What happened in Socorro NM April 24 1964

[MapperGuy]

Thanks for mentioning it again, I love these collections of cases from what I think of as the Golden Era of UFO stuff -- it is amazing how few modern UFOlogist folks know the history of their area of interest, and how often the amazing thing reported this week is pretty much the same as the amazing thing that has been reported a hundred times previously and all those times was (for example) Venus.

Does it strike anyone else as odd that many of these Golden Era reports included landing gear prints on the ground, as here. Proof that something was there, either flying saucer or someone with a shovel.
But today we never seem to have any marks on the ground (except crop circles) that show evidence of a landing?
UAP's seem to have become allergic to actually landing anywhere.

Or perhaps it's just the larger number of fuzzy 'lights in the sky' reports, versus saucers that the witness actually touched.

 

[FatPhil]

View attachment 84823

What are the chances that every single distance being measured would include the extra half inch above an integer when measured to half inch precision?

? 1/2.^6*100
1.6

1.6%. Woh, that's enough sigmas. So, with 96.9% confidence, I'm happy to call all that data fake.

But that's only the start of it...

I also notice his angles are given to single minute precision. Were he to be accurate and precise in those measurements, that would imply they were taken to

? (11+10.5/12)*(1/60)*Pi/180*304.8
1.0

millimetre accuracy.
(That 11'10.5" distance is associated with the 22o01' angle, which I chose as evidence that he's using single minute precision, and therefore that something close to single minute accuracy is being implied.)

You're analysing a report on the dimensions of the tooth fairy's wings.

 

[deirdre]

What are the chances that every single distance being measured would include the extra half inch above an integer when measured to half inch precision?

? 1/2.^6*100
1.6

1.6%. Woh, that's enough sigmas. So, with 96.9% confidence, I'm happy to call all that data fake.

But that's only the start of it...

I also notice his angles are given to single minute precision. Were he to be accurate and precise in those measurements, that would imply they were taken to

? (11+10.5/12)*(1/60)*Pi/180*304.8
1.0

millimetre accuracy.
(That 11'10.5" distance is associated with the 22o01' angle, which I chose as evidence that he's using single minute precision, and therefore that something close to single minute accuracy is being implied.)

You're analysing a report on the dimensions of the tooth fairy's wings.

what? can you translate that to common folk english?

 

[JMartJr]

Does it strike anyone else as odd that many of these Golden Era reports included landing gear prints on the ground, as here. Proof that something was there, either flying saucer or someone with a shovel.
But today we never seem to have any marks on the ground (except crop circles) that show evidence of a landing?
UAP's seem to have become allergic to actually landing anywhere.

Or perhaps it's just the larger number of fuzzy 'lights in the sky' reports, versus saucers that the witness actually touched.

I wonder if it is partially a result of the shift of perception among UFO devotees from the Extraterrestrial Spaceship hypothesis to the much more wooish transdimensional-spirit-entities type of hypotheses. Spirit entities and floating atmospheric jellyfish lifeforms maybe aren't assumed to need to land (spaceships land on strange new worlds, as all of science fiction shows, as does our own history of landing on the moon, etc.)

 

[JMartJr]

What are the chances that every single distance being measured would include the extra half inch above an integer when measured to half inch precision?

? 1/2.^6*100
1.6

1.6%. Woh, that's enough sigmas. So, with 96.9% confidence, I'm happy to call all that data fake.

But that's only the start of it...

I also notice his angles are given to single minute precision. Were he to be accurate and precise in those measurements, that would imply they were taken to

? (11+10.5/12)*(1/60)*Pi/180*304.8
1.0

millimetre accuracy.
(That 11'10.5" distance is associated with the 22o01' angle, which I chose as evidence that he's using single minute precision, and therefore that something close to single minute accuracy is being implied.)

You're analysing a report on the dimensions of the tooth fairy's wings.

Or he just liked rounding to the nearest half inch?

 

[John J.]

Does it strike anyone else as odd that many of these Golden Era reports included landing gear prints on the ground, as here. Proof that something was there, either flying saucer or someone with a shovel.

Maybe people are more aware of what forensics might show- not necessarily from a police/ official investigation, but also from groups/ members of the public with an interest in UFO claims (including some sceptics). I'd guess it's possible to work out very roughly how much weight is needed to create an indentation on a specific ground surface, and maybe (I don't know) digging with tools leaves characteristic signs.

Or ETI technology has improved radically since the 1960s; they don't need Eagle Lunar Lander-style landing gear and ladders anymore, they just hover, without causing any downward pressure.

 

[FatPhil]

what? can you translate that to common folk english?

On the half-inches:
I'm assuming that he's prepared to give measurements with a precision down to half an inch, and anything within a quarter of an inch of a whole number of inches will be rounded to the nearest inch, and anything outside that will be rounded to the nearest half inch, which is what rational people would do. Given that the distances are effectively random numbers, there's no reason to think that the rounded-to-a-whole-inch and rounded-to-a-half-inch cases would be equally likely. There are 6 such measurements in his diagram, four round the outside, and the two diagonals. None of them rounded to a whole inch, they all rounded to a half. That's 6 heads from 6 flips. The probability of that happening by chance is (1/2)^6 = 1/64 = 1.6%. Which makes the probability of fakery pretty damn high. It also has the whiff of "if I use more precision a lot, people will think I'm being more accurate", but on that note, the second example is the better one:

On the angles:
This is an example of the precision used is meaningless given the context of what's being measured. It's what some have dubbed "Ludicrous Precision".

Use of overly precise statistics to verify claims will often be a sign of pseudoscience rather than proper scientific method. This is particularly true when the statistics in question could not have realistically been measured to that degree (i.e. the margin of error is being ignored) or if they are subject to major fluctuation anyway.

-- https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LudicrousPrecision
I used to have a different term for it, but I've forgotten what that was.

Star Trek's Spock is probably the go-to source of examples:
e.g. /Catspaw/ "Spock: Picking up life-form readings. 24 degrees, mark 7. Range 137.16 meters." - *two* people's locations are being specified with 1cm precision!?!?
or /Errand of Mercy/, where the writers even seem to be poking fun at the concept:

Kirk: What would you say the odds are on our getting out of here?
Spock: Difficult to be precise, Captain. I should say, approximately 7,824.7 to 1.
Kirk: Difficult to be precise? 7,824 to 1?
Spock: 7,824.7 to 1.
Kirk: That's a pretty close approximation.
Spock: I endeavor to be accurate.

One classic example caused my g/f & I to simultaniously shout at the screen "it that relative to the start of your sentence, or the end of it?!?!"
/The Immunity Syndrome/ "SPOCK: Slowing now. Contact in 18.3 seconds."

So the angles between these probably-feet-wide indentations are being given with a precision where the presence or absense of an extra grain of grit would mean the number should be changed. Even a degree (or half a degree, as he really seems to love his halves), would suffice.

Excess precision is usually used in order to appear smart and accurate (which is why it's a trope in sci-fi for such characters), but to those who understand mensuration it's conveys exactly the opposite message (and says "demonstrably bad writing" in the sci-fi context - actual smart people wouldn't say such idiotic things).

Combine that with the half-inch almost-certain-fakery, and my only conclusion is that it completely stinks.

 

[deirdre]

On the half-inches:
I'm assuming that he's prepared to give measurements with a precision down to half an inch, and anything within a quarter of an inch of a whole number of inches will be rounded to the nearest inch, and anything outside that will be rounded to the nearest half inch, which is what rational people would do. Given that the distances are effectively random numbers, there's no reason to think that the rounded-to-a-whole-inch and rounded-to-a-half-inch cases would be equally likely.

ah. got it.

or...the first measurement was a 1/2 inch, then the army guy moved the tape measure to 1/2 inches when trying to eyeball where the center of the squares might be. because if you got a full inch it might indicate you werent over the center of the rectangle area. ?? (of course i'm a "measure 4x then cut" person and my cuts are still always off.. so my measure thinking might off here)

 

[NorCal Dave]

Does it strike anyone else as odd that many of these Golden Era reports included landing gear prints on the ground, as here. Proof that something was there, either flying saucer or someone with a shovel.
But today we never seem to have any marks on the ground (except crop circles) that show evidence of a landing?
UAP's seem to have become allergic to actually landing anywhere.

Or perhaps it's just the larger number of fuzzy 'lights in the sky' reports, versus saucers that the witness actually touched.

Different era, different zeitgeist. I think in the Golden Age, UFOs were actual physical craft that needed landing gear. It's what was in the books and the popular culture. 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still is the classic embodiment:

While Vallee's Passport to Magonia (1969) and the writings of John Keel were blending UFOs with the paranormal in the '60s-'70s, the physical "nuts & bolts" UFO persisted into the '80s. Close Encounters 3K (1977) still had a physical space ship with actual aliens in it:

Nowadays we live in a post The X Files era, where Vallee and Keel's earlier musing are the norm. UFOs and the paranormal are completely intermingled. The Contact in the Desert 2025 UFO conference was almost equal parts UFOs and New Age/paranormal.

UFO whistle-blower Matthew Brown will post about Enochian magic as much as UFOs.

The whole Skinwalker Ranch shtick is about the "phenomenon" which encompasses everything from UFOs to were-wolves.

However, what I find interesting is that in this new UFO/paranormal age, the crashed UFO hidden by the government is a notable throwback or carry over from the Golden Age. There is still a firm belief by those in the disclosure community that there are actual physical craft that were recovered and are hidden away, even if most current UFOs are assortments of glowing orbs, lights, amorphous floating things or possibly angles.

The lack of actual physical craft in the modern era, makes these old "space ship landed here" cases attractive still.

 

[jdog]

Different era, different zeitgeist. I think in the Golden Age, UFOs were actual physical craft that needed landing gear. It's what was in the books and the popular culture. 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still is the classic embodiment:

...
While Vallee's Passport to Magonia (1969) and the writings of John Keel were blending UFOs with the paranormal in the '60s-'70s, the physical "nuts & bolts" UFO persisted into the '80s. Close Encounters 3K (1977) still had a physical space ship with actual aliens in it:

....
The whole Skinwalker Ranch shtick is about the "phenomenon" which encompasses everything from UFOs to were-wolves.

However, what I find interesting is that in this new UFO/paranormal age, the crashed UFO hidden by the government is a notable throwback or carry over from the Golden Age. There is still a firm belief by those in the disclosure community that there are actual physical craft that were recovered and are hidden away, even if most current UFOs are assortments of glowing orbs, lights, amorphous floating things or possibly angles.

...

I think that's why the "galactic council" rationale arose to justify the radical differences among UFO reports, that the saucer tech and the orbs and the whatnot come from different species, some needed landing gear, left physical evidence, abducted people, and could be filmed flying past barns, and the ones here now don't.

(I saw some discomfort growing about the 3I/Atlas-is-a-spaceship narrative on /r/ufos, since if it were an alien vessel it would be oddly large, oddly slow, oddly primitive and not at all in keeping with the crossing-light-years-in-a-single bound concept. Why big slow cylinder when egg/three-sphere-jet-plane-wormhole-teleport would be faster?)

 

[Mendel]

(I saw some discomfort growing about the 3I/Atlas-is-a-spaceship narrative on /r/ufos, since if it were an alien vessel it would be oddly large, oddly slow, oddly primitive and not at all in keeping with the crossing-light-years-in-a-single bound concept. Why big slow cylinder when egg/three-sphere-jet-plane-wormhole-teleport would be faster?)

in short, it would invalidate the tooth fairy science data they have hitherto amassed

 

[MapperGuy]

Maybe people are more aware of what forensics might show- not necessarily from a police/ official investigation, but also from groups/ members of the public with an interest in UFO claims (including some sceptics). I'd guess it's possible to work out very roughly how much weight is needed to create an indentation on a specific ground surface, and maybe (I don't know) digging with tools leaves characteristic signs.

Or ETI technology has improved radically since the 1960s; they don't need Eagle Lunar Lander-style landing gear and ladders anymore, they just hover, without causing any downward pressure.

I suspect the difficulty of faking traces of a landing that could defeat modern technology and forensics is a part of the problem. If an alien got out of his flying saucer and just walked a few steps he might (should?) leave forensic traces. Safer to say you saw something hovering (if you are faking) and if you are simply mistaken in what you saw it was probably some distance away from you.

 

[John J.]

Almost certainly a coincidence, and perhaps a tenuous one:

One of the interesting things about Lonnie Zamora's account is his description of a red insignia/ symbol on the object, discussed on this thread earlier.

Sketches made by Zamora

(from Enigma website https://enigmalabs.io/library/d5a94111-9a9b-4d25-b411-5baf83034520).

Found this; an illustration of an imaginary craft exploring the moon. The Italian words indicate it is on the cover of a notebook.

-From Rome Central website, "Science fiction 1950-1970. Iconography of the golden years", 13 October 2014
https://www.romecentral.com/en/fantascienza-1950-1970-liconografia-degli-anni-doro/

The handwritten "Marzo 1964" (March 1964) probably dates when the owner started using the notebook, the Socorro incident took place 24 April 1964.

Its unlikely Zamora saw an example of this notebook (which might have been marketed at children) and there's no evidence he had any particular interest in space exploration or science fiction, but SF illustrations/ artist's impressions of future spacecraft were sometimes re-used on the colourful covers of SF/ adventure story magazines and paperback books.
Maybe, if Zamora's craft was something constructed for a hoax, its builders had some inspiration for the emblem.

All rather unlikely I guess, just sharing.

 

[Todd Feinman]

Methinks Zamora's case gets too much attention. The Stories Lost YouTube channel has many cases from Scandinavia and other places that are very similar to Zamora's; his encounter is of a particular type, as are the road encounters (lonely road encounters). I also recently discovered many experiences similar to my own, on Stories Lost.

 

[NorCal Dave]

Methinks Zamora's case gets too much attention.

I don't quite get the fascination with it nowadays, other than as @jarlrmai has pointed out before, old stories are hard to debunk. Even the OP for this thread makes the claim that this is supposedly one of the best cases based on it being a police officer and maybe more importantly never quite being explained:

This is to me the best UFO case ever, by a long ways. It involved a policeman, occurred in daylight, and at close range. It was marked Unexplained after a concerted effort to find a solution by the US govt, featuring an investigative team led by Major Quintanilla and at least 3 employees of the Air Force assigned to it (the only unidentified and unexplained CE III on record classed as an "unknown" by Project Blue Book).

The problem with old cases though is that they are often products of their time and this one certainly is. Whatever happened, Zamora's descriptions are solidly rooted in the early '60s. If we take it at face value, he's talking about 2 humans in white lab suits with a chemical powered rocket ship that uses landing gear and has some sort of identifying insignia on it. He's describing exactly what human technology for space flight looked like at the time.

At least with Ezekiel's throne of God thing, one can make an argument that this is a guy from 2500 years ago trying to describe something like a quad-copter or other advanced technology with the language he had. Zamora is just describing what everyone would have seen on the news or in newsreels at the local theater. There's nothing advanced about it and as a product of its time, it really doesn't fit any of the more modern interpretations of UFOs.

 

[Giddierone]

Almost certainly a coincidence, and perhaps a tenuous one:

One of the interesting things about Lonnie Zamora's account is his description of a red insignia/ symbol on the object, discussed on this thread earlier.

Sketches made by Zamora
View attachment 88084
(from Enigma website https://enigmalabs.io/library/d5a94111-9a9b-4d25-b411-5baf83034520).

Found this; an illustration of an imaginary craft exploring the moon. The Italian words indicate it is on the cover of a notebook.

View attachment 88085
-From Rome Central website, "Science fiction 1950-1970. Iconography of the golden years", 13 October 2014
https://www.romecentral.com/en/fantascienza-1950-1970-liconografia-degli-anni-doro/

The handwritten "Marzo 1964" (March 1964) probably dates when the owner started using the notebook, the Socorro incident took place 24 April 1964.

Its unlikely Zamora saw an example of this notebook (which might have been marketed at children) and there's no evidence he had any particular interest in space exploration or science fiction, but SF illustrations/ artist's impressions of future spacecraft were sometimes re-used on the colourful covers of SF/ adventure story magazines and paperback books.
Maybe, if Zamora's craft was something constructed for a hoax, its builders had some inspiration for the emblem.

All rather unlikely I guess, just sharing.

Kind of looks like
[https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/character.jsp?a=233B4]

 

[John J.]

Kind of looks like
[https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/character.jsp?a=233B4]

It does a bit, but I think it's more likely to be an Arabic numeral "1" as part of some imagined insignia.

When I first saw the picture I thought it was one rather ungainly spaceship; but it's probably meant to show a globular landing craft in front of a separate winged vehicle: there's a slight white border around the curve of the cupola/ dome of the "landing craft", the two aren't attached. Maybe just inelegant composition by the artist.