Seagulls

a given specific siting. There's nothing to hide. There's nothing to hide it all. Is there anything in the files, either classified or unclassified, that would indicate that there may be extra terrestrial visitors overhead? What's to all? The protect is completely class and there's nothing in the record to could indicate that we have been visited by any of fantacism. How does the Air Force look upon people who make full for to the UFO. They look at him as

qualified a. Yes, they do look on him as qualified observers. Actually, most people who report a UFO sighting patreontic citizens who have been mystified by something that they've seen. I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals. A six months after the assassination of President Kennedy a police officer named Lonnie Zamora chased a speeding car down a desert stretch of

highway outside the town of Socorro, New Mexico. While in pursuit, he heard a roaring sound, and looking to the sowest, saw a flame in the sky, maybe a half mile in the distance. He knew that there was a dynamite shack somewhere in that area and figured it must have exploded. He abandoned his pursuit of the speeding car and drove in the direction of the flame. In a report about the incident filed by Colonel Eric de Jacquier of the United States Air Force, he has the more claiming that

the flame was quote bluish and sort of orange and color. However, he could not tell the size of the flame, which was slowly descending. The flame was of a narrow type and streamed down into a sort of funnel shape end quote. Zamora drove slowly westward on a gravel road. Here he is describing what happened next in an interview with K. S R. C. S. Walter Schrode, I went up the

road for about has a mile. Again, UH came up to this a little balcon deal there on the side of the old night for a glance about the of the window. Look to my lad in the white object on the ground. Far thought it might be a card that turned over. Also really the real thing. Harry going out there to investigate. Maybe somebody would be hurt. Uh that diamond saw his white at a jape luke an object. It was a luminum white in color, though he pointed

out not chrome. Photos taken later of the site show a desert scene, low scrub, sandy soil, rocks, distant mountains. He's a half mile or more from town. He briefly stopped his cruiser and saw two figures by the egg shaped object to what appeared to be people dressed in white uniforms with they have gentmts on like spaceman or anything. Low. I would say, there are people. I just I saw something white, white color like he didn't. You could not identify them as actually being a human being. And you

and I were they two of them? I would say were two, because one with some fronds and the other talked to him back so more a radio back to headquarters that he was going to investigate. He lost sight of the figures in the white overalls. Leaving his car, he began to walk towards the object, which he now saw was resting on two outward slanting legs, but his approach was cut short by a sudden loud noise. When it took off, it made a loud, loud, growing sound

that the very low noise rower panicked. Zamora turned and ran in the opposite direction. He banged his leg on the bumper of the cruiser, fell to the ground, losing his glasses, and scrambled to get further away. The object emitted a bluish orange flame. Zamora said he was concerned it might blow up, but instead it rose into the air, and then after it got up near about the sound seemed to disappeared. The sound was It was very very quiet there with the craft in the air and silently

moving away from him. He noticed a marking on the side, which a second report has him describing as being read about a foot to a foot and a half in height and shaped like a quote crescent with a vertical arrow and horizontal lines underneath. Samura claimed that the object then aimed in altitude and moved off to the south. Later in this radio interview, Walter Schrode asked this strange question.

It wasn't dragging anything. We had a report that dragging something as that land was dragging log n. Shrode said he heard reports that the object was dragging something. Zamora denied it. The interview ended abruptly when Zamora said, excuse, we wanted some military people that the ones up to me. Now, let pole when you have the military people are here from Ulefo to talk to you right now and ask

you some more questions about this. The military people who had come to speak with him were from the US Air Force, and we're working on Project blue Book, the effort to investigate and explain uf fositeings. While Blue Book officially ended in nineteen sixty nine, it has lived on in popular culture. At least three television shows, Project UFO Dark Skies in the History Channels show Project blue Book have centered on Bluebook investigations, and it is found in

countless other shows, movies, and books. Ezekiel saw the wheel. This is the wheel, he said, he saw. These are unidentified flying objects that people say they are seeing. Now, are they proof that we are being visited by civilizations from other stars? Are just? What are they? The United States Air Force began an investigation of this high strangeness in a search for the truth. What you were about

to see is part of that twenty years search. The UFO era is generally considered to start in when a pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw nine metallic flying discs traveling at high speeds near Mount Rainier. His story hit the newspapers. Two days later, The Chicago Sun for one ran a page two story headlined supersonic flying saucers cited by Idaho pilot speed estimated at twelve hundred miles an hour when

seeing ten thousand feet up near Mount Rainier. Two weeks later, in New Mexico, the public information officer at Roswell Army Air Force Base issued a press release stating that the five hundred and ninth Operations Group had recovered a flying disc that had crashed on ranch land. The Roswell crash is probably the best snow own of all UFO stories. We'll get to it later in this series. But while these are the two most famous UFO incidents from ninety seven,

they are far from the only ones. This is Air Force Captain Hector Quintinilla, speaking in nineteen sixty four. At the time, he was the head of Project Blue Book. You're nine. We had a rash of unidentified flying objects we recorded to the Air Force. A researcher named Ted Blocher set out to document just how many UFO reports

there were that year. On January one, nixty seven, he made public his findings in a book called Report on the UFO Wave of ninety seven, published by the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena or NIGHTCAP, a leading civilian UFO research organization. It was just the fantastic the number of cases that he found. He found eight hundred thirty cases, initially found well over a thousand. When he finished, he published a book on the eight cases that he had done,

and I got interested in what he was doing. My name is jan Aldrich. I am retired from the Army with twenty five years and I'm retired from the Post Office twenty five years. During my army career, I worked in meteorology, intelligence and security, safety and personnel, so I have quite a bit of experience in all these areas, and I started looking at newspapers to find more cases. Bloacher only done about a hundred and seventy newspapers in

the United States and Canada. I continued this on, and he continued on, we continue to find more and more cases. There was about eleven thousand newspapers in North America in just a few had been scanned, had looked for items, and it was obvious that if there's eight hundred items in about two hundred newspapers, what are there going to

be in a thousand, two thousand, five thousand. I said, my goal is doing three thousand newspapers with the help of people all over the world looking through newspapers, and we were able to do about five thousand total newspapers. Those Some of the cases were admittedly trivial. These were, after all, the earliest days of the UFO era. Aldridge, Bloacher and others were able to identify about three thousand

sightings reported in nine three thousand. Is is interesting what Bloatcher, myself and other people that looked at what we found, Amain Michelle, Dr James McDonald at the University of Arizona and other people said, Oh, the UFO activity that we know of currently existed in except maybe abductions. This is kind of a revelation. The phenomenon does not evolve. In other words, almost anything that you think of when you think about UFOs today turned up in the cases from

except for abductions. Again. Captain Hector Quentinilla on the seven UFO sightings. During this time, Jene Sanford directed the Air Force to establish an office to try to determine what these unidentified flying objects were. The program that became Project blue Book started out as Project sign. The program is threefold and the Air Force interest in you FOLS is first to determine if a possible threat to the security of the United States exists. Second, to determine the technical

or scientific characteristics of any such youthfols. Third, to try to explain are identified. All youthol sightings reported to the services the U FOLS as such do not pose any threat to the security of the United States. I do get a number of reports from people who claim that they have um seeing little green men. Retired Air Force pilot James mcgahey the program was started primarily out of concern over security issues that possibly had nothing to do

with alien spacecraft. It had to do is something going on in the airspace United States. Is possibly some foreign country doing something, possibly the Soviet Union and that's really why it started. Jan Aldredge Project site had a lot of engineers and aviation experts involved with it. It involved lots of people, and it probably as far as the

military goes, is probably the biggest project. It became fairly apparent very early on that people were seeing all kinds of things in the sky, but most of them could easily be explained with prosaic explanations of natural phenomena, misidentification, and various auto connectic effects, various other psychological effects and visual effects. And the Air Force said, why are we

doing this? We don't want to be doing this. Projects Signs name changed in to Project Grudge, and with the name change came a change in direction, a certainty that what people were seeing we're not extraterrestrial craft. The attitude was now that we can explain all these things away, either as hoaxes, hallucinations or man made objects. And that was their theme song for about up till the middle of fifty one. After January it changed its name to

Project blue Book. They had a bunch of reserve Air Force officers who were called into service because of the Korean War and they were put on this so ahead about eight eight or nine people that we're working on UFOs in that era up to all about early nineteen fifty three. Then these people started to be released from active duty service. The program was never very big. Most of the time it was only five people, one officer or a couple enlisted people as secretary and one consultant,

j Allen Heineck. At the beginning of their interest in UFOs, the Air Force contacted Jay Allan Heinek at the time and astronomer at Ohio State University to see if he might be interested in consulting on what was then Project sign. They understood that some percentage of the cases would be traceable back to stars, meteors, and other such phenomena. He liked to claim that he was like the innocent bystander who got shot accidentally. This is in the late nineteen forties.

He was teaching astronomy at Ohio State and one day a couple of Air Force people from right Field It's not right Patterson Dayton came to visit him at the university. Hi, I'm Mark O'Connell. I am the author of The Close Encounters Man. How one man made the world believe in UFOs. It's a biography of Dr J. Allen Heineck, who is one of the best known, if not the best known UFO experts of all time. After making small talk for a while, they said, hey, so what do you know

about these UFOs. Well, UFOs were a new thing in that time period, and Heineck, being a serious scientists, just kind of shrugged it off and said, well, you know, I think the whole thing is kind of stupid. I think it's just a phase. People are still kind of jumpy after Pearl Harbor, are worried about sneak attacks and

these are of force. People said, well, we have a job for you if you're interested, because we have a whole pile of these UFO reports and we don't know what to do with them, and we'd like to have an astronomer look at them and tell us if these people are really just seeing ordinary astronomical objects that they're just misinterpreting somehow. And heine said sure. I mean, basically

to him, it was easy money. He Nick is an interesting and important figure in UFO lore, and we will spend more time looking at his life and career as a UFO investigator, but for now, what's important is that he was involved in an effort to look at the information that had been collected during Projects Sign Project Grudge in the early days of Project Blue Book. This effort

was known informally as the Robertson Panel. In the CIA put together a panel, a Committee on the the Scientific Study of UFOs something like that was the official title. And it's one of those things where the report was classified for a long time. It wasn't until you know, decades later that the public got to see the report. But the Robertson Panel was dedicated to looking at whether or not the UFO phenomenon might be a threat. I am Aaron Gullias. I'm a history teacher and writer and

the host of the Saucer Life podcast. Like most defense and intelligence establishment efforts to investigate UFOs in the nineteen fifties, this was mostly concerned about not about determining what the things in the sky are, but determining whether or not the things in the sky are a danger to national security or something that needs to be dealt with immediately.

James mcgahey. At that time, they were again concerned about Soviet disinformation because the Soviet unions since in Brown nine, has spent a huge amount of time trying to see disinformation, trying to disrupt society in the United States. The KJB at various other organizations just trying to make trouble inside the United States, whether physical trouble or psychological trouble, and the CIA was very concerned that the Soviet Union might use UFOs as a way to spread panic in the

United States. The Robertson Panel was so named because it was chaired by Howard Robertson, a highly respected physicist and mathematician at cal Tech who also worked on a number of government and military programs. He was asked by the CIA to assemble a team of experts to evaluate the UFO evidence to date. The panel comprised mostly other physicists, along with a CIA officer who was also a missile

expert and served as the panel secretary. And it was very disappointed right off the bat with the Robertson panel because he was invited in a sort of a guest speaker, but he wasn't part of the panel, and he legitimately felt that he probably should have been part of that panel.

So it was handled very very informally without much serious intent, and iin it just basically felt like when he went into interview with them, when he gave testimony to this panel, that he was just sort of dismissed, and you know, they didn't really take anything he said very seriously. In all, the panel met for twelve hours over four days and examined twenty three cases, or about one percent of the

total number that were available. At one point, they watched a movie of some UFOs taken by an air worse photographer military photographer that's actually, even today is still pretty remarkable film to watch. They've projected the film on a wall in the conference room where you couldn't make out much detail, and all the members of the panel said, oh, well, those are obviously seagulls. Well, this took place in Utah, very far from any oceans, so I don't know where

they thought seagulls were coming from. So that was the Robertson panel. Heinek was pretty disappointed in how that worked out. Aaron Gullies. The Robertson panel concluded that you know, physically, sort of operationally, there was no real danger from the UFOs, but the concept of the UFOs, the concept of invaders from outer space, the concerns about people not knowing what

these things might be. In the government not knowing or not sharing what these things might be, that there might be some negative effects on the public with regard to keeping them focused on the Soviet Union, as you know, geopolitical enemy number one. They worried that that the UFOs might be a distraction if if, sort of the popular conception of UFOs as alien craft continued to to be

on the rise. So among the recommendations the Robertson panel made was to work on the educational side of things to encourage media outlets to present their news stories and documentaries on on the UFOs as being essentially harmless, not a danger, not anything to worry about, to sort of

defang and devenomize the UFOs as an existential threat. The recommendations weren't just to discourage the view that UFOs were something to be concerned about, but also to encourage the development of skills to help people evaluate any information they were provided with. The CIA actually said in that report that we should create a program to teach critical thinking to the American public such that they will not be easily swayed by disinformation and panic. The things that are real.

It's probably the best thing. The CIA ever said un virtually it was instituted. So the Robertson panel ended up disregarding UFOs as physical entities. Might there have been a

thumb on the scale. In reply to a letter from James Klotts that was posted to the computer UFO network on the Worldwide Web or Coupon, Robertson panel member Thornton Page wrote, quote, HP Robertson told us in the first private No Outsiders session that our job was to reduce public concern and show that UFO reports could be explained by conventional reasoning. End quote. There's no corroboration for this story, but it is interesting in what it implies about the

goals of the meetings. So the Robertson panel dismissed the notion that UFOs were real, physical objects or anything that the public should be concerned about. And yet people continued to see things that they couldn't explain, and the Air Force kept investigating, And one of these investigations drew Alan Heinik to the small town of Socorro, New Mexico, to try to determine what a local policeman had seen in the desert after the break strange arrivals will return in

a moment. So back to Lonnie Zamora and his sighting in Socorro, New Mexico in ninety sixty four. Remember, Zamora had been chasing a speeding car on when he heard a roaring sound and saw flames descending from the sky. He turned off the highway and came upon two white clad figures outside an egg shaped craft. With another loud roar, the craft took off again, flying low over the desert before rising into the sky. The Air Force clearly felt

a sense of urgency to deal with this sighting. The first report on the case was filed two days after the encounter on April. On April, a second report was submitted on four days after the encounter. Alan Heinik was summoned to New Mexico to assist with the investigation. This is Heinik speaking with k s r C radio's Walter Schrode.

If you don't mind like to a here here so I see um whether you're common province might be on this and I might ask any direct questions because I don't know why the questions you can cannot answer you this opinion and and an honor to appreciate it very much. Well, yeah, first off, I should say there's no question of my not being able to answer anything because I'm acting as

u uh independent investigating might say. Um. But the fact that I don't have anything to say the things that's puggling to me is I'm sure it must be to the folks around here. UM. I certainly believe that Zama had a most interesting and significant experience, and I'm particularly interested in the tracks that were left and the analysis

of the samples of material from those tracks. And until you know more about it, thus, all I can say, disappointing to you perhaps is something that right, I'm apposed as you are. From the beginning there was confusion as public statements by Heinich and the Air Force investigators were at odds with those of Zamora and other locals. This is Lonnie Zamora with the ever President Walter Schrode. Schrode had asked Samora if the craft he saw bore any markings, Yes,

they did not from them all, I didn't see the market. Well, I went up closer to it. I did to the market, and someone said that the markings that you saw it was an upside down be with three lines running through its group that goes They feel though the one who say doesn't marketing, and they don't want to say anything about the markets or every more question you on, Matt, and we run into an area that they don't want

to to talk about when you just say so. But when Schrod interviewed Heinek, Heineck disputed that the Air Force had put any restrictions on what Zamora could say. I was called by the Pentagon this morning, and there's an Associated Press's report out to the effect that some Air Force person had told Mr Zamara not to say anything about the lettering, and I was asked specifically to find out whether this statement had been made, who made it

and all that sort of thing. Zamara tells me that no one Air Force or no one else told him not to say anything about it. But this is how these rumors get started. To emphasize the point that the Pentagon had nothing to hide. Heinick described the marking as

related to him by Zamora. He said, Zamora quote described it to me as an inverted V. Was sort of a bar Across said earlier we heard that Samora described it as a quote crescent with a vertical arrow and horizontal lines underneath, which isn't exactly the same as what Heineck says, but close enough that I don't think Heinek is being intentionally misleading. Later in the interview, Schrode asked Heineck Samoura had told them that there had been men

around the craft. I know that there were earlier reports that he had seen people, but to me, he said nothing specific about people that he describes seeing objects that appeared to be in white coveralls. He indicated that he saw something along the side on the side of the instrument of the device that resembled white cover rolls. Yes.

But when Race Stanford, a NYECAP investigator who had come to Skoro to look into Zamora's claims, asked lew Us Ridell, the editor of a Sakora newspaper who had talked to Zamora about the encounter, there is again this disconnect between the stories that Samora is telling and high Neck's assertions. And talking to Dr I him by the Samori told him nothing specific at all about seeing any men, imply

they hadn't even he hadn't even mentioned any men. He later seemed to come down and say that you mentioned cover all after very funny questioning by one of the persons to his present. But did in this talk with Zamara soon after the citing, since you were one of the first to be there, did he mentioned to you that he actually saw a man or just cover off. Um he really doesn't have did and he said there were cool and even swimming bone bim men. But you learnt to think so over go, he said to be

when you were still in the car. The one of them a boat of a man objects had their BacT to him and one of them turned around and not him square in the face. That was the exact words. And he very definitely uh deliso two men at at Obe and uh he said immediately m uh. They disappeared and kindly got in the plane from the side, from the west side, and the plane lifted up. And start of the investigation was made more difficult by a lack

of physical evidence. There were some shallow depressions where the more I had seen the craft, and some of the brushes of burn marks, but that was all. The Air Force investigators at the scene listed the acts that they were able to establish. They were unable to find any witnesses other than Zamora. There were no unidentified helicopters or aircraft in the area at that time, and no unusual radar readings. The weather was windy but clear, so a

weather phenomenon was ruled out. There was no evidence of markings of any sort in the area other than the shallow depressions where the craft had been. Soil samples taken from the site disclosed no foreign material or unusual radiation and burn brush, so no evidence of chemical propellants. There was no evidence presented that the object was extraterrestrial in origin or represented a threat to the security of the

United States. But despite these findings, there was a general belief that Zamora had seen something that he hadn't hallucinated, and he wasn't lying. Heinich wrote that Zamora, although not overly bright or articulate, is basically sincere, honest and reliable. He would not be capable of contriving a complete hoax, nor would his temperament indicate that he would have the

slightest interest in such. In fact, Heinik was sure that Zamora had seen a physical object and that it was important to determine what exactly that object was given the proximity to Air Force Bass such as Holloman and Kurtland. The investigation focused on whether the craft could have been a helicopter, an experimental lunar module, or a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, a kind of hybrid vehicle that could take off like a helicopter and then fly like a plane.

A considerable amount of space in the Project Bluebook file about the Zamora case is taken up with letters sent to try to det herman if any of those types of aircraft might have been active in that area at the date and time of Samora's encounter. These inquiries did not turn up an explanation. Could it have been a hoax? That is some people's preferred theory. See Lonnie Zamora wasn't just a so Cora police officer. He was an actual

police officer in the police force. But he was also a campus police officer at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, which is a very respectable college there, smallish but respected. Hi. I am Brian Dunning. I'm best known for the Skeptoid podcast at skeptoid dot com, where we take a science based look at urban legends. It was like a character in a movie. Okay, he's the guy that all the students would make fun of. He was extremely rigid, he was overweight. I mean they would

make fun of him. And what the president of the university always said, it was, Yes, this was some of our students. They were making fun of him. They were hoaxing him. They put a big balloon out in the desert. They tricked him into chasing one of their guys up this dirt road, and once he got there, they put this balloon with some flashing lights on it and they towed it off at high speed, following behind another car and another road, something like you might expect out of

the movie Animal House. Okay, remember this odd question that Walter Schroede asked Lonnie Zamora. It wasn't dragging anything. We had a report that dragging something. It makes me wonder if, in fact, the UFO wasn't dragging something but was actually being towed. But Zamora seems to deny this. Regardless, there's documentation that a student hoax was suspected, at least by some people. The president of the New Mexico Institute of

Mining and Technology was named Sterling Colgate. In he received a letter from his friend, the chemist and winner of two Nobel Prizes, Linus Pauling, that included a question about the Zamora encounter. In response, Colgate wrote, I have good indication of student who engineered hoax. Student has left now. Lonnie Zamora always stuck to his story, and by all accounts, Lonnie Zamora was a straight up, straightforward guy. He was honest, he was patriotic, he loved his family, he was a good,

strong member of the community. Literally, I've never heard anyone say anything bad about the guy, that he was unreliable, and not for a minute do I claim that he was lying or making anything up. Nevertheless, if the word gets out that you were hoaxed, most of us are more likely to kind of double down on our original story than to admit that we were hoaxed and fooled by a bunch of snot nosed jerky kids at this university.

The balloon idea had been floated earlier in the files and dismissed in part because the winds that day were blowing opposite the direction that the object took. There was also speculation about whether a car could have towed the balloon as Dunning describes, but that was similarly doubted because the expectation was that a car would have kicked up dust, and there was no report of dust nor retire tracks

from a TOKR found at the scene. In April letter to Donald Menzel at the Harvard Observatory, heim Nick expressed skepticism about a hoax, and he tells this anecdote which seems to address the explanation voiced by Dunning. The path once told me of an instance in which some college students wanted to get even with the geology professor, so they planted a quote meteorite unquote and contrived an explosion at some instant part of the state, and had this

poor professor running around ragged chasing a meteor right. The perpetrators, however, were caught and expelled from school because they simply couldn't keep their secret. They quote confided unquote to friends, who in turn confided to others. And there you are. So where does this leave us? The case has never been conclusively solved. As Brian Dunning says, the Lonnie Zamora story is. You'll find it as one of the foundational stones in any book about UFO stories. In the end, you are

left with a credible witness, but only one. The physical evidence is scant. The description of the vehicle and egg on stilts seems like something you'd see on a science fiction movie or television show more than an actual craft from an advanced civilization. But the alternative explanations aren't without their flaws. I find myself agreeing with Dunning because I can imagine entire tracks being missed in the desert, or the search for them taking place after the wind and

the weather had obscured them. That seems more likely to me than a visit by a craft from a different planet or, in Jim Peniston's view, a different time. In the letter to Menzel Heineck offered his thoughts a year after the encounter, it seems much more likely to me that he saw a strange test craft which is super secret. The flaws in this reasoning or that if it is so secret, why would anyone be landing a half mile

south of a town. Why also have we been unable to an earth from various agencies any classified clues as such going on? And that's probably the best place to leave it. With the caveat that the default position here is not an extraterrestrial craft. There is no evidence that this is the case. There is simply a sighting, and in the absence of a definitive explanation, the most likely

possible solutions. What this undoubtedly was was another story in a growing litany of such stories that seemed to indicate that there was something going on in our skies that the government either couldn't explain or was keeping secret. Heinek acknowledged this in his letter to Donald Menzel. There is no question that a mighty folklore is being built up in this whole field. Someday it might be worth while to document all this for the benefit of historians who

will look back at the era. Two years later, another piece of this folklore would be born in Michigan, an event that would come to symbolize the public's distrust over the government handling of UFO reports and shake Alan Heineck's belief in the work he was doing for the Air Force. Hi Nick, the Air Force's skeptical scientists investigator, would become a believer next time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heeart three D audio and Grimm

and mild from Aaron Manky. This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thame, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick, and Aaron Manky, and special thanks to Wendy Connors, creator of the Faded Discs archive of UFO related audio on archive

dot org. Learn more about Strange Rivals over at grimm and mild dot com, and find more podcasts from My heart Radio by visiting the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite chows