Close Encounters of the Unnerving Kind: UFOs vs. Law Enforcement

UFOs vs. Law Enforcement

As first responders, members of law enforcement are frequently involved in UFO incidents: investigating reports at the behest of local governments or military, taking down witness accounts, and scrutinizing apparent accidents or other anomalous physical conditions that may be linked to unidentified flying objects. Officers’ physical encounters with UFOs carry special significance, because those men and women are servants of the larger population, dedicated to the protection of the public. An officer’s negative encounter with a UFO, then, does not involve merely the officer, but all of us. An assault on an officer is an assault on everyone in the community.

Training helps officers develop watchfulness, self-discipline, and an active but objective attitude. Sometimes, though, even the best training has seemed inadequate.

Encounter in the Desert

Friday, April 24, 1964, near Socorro, New Mexico. 5:45 p.m.

Socorro patrolman Lonnie Zamora had picked up on the speeding black Chevy at the edge of town, just past the courthouse. The Chevy was new, and from the way the kid inside was pulling away south toward the desert, Zamora figured that the Chevy had the muscular 327 that pumped out three hundred horsepower.

Zamora flipped his lights and punched his white ’64 Pontiac Catalina. The cruiser had a police-package 389, and when the carb sucked greedily at the gas, Zamora’s head snapped back as the big car leapt forward.

The Chevy had started three blocks ahead, but as the edge of town receded, Zamora rode the accelerator pedal hard and closed the gap. It was late afternoon, and the desert and surrounding Socorro Range were quickly filling in with purple shadow. Zamora was close, almost on the kid’s bumper.

And then the sky to the southwest exploded in blue and orange. The concussive sound of a blast momentarily drowned out the roar of the cruiser’s engine, and Zamora instinctively lifted his foot from the accelerator. He craned his neck for a better look at the flash as he reached for his radio. There was a dynamite shack in the desert outside of town, and now the damn thing had blown up. And who blew up with it? Zamora wondered.

The speeder in the Chevy was gone, out of sight, probably into Socorro’s rodeo grounds. Zamora didn’t care about that anymore. He brought the Catalina back up to speed and traveled about a mile, and then stood on the brakes to slew the cruiser off the macadam onto an unimproved dirt road that would bring him near whatever was left of the shack. The Pontiac’s tail stepped out on the loose surface, but Zamora wrestled it back. He was thirty years old. He’d been with Socorro PD for five years, and had learned a long time ago how to handle a car on desert roads.

He continued on, slower now. Plumes of yellow dust rose from the sides of the cruiser, and small rocks pinged and thudded against the rocker panels. Zamora noticed that the blast fire’s blue color had diminished; now it was mostly orange.

And there was still a noise—like the blast, only less loud, and lower in register.

Zamora scowled. How could that be?

Something about the flame seemed odd, too. It was unusually narrow at the base, like the controlled finger at the business end of an acetylene torch. The setting sun didn’t help Zamora’s vision, and he had to squint through his flip- down sunglasses. He was still two hundred yards from the blast, and now the road rose in a steep hill. Zamora blipped the accelerator, and the Catalina struggled to climb the dirt and loose rocks. Even with a light, steady foot, the rear wheels spun, and Zamora finally had to stop and try again. He got the same unsatisfactory result the second time, and he finally topped the crest only after rocking the car back and forth.

There was a car about 150 yards off-road. It lay on its side, or maybe on its roof, and two men in coveralls stood nearby. Is this the shack? No, the shack is over there. It didn’t blow up. And who are the jokers in the coveralls?

Zamora pulled the cruiser onto the uneven desert scrub. When he looked again at the orange flame, the two men were gone. Zamora pulled to a stop and radioed in an accident report. The overturned car was in an arroyo, and when Zamora left his cruiser the low roar became louder, more like the first sound he had heard.

The men in the coveralls were still nowhere to be seen.

Now Zamora could see that the object wasn’t a car. It was car-sized or bigger, white—aluminum, maybe—and oval, without windows or doors, not even a seam. A peculiar, two-foot by two-foot insignia that Zamora couldn’t identify was visible on the object’s skin. Two slender support legs were visible at the base, but the coverall twins seemed to have vanished altogether. Something Zamora couldn’t see thumped audibly once, twice, and then the flame beneath the object expanded and shifted to the blue tone Zamora had first seen. The object began to rise into the air. The roar was loud, like a jet engine, but Zamora knew it wasn’t a jet. This was something else. The flame and noise were so great that Zamora was afraid the object was going to crash or explode. When he turned to crouch behind his cruiser his legs caught the front fender and he collapsed into the dirt. His glasses flew off. He could see all right without them, so he just ran. He wanted to get the car between him and the object, and he wanted some distance, too. He ran north, looking over his shoulder as the object rose to about ten feet. The blue flame had vanished, and now the oval just hovered. The thing made no noise at all, and Zamora was surprised that the sudden silence made his ears ring.

He locked his gaze on the object and slowly made his way back to the cruiser.

He retrieved his glasses, and was surprised when the object took off laterally, in silence, clearing the dynamite shack by about three feet and continuing south at high speed. The thing cleared the distant peak of Six Mile Canyon Mountain and disappeared.

Zamora just stood there for a long moment. He rested his hand on the Pontiac’s fender, and he thought how foolish and inadequate his fast car suddenly seemed. He leaned through the window and got on the radio again. He told two colleagues, Chavez and Lopez, to get the hell out there, fast.

Patrolman Zamora didn’t know it, but he had entered legend. He’d come as close to a UFO—an unidentified flying object—as anyone had yet reported. He was no longer simply Lonnie Zamora. Now he was Lonnie Zamora-who-got- within-spitting-distance-of-a-UFO-and-lived-to-tell-the-tale. Over the next fifty years, no one would be able to come up with a reasonable explanation for what Zamora had seen—and nobody could discredit his story, either. Although Air Force and other government investigators studied the scene, no details of their findings have ever been released.