Ray Stanford's Socorro Photograph

For those interested in such things, Ray Stanford had claimed that he had a photograph of a Socorro-like UFO, he had taken after the Lonnie Zamora sighting. He was careful who saw the picture. I’m not sure his rationale for that, but there were very few who had seen it. We had to rely on their descriptions of the picture, if they were inclined to give us any information about it.

Ben Moss, who had worked with Stanford for years, thought the picture to be important. He had mentioned to me that it looked somewhat like an egg-shaped UFO with landing gear underneath it. With Stanford’s passing, and with Stanford’s wife’s permission, Ben searched through the mountains of material that Stanford had collected. He didn’t want to say anything about this, though he had located a print. He wanted to have the negative.

From what he emailed me, he thought he had the original negative, but, apparently, it was only a duplicate. It follows here:

The Ray Stanford photo of the Socorro like-object.

Close up of the object, whatever it might be.

Here is the important part of Ben’s email to me. “If you wanted to post the Socorro craft pictures I sent, please feel free to do so with any commentary you want to add, I'm sure the usual suspects will be commenting on them. I discovered that the picture of the dynamite shack that I thought had the images was the wrong one, it is in the original polaroid Ray took without the kid standing in front of it. I will scan that picture in January, but have no negative, yet I did find it at Ray’s house listed as 'original', and as I examined it there are several objects in the background sky, I just need to get a high DPI scan to confirm.”

Here’s where we are with this. A solid analysis has not been made but Ben plans to do that. We have an interesting story that connects to the Zamora sighting, we have photographic evidence, but those of us who have been around for a while, we know we need the original. Ben is attempting to find that doing the follow up investigation as time permits.

Without the original, and without a solid analysis, I can say nothing about the authenticity of the photograph. All I’m able to say is that we now know what it looks like. We need the analysis to determine the important of the picture. 

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.

Zamora vs People

Last night, while appearing on Martin Willis’ Podcast UFO (see http://podcastufo.com/about/) to talk about Encounters in the Desert, I had a chance to speak with Ray Stanford. I believe Ray is the last surviving investigator or witness who was on the site of the Socorro UFO landing in the days that

Martin Willis

followed. He provided some interesting insight to what he had seen and done but there was one point that he made, which is that Lonnie Zamora had never used the word “people” to refer to the figures he had seen near the landed craft.

I did know, based on my research, that FBI agent Arthur Byrnes had suggested to Zamora that he might not want to mention those creatures because he might find himself the butt of jokes. UFOs in the sky were fine, and landed craft were okay, but the actual sighting of the crew on the outside was just too hard for some to accept. This gave rise to the idea that Zamora had only seen white coveralls in the distance and had seen no real detail.

While I suggested that the official file did provide a number of words for the crew, Ray insisted that people wasn’t one of them. He objected strongly to that word, though I’m not sure why. He did say that in his discussions with Zamora, only the word “figures” had been used.

As they often say, “Let’s go to the video tape,” which, of course, doesn’t exactly apply here but we can go the documents created at the time. What do they say about this?

Coral and Jim Lorenzen had been in Socorro within 48 hours of the landing and had the opportunity to interview Zamora. In the May 1964 issue of The A.P.R.O. Bulletin, she wrote that she had asked Zamora about what he had seen. He said he hadn’t seen any “little men,” which is not the word people but does move us beyond “figures.”

When Lorenzen pointed out that he had already described them in the press and that description had been published, he expanded on it, saying that they looked like “young boys” or “small adults.” I will go out on a limb here and point out that the quotation marks are used in that article suggesting that they are the words of Zamora. Still not people, but moving us even closer.

In the Project Blue Book files there are various reports written by a number of men. In one of those documents, dated May 13, 1964, written just over two weeks after the event, it says, “At this point he saw two people in white coveralls…” That moves us directly to the use of the word. The document was written by Colonel Eric T. de Jonckheere. His name surfaces in a number of reports of UFOs besides the one in Socorro.

But the use of the term is not in quotation marks and it could be argued that de Jonckheere had interpreted what Zamora said to mean people although he hadn’t used that specific word. Fair enough.

In a report written by Major William Connor, who has been identified as the Public Information Officer at Kirtland AFB but whose job was probably a bit more significant, wrote in his report that Zamora said, “The only time I saw these two persons was when I stopped… These persons appeared normal in shape – but possible they were small adults or large kids.”

In another document, either written by Zamora, or dictated by him, he said, “Saw two people in white coveralls very close to the object. One of these persons seemed to turn and look straight at my car and seemed startled…”

Although it was argued that these weren’t exactly Zamora’s words, they are in quotation marks that suggest that they were. In that document, which is a partial transcript of what Zamora had told those first investigations, it seems that he did use “people” to describe the beings.

Other documents, however, seem to cloud the issue. T/Sgt David Moody, the Air Force investigator on the scene, wrote in his undated report, “…it [the craft] appeared to be a thing on four pronged legs and the two white things (described as coveralls) were no longer visible.”

This, of course, moves us away from people, but by the time Moody had arrived, Zamora had become reluctant to talk about seeing anything at all. But the newspapers were not reluctant to print stories about the landing. The Alamogordo Daily News reported that Zamora “saw two ‘men’ adjacent to it wearing white suits.”

The Albuquerque Tribune, on April 25, the day after the sighting, reported, “Moving close he [Zamora] saw two figures…”

Interestingly, the Albuquerque Journal reported on April 27, “Zamora denied that he had seen any little creatures around the object…”

Later in that same article, however, Zamora talked about seeing white coveralls near the craft. According to the article, “…whether anything was in them he did not know.”

Now we have moved from a debate about whether Zamora ever said “people” in relation to the figures he had seen to a denial that he had seen anything other than the craft and white coveralls. This, of course, reflects the confusion of the time and the suggestion by Byrnes that Zamora might be better off he said nothing about the alien beings.

The El Paso Herald-Post, reinforced the white coveralls without anything in them on April 27. According to that article, “Zamora said he also saw what looked like white coveralls but could not tell if anyone – or anything – was in them.”

Finally, the Socorro Defensor Chieftain reported that Zamora has seen two persons near the object in a gully. Given that it was the local newspaper, you would think that one of their reporters or the editor would have interviewed Zamora, but there are no direct quotes from him, though others, such as Captain Richard Holder are quoted. The only thing about the beings in quotation marks are the words, “child-like.’”

The point here, maybe unnecessarily, is that according to the documentation from 1964, within days of the sighting, Zamora had used a number of words to describe the beings he saw. One of those documents, in the Project Blue Book files, is a transcript of Zamora’s testimony and while it might not have been tape recorded, it is a transcript of his words. He said they were “people.” He also said they were “child-like,” and said they were “persons,” but he also said they were figures, and it is clear that after he talked with the government officials, he said that he had only seen “white coveralls.”

But the real point, one that is missed as we drive deep into the weeds, is that Zamora said he saw two beings, two humanoids, standing near the craft and that once they returned inside, it lifted off with a roar. We can argue about the precise words, but that only hides the real issue. Zamora was talking about something that was very strange and it frightened him badly.

You can read the full Socorro landing story and review the words of Lonnie Zamora here:

https://www.amazon.com/Encounter-Desert-Alien-Contact-Socorro/dp/1632651130/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1508096455&sr=8-1&keywords=encounter+in+the+desert

Chasing Footnotes -The Socorro Case

As anyone who visits here regularly, you know that I chase footnotes. I sometimes try to find specific instances to make the case, but when I search without a known destination, it seems to be an impossible task. Instead, I find the bad footnotes by accident. This is just something that cannot be forced.

Lonnie Zamora

As you all also know, I have been looking into the symbol that Lonnie Zamora reported seeing on the side of the landed UFO. That research has bled into other areas, including the idea that other members of the Socorro Police Department or the New Mexico State Police saw the same object as Zamora. In the Unidentified Flying Objects Briefing Document: The Best Available Evidence compiled by Don Berliner, Marie Galbraith and Antonio Huneeus and “presented” by CUFOS, FUFOR and MUFON, in December, 1995, I read the short segment on the Socorro case. They wrote, “At this time, Zamora was joined by a police sergeant [Chavez] who watched the craft fly away into the distance.”

This is an argument, that Chavez saw the object, that has been made here by David Rudiak and one that Ray Stanford as well as Ben Moss and Tony Angiola shared during the interviews on my X-Zone Broadcast Network radio show. The links can be found in the postings for those programs. It is not this argument, that Chavez saw the object, which I’m concerned with here, but with the footnote about where this information was found or where it could be verified. According to Berliner, Galbraith and Hunees, this was a “Written statement by Lonnie Zamora to Project Blue Book, 1964; reprinted in Steiger, Brad, ed. Project Blue Book, ibid.”

In the last weeks I have been through the Blue Book files several times. I have discussed this idea of other police witnesses, both privately with a number of people and publicly on this blog. I have a copy of Steiger’s book and a complete copy of the Blue Book file on the case. Nowhere in the statement by Zamora does it suggest that the police sergeant arrived in time to see the UFO as it disappeared in the distance. In fact, Zamora in that statement said:

As I was calling Nep [a police radio operator], I could still see the object. The object seemed to lift up slowly, and to “get small” in the distance very fast. It seemed to just clear Box Canyon or Six Mile Canyon mountain. It disappeared as it went over the mountains. It had no flame whatsoever as it was traveling over the ground and made no smoke or noise…

Zamora said that he then went down to where the craft had landed and saw that one of the bushes was still smoking. He then said:

Gave directions to Nep Lopez at radio and to Sgt. M.S. Chavez to get there. Went down to where the object was (had been), and I noted the bush was burning in several places. At that time, I heard Sgt. Chavez calling me on radio for my location, and I returned to my car, told him he was looking at me. Then Sgt. Chavez came up and asked me what the trouble was, because I was sweating and he told me I was white, very pale. I asked the Sergeant to see what I saw, and that was the burning bush. Then Sgt. Chavez and I went to the spot, and Sgt. Chavez pointed out the tracks.

It is clear from Zamora’s statement in the Blue Book files and in Steiger’s book, that Chavez didn’t arrive until after the UFO had disappeared in the distance. Now we really don’t have to go through the arguments again about how Chavez did arrive in time to see it in the sky. What I’m saying here is that the sources quoted for the information do not support that idea. We can argue about other sources, but in this very limited case, those additional sources are irrelevant because they weren’t cited. The sources quoted do not support the statement, and that is all that is relevant here.

A Final Analysis of the Socorro Symbol

It is time to put the controversy about the symbol Lonnie Zamora saw to rest. The preponderance of the evidence suggests that Zamora saw what I have begun to call the “umbrella” symbol. I say that based on the “official” Project Blue Book files, what those investigators, the civilians that include Coral and Jim Lorenzen and Ray Stanford and even Rick Baca said in the days after the sighting and what was printed in some of the newspapers and in the APRO Bulletin.

Although I have gone over this before, I will repeat it here. In the minutes after the sighting, according to the testimony given on the night of April 24, 1964, Zamora scribbled the symbol on a scrap of paper. That scrap is in the Project Blue Book files and it was signed by Lonnie Zamora. There have been suggestions that it isn’t the original because Zamora would have drawn it on something else or that it was inserted into the file later. The only truth we have here is that the scrap of paper is in the Blue Book file and that Lonnie Zamora signed it.  It is clear from the deterioration of the tape that it had been in the file for a very long time. The testimony tells us that there would be a piece of paper and there is one. There is no evidence to suggest it is anything other than what it purports to be.

Also contained in the “official” Project Blue Book files is a drawing by Zamora of the craft with the symbol on the side. It is of the umbrella symbol and once again, Zamora signed it. This too argues for the authenticity of the umbrella symbol.

There is a report in the file which seems to have been prepared by Major William Connor, who was the Public Relations Officer at Kirkland Air Force Base in Albuquerque and who escorted Hynek around New Mexico when he made his investigation in the days that followed. He is reporting on his interview with Zamora. On page three of that report, he included an illustration of the umbrella symbol.

There was a suggestion that Zamora not reveal the real nature of the symbol so that if others reported seeing a symbol it could be cross-checked without fear of contamination. Almost everyone thought this was a good idea but the fact is, the symbol was revealed within a couple of months when the Lorenzens published it in the pages of the May issue of their APRO Bulletin. The symbol they published was the umbrella symbol. To be fair, they also had a different symbol in that same issue, though it vaguely resembles the umbrella symbol.

There is another source for the umbrella symbol. Ricky Baca, a teenager in 1964, drew the craft along with the umbrella symbol on it within two weeks of the sighting. It was ordered by the city attorney whose legal secretary was Baca’s father. The thinking was that a youngster such as Baca would be free of any bias that would influence his illustration. Baca and Zamora sat in the city attorney’s office for two hours working on the sketch. Baca took the job seriously and altered the sketch and the elements in it according to Zamora’s instructions. It was later published in the Socorro newspaper but the symbol had been “whited out” on instructions by Hynek, according to one source. However, Baca retained the sketch and a picture of him holding it many years later was published in the Socorro newspaper and the umbrella symbol is clearly visible on it.

Finally, as I have noted, in a letter to Dick Hall, Ray Stanford himself confirmed that the umbrella symbol was the correct one. Stanford included, in his letter to Hall, a sketch of the “fake” symbol, which at that time, just days after he returned from Socorro, was the inverted “V” with the three lines through it.

This inverted “V” symbol was the first published by the national media. In a newspaper story on April 30, that symbol is shown. If, as has been documented by not only the Lorenzens, but also Captain Richard Holder, that the real symbol had been withheld, then how did the newspapers obtain it only days after the sighting. There is nothing in the official files to suggest that this symbol is the correct one.

Dr. J. Allen Hynek, in a handwritten letter on September 7, included an illustration of the symbol. While it is of an inverted “V” and it does contain three horizontal lines, it does not actually resemble the symbol as suggested by others. There is a line above the apex of the “V” and two lines between the legs but that do not touch them. To the discerning eye, it can’t really be called a match.

The best evidence for this symbol seems to be two pieces of paper found in the files that had been retained by former Blue Book officer, Carmon Marano. The story of these files was explored in my interview with him on November 2 and can been accessed on YouTube here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wyz0ZAvhv7g

This information was not part of the official Socorro file and they don’t seem to have been filed with that information. In other words, as David Rudiak tells us about other information from that same source, we don’t know who drew them, who made the notes or when those notes were written. Rudiak suggested that given the wording, which is close to that from the newspaper articles, someone might have been jotting down this information from that source. It might not be based on testimony from those directly involved, but part of the deception of the faked symbol.

Ray Stanford also suggests that Mike Martinez, who was a police dispatcher, said, in Spanish in a recorded interview, that the inverted “V” with the three lines was the correct one. That interview, recorded in the police station, is difficult to understand because of the background noise. I guess the question here is if Martinez was sticking to the script of not revealing the real symbol or if he thought he knew what it was.

As I review all the documentation, all the testimony that is available, everything that was in Carmon Marano’s copy of the Blue Book file, the obvious conclusion is that the umbrella symbol is the correct one. There is nothing in the file to suggest that those signed by Zamora were faked, it is clear that those who spoke to Zamora in the hours after the event all were told of the umbrella symbol, Zamora himself said that he had drawn the symbol on a scrap of paper and that scrap is in the file showing the umbrella symbol and there is nothing in the official file other than Hynek’s loose interpretation of the inverted “V” to suggest otherwise. Given all this, I say that the correct symbol is the umbrella symbol… let the arguments flow.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Ray Stanford

For those of you who thought that this week’s show would feature Brad Steiger, I received an email from Brad saying that he was sick and would have to postpone. That left me with a hole, but I contacted Ray Stanford who graciously agreed to move his interview from November 9 to this week. Brad will be scheduled for a future show.

There were questions left over from my other Socorro UFO landing/Lonnie Zamora sighting show with Ben Moss and Tony Angiola and Ray was the man who had the answers. He went into detail about the picture he had taken of the dynamite shack that Zamora thought might have exploded, and what that photograph showed. We also discussed the idea that Zamora hadn’t talked of figures but only white coveralls. Ray, who might be the only living person who was involved in the original investigation in late April 1964, provided his insights into what he had seen, and what he had heard and how this white coverall confusion came to be.

You can listen to the program here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8QfQ4F_7ww

Ray Stanford wrote (for those who wanted to find a copy of his book), “The email address for people to use to pay for the book at PayPal is: raystanford38@gmail.com

“If you can post that with the statement that the signed, first edition, brand new book costs $50 + $10 for shipping and handling via Priority Mail, it will be appreciated.”

And, of course, there are those papers about dinosaurs that might interest some of you. As I mentioned, the address is a little complicated for a radio show. You can find them here:

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/newborn_dinosaur_discovered_in_maryland

and

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23020141?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

If all goes well, next week I’ll talk with a man who had been part of the Blue Book team for the last couple of years and who had the boxes that Rob Mercer found. He is fascinating if for no other reason than he was one of those assigned to Blue Book and we can prove it.

The Socorro Symbol - Resolved?

For the last several weeks I have been looking into the symbol that Lonnie Zamora saw on the side of the object he reported. (Note to all: I am not suggesting anything other than Zamora saw an object with a symbol on it. I am not drawing any conclusions about that object’s origin). During the research, I have found a variety of documents, I have received assistance from a variety of investigators in a variety of locations, and I have been able to draw some pretty specific conclusions.

For those interested, I have found about a dozen different designs, four of them in the Project Blue Book files. The controversy seemed to arise when Captain Richard Holder (who lived in Socorro), assigned as the up range commander at the White Sands Missile Range, which is not all that far from Socorro, asked Zamora and others not to reveal the true symbol. His thinking was, and it seems that Jim and Coral Lorenzen of APRO felt the same way, that this could help eliminate hoaxers and confabulators from the witness pool. Oddly, in their APRO Bulletin of May 1964, they print illustrations of the craft with an insignia on the side. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the symbol in one of the illustrations differs from that in the other.

The first of the symbols from the APRO Bulletin.

The second of the symbols from the APRO Bulletin.

Within days of the sighting, on April 30, 1964, San Antonio Express among other newspapers, complicated the matter in a report that said, “Witnesses to the craft seen by Zamora said it was marked with a red inverted V with a line or several lines horizontally through the V.”  

An Associated Press Story, also on April 30 suggested that Hynek was one of those witnesses. They reported, “The scientist [Hynek] also discussed the markings that Zamora said he saw on the side of the object, a red, inverted V with bars through it.”

Ray Stanford reported that he had recorded on tape, a conversation with Socorro police dispatcher Mike Martinez telling him that Zamora described the design as "...un 'V' invertido, con tres líneas debajo," meaning "an inverted 'V' with three lines beneath it". I don’t have an indication of when that recording was made, but it would seem to confirm that the inverted “V” with the three lines is the correct symbol. Note I said “would seem.”

Hynek's inverted "V."

This does nothing to answer the question. Both symbols, or variations of them, were reported in the days that followed Zamora’s sighting. But there is one that appeared in the Blue Book file on the case that might give a hint. Although Hynek, in a letter dated September 7, 1964, drew a symbol that was an inverted “V”, he placed one of the lines above the apex of the “V” and two short lines that did not touch the sides inside the legs of the “V.” Ray Stanford, when he found the letter at the National Archives (in what had to be the Blue Book files) believed that it corroborated the inverted “V” with the three lines through it. I don’t believe it does.

Instead, I look at the symbol that Zamora signed. This is the inverted “V” with the “umbrella” over it, and a perpendicular line into the apex of the “V” and a line under that. Zamora signed this drawing, which to me, suggests that it is the correct symbol. None of the other competing illustrations in the file were signed by Zamora, though there are other representations of something like it.

But there are other documents in the file and these, I believe, give the nod to what I think of as the umbrella symbol. First, is one on a scrap of paper and the notation on the paper suggests that it was drawn within five minutes of the

The first drawing made by Zamora.

sighting, whenever that it might have been, and is the correct one. This tiny scrap of paper, also in the Blue Book file, is also signed by Zamora.

Finally, there is an undated, unsigned report in the file but it seems that it was written weeks or months after the sighting. I base this on the comments section that mentions other sightings after the fact and the analysis of some of the soil samples that had been gathered. This document also shows the “umbrella” symbol, which reinforces the idea that it is the correct one.

The "umbrella" symbol from the undated report in the Blue Book file.

Here’s my thinking on this. I can see no reason why a false symbol would be included in the file without a notation that it is a false symbol. Hynek’s illustration, drawn months after the sighting looks more like he was recreating a symbol that he had been told about rather than he was drawing the real thing. Besides, he never saw it himself and because of that, and because it was months later, no one bothered to mention a thing about it.

I will note that I have, in my possession, a copy of a handwritten letter by Ray Stanford dated May 3, 1964, in which he wrote, “I advise not letting out the real (as told in the tape by Mike Martinez) description of symbol on UFO, as if person(s) claim UFO ‘contact’ with an “A” or “A” (here he drew the one with the three bars through it) on side we can suspect a hoax.” (Or, in other words, he is contradicting himself when he now claims that the inverted “V” with the three lines is the real one.) 

Stanford's May 3, 1964 letter to Richard Hall.

With the symbol signed by Zamora, we have, not only the one reported to have been drawn within minutes of the departure of the craft, but another, apparently created within hours, while the very first investigators were on the scene. It would seem to me that two signed symbols in the file outweigh the contradicted inverted “V” with the three lines. It would seem to me that the correct symbol is the one we thought it was all along.

The Socorro Symbols - Redux

A couple of weeks ago I interviewed Ben Moss and Tony Angiola on the radio version of this blog. At the time they said a couple of things that I attempted to follow up on while we were on the air but didn’t get good answers. In the weeks that followed, I again tried to get more information and now have some of that. Ben Moss sent me a DVD copy of their presentation at the recent MUFON Symposium in Orlando, Florida, which provided some of the answers, and he has been sending me additional information through email. Here’s what I have learned.

First, they had mentioned a picture taken in Socorro though it wasn’t clear if there were pictures, plural, when they were taken, and who had taken them. The presentation answered all these questions. There is a single picture; it shows a number of objects, one of which has landing gear lowered and one that is six-tenths of a mile from the camera lens. The picture was taken by Ray Stanford some four months after the Zamora sighting. Although Stanford said they were “Zamora-like” objects, I haven’t seen the picture though both Ben Moss and Tony Angiola said they have. According to them, Stanford had been attempting to photograph the dynamite shed that Zamora had worried about and the objects were in the background. I don’t know why this information didn’t come out decades ago but I do know that Stanford said he would release the picture when he was ready. This, of course, worries me greatly given the history of claims of photographic evidence from important cases that we’ve dealt with in the recent past.

The Zamora symbol that has been featured as

the true symbol for decades.

Second is the claim that four newspapers of the time had printed either the upside down “V” with the bars through it or a variation of that or they had published a description of it. We’ve all seen the official version that has appeared in magazines and newspapers and we’ve all heard that Zamora was asked (ordered?) to change the design for security reasons. On KSRC radio Zamora told Walter Strode when asked about the symbol, “No, sir, I couldn’t tell you that, because they still don’t want me to say nothing about the markings.” You can listen to it here thanks to David Rudiak and Wendy Connors:

http://www.roswellproof.com/Socorro/Socorro_Zamora_interview.html

Zamora was also interviewed by Jim and Coral Lorenzen the day after the sighting. At the time they lived in Alamogordo which is not all that far from Socorro. When they asked about the design he had seen, he refused to tell them anything about it because he had been told not to by intelligence officers. While I’m not sure it was an intelligence officer who made the “request” it is clear someone in authority had. There were military officers in Socorro, representatives of the State Police and at least one FBI agent, who requested that it not be mentioned he was involved.  (The Lorenzen’s take on this can be seen in the APRO Bulletin for May 1964.)

There are descriptions of the symbol directly attributed to Zamora. In an AP story on April 29, 1964, and carried in many newspapers around the country it was reported, “Officer Zamora said the object he saw last Friday night was a brilliant white. He said there was a red marking on it like an upside down V with three lines across the top, through the middle and at the bottom.” (One of the sources for this is the Dubuque Telegraph-Herald for Wednesday, April 29, 1964, page 1.)  

A few days after the sighting, Dr. J. Allen Hynek was interviewed by the same reporter who had interviewed Zamora, on the same radio station, which is Shrode at KSRC. Hynek was asked what the marking was and Hynek replied, “He [Zamora] described it to me as an inverted ‘V’ with a sort of bar across it…” You can listen to this here:

http://www.roswellproof.com/Socorro/Socorro_Hynek_interview.html

This is actually at odds with the true symbol as has been suggested recently. Rather than three lines through it, Hynek said one line. Without a drawing, the many descriptions we now have can be interpreted in various ways. There are, however, drawings. There is the one that we all are familiar with which has the half circle over the inverted “V” with a single horizontal line under it. It is claimed that this is a faked symbol made up to keep the real one secret to weed out copycats. There is some support for this, with Zamora claiming that he was told not to talk about the symbol, and, according to the Lorenzen’s they couldn’t get him to tell then what the symbol looked like.

There is a hand-written letter by Hynek dated September 7, 1964, in the Project Blue Book files that seems to provide some corroboration. In fact, Ray Stanford made a big deal out of this when he found a copy on August 3, 2013. In an article published on Bill Chalker’s blog on June 4, 2014, Ray Stanford wrote, “James Fox asked to take that photo of me holding an important Hynek letter I had just discovered in the National Archives’s Socorro files.” These are, of course the Blue Book files which Stanford, for some reason, does not mention. You can read the whole article here:

http://theozfiles.blogspot.com/2014/06/socorro-ufo-symbol-1964-2014.html

But, the letter had always been in the Blue Book files and available to nearly everyone since the files were declassified and released to the public in the 1970s. Microfilms of them have been available since about that same time for purchase at the National Archives and Fold3 has put them up on the Internet.

Hynek's symbol that excited

Ray Stanford.

The symbol that excited Stanford isn’t quite the one that is being pushed as the real one. It has a horizontal bar over the top of the inverted “V” and two other bars inside the legs. I’m not sure that it does much to corroborate the inverted “V” with three bars drawn through it. You can argue that Hynek didn’t see the symbol himself and might have created this from the descriptions that have been offered rather than seeing a drawing made by Zamora, but it does complicate the issue and isn’t really corroboration for the symbol being pushed by Stanford.

There is another version of the symbol, also from the Blue Book files, but given that it is from the microfilm and that it was hand drawn in the text of a letter, it is difficult to see. It looks more like the symbol we’ve all seen, but it has variations as well, and in this case, does look like the corporate logo of Astropower, Inc. I’m not sure of the relevance. It’s just one more complication in all this and leads us off in another direction.

Another variation of the Zamora Symbol found in the Project Blue Book files.

The Astropower logo.

The final complication, at least for me, is why the “faked” symbol is in the Blue Book file with no notation about it being faked. There is no reason to include it because, the file, in 1964, was classified as secret so no one who didn’t have a clearance, a need to know, and who wasn’t part of the Blue Book team would have seen it. While it might make some sense to put out a false version to help identify any other sightings for comparison, the “true” symbol had already been described, more or less, in newspapers. There is nothing in the Blue Book files to indicate that they had created a fake, just the various symbols provided by various people at various times with little in the way of identification as to which is right and which are wrong.  

The only symbol that Zamora seemed to identify is the one that looks like an umbrella over an arrow. He signed the illustration and although it is his signature, the claim is that the other words on the paper were written by someone else. I don’t think that is a disqualification given the circumstances. It was merely the investigating officer identifying what the illustration showed.

Given the sighting is now a half century old and Zamora has died, many of those involved in the various investigations have died, I’m not sure that we’ll ever be able to sort this out. A case can be made that the “real” symbol is the inverted “V” with the three bars through it, but the variations to that description and what is found in the Blue Book files does nothing to prove it. A good case can be made for the other symbols as well. It boils down to what you wish to believe about what Zamora saw on the side of the craft. After so many decades, this is going to end up as one more of those little mysteries that we just can’t solve today.

I need to thank Ben Moss for providing the links and other information I used here and to Bill Chalker for his analysis at his blog. David Rudiak indirectly supplied some of the links to the radio interviews that were supplied by Wendy Connors. This just shows that something as simple as attempting to verify the symbols requires a review of the work done by so many others.