Holder's Five-Page Report on the Socorro UFO Landing

Those of you who have followed this research know that I had found a reference to a five-page report written by Captain Richard Holder about the Socorro landing. There was, in the Project Blue Book files, a single-spaced report that covered about half a page. The bottom was blank and it was clear that the pages that followed were not those written by Holder and not part of that five-page report.

I have now found four of those pages from a file that had been kept by Dr. James McDonald. After the note that said that the FBI agent and the FBI preferred that no one refer to the FBI’s participation, there is another, parenthetical sentence that introduces the information and said, “There follows Zamora’s interview.”

This matches, to a large degree, a statement that does appear in the Blue Book file but one that is attributed to Major William Conner, the UFO officer from Kirtland AFB who apparently didn’t arrived until some 96 hours after the sighting. Comparing it to that of Holder, I find that some of the strikeovers do not match and there are a couple of other differences. It would seem that Connor had the report retyped and then probably gave it to Dr. J. Allen Hynek to take back to Blue Book. I don’t think there was any attempt by Connor to deceive anyone. He was just supplying information.

So, what I had suspected and now know, Connor’s statement which did not include much in the way of identifying information about who was speaking and how it was obtained, is that it was an interview with Lonnie Zamora. The notes were taken by Holder and might have been supplemented by FBI agent Arthur Byrnes. The version I now have included Zamora’s home address and telephone number which had been redacted in the version found in Blue Book.

This is what I suspect was the fifth page of
Holder's report.

The fifth page, which I don’t have, but given this information, was probably one of those illustrations found in the Blue Book file that had been signed by Zamora. And, given that at the bottom of the last page is a small illustration of the craft, I suspect the missing illustration is the one signed by Zamora that included the symbol as seen by him.

There is nothing in Holder’s report that isn’t found in Connor’s copy of it, so there is no reason that Holder’s shouldn’t have been included in the Blue Book file. It wouldn’t be the first time that information had been duplicated. Anyway, I have, to my satisfaction, solved the mystery of the missing report, which I wouldn’t have been able to do with the help of Rob Swiatek, Ben Moss, Tony Angiola, Rob Mercer and Carmon Marano. I will now close the book on this area of the investigation and hope that I don’t have to open it again.