Investigating New Mexico's less-famous UFO landing

CNET - Roswell gets all the glory. It has a UFO festival, a UFO museum, and a prominent place in the national mindset. Roswell happened back in 1947, but it wasn't really popularized until the late 1970s. Before Roswell got famous, Socorro, N.M., made national news in 1964 after a very peculiar incident on an April evening. Police officer Lonnie Zamora was chasing a speeding car near the outskirts of town when he turned off to investigate a loud roaring sound and a flame in the sky. What he initially thought was a car turned over in an arroyo turned out to be what he described as a shiny whitish object, shaped like an "O" with legs. Two figures the size of small adults were near the object, he said. As he got closer, the object rose up and flew away. Indentations and burn marks on the ground marked the spot to corroborate his report. You can read the full report from Zamora, copied from the U.S. government's Project Blue Book files. There are plenty of theories about what he saw, but everybody seems to agree that Zamora was a well-regarded and reliable officer who spotted something mysterious. Some people believe it was an alien visitation, others that it may have been a hoax. It's 2012 and I'm standing above a dusty, scrub-filled arroyo with Dave Thomas, president of New Mexicans for Science and Reason, a nonprofit that aims to promote science and critical examinations of extraordinary claims. He holds a folder labeled "Socorro UFO X-File" in one hand and a GPS device in the other. We are at the location where Zamora saw the mysterious object. Wind blasts over the mesa and the only sign that something happened here is a human-built pile of rocks meant to mark the spot. Read More News New Mexico

Investigating New Mexico's less-famous UFO landing