A "forensic" analysis of the April 24th, 1964 Socorro/Zamora UFO sighting

Two sites dealing with the Socorro sighting [April 24th, 1964]:

http://www.nmsr.org/socorro.htm

http://www.cufon.org/contributors/chrisl/socorro.htm

The first site – New Mexicans for Science and Reason – presents an objective overview of the Zamora sighting.

The Chris Lambert account – the second site above – is, while tending to choose the alien spacecraft scenario, provides a rather thorough account of the Socorro sighting.

However, let’s set aside the various hypotheses about what Zamora saw, even our own (which appear elsewhere), and look at some details that Zamora and his report show but have been ignored or overlooked by UFO researchers.

Zamora, in his own words (see previous post here), notes that he was wearing green sunglasses over his prescription glasses.

(Even David Rudiak, whose career-profession is optometry, eschews discussing Zamora’s eyesight condition, and no one has ever addressed, as far as we can tell, what exactly Zamora’s vision deficiency was.)

The green tint of the sunglasses would affect the color and tone of the object seen by Zamora, and the flames he describes.

This skews his observation, considerably.

Later, when Zamora stumbles and loses his glasses (both the sunglasses and his prescription glasses), he describes the object’s departure, but his estimations and observation has to be affected by the loss of his necessary visual aids.

But nowhere is this significant visual loss taken into account, nor is Zamora’s exact visual deficiency. What was Zamora’s visual acuity, and what visual impairment did he suffer from?

Zamora describes a symbol or insignia on the side of the object he saw. (We, and others, deal with this elsewhere, and Dr. Leon Davidson provided an interesting interpretation in 1976 which can be found at our UFO web-site.)

Our concern here, however, is that Zamora, before he lost his glasses, describes the symbol/insignia as 2¼ by 2 inches in size.

And this is his drawing of the insignia:



This when the object was somewhere between the 200 yards, when he first spotted the object, and the distance from which he observed the object after he and gotten nearer to it and it started to lift off.

Zamora’s approach has not been delineated in feet or yards, so we can’t be precise about how far away he was from the object when it began to depart so our forensic search can only be guessed at.

For instance, if you draw the insignia with red pencil or paint, and set it only 50 feet from you – a distance much smaller than Zamora’s from the departing object we assume (or else he would have been scorched by the flames he said were spewing from it) – you can note that the insignia – all 2¼ by 2 inches of it – are barely discernable.

(Several UFO web-sites report a CIA report that states the insignia was 1 foot to 18 inches in height. Zamora’s testimony is the one that should be accepted.)

And is you add green sunglasses over prescription glasses the color of the insignia – red, according to Zamora – would be altered and detail lost because of the distance from eyes to the insignia.

Forensically, the eyeglasses and Zamora’s eyesight has to be determined, specifically, but it has never been.

The chemical make-up of the flame(s) that Zamora saw at several different times of his sighting should have been considered by investigators.

An evaluation of those chemical colors could determine what propulsion fuel the object employed.

The noise from the object – the roar and the whines that the object emitted over the duration of the sighting -- should have been scrutinized, even going so far as to having Officer Zamora compare noises made by aircraft at the various bases close to Socorro.

Drawings of the imprints left by the object and the Hynek account, among others, indicate hat four (4) impression were left at the spot where Zamora said the object rested.

But he said he saw two legs, not four. Why the discrepancy? Did the object rise up and resettle, or were there four legs not two? What does this say about Zamora’s observation (and eyesight)?

Scorch marks and burnt residue were allegedly found at the site, some reports saying “fused sand” was found, and others saying that the residue was sap.

No serious investigation of the trace material was undertaken, or if it was, it hasn’t appeared anywhere.

A forensic study would have surely gathered plants and soil/sand samples from the reported landing site. This was not done hat April 24th day, or anytime thereafter, not specifically anyway.

As you can see, deficiencies of investigation were rampant at the time of the Zamora sighting, and they remain so even to this day, with some ufologists, however, still making a blanket statement that Zamora’s sighting was and is one of the best in the flying saucer/UFO annals.

But a symbolic forensic evaluation shows that Zamora’s sighting is replete with discrepancies and anomalies that belie the UFO scenario.

And the Socorro incident is not the only UFO account so flawed.