Famous Socorro landing case a hoax?

Originally posted by FireMoon
Oh, and as far as i know, Black powder burns at about 1700C.. to turn sand into glass it needs to be 2000C.. So I'm not sure how the fireworks explanation works.

Possibly magnesium shavings. They burn quite brightly and I believe more than hot enough to fuse sand. (2200C)



[edit on 1-10-2009 by Arbitrageur]

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Hardly turned around from car, when heard roar (was not exactly a blast), very loud roar--at that close was real loud. Not like a jet--knows what jets sound like. Started low frequency quickly, then roar rose in frequency (higher tone) and in loudness--from loud to very loud. At same time as roar saw flame. Flame was under the object. Object was starting to go straight up--slowly up. Object slowly rose stright up. Flame was light blue and at bottom was sort of orange color From this angle, saw the side of object (not end, as first noted). Difficult to describe flame. Thought, from roar, it might blow up. Flame might have come from underside of object, at middle, possibly a four feet area--very rough guess. Cannot describe flame further except blue and orange. No smoke, except dust in immediate area.

From Zamora's statement. to Project Bluebook

Now, what i am not sure about is this. He was a some point wearing green lensed sunglasses. I am not sure whether he still was. Obviously, if he was, it would have some effect on his colour perception.

reply to post by FireMoon


I think his sunglasses fell off when he was running away from the thing and he left them lie on the ground and kept running back to his car. He put on his regular glasses after he got back to the car. The Frank Warren story linked on the previous page is mostly Lonnie Zamora's account with a lot of details, I think he mentions the sunglasses too.

I suspect if it was hoaxed they would have had a combination of pyrotechnic and other effects to get the light, sound, etc. I remember in chemistry classes figuring which chemicals burned with which color when stuck in a flame so with that kind of stuff fresh in your mind it's not hard to find chemicals that can generate colors in a fire, if that's what you want to do.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


I'm sorry but it is becoming way too labyrinthine this prank to be sustainable. So they thought... Right... Lets find something with burns with a blue flame and produces no smoke?

Well that's pretty much all the your typical pyros or fireworks removed from the equation already. Black powder creates plumes of smoke.

So, let's see what we have and what they did and let's see if it stands up?

They found 2-3 midgets, or kids. Dressed them up then shot them up into the air using a balloon with the gas burner turned upside down so as to look like some kind of *rocket craft*?

Or they built a large model which the then transported across town, during the day, which no-one saw and then launched that plus a couple of midgets using some kind of gas burner.

One would assume, said midgets/kids probably needed medical attention after such an escapade. Are there any records of kids or midgets being treated for burns or impact injuries that day in the local hospital?

The abiding impression i h get is this. That those who invented the hoax story, didn't actually study the available data on the sighting before making it up. Because, so far, there isn't a shred of evidence to support the story from a *this is exactly how we did* point of view.

Originally posted by FireMoon
so far, there isn't a shred of evidence to support the story from a *this is exactly how we did* point of view.

I agree with you there. The author came up with lots of hypotheticals on here's how they might have done it, but it's all complete speculation and completely unproven.

However you seem to be misinformed about some facts of the case.

Originally posted by FireMoon
They found 2-3 midgets, or kids. Dressed them up then shot them up into the air using a balloon with the gas burner turned upside down so as to look like some kind of *rocket craft*?

Nobody ever said the people he saw went up with the craft and they weren't midgets. What he said was:

The only time I saw these two persons was when I had stopped, for possibly two seconds or so, to glance at the object. I don't recall noting any particular shape or possibly any hats, or headgear. These persons appeared normal in shape--but possibly they were small adults or large kids.

www.theufochronicles.com...

You might want to read up on the facts of the case.

So where did the figures go> if they weren't in the craft he'd surely have noticed them moving off? You have to s assume by default, unless he saw the figures exit in any other manner, they left in the craft?


Object was traveling very fast. It seemed to rise up, and take off immediately across country. I ran back to my car and as I ran back, I kept an eye on the object. I picked up my glasses (I left the sun glasses on ground), got into the car, and radioed to Nep Lopez, radio operator, to "look out of the window, to see if you could see an object." He asked what is it? I answered "It looks like a balloon." I don't know if he saw it. If Nep looked out of his window, which faces north, he couldn't have seen it. I did not tell him at the moment which window to look out of.

Balloon don;t move *very fast*... so what was this miraculous craft they constructed that could almost hover, emit blue flame, but no smoke and then rapidly accelerate under controlled flight?


If Zamora was completely mistaken in his testimony, maybe it was a hoax, but if his testimony was correct, we are talking genius level for the pranksters..

Sorry but if we accept Zamora's evidence as accurate... the idea of a hoax looks like total hogwash to me..

reply to post by FireMoon

You might want to try reading this thread, it may answer some of your questions about how it MIGHT HAVE been hoaxed, but you won't find any real proof it's a hoax.

Here's one such post, good research by fls on Google Earth showing where they might have gone:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't it windy that day? That's the only thing that comes to mind for the balloon movement if it was a balloon.

I've read rake loads about Zamora over the years... Sorry but the hoax idea is just as ridiculous as some of the so called sightings people claim to have had..

If this hoax claim was a sighting, not a debunk, everyone would be saying what utter codswallop the whole thing was. How there was not a shred of evidence to back it up. And that's the facts..No photos to prove how clever they were... not one iota of evidence save some, at best circumstantial maybes and a letter that could easily been a total fraud. Where's the wreckage of the balloon, Or did they just let it disappear and no-one ever actually found it?

It is funny how this whole hoax thing has shown up at roughly the same time as the laughable explanation for Rendlesham

Originally posted by FireMoon
If this hoax claim was a sighting, not a debunk, everyone would be saying what utter codswallop the whole thing was. How there was not a shred of evidence to back it up.

You're right and I think just about every poster in this thread including me agrees and says the hoax is unproven until we see more evidence (maybe one exception). Until then it's "unexplained" just as Frank Warren concluded.

I described it as a "shadow" hanging over the case. But that's all it is, an unresolved question until there's more proof.

Got a link to the new Rendlesham explanation you mentioned? Don't think I've seen that. I know that's off topic here so I won't discuss it further here but you got me curious.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Whilst most posters may agree the hoax is unproven it is interesting to see how this kind of thing works over time.

If a mainstream discussion on the Zamora sighting came up 5 years from now somewhere it's amazing how someone can come along and say " that was explained as a prank by some students" and it be simply accepted with no further proof required.

If I had the time I would look into the chain of events a bit further because to me the MO is similar to a number of other explanations.

Originally posted by chunder
If a mainstream discussion on the Zamora sighting came up 5 years from now somewhere it's amazing how someone can come along and say " that was explained as a prank by some students" and it be simply accepted with no further proof required.

Too bad. It's the proof that makes the hoax explanation the best explanation and the best story too.

Originally posted by fls13
Too bad. It's the proof that makes the hoax explanation the best explanation and the best story too.

There is as much proof of this being real as there is of it being a hoax.

One story vs another.

Me, I side with the dedicated cop of many years experience who saw something that scared the life out of him and the various other people who stepped forward and said they heard something, as well as the people who investigated the site of the incident, including Hynek who was convinced Zamora was telling the truth btw - over a claim written on a piece of paper.

Been thinking about this and what, if i'd been given this info 'd have done before publishing a single word...

Checked the speeding car are and attempted to ascertain the following..

Did it have local or out of state plates?

Did Zamora know the driver or recognise the driver as a local/student?

Was there any follow up on the speeding offense by the local PD?

Checked the college year book for that year

Attempted to least interview half a dozen of the students attending the college in 65 and asked them who were the people who were *victims* of Zamora and did any of them hold an open grudge. Did anyone talk openly about getting even with him?

The names of any students Zamora had arrested or cautioned in the previous year, were any of them engineering students or on science courses?

Ascertained whether any of the teaching staff on the engineering or science side were, still alive and if so, do they remember anyone asking them questions about subjects that might have a baring on the incident.

Checked the school records and police records for any evidence of the theft of materials from college premises that might have been used in the incident.

Given the incident was specifically targeted. Who of the students, knew Zamora well enough to know that a UFO would be one of the very few things that would genuinely upset the guy and throw him out of his stride?

Socorro is a small town, I doubt the college was that large. I think, with a copy of the year book you could narrow the list of suspects down to a couple of dozen, at most, inside a week.

Checked the local hardware stores. Small town small shops are often family businesses that have records going back to the year dot of sales. There would be a chance, slim yes but still a chance, that records might show the purchase of materials commensurate with the incident around the time it happened.

Consulted the weather record for the Socorro area on the day in question. Was the prevailing wind direction that day commensurate with the flight path of a balloon?

So far, it would seem , the claimants have not done any of the background work you would expect from any serious investigation. Or maybe they have and are saying nothing because it doesn't fit the thesis they want to expound. Who knows?

What it does say is this. The so called expose is, at worst, nothing more than a risible shoddy piece of investigation, done with with a totally slapdash approach designed to promote a particular agenda. At best, it is just badly researched and incredibly naive in its' execution.

Here is a blog from Kevin Randle about this "hoax" theory:

kevinrandle.blogspot.com...

Dr J Allen Hynek was on the scene in the beginning and did not think it was a hoax. Also, an FBI agent also went to the scene and did not see any footprints to indicate someone had ran from the site.

Major Randle gets into some good details, and I think his article speaks for itself.

Originally posted by kidflash2008
Here is a blog from Kevin Randle about this "hoax" theory:

kevinrandle.blogspot.com...

Major Randle gets into some good details, and I think his article speaks for itself.

Here's a quote from the Randle article:

As I have said, and as Hynek wrote, they were looking for any solution and even a hint of a hoax would have been enough to push this from the unidentified category.

What??? How can that be true? We have a hint of a hoax now and it hasn't pushed it from the unidentified category, so why would just a hint have done so back then? It wouldn't have. Unless they could determine it was a hoax it would be unexplained.

The other thing he rehashes in the article is this:

Hynek finally does suggest the real problem with the hoax idea. He wrote, "If the hoax comes off well, perpetrators like to gloat abit (sic), and there would have been no point in getting even with Zamora if they couldn’t have gotten some kudos for it."

OK Hyneck may have been a professional astronomer, but he wasn't a professional psychologist. I simply don't buy the claim that hoaxers all feel compelled to take credit for their work, and the crop circle phenomenon would seem to verify this. A few circle makers have taken credit for their work but as far as I know, most haven't. If they all took credit for every crop circle we would have fewer people believing aliens made the circles people didn't take credit for.

But I do agree with Randle's conclusion that the hoax hasn't yet been proven. Where are the ex-students and how did they do it? Yes it's still unexplained until that happens.

Originally posted by FireMoon
Oh, and as far as i know, Black powder burns at about 1700C.. to turn sand into glass it needs to be 2000C.. So I'm not sure how the fireworks explanation works.

That work gets done back at the oven, somewhere on campus. That material is brought with the hoaxers and the area is seeded.

"OK Hyneck may have been a professional astronomer, but he wasn't a professional psychologist. I simply don't buy the claim that hoaxers all feel compelled to take credit for their work, and the crop circle phenomenon would seem to verify this. A few circle makers have taken credit for their work but as far as I know, most haven't. If they all took credit for every crop circle we would have fewer people believing aliens made the circles people didn't take credit for."

Crop circle makers have a very different agenda and very different psychology to the people who supposedly perpetrated this hoax..
Many of the crop circle makers and this i know from personal experience, have an agenda that encompasses both art and one involving the whole *Erisian and Cosmic trigger* school of thought. They are pranksters on a conscious level. They see their work as challenging people's perceptions of life in general.

If the patterns they make serve to make people think they have done their job. Their satisfaction is derived from watching people think or others consternation that the phenomenon won;t simply go away. Others are quietly, for their own purposes, collating and cataloguing people's reactions and looking for common threads with relation to paranormal phenomenon in other fields.

There area tiny minority of people who just do it for a laugh. Their circles are usually the least impressive designs and rarely make the news or even the on-line sites other than to be catalogued.

That is, there are no specific targets for the hoax who is to made a fool of in public. They have no need and many do not seek publicity for themselves. Many are widely known in the local communities for their activities but, the press or the authorities have no real interest in finding out who they are.

Socorro is totally different. We are meant to believe this was all orchestrated to make one man look a fool. Only it it utterly failed because they didn't come out and close the end game. Zamora, was by their own admission a figure of fun in Socorro, what happened after really didn't make that much difference. One is tempted to extrapolate that, Zamora would have been forced out of the force by his own actions sooner or later, unless he changed his way of acting. So maybe this action hastened that by a year or so.

To be so personal in intent in the hoax makes no sense whatsoever unless you then inflict the maximum damage in the aftermath. The psychology of a person or f group that go to such great lengths to attack one person shows they were possessed, not just annoyed. There is very little chance, given that, that wouldn't having stuck the knife in, relished the twisting of it in a very public manner, at the very first opportunity.

This was a vendetta not just hoax, according to the evidence that has been offered. The whole psychology of a vendetta is, two opponents obsessed with each other and seeing each other belittled publically and as extensively as is possible..

I will make a suggestion here. What happened to Zamora did actually happen as he reported. The students he has upset then concocted the idea of a hoax to try and discredit him but as soon as the military became involved along with the FBI they bottled it and never went through with it because they were scared they might find themselves in deep trouble if they did.

Ie, they were nowhere near as obsessed with Zamora as to perpetrate the hoax but thought it would be a giggle to claim they hoaxed it after the fact. However, they didn't have the nerve to follow through with their plan and what we have here is bunch of half formed plans that never actually saw fruition , now posted as if they were responsible for the actual event.

That would make sense

[edit on 2-10-2009 by FireMoon]

reply to post by FireMoon

Hyneck wasn't the only amateur psychologist, I'll include you, me and some others in this thread in that category. We pretend to know what their motivations are and how they would have behaved when we don't. Maybe they did want to make him look like a fool, maybe not, and they just wanted a good laugh. Maybe they had some creative talent like the crop circle makers and creating this was an outlet for them to express their artistic work, and it wasn't so much a vendetta for Zamora as the fact he was a convenient target.

I don't know what their exact motivations and reasons might be and it seems presumptuous for others to presume that they do unless they are professional psychologists who have studied the psychology of hoaxing.
I can only say that a boy who goes to the house of the old man down the street who was mean to him, and lights a bag of dog poop on his front porch, and rings the bell, hides in the bushes, then laughs as he stomped it out, has no motivation to take credit for the prank. I see no reason why this couldn't be a much more elaborate version of the dog poop on fire on the front porch gag. You just can't conclude that people will always want to take credit for their pranks.

You do bring out one possibility though. What if the students did this with the possible intent of claiming credit afterward thinking it would just be a local event within the town? But once they saw military involvement they decided not to admit anything because they then feared the consequences of doing so.

To me the psychological debate is very weak and I almost sense that people who want to believe it wasn't a hoax build this up into a big reason it can't be a hoax based on complete speculation, pretending they know all the possible motivations a hoaxer can have.

Randle also mentioned the lack of footprints leaving the scene as possible evidence that it wasn't hoaxed. Well at least that's based on supposed physical evidence (or lack thereof) so it might have some more credibility than the psychological angle. But even Randle didn't find that persuasive, I guess because it was too easy for someone to have missed the footprints. Some people have even said they didn't find ANY footprints afterward. Since Zamora didn't report the people he saw were floating a foot off the ground, one can only infer that there had to be footprints and someone missed them, or they walked on areas of the soil that didn't leave good footprints.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Actually, I am a trained interviewer. Plus back in my student days and early 20s i was involved with collating reports and interviewing subjects about several different paranormal phenomenon. Over the years i have studied many hoax's and hoaxers and the psychology of them has a certain pattern. It's no different to psychological profiling in murder cases. Once you know what the basic parameters are, you tend to find that. Nearly all hoaxers fall into a neat series of categories.

Retrospective claims of hoaxs are often the most hoaxed themselves. The Patterson film of Bigfoot, one guy couldn't find the area, let alone the actual site of the film when challenged. A recent forensic test, using an athlete has shown, pretty conclusively that no human can ape (sic) the motion of the creature in the film. Be that as it may, the claimants still cling to their claims.

The laughable*lorry on fire* explanation for the Rendlesham incidents.

With this particular raking over of Socorro i strongly suspect the motivation with the people proposing the hoax theory is. They want to make a name for themselves and book themselves onto the lucrative circuit of radio talks hows and lectures rather than actually work for a living.

As such, they have quite deliberately picked on a cause celebe from the annals of Ufology and dredged up what scant evidence there is and simply re-presented it in an attempt to say ..Look at me.. I'm the person(s) who solved the Socorro case.

It's common enough. The problem we have is that people tend to assume debunker's tell the truth. They don't they are as likely, if not more likely to lie, as the most fervent of believers, because their non belief is as consuming as the believer's belief is. They are as obsessed with disproving what the believers seek to prove. Oh they deny it, of cause they do, as it would bring into question their impartiality. The truth is, people like Randi et al, are not impartial at all.

To my mind the key to this being, as far i can tell, a hoax of a hoax is simple. The weather data from the day could have provided a virtual slam dunk for the hoaxers. If the wind direction was commensurate with the direction the object vanished then they have, virtually, won.

See. if the wind was right, that simple fact alone will have the vast majority of neutrals and suspicious say. "Oh well that's all i need to know, it was a hoax".

Its' total and utter absence speaks volumes about, not only the veracity of the claimants, but also their work methods. If they can't be bothered with such a crucially significant detail, then why should we believe a word they say, when they are obviously such lazy idiots?

That the weather information is absent from their hypothesis suggests a very arrogant self satisfied mindset that has drawn a conclusion and has no wish to further test it, but merely bask in the fame/notoriety simply expounding it, in public, brings.

I am reminded of one of the classic moments in Ufology TV, involving Stanton Freidman, who at times, i have real issues with surrounding his cult of personality, and a British Astronomer.

Astronomer... "Look, if i was aware of the existence of extra terrestrial being and ships i would be telling everyone i know about it and phoning the press.."

Friedman... "Now you know why you have never been asked or co-opted onto any of the groups who study the phenomenon on behalf of the government"...

[edit on 2-10-2009 by FireMoon]

[edit on 2-10-2009 by FireMoon]

Originally posted by FireMoon
With this particular raking over of Socorro i strongly suspect the motivation with the people proposing the hoax theory is. They want to make a name for themselves and book themselves onto the lucrative circuit of radio talks hows and lectures rather than actually work for a living.

As such, they have quite deliberately picked on a cause celebe from the annals of Ufology and dredged up what scant evidence there is and simply re-presented it in an attempt to say ..Look at me.. I'm the person(s) who solved the Socorro case.

It's common enough. The problem we have is that people tend to assume debunker's tell the truth. They don't they are as likely, if not more likely to lie, as the most fervent of believers, because their non belief is as consuming as the believer's belief is. They are as obsessed with disproving what the believers seek to prove. Oh they deny it, of cause they do, as it would bring into question their impartiality. The truth is, people like Randi et al, are not impartial at all.

If you were familiar with Zamora's account and knew how this recent story came to be, you wouldn't have written all that crap.