Regarding The 1964 Socorro UFO Incident

John wrote several weeks ago:

Hey Marc,

[This] was written 3 1/2 years ago but I just came across it today. I was hoping from the title that it was a definite explanation of a hoax but it really is not convincing. My feeling is that Colgate was told that the event was a prank and he probably believed it. But there still is no real information that would contradict what Zamora claimed to have seen.

Many people at Tech claimed to have some inside knowledge about it but then Techies claimed to have inside knowledge about a lot of things--it goes with the academic environment I think. The one claim that I wonder about was when I heard physics professor Brian O'Donnell in a freshman class conversation with students remarking that it was a hoax and that he knew who did it (he did not elaborate further). Brian was a past doc under Colgate in the early 70's. ....

A friend of mine here in Oklahoma was an undergraduate in geology at Tech, graduating in 1960. He remarked that Zamora was regarded as an "elbow bender" but offered no other thoughts on the alleged UFO sighting.

Anyway, it's worth a read. Most of the comments point out what I see as obvious weaknesses of the hoax explanation. Quien sabe...

By the way, good job on the BB reporting from NM!

John

Thanks, John! I wrote back:

Hi John:

I had set aside your recent E-Mails to look at when time allowed. Today is such a day.

Interesting read! When I was growing up in Corrales, the Socorro incident was much more famous than the Roswell incident, probably because it was newer, and occurred closer to Albuquerque. It always bewildered me how, starting in the late-70’s, the Roswell incident rose and rose in the public imagination, until by the mid-90’s, the name Roswell was synonymous with UFOs:



If they can build Roswell up that much, they can do anything!

Also interesting is the small bit of blog plagiarism in the article. The author provides a picture of the Name-A-Brick monument at NM Tech – which is identical to my photograph from 2006:



I'm not seriously worried about credit. Anyone can take a picture of a monument. But the lack of attribution doesn’t speak as well as it should to the authors’ own credibility, when their own credibility is at stake. But then again, even Snopes, that epitome of myth-busting, deliberately salts its own Web Pages with falsehoods (I fell for their ‘Poseidon Adventure on the Titanic’ story). They pulled that prank, and no doubt others, in order to force upon gullible people the need to get several sources for any information they use.

Marc