Lorenzen and Zamora

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I remember that initial drive down towards Socorro, NM.

I have to admit that I was quite excited about going to school at NMIMT. One, the school was rated 5th in the nation at that time in history, and two it was home to the sighting that changed J. Allen Hynek’s, opinion of UFOs.

My first semester was uneventful, basically adjusting to living on one’s own. I had no one to answer to but myself. Then, came the spring semester and the state Science Fair.


Since I was a freshman, I could not evaluate the participants, but I could work as security.  As we sat there, in the gymnasium, “guarding” the installations of experiments, the talk turned to the April 1964 landing.

Another students said he knew exactly what had landed in Socorro, and it was a test of the lunar module. That did not ring true with what I knew of the landing so I decided to do two things:

A) Contact UFO investigators, Jim and Coral Lorenzen at APRO, the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization.

B) Contact and meet with Officer Lonnie Zamora.

I was successful at both.

The letter I received back from the Lorenzens was quite informative. It was 3 pages, handwritten by Coral It  included every piece of information which they had acquired during their investigation.



The time I spent with Mr. Zamora was quite informative. We went to the site, and in the ground, 11 years after the incident, were the landing indentations. The sand around them was glass-like in appearance.

This is quite telling, as they had survived the erosive properties of the desert. This alone indicated that it was highly unlikely a prank; nor did his story speak of a prank of any kind. This man was sincere, and at the time of the incident, scared.

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The New Mexico Years

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As my life began to end in my hometown, I was preparing to move to New Mexico to further my education at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. 

We sold our house, packed our belongings and moved to Peralta, NM, which is just south of Albuquerque. My dad’ sister and her husband lived on the property just across the street from what would become my home for the next 31 years.

Our first night in NM, waiting for our furniture to arrive, was spent at my aunt’s and uncle’s home. My uncle worked out at Sandia Base as a security guard. 

My uncle and I were shooting pool and drinking beer and discussing UFOs. He told me that on several occasions he had seen strange craft in the skies over the base. Most of them he said were probably ours under the cover of what he called “Black Projects”, but there were two that stood out in his mind that probably were not ours. 

The first one took place out in Coyote Canyon. He had just clocked in at the site, and something caught his eye just above the Manzano Mt range. His estimate of the size of this craft was about 2 football fields in length, and about 4 stories thick. It hung silently in the air, no sound nor movement for about 10 minutes, then, it abruptly disappeared straight up. He said that there was no reflection of sunlight; rather the craft had a matte finish to it.

The other was a sighting back in the late fifties or early sixties that he and my dad’s brother had at Sandia. My dad’s brother was an engineer for Sandia, and lived with my uncle for a few months. They were near one of the gates that lead back to the Manzano Mt range (nuclear weapons were stored there during the cold war), when a “bat winged” like object appeared to emerge from the side of the mountain range. It disappeared from view in seconds, and never made a sound.

Little did I know that this conversation would be the precursor to my life in New Mexico.

Uncle Mamp

As I mentioned in my last post, I come from a family whose ties, both musically and spiritually, are in the Roswell/Corona area. The uncle that I immediately took a “shine” to when we first met was my uncle Mamp.

Uncle Mamp moved from the area in the ‘20’s to San Antonio, TX. He would come back for the family gatherings/reunions as one of the Ol’ Timers. I remember him as being very youthful, not being “bent” by life.

Our first meeting was quite interesting. My family had just pulled into the small clearing at the base of the Pinos Wells Mountain. We had no sooner gotten out of the car than here was a tall gentleman, balding, holding a mandolin. He walked straight over to me and started a conversation with me (I was 10 years old). The conversation dealt with UFOs and their reality in our reality.

We walked off continuing this discussion. Mamp introduced himself to me, and said he had been waiting for me to arrive at the reunion; a kindred spirit is what he referred to me as being, and began to tell me about his experiences with UFOs. Keep in mind that this was the very first time I had met this man.

We ended up walking, picking up arrowheads, and discussing our views on the possibility of life on other planets. He told me that when I got older that this “talk” with him would mean more to me and make more sense. He got my mailing address and promised that he would keep in touch. Which he did, he mailed clippings from Texas newspapers, articles that he would find and my first UFO book “UFOs: Serious Business!” by Frank Edwards.

We must have covered a lot of ground on our walk, as when we headed back to the gathering everybody there was out scouring the area for me. It was a forested area and my folks were worried that I had wandered off and had gotten lost. Apparently no one noticed Mamp and I walking away from camp.

Mamp passed back in 1978. I still have some of our correspondences and that book. In that book is the small blurb on Roswell, which at that time was still being accepted as a balloon. On a small piece of paper, marking that page, Mamp had scribbled, “Not what happened.”

Damn-near Indestructible...

As I have mentioned before, my folks grew up around the Cedarvale, Roswell, Corona NM area. My dad’s family lived up in a small mountain in that region called Pinos Wells Mountain. There was a small village with that same name located in the land just before reaching that mountain. A friend of the family, who has been ranching, now owns that land. Much of the population has moved away.

Back when he owned the property, my dad’s side of the family would hold family reunions at the base of Pinos Wells Mountain. We would gather, usually at the end of the summer, and have a great time. I got to meet cousins, uncles and aunts that I would probably never have known existed. We would camp out at the mountain under the stars. It was there that I got to hear of some of the first-hand experiences by other members of my family.

I remember vividly one such night, as I came up on the campfire, my dad was playing guitar along with his brothers. My uncle Mamp was on mandolin and one of my cousins was on fiddle. They were talking about some metal that they had seen “back in the day”. My dad was struck by how the metal was damn-near indestructible. You couldn’t burn it, bend it or tear it, but it looked just like the foil from a package of cigarettes.

Uncle Mamp came up with the idea of the metal probably not being from this planet, and all of my relatives agreed. Then they told me about a cousin who revolved between being sheriff and chief of police in a small NM town. Apparently, during a term when he was sheriff, he took a photograph of 5 or 6 UFOs in formation flying over the town. Everybody there said that they had seen the photo and it clearly showed the crafts. They also said that it was so clear that the Air Force came and took the photo and the negative. Unfortunately this cousin was not in attendance that year. I filed the information away and would ask this cousin when I saw him next.

It would be 20+ years before I saw him again. It was at a town reunion for Cedarvale, NM. He and his wife showed up and he sought me out to see if I followed in my father’s footsteps

musically.

As we were tuning up, I mentioned this photo. He got a strange

look on his face, then looked straight at me and said, “ Why Wade, that never happened. You know that those things don’t exist.” I said I didn’t know any such thing, and that every relative said that he had the photo, that they had physically seen it, and that the local Air Force base came and confiscated it.

His eyes darkened and he repeated, “Those things don’t exist.”

He passed away later that year from prostate cancer.

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