ON MARCH 8, 1949, an aircraft systems inspector at Los Alamos National Laboratory looked up to see “an elliptical, rather stubby, aluminum body” surrounded by “billowy flame.” While watching it descend behind clouds, the inspector described the eerie shape as similar to a German fighter plane’s aft cockpit, but “there was no noise.”
The sighting was just the tip of the flying saucer, as it were. A recently released 116-page Armed Forces Special Weapons Project report documents more than 200 cases of unidentified objects—what the government now calls “unidentified anomalous phenomena” or UAPs—in New Mexico and West Texas from 1948 to 1950. Going far beyond the July 1947 Roswell Incident, the declassified reports detail disks, glowing orbs, and green fireballs flying faster than planes.
“Starting in November 1948 into 1951, there was a high concentration of UFO sightings here in New Mexico,” says David Marler, executive director of the National UFO Historical Records Center in Rio Rancho. “These objects—whatever they are—seem to be frequenting around Los Alamos and Sandia.”
At the time, the government’s military operations and classified experiments in those areas made them fertile ground for the unexplained. Marler, who was drawn by the UFO phenomena to move to New Mexico in 2012, finds these accounts credible.
The government did too. Among the collected reports is a letter dated May 1950 and addressed to Brigadier General Joseph F. Carroll, director of special investigations: “The observers of these phenomena include scientists, Special Agents of the Office of Special Investigations (IG) USAF, airline pilots, military pilots, Los Alamos Security Inspectors, military personnel, and many other persons of various occupations whose reliability is not questioned.”
Unlike today, when the skies are filled with advanced technology, Marler says, we have a good idea of what humans could do with aircraft in the 1940s and ’50s. Thus, he is fascinated by those early sightings of flying phenomena making right-angle turns at speeds unachievable by our own technology.
The military investigated these sightings due to Cold War national security concerns. “Going back to that time period, the concern was, ‘Is this Soviet technology that has leapfrogged us by many, many years? If so, we’ve got to be concerned about this,’ ” Marler says.
Illustration by Andy Bourne.
As for those green fireballs? The original hypothesis was that they were meteorites. But conferences that took place in Los Alamos in February and October 1949 were held to investigate. Lincoln LaPaz, of the University of New Mexico’s Institute of Meteoritics, was among the scientists, military, FBI, and government officials assembled. “He stated that never in the history of recording meteors have we seen the frequency, the luminosity, and the concentration here in New Mexico,” Marler says.
The summary report from those meetings details 209 confirmed sightings with dates, descriptions, altitudes, velocities, and courses of travel. It also includes a black-and-white photo of a “perfectly round luminous object” taken in Datil. LaPaz determined the object was definitely not the moon, a planet, a star, or another heavenly body.
“There is cause for concern of the continued occurrences of unexplainable phenomena of this nature in the vicinity of sensitive installations,” the meeting minutes read. But no conclusion was ever reached, and the mystery of the green fireballs remains unresolved.
“When you look at the sightings that we had in the ’40s and the ’50s here in New Mexico, it goes against the grain,” Marler says. Usually, high numbers of UFO sightings correspond with densely populated areas. But New Mexico in those decades was largely rural. However, Marler argues that most UFO sightings have mundane explanations. “I would hypothesize [the many UFO sightings] could be due to all of the technological development that was taking place here at the time,” he says.
The military secretly tested all kinds of rockets and weapons during this period, so the sightings make sense. But the other explanation could be out of this world. “Just waxing hypothetical,” he adds, “if this is another intelligence that’s observing what we’re doing, New Mexico would be a likely place to go.”