, in which the reporter took the liberty of inventing the quote that Vigil “hopes [sic] it never comes back.” The one other disclaimer was to the effect that he had said nothing to reporter Longo to suggest that “they really put the heat on Gallegos to keep his mouth shut about that sighting in La Madera.”

There is one other thing to say about all this. I have been accused of misquoting people on a number of occasions, but those allegations were untrue. I had taped the interviews and the transcripts reflected what I had said they said. J. Bond Johnson, the man who took most of the photographs in General Ramey’s office after the Roswell story broke in 1947, said that I had misquoted him on a number of points. When I read the transcripts to him over the telephone, he said that he hadn’t said those things because they weren’t true. He was convinced that I had misquoted him and he wanted to hear the tapes so he could prove it.

I sent him an edited version so that he wouldn’t have to sit through the whole four hours of interviews, but that had the quotes on them. His response was to say that I had admitted to editing the tapes and he couldn’t find all the quotes. So, I sent him all four hours, plus the transcripts, twice, and the best he could do was show that I had left an unimportant conjunction out of the transcripts. That, of course, didn’t satisfy him and even though he had the tapes, he continued to say that I had misquoted him. He had gone from telling the truth in the interviews I conducted to an assault on me, even when he knew he was wrong.

The point is that sometimes, when people don’t like the direction of the quotes, they claim to have been misquoted. Here, with Vigil, I see no reason he would claim to have been misquoted on something as innocuous as the last line in the story unless that was something that he hadn’t said. The quote is a nice wrap up for the story, a good final line, and the impression of the reporter might have been that Vigil felt that way, but Vigil said he didn’t say it. At least he said he hadn’t said it.

Is this overly important to the overall story? Not really, other than give us a look at something that in the world today would be called fake news. Vigil didn’t seem overly upset by the quote given his reaction to it. But it also demonstrates that we, as investigators, researchers, writers, and proponents of a point of view must get this stuff right even when it is something as inconsequential as that last line. E must be careful or we can damage all the work we have done.

And, besides all that, I thought it was kind of an interesting anecdote…

Socorro UFO Landing - Fused Sand and More

There have been questions raised about aspects of this case that are buried in documentation that can be found in many locations. Given the questions about Mary Mayes and the "fused sand," I thought I would publish some of that documentation to prove its existence and let others bring their own interpretations to it. First up is from The A.P.R.0. Bulletin of May, 1964, and provides one of the hints about how extensive the search of the landing site was on the first night.

Next up is a letter from Charles Moore to James McDonald about what was found on the night of the landing. This addresses some of the issues about Mary Mayes, but also shows that others were there before her and none of them saw the fused sand that she mentioned to Stan Friedman. It also provides some commentary on the soil analysis, though the comments are not very extensive.

And here is page two, which might be more relevant.

Please note the name of another who visited the site on the evening of April 24, and who made a careful examination of the landing area. While the information is from Charles Moore, it does reflect what he had been told by John Reiche about his examination of the site. It also provides more information about the search for the fused sand.

Soil samples collected by Captain Richard Holder were turned over to Dr. J. Allen Hynek for analysis. The Air Force provided information about that, though it was not very comprehensive.

Finally, in what might explain why Mayes would have told the tale to Friedman, there is this newspaper article. This is, of course, speculation on my part, but when I saw the clipping, I thought immediately of motivation for inventing a tale. Granted, it is speculation, but it is the first document that I have seen that addresses the issue.

This is from an Albuquerque newspaper and it has been suggested that Mayes was a student in Albuquerque at one time. She could have seen the article, but I freely admitted that this is a stretch. I just thought I would mention it.

If I find other documents that seem relevant to the case, I'll publish them here. I will note that each of these documents is protected by copyright.

Socorro, Fused Sand and Mary Mayes (Update 5)

When I was researching my book on the Socorro UFO landing, I had come across information about some fused sand that had been recovered at the site. Both Ray Stanford and Jerry Clark had reported on it. The information source seemed to be unidentified, the fused sand wasn’t mentioned in the Project Blue Book files, and the analysis of other physical evidence seemed to be about whatever you wanted it to be. Jerry Clark wrote, “If such ‘notes and materials’ exist [about the fused sand], they have never come to light. They are not in the Blue Book file on the case.”

This seemed to be more of the unconfirmed information that dot this case. We have those pesky three people (or rather the three telephone calls) to the Socorro police about the flame in the sky as noted by Captain Richard Holder. We have the car of tourists talking to Opal Grinder about low-flying aircraft that nearly smashed into them. We have the auditory witnesses, mentioned by Ray Stanford, who heard the roar of the object but who apparently didn’t see an object and whose names have been lost. Given all that, and the fact that this information, about the fused sand was not very well documented, I reported what I knew and let it go.

Dick Hall

But, as always happens, once the book is published, new information is found. This time it was spurred by a question at this blog about that particular aspect of the case, one that I didn’t think of as important. I decided that I needed to know more about this, so I went back to Stanford’s book, Socorro Saucer in a Pentagon Pantry. His entry was somewhat misleading, given the way he reported on it. Although he credited Dr. James McDonald as the source, he failed to mention it was in a letter to Dick Hall of NICAP, who provided a copy to him. Stanford wrote:

…a woman who is now [1968] a radiological chemist with the Public Health Service in Las Vegas [Nevada]… [who] was involved in some special analysis of materials collected at the Socorro site, and when she was there the morning after, she claims that there was a patch of melted and resolidified [vitrified] sand right under the landing area. I [McDonald] have talked to her both by telephone and in person here in Tucson recently. Shortly after she finished the work [on the Socorro specimens], air force personnel came and took all her notes and materials and told her she wasn’t to talk about it anymore (My [Stanford’s] emphasis. A copy in my files.)

That, of course, is not the whole story. In fact, as noted, this is very misleading based on everything that McDonald put in his letter. When you read what McDonald wrote, it tells us some more about all this. He wrote (differences highlighted in bold:

One last point: Have you ever heard of any reports that there was a patch of “fused sand” near the site of the Socorro landing? As a result of a remark that Hank Kalapaca made to me at lunch in the Rayburn building on 7/29 [I will assume here the year was 1968], I followed up a lead that Stan Friedman picked up when he spoke to a nuclear society in Las Vegas. I’m still in the process of checking it, so won’t elaborate the details here. Briefly, a woman who is now a radiological chemist with the Public Health Service in Las Vegas was involved in some special analyses of materials collected at the Socorro site, and when she was there, the morning after, she claims that there was a patch of melted and resolidified sand right under the landing area. I have talked to her both by telephone and in person here in Tucson recently, and am asking Charlie Moore to do some further checking. I must say, it’s very hard to imagine how such material could have been there not only on the evening of the 24^th but still there on the morning of the 25^th without it ever having been reported before. She mentioned it to Stan rather casually, as if she assumed that everybody knew about the fused sand. She was surprised to be told, especially by me, that nothing like that had ever before been reports. She did the analyses on the plant-fluids exuded from the stems of greasewood and mesquite that had been scorched. She said there were a few organic materials they couldn’t identify, but most of the stuff that had come out through the cracks and blisters in the stems were just saps from the phloem and xylem. Shortly after she finished the work, Air Force personnel came and took all her notes and materials and told her she wasn’t to talk about it anymore. Grand coverup? Not necessarily. The fused sand might be another matter.

By comparing the two reports, that is, what McDonald actually wrote with what Stanford provided, you can see that this information isn’t quite as strong as Stanford suggested. In fact, McDonald didn’t seem to be particularly impressed with it, but he did what all good researchers would do. He decided to see what he could learn about the witness, who isn’t named here but whose name appears in other correspondence written by McDonald, and to see if he could find additional information.

The first thing that I wanted to know, now that I had a copy of the letter, is what Stan might have remembered about this. It was, of course, fifty years ago, so his

Mary Mayes, 1959.

memory might be a little vague. He told me that as best he could recall, “Mary Mayes approached me after I lectured to a technical group saying that she had been a student at NMIT [New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology] at Socorro when she was asked to check on the soil which she had done. I told Jim [McDonald] about it as he was much closer obviously than I was. No need for me to be a middleman.”

The next question was if this Mary Mayes’ name could be verified since it wasn’t mentioned in the original letter. On November 25, 1968, Charles Moore (yes, that Charles Moore) reported that he had talked with both Raymond Senn and Sam Chavez about the melted sand. Neither of them saw any melted sand on the site and neither remembered Mayes, though in his letter, Moore incorrectly identified her as Nayes. He also mentioned a Mary Rumph, which as I have just learned from Don  Ecsedy was her maiden name. 

And, since we’re trying to get to the bottom of all this, I’ll note here that Moore wrote, “Our instrument man at the Institute, Mr. John Reiche, visited the Zamora site on the night of April 24^th, 1964. John, an active amateur scientist and rock collector, tells me that he saw nothing unusual other than a burned bush, the markings on the ground which were at that time ringed by stones. Reiche appears agnostic about the whole sighting but places no high value on Zamora’s credibility. He says that Zamora reported other highly unusual events such as deer passing through the Socorro plaza at night when no one else has ever seen such things in modern times.”

This, is, of course, disturbing. It suggests something about Zamora that had not been mentioned by anyone else over the years, and while this letter, from Moore to McDonald has been available to researchers for a long, it seems that information from it had been overlooked.

One of the landing pad impressions found by Zamora. Photo courtesy USAF.

Moore goes on to say, “Reiche has also told me that the markings on the ground (presumably made by the support gear of the flying object) seems ‘wrong’. The soil on the sides of the indentations was loose and appeared as though it had been moved by a shovel; it did not appear to have the character that it should have, had it been made by the intrusion of a load bearing support.”

Which is another bit of information that hasn’t seen much in the way of publicity. While it seems that Reiche doesn’t care about any agenda, only the truth, it is also clear that he has raised some questions about Zamora and about the landing gear traces. I haven’t seen much like this in the research that I had conducted until now. But I will note that some of that loose dirt seemed to be explained by the landing gear sliding in the dirt as the weight was applied to the landing pad and the dirt shifted under the added weight.

Charles Moore at the Institute Library. Photo copyright
by Kevin Randle.

As for the melted sand, Moore wrote, “As I told you earlier, I screened the dirt in the arroyo bottom in an effort to find any evidence of fused material and found nothing that suggested the spalling off of rhyolite, melting of any vesicular lava nor the fusing of any sand. While it is true that the arroyo is subject to washing during summer thunderstorms, the fragments of the burned bush are still there, and I examined carefully the vicinity of the roots of the burned bush but found no evidence of fusing heat.”

We now have evidence that suggests Mayes’ tale might not be true. Although Moore called her Nayes in his letter, it would seem that if Senn heard the name Nayes, he would have mentioned that he knew someone named Mayes. Instead, he denied knowing her.

To complicate the issue, McDonald asked Mayes about these negative results. He talked to her on the telephone and then in person. He said that she had “remarried as Mrs. Mary White.”

According to McDonald’s letter to Moore dated April 2, 1970, mentioning the investigation, he wrote:

She [Mayes/White] seemed to be quite astonished that Senn said he did not know her, and she said not only had her family known him for many years, but she, herself, had “stood up for him” at his wedding… I had frankly tended to dismiss her story on the basis of what you’d turned up and Senn’s not knowing her. She again went very briefly over it - - where the fused sand lay relative to the impression, etc. No signs of evasive coverup or backtracking to mend her story. And reexpressed surprise at Senn’s saying he didn’t know her.

I pointed out that Reiche saw nothing like that when he was there, and she seemed genuinely puzzled.

Don Ecsedy tells me that there was a fellow namd Rumpf at Senn's wedding and is mentioned on the documentation available on line. So it seems possible that Mayes was at the wedding but that Senn knew her as Mary Rumpf rather than Mary Mayes. But I also have to wonder why, when McDonald asked her about this, she didn't mention that she was Mary Rumpf at the time. It would have cleared up this one point of disagreement and that she didn't seems curious.

There are more technical aspects to this claim of melted sand. According to a report from McDonald to Colonel L. DeGoes (apparently an officer assigned to ATIC at the time), “Charlie [Moore] took to the lab at NMIMT specimens of vesicular lavas that are abundant near the site and also a sample of a rhyolite present in abundance. A welding torch melted the vesicular lava to a smooth obsidian-like form, without sputtering. The torch would not melt the rhyolite, but it flaked off. A thorough search by Moore and a graduate student failed to turn up any sputtered-drop spherules in the dirt near the center of the site.”

But here’s the rub. Moore told McDonald that he had gotten to know Zamora and according to that same report by McDonald:

It came out a few weeks ago in the course of a rather careful recheck done by C.B. Moore of NMIMT at Socorro. Charlie has been out to the site with Zamora and… Zamora happened to volunteer the information about a “bubbly lava” rock one side of which had melted down. It was something like a foot across… and was located near the geometric center of the four leg holes i.e., right in the most heavily charred by the flame of the object in takeoff. Zamora said “some official” took it away that night… Holder makes no mention of such a rock…

Going through the entire Blue Book file on the case, there is no mention of the fused sand by anyone who was on the scene. From the moment that Zamora saw the thing in the arroyo there were people on the site. Holder even had military

Although this picture has been published suggesting it is Mary Mayes on the scene, this photograph was staged some time later with Zamora looking on.

police from White Sands cordon the area, take measurements and preserve the scene. Although it is not clear if the MPs were there overnight, but next day, there were any number of people on the scene, but no one mentioned Mayes and her colleagues being there. They would have needed some guidance to find the right place, so they would have had to come into contact with the Socorro police or the government officials (Holder and FBI Agent Byrnes). Photographs, taken the evening of the 24^th and at other times give no hint of the melted sand, and those taking samples, from the damaged bush, from the soil around the landing area, and from other parts of the arroyo have nothing to suggest a high heat that would melt the sand.

Here's something else. According to Stanford, when he was on the site with Hynek and Zamora, he, Zamora, spotted a rock with what looked like metal scrapings on it. He pointed it out, but it seemed that no one cared about these possible metal sample from an alien spacecraft. Once the site was cleared, sometime that afternoon, Stanford returned and retrieved the rock and its metallic samples. This does not seem to be the same rock that was near the melted sand that Mayes mentioned and that Zamora seemed to confirm existed some two years later but I wonder if Zamora wasn’t confused by the disappearance of the rock taken by Stanford.

Zamora, and others, thought that the Air Force had retrieved the melted sand sometime later and that it was taken to a secret lab for analysis. Again, there is no testimony anywhere in the Blue Book files to confirm that this melted sand existed or that there was any analysis done of it. There are, in the documents I now have, a suggestion that Holder had written a five-page report, but I have not located it yet.

To recap what we’ve learned here. Mayes told Friedman about the melted sand some two years after the landing and that she had analyzed it. Friedman passed the information to McDonald, who followed up on it. Mayes said she was at the scene the next day, April 25, but that seems to be unlikely given the statements of others. At any rate, she claimed to have found an area of melted sand near the burned bush and recovered it, taking it to her lab for analysis. Once that was completed, the Air Force arrived, confiscated all the material and her notes, and told her not to talk about it. She had nothing to prove any of this, though there are those who accept the story without question.

Apparently, no one who was on the site on the evening of April 24^th, who examined the burned bush carefully, who studied the landing gear impressions, and made measurements, noticed the area of melted sand near the bush and therefore none reported it. Other examinations of the site, in the months and years to follow found no evidence of heat high enough to fuse the sand, or any other indications of fused sand. It would seem, if we accept Mayes as telling the truth, that she collected the entirety of this evidence.

We have found, or rather Don Ecsedy Reported, that Mary G. Mayes is listed as a junior in the University of New Mexico 1959 Yearbook (page 42). He also reported that she had two years of college in Texas, but then she seemed to have claimed that she had attended NMIMT at some point so that she was familiar with the Socorro area. She told McDonald that she was a doctoral student at the University of New Mexico. She drops out of the picture after telling her tale to Stan and the beginning of the investigation by McDonald. In a letter dated March 13, 1969, McDonald wrote, “You 11/25 letter, for which thanks, indicated that neither Senn nor Chaves could in any way confirm the statements made to me by Mrs. Mary Nayes (sic) concerning the ‘fused sand.’ That certainly tends to cast strong doubt on her account. I have written to her but she has never replied, which may be further indication of something seriously amiss there.”

This was, of course superseded by his April 2, 1970 letter that actually explains nothing, other to reaffirm her original story. In the long run, no one can place her at the scene, no one saw the fused sand she talked about and she had no documentation to back up what she had claimed. All of this might have gotten more attention than it deserved, though there are still some avenues to pursue. (I will note here that Rumpf/Mayes/White died in 2007.) For those who wish to know who is Colonel DeGoes see:

 ftp://rock.geosociety.org/pub/Memorials/v29/degoes.pdf. 

Overall, this might be as far as we can take this, which is farther than I thought we could get. I have a couple of inquiries out that might pay off, but then again, we are pursuing something that is now over half a century old. Time might just be the one hurtle that we are unable to leap.