Encounter in the Desert

The Case for Alien Contact at Socorro

New Page Books 2017 Pb, 284pp, illus, ind, bib, $16.74, ISBN 9781632651136

With revelations of a secret US government UFO programme recently exposed in surprisingly even-handed treatments by traditionally unfriendly outlets such as the New York Times and

Washington Post, maybe it’s time to re-examine the Socorro, New Mexico, landing of 24 April 1964. Even Project Blue Book, ordinarily adept at drawing explanations out of the thinnest of air, listed it as among its rare unexplaineds. It continues to defy conventional explanation more than half a century later.

In the mid-1990s, in the desert near Socorro, I met the principal witness, Lonnie Zamora, and fellow Socorro police officers (all retired by then) who had played secondary roles in the incident. Zamora, who has since died, turned out to be personable, warm-hearted, and good-humoured – a decent man and far from the devious hoaxer portrayed (unconvincingly on just about any grounds) by particularly resolute debunkers. Other officers related aspects of the case (mostly involving persons who provided corroborating testimony) that had not appeared in the standard recountings. Veteran ufologist and prolific UFO-book author Kevin D Randle passes on that information, along with much else, in his comprehensive Encounter in the Desert.

The new book is, to my fairly certain knowledge, the second on the subject. The first was Ray Stanford’s Socorro ‘Saucer’ in a Pentagon Pantry (1976), based on the author’s investigation in the immediate aftermath of Zamora’s reported late-afternoon sighting of an egg-shaped craft with two briefly visible small humanlike figures nearby.

The object, which sported a symbol (an upright arrow with a straight line at the bottom and an arc over the top) on its side, left traces in the sand and (controversially) on the rocks beneath it. Parts of Stanford’s book generated fierce disputation, most of it focused on Stanford’s reported recovery and handling of tiny metal flakes seemingly from the vehicle. It doesn’t help that, as the title hints, the book strays into dead-end crashed-saucer country.

Randle’s book re-examines the case and its larger context within the framework of UFO experiences overall, including CE2s (physical traces) and CE3s (occupants). He also surveys, and persuasively discounts, the alternative explanations (e.g., hoax and lunar-landing vehicle), while trying to clear up such lingering matters as the precise shape of the symbol Zamora reported.

As always Randle is a calm, matter-of-fact chronicler, constitutionally immune to such occupational disorders as paranoia, excitability, credulity, and conclusion-leaping. If he is not a natural prose stylist, any open-minded reader will likely forgive him for what Randle offers in responsible analysis. In fact, at times he bends over backwards to embrace a prosaic solution when equally sober researchers might conclude otherwise, as in his dismissal of the Flatwoods, West Virginia, 1952 monster report as hysteria-generated. Still, caution in handling complicated data, and any UFO data worth thinking about are bound to be complicated, is always preferable to its opposite.

Unless earthshaking new developments rattle our understanding, surely unlikely at this stage, Encounter in the

Desert will remain the definitive treatment of one of ufology’s foundational cases. It will also serve as a good example of how to treat a single case at book length. It’s not enough to lay out a detailed exposition of the incident. That incident also needs to be viewed through the prism of instructive comparable reports in other times and places.

Randle, who understands as much, handles Socorro and related issues in characteristic ally able fashion.