65 HS1-834228961 62-HQ-83894 Serial 438

This serial is the FBI’s record of one of the most-cited UFO reports of the 1960s: the object police officer Lonnie Zamora said he saw land and take off outside Socorro, New Mexico, on April 24, 1964. The memos come from the Bureau’s Albuquerque office, dated May 8, 1964, and the serial repeats them several times, some copies barely legible. The Air Force’s Project Blue Book went on to list the Socorro case as unidentified.

An FBI agent at the scene

Special Agent D. Arthur Byrnes Jr. happened to be at the State Police office in Socorro that afternoon when, around 5:45 to 5:50 P.M., the sheriff’s radio operator, Nep Lopez, relayed Zamora’s call about something that had “landed and has taken off” about a mile southwest of town. Byrnes went out after 6:00 P.M. He vouched for Zamora, whom he had known for about five years, as sober and “not given to fantasy,” and he logged four rectangular depressions roughly 16 by 6 inches and 2 inches deep, burned clumps of grass, and three smooth round marks about 4 inches across, “as if a jar lid” had been pressed into the sand.

Zamora’s statement, taken that night, describes breaking off a chase after a speeding car when he heard a roar and saw a bluish-orange flame. Over a hill he saw a shiny, aluminum-white object he first took for an overturned car, standing on two legs, with two people in white coveralls beside it. After loud thumps it rose on a roaring flame, showing red insignia, then flew off low to the southwest, clearing a dynamite shack. He radioed that it looked “like a balloon.”

How to read it

The FBI recorded what it saw and heard; it drew no conclusion. Both the measurements and the account are as written down in 1964. For other cases, see cases.