April 26, 1964 — La Madera, NM
Around 1:00 a.m. Orlando Gallegos steps outside his father’s ranch at La Madera, New Mexico, to chase away some horses in the yard. He sees a peculiar structure in the Rio Vallecitos creek bed some 900 feet away. It looks like a butane tank “as long as a telephone pole” about 14 feet in diameter, metallic, and shooting blue flames out of holes in the sides. As he watches over the next minute, the flames subside. It is still there when he goes inside, where no one else believes him. It is gone the next morning, but state police (including Capt. Martin E. Vigil, David Kingsbury, and Albert Vega) investigate and find the ground still smoldering and scorched with four depressions, one of them 8 by 12 inches in size. The charred area is in the shape of two overlapping circles and about 20 feet across. Hynek is refused authorization to go visit the site. [Eberhart]
UFO Reporter. Summer 1964 from BB File:
Sources:
“Mystery Object Report Is Told,” Albuquerque Tribune, April 27, 1964, p. 1;
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-albuquerque-tribune/95207810/
Coral Lorenzen, Flying Saucers The Startling Evidence Of The Invasion From Outer Space, 1966, pp. 222–223;
Donald E. Keyhoe and Gordon I. R. Lore Jr., Strange Effects from UFOs, NICAP, 1969, pp. 54–55;
“Hunting Old and New UFOs in New Mexico,” IUR 7, no. 2 (March 1982):12–13;
Jerome Clark, The UFO Encyclopedia, 3rd Ed., p. 1092;
Jerome Clark, The UFO Encyclopedia, 4th Ed., pp. 208–1209;
Brad Sparks, Blue Book Unknowns Catalogue, Case 1561, p. 298;
Lacatski, James T., Colm A. Kelleher, and George Knapp. Inside the U.S. Government Covert UFO Program: Initial Revelations. RTMA, 2023, p. 70;
