LAS CRUCES, AUGUST 20, 1949
Clyde Tombaugh, who famously discovered Pluto, was in his Las Cruces backyard with his wife and mother-in-law on a clear, starry night when “he saw a series of rectangular, illuminated boxes moving together in a formation,” Marler says, showing the center’s copies of the sketches Tombaugh made. “As they continued to move, they gradually collapsed onto themselves, where they looked like rectangles. But then they dropped down to look like little slits of light, and then eventually the slits of light disappeared.”
KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, NOVEMBER 4, 1957
During the night, Kirtland’s radar picked up an object traveling toward the Albuquerque base. Two military personnel in the control tower saw a UFO violate the base perimeter and watched through binoculars as it flew around, hovering and reversing direction. Eventually, the dark, rectangular silhouette, standing vertically on one end, with a white light emanating out of the bottom, shot up into the sky at 45,000 feet per minute and disappeared. “The official Air Force explanation was that it was probably a private pilot that mistook Kirtland as a commercial airfield,” he says.
AMERICAN SOUTHWEST, SEPTEMBER 13, 1959
There are no known eyewitnesses in this case, but an unidentified radar tracking report from Kirtland Air Force Base clocked an object flying at an average of 1,920 mph and making angular turns at high velocities. Four separate radar stations across the Southwest recorded the UFO with similar observations. “This object, whatever it was, was moving between 400 to 900 miles [per hour] faster than the airspeed record we would achieve three months later,” Marler says.