UFOs and the legend of Lonnie Zamora
"There’s almost no scenario where, as an ordinary person, saying that you encountered a flying saucer helps you."
I had a fascinating conversation last week with Garrett Graff about his brand new book, UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—And Out There, which hit shelves Tuesday from S&S/Avid Reader Press.
It’s filled with otherworldly history going back to the Roswell era, like the following anecdote circa 1960s New Mexico:
Of all the many alleged encounters you researched, is there one in particular that feels the most convincing to you?
There is a category of witnesses that I find most intriguing and most believable. The one I always point to is Lonnie Zamora in Socorro, New Mexico, in 1964. Lonnie Zamora was a local police officer, an extremely ordinary guy who was chasing a speeder on the outskirts of town when he saw what looked to him like an overturned white car in a ditch out in the desert. He turns off the road and sort of bumps his way toward this scene. He’s coming in and out of view of this thing. It’s white. He sees two figures standing next to it who are not quite fully adult-size but larger than children. As he gets closer, they get back into the craft, and the craft flies away. There’s a New Mexico state trooper or some other witnesses who arrive at the scene within a couple of minutes and see him really shaken up by whatever the thing is that he encountered. There’s physical evidence that he had some type of encounter there. It’s not that there’s wreckage that he misidentified, that when he got closer, it was a weather balloon. There’s no real reason for Lonnie Zamora to make up that story. There’s pretty good circumstantial evidence that something happened to him out there, and we don’t have any explanation of what it is. And the guy goes on and leads a sort of totally ordinary life for the rest of his life.
He doesn’t turn into an obsessive UFO hunter.
He just sort of goes on about his life. A possible, very simple explanation is that Socorro, New Mexico, is right next to a big secret military test facility. This is the height of the space race. Maybe he stumbled on some part of the Apollo program that was building a secret moon lander that they were testing out in the desert, and it flew away. Except, it’s 50, 60 years later, and we’ve never seen any craft emerge from the government archives that does anything or looks anything like the thing that he saw. And there are a lot of people over the years, like Lonnie Zamora—not tens of thousands, but scores or hundreds of people—who have these sort of singular detailed encounters, with some level of documentary or circumstantial evidence that something happened, who have no apparent reason to lie about the thing that they saw. And by the way, ordinary people have a lot of reasons to lie about seeing UFOs. There’s almost no scenario where, as an ordinary person, saying that you encountered a flying saucer helps you.
Click here for more on the so-called Lonnie Zamora incident. Click here to read my full interview with Graff. Click here to buy the book. Scroll down for a Man or Astro-man? banger from 1993.
That’s all for now. More soon…