UFO, page 24
When his cruiser was about 150 yards away, he spotted a metallic object that he first judged to be a car on its side. Then, he saw “two figures in what resembled white coveralls, pretty close to the object on its northwest side, as if inspecting it.” The figures—he’d thought upon approach that they were young boys, given their size—turned at the sound of his police car, and one “must have seen me, ’cause when I turned and it looked straight at my car, it seemed startled—almost seemed to jump somewhat.” The terrain was uneven, and the object kept coming in and out of view as he drove through dips, depressions, and rises. “10-44 [accident],” he radioed to his dispatcher. “I’ll be 10-6 [occupied out of the car] checking the car down in the arroyo.”
As he got closer, though, the object looked more football-shaped and aluminum-colored, rather than a car’s standard chrome. It had red lettering or an insignia of some kind, about two feet high on the side, but had no visible doors or windows. He heard a couple quick loud thumps—“like someone possibly hammering or shutting a door”—and then a load, growing roar. “Flame was under the object. Object was starting to go straight up—slowly up,” he explained later. He turned and ran, unsure what he was seeing or what was happening, and ended up colliding with his own car, losing his glasses in the commotion. After running about seventy-five feet and jumping over a hill, he heard the roar stop. “I lifted up my head,” he said, “and saw the object going away from me.
“It appeared to go in straight line and at same height—possibly 10 to 15 feet from ground,” he recounted. “Object was traveling very fast. It seemed to rise up, and take off immediately across country.”
Zamora raced back to his cruiser and radioed a local amateur radio operator, unsuccessfully asking him to look out his window and verify the object, as it disappeared over the mountains. A New Mexico state police sergeant, M. S. Chavez, arrived moments later and commented, “You look like you’ve seen the devil.”
“Maybe I have,” Zamora said.
Socorro was near the northwest corner of the White Sands Missile Range, and the sighting gained widespread attention—especially after Chavez, Zamora, and other responding officers said they found seared bushes and impressions in the desert where Zamora had seen the legs of the object. The FBI began looking into the incident that night, and it was reported to the local army commander. Neither White Sands nor nearby Holloman Air Force Base had any operations that seemed to square with what the officer had reported, but everyone involved had reason to trust the account. The local FBI agent, who happened to be at the local office of the New Mexico State Police when the sightings were called in, had known Zamora for five years and reported to the bureau’s headquarters that he was “well regarded as a sober, industrious, and conscientious officer and not given to fantasy.”
The local FBI agent responded to the scene that evening, as did Captain Richard Holder with the army’s military police, to search the sighting’s location by flashlight, and found disturbances in the dirt and burned bushes. The FBI report described the four indentations as “sixteen by six inches rectangular,” all “going into the earth at an angle from a center line.” The next morning, a colonel in the Pentagon’s command center called unexpectedly and demanded Holder read his report out loud on the phone. (As he told an interviewer later, he always wondered, “Why in the world were they so interested?”) The UFO community responded quickly: the day after the news broke, Coral and Jim Lorenzen—the APRO founders—were also in town, as was an investigator for Blue Book.
As word spread farther about the happenings in the New Mexico desert, Hynek, by chance, was with Vallée at Wright-Patterson wrapping up a two-day meeting with Blue Book’s commander, Hector Quintanilla. (At the meeting, Vallée had been little impressed with the air force officer; the two couldn’t even agree on music and spent the first evening of the visit arguing about the Beatles, which Quintanilla saw as too violent and encouraging the “wrong kind of behavior” in youth. “The attitude of the Air Force in the face of the phenomenon remains consistent: open and motionless, like a lazy schoolboy yawning in the back of the class,” Vallée noted.) When the meeting was over, Quintanilla promptly dispatched Hynek to Socorro.
A local air force officer met Hynek in Albuquerque on the twenty-eighth to drive to Socorro, but their vehicle got a flat tire en route and Hynek hitchhiked the rest of the way by himself.IV He thought that arriving alone would benefit him in the long run—Zamora and Chavez seemed wary of the military, and might be more likely to speak with him if he didn’t arrive with an entourage. He was right. The next morning, they took him to the site of the “landing” (where they ran into a NICAP investigator doing his own report) to examine the gouges in the ground.
In a confidential memo afterward, Hynek observed, “Z. is an unimaginative cop of an old Socorro family, incapable of hoax, and pretty sore at being regarded as a romancer.” He added, “There’s never been a strong case with so unimpeachable a witness.”
The air force never figured out what was seen that day.V Writing in the CIA’s own internal journal, Studies in Intelligence, Quintanilla would later conclude, “There is no doubt that Lonnie Zamora saw an object which left quite an impression on him. There is also no question about Zamora’s reliability. He is a serious police officer, a pillar of his church, and a man well versed in recognizing airborne vehicles in his area. He is puzzled by what he saw, and frankly, so are we.”
Despite the remarkable and widespread cooperation of government and private-sector industries in his probe, Quintanilla remained committed to the theory that Zamora had stumbled upon a secret experimental lunar lander being tested by the space program, though searches for more information and proof came up empty after contacting NASA and more than fifteen private-sector contractors. “During the course of the investigation and immediately thereafter, everything that was humanly possible to verify was checked,” he wrote, explaining that they checked the scene with Geiger counters; analyzed soil; checked on possible launches with the Holloman Air Force Base’s Balloon Control Center, as well as with local authorities; cross-checked helicopter and plane flights across New Mexico; interviewed personnel at the Pentagon and range controllers at White Sands, as well as “industrial companies engaged in lunar vehicle research activity.” All to no avail. As Quintanilla wrote, “The findings were altogether negative.”
Local legend eventually settled on an experimental aircraft from one of the nearby military bases as an explanation, but as Blue Books’s leader then told the CIA, “This is the best-documented case on record, and still we have been unable, in spite of thorough investigation, to find the vehicle or other stimulus that scared Zamora to the point of panic.”
The “unusual case,” as historian David Jacobs wrote, “had important ramifications,” including widespread public press attention and ongoing government puzzlement, but even as “by the end of 1964 the UFO controversy had reached a type of stalemate,” with the unmoving tension between NICAP and Keyhoe on one side and government and the military on the other, Hynek “now came to virtually the opposite position to that which he had held when he started as an Air Force consultant in 1948.” He was ready privately to accept some sensational cases as being legitimate mysteries—he couldn’t get past why people like Officer Zamora, people with nothing to gain and much to lose from reporting an encounter, continued to come forward. What exactly they were seeing, well, he still didn’t know. But he was more and more convinced they saw something.
I. Worried about the sightings and the potential for damaging the wine-making region’s famous grape vines—or merely hungry for publicity—the mayor and village council in Châteauneuf-du-Pape had passed an ordinance amid the sighting wave prohibiting “the overflight, the landing and the takeoff of aircraft known as flying saucers or flying cigars, whatever their nationality is.”
II. “He is a warm and yet a deeply scholarly man, with much energy and a great sense of humor, an open mind, and a deep sense of culture,” Vallée wrote. “We are impressed by his sharp ideas and his eagerness for action. He has a lively face where piercing ideas are softened by a little goatee that makes it hard to take him completely seriously.”
III. Hynek’s wife, Mimi, argued vociferously against Vallée that UFOs could or would ever be able to be studied seriously at a major university—the ridicule factor was just too high. Vallée remembered, “Hynek watched us fight, cleaned his pipe, and refilled it in silence. Wisely, he avoided getting into the dispute.”
IV. As historian Jerome Clark notes, the “symbolism” of the flat tire and Hynek thumbing his way into a UFO sighting amid how underresourced Blue Book was by the 1960s amid the giant defense bureaucracy “seems a little too perfect.”
V. Interestingly, one of the FBI reports on the incident, released only decades later, cites specifically that the sighting was not connected to Operation Cloud Gap, a then-classified military research project to determine the feasibility of dismantling nuclear weapons as part of a hypothetical arms control agreement. It’s not clear why that specific military project, among all possible ones, was specifically ruled out.
23 Exploring Mars
As the 1960s began, it was time for mankind to finally explore Mars—and, again, the Cold War race was on for who would do so first. Mars, as our closest neighbor, has always held a specific fascination for earthlings. Records of observing the red planet go back some four thousand years, to both the early Egyptian astronomers on one side of the planet and Chinese astronomers on the other. Even then they understood Mars was somehow different—it and seven other celestial bodies moved against the backdrop of the rest of the stars—and its red light led the Chinese to call it the “fire star.” The Greeks called the celestial object Ares, the name for their god of war, but later it was the Roman version of the name that stuck.
Throughout the 1500s and 1600s, scientists and astronomers Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Tycho Brahe all studied the planet; their observations reoriented how we understood the solar system and our own place in the heavens, namely that the sun did not revolve around us, we revolved around it. In 1610, Galileo Galilei looked at the red planet for the first time through a telescope, seeing in more detail than anyone ever before him. He had no idea what might lurk on it—or any other heavenly body. “If we could believe with any probability that there were living beings and vegetables on the moon or any planet, different not only from terrestrial ones but remote from our wildest imaginations,” he wrote in 1612, “I should for my part neither affirm it nor deny it, but should leave the decision to wiser men than I.” (It would be another almost half century before a Dutch astronomer, working with a more powerful convex telescope, was able to map the first surface feature on Mars, and another half century after that, a British Astronomer Royal, William Herschel, was finally able to identify its polar ice caps and apparent clouds.)
The planet fully came into mainstream public imagination when it reached its closest position to Earth, about 56 million kilometers, in the summer of 1877. Discoveries during that time abounded; the US Naval Observatory used its sixty-six-centimeter telescope to uncover two new Martian moons, and Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli went to the rooftop of the Brera Palace in Milan to sketch the planet through his own telescope, drawing the most detailed map to date. “During those nights up on the rooftop observing Mars, Schiaparelli noticed curious features crisscrossing dark patches—lines that would entrance and bedevil scientists for decades,” planetary science professor Sarah Stewart Johnson later wrote. “He interpreted each dark patch to be a sea, ‘the saltier the water, the darker it appears.’ He conjectured that the lines linking them were waterways.” He named the lines canali, an Italian word for “channels,” but French astronomer Camille Flammarion began to popularize the notion that the lines were in fact canals—infrastructure like the Erie, Suez, and Panama projects, Earth’s greatest engineering feats in the 1800s.
Across the Atlantic, American astronomer Percival Lowell had also spent some time considering the Mars question, imagining the lush vegetation that surely spread out from the irrigation and navigation canals. To learn more, he funded an elaborate new observatory in Arizona in May 1894 and set out on an effort to better map the pathways—and the more he studied them, the more convinced he became that the planet represented a unique, more advanced civilization. The canals went everywhere, apparently without borders, indicating a peaceful society that had solved Earth’s geopolitical and warring rivalries. “The evidence of handicraft, if such it be, points to a highly intelligent mind behind it,” Lowell wrote. “Party politics, at all events, have had no part in them for the system is planet wide. Quite possibly, such Martian folk are possessed of inventions of which we have not dreamed.… Certainly what we see hints at the existence of beings who are in advance of not behind us in the journey of life.”
In 1895, Lowell outlined his thesis of an advanced civilization on our closest planetary neighbor in Mars, a book that experienced its own mini-phenomenon. As one of Lowell’s reviewers wrote soon after the book came out, “The world at large is anxious for the discovery of intelligent life on Mars and every advocate gets an instant and large audience.” His sheer confidence and exuberance in some ways was the greatest selling point for his theory—especially as his Martian maps proliferated. How could he be wrong if there were such detailed maps of the red planet’s surface? Even as pieces of evidence from other astronomers accumulated that questioned whether Mars really was packed with advanced Martians, it was “Lowell’s tour de force of popular science [that] would hold sway over the public for years,” as Sarah Stewart Johnson wrote.
A few years later, one of the world’s leading scientists took the discourse even further, revealing that he’d potentially received a message from Martians. Inventor Nikola Tesla, in 1899, had built a giant experimental laboratory in Colorado Springs, funded by J. Pierpont Morgan, to advance his new work in high-voltage electricity, and that December, as he was studying the wireless transmission of electricity, he was surprised to actually receive a signal on his transformer—a noise that was described as either a chirping or three distinct dots. “My first observations positively terrified me, as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night,” Tesla recalled. “It was some time afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control.” He said that he’d been later able to rule out that the signals were of earthly origin, leaving him even more sure that he’d made contact with a civilization beyond—especially since, as he saw it, there was no particular reason to imagine it would be technologically complicated to send a message from Mars or vice versa. As he wrote in 1901 in Collier’s Weekly, “The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.”I
Tesla’s suggestion that he’d heard from Mars did not seem like an “out of this world” proposition to many people at the time. Science fiction was a popular part of culture, and at the end of the nineteenth century “it was a popularly held belief among sane, educated, sensible people of Earth that intelligent beings existed on the planet Mars.” The more scientists—and the public—learned, Sarah Stewart Johnson wrote, the observations “all fit with the idea of Mars as another Earth, a planet with its own oceans to sail and lands to walk, a place we could recognize, relate, to, and imagine.”
While subsequent astronomical observations in the twentieth century had increasingly cast doubt on the possibility of thriving Martian civilizations, more than a few scientists and astronomers held out hope that the space race of the 1960s might finally discover that vegetation or other more simple life-forms existed on our closest neighbor.
* * *
As had been the case with the satellite contest, the Soviet Union was determined to make history first—and in 1960, as Premier Nikita Khrushchev was set to be appearing before the United Nations General Assembly, scientists readied two probes for launch, a dual display of the triumph for Soviet science; to hammer the point of victory home, the leader had had models created and sent for display in New York. As they saw it, they had always been one step ahead in the continuing march of space exploration dominance: Sputnik; the first space animal, the dog Laika; the first human, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin; and the first woman, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. Mars, naturally, would be next.
And then, the mission failed. Spectacularly. The first craft was destroyed in launch; the second made it 120 kilometers up before it, too, stopped working. The New York–bound models never saw the light of day, and Soviet scientists tried to cover up the evidence that they had not succeeded in their quest.II Two years later, three more flybys of the red planet were attempted. The first, known to the US as Sputnik 22, launched on October 24 amid global tensions over the Soviet missiles in Cuba, but exploded (causing quite the scare, as a US early-warning radar in Alaska picked up the falling debris and alerted incoming nuclear missiles), while the second, launched a week later, made it five months into space and 100 million kilometers from Earth before the communications systems went silent, ninety days before it was supposed to reach Mars. The third exploded prematurely.
In 1964, it was the US’s turn to make a move, and although its attempts at interplanetary study were barely more successful, it did by the narrowest of miracles manage to send a probe by Venus, known as Mariner 2. (Mariner 1, aiming for Venus, and Mariner 3, aiming for Mars, had failed.) On November 28, 1964—after hurried repairs to remedy the problems that doomed Mariner 3—Mariner 4, a 575-pound probe, filled with 168,000 parts, was at once cutting-edge and unbelievably primitive, with vacuum tubes, magnetic tape, and 28,224 solar cells that collectively provided just 310 watts of power—e.g., the equivalent of three 100-watt lightbulbs—lifted off successfully. It was a major scientific leap, using the star Canopus—the second-brightest star in the night sky—as a reference point for navigation, instead of locking onto Venus or Earth. Two days later, the Soviet Union launched the Zond-2 probe, which lost communication with Earth.
