At about 5:45 p.m. on April 24, 1964, Socorro police sergeant Lonnie Zamora was chasing a speeding car south of town when he heard a roar and saw a flame in the sky to the southwest. Thinking a dynamite shack might have exploded, he left the chase to check. In a gully he saw a shiny, whitish object shaped like an "O" that he first took for an overturned car, and briefly saw two figures in white coveralls standing beside it.
As Zamora drove closer, he said he heard a loud roar and saw a blue and orange flame under the object, which rose and moved quickly away. He radioed for help, and New Mexico State Police Sergeant Chavez arrived soon after. Officers found burning and smouldering brush and shallow depressions in the ground where Zamora said the object had stood.
The US Air Force's Project Blue Book investigated, and the case fills one of the larger Blue Book folders, at about 170 pages. Blue Book could not identify the object and listed the case as "unknown", one of its best-known unsolved landing reports.
Proposed explanations include a test of a lunar landing craft from White Sands Missile Range, a hoax by New Mexico Tech students (an idea supported by the college's then-president Stirling Colgate), a mirage of the star Canopus, and, from skeptic Philip J. Klass, a scheme to boost tourism. None has been proven. Zamora died in Socorro in 2009. The town built a viewing area near the site and in 2012 commissioned a mural marking the event.