Socorro Saucer: Ray Stanford

A UFO landing was reported at Socorro, New Mexico, on April 24, 1964. This was witnessed by police officer Lonnie Zamora and an unidentified tourist. It was also later reported and documented as having been witnessed (in flight) by 5 tourists traveling through Socorro at the time. Three physical items of evidence were retrieved, but this information was censored; Zamora was instructed not to reveal the red insignia he saw on the UFO; an FBI agent told him to deny seeing two humanoid figures beside the UFO; and the U.S. Air Force tried to hide the fact that the soil at the site was highly radioactive at the landing site. Various 'explanations' were rushed out to the media: the testing of a lunar landing device by personnel from the White Sands Missile Range; a prank perpetrated by students from the nearby New Mexico Tech - an explanation supported by the then-president Stirling Colgate. UFO skeptic Steuart Campbell suggested that what Zamora observed was "almost certainly" a mirage of the star Canopus...except star mirages don't normally sound like an explosion, nor do they produce flames as Zamora consistently claimed. So what really happened at Socorro that had to be covered up? Illustrated with photographs.