Hello and welcome to the program UFO Warning.
In this episode, we're talking about the Socorro Fireballs of
1949. That's correct, the Socorro
Fireballs of 1949. This whole story's been around
for a little while, but I bring this up because of this recent
document dump. This came out today.
More of this stuff in the Department of War.
I have to tell you, there's a lot of stuff mixed in with this
and I have to ask myself, why is it even classified?
I mean, it really is a dump and it's, there's so much volume
here that you literally have to go through file by file.
And I don't think I could even go through it if it wasn't for
AI going through and reviewing some of the stuff and sorting
out the wheat from the shaft. Now, the file we're looking at
is the second one on the Department of War UFO website.
You can go to yourself and look at it.
And I asked, I asked Grok to go ahead and do a little bit of a
summary of this thing. And it says Summary of the
DOWAPDO 17 General Correspondence of Sandia 1949.
This is a 116 page declassified collection of 1949
correspondence and reports primarily for Sandia Base,
Albuquerque, NM, and related military scientific personnel.
It focuses on security matters at sensitive nuclear related
facilities and investigations into the green of fireballs, an
unusual luminous phenomena frequently reported over New
Mexico in 1948 to 1949, especially near Los Alamos and
Sandia. Now.
It starts off with some routine conversation about some
maintenance work that needs to be done to prevent some erosion
at a site, and then it moves right into this next page, it
says. Main sections and topics base
security correspondence, airborne particle collections,
and fireball analysis. July through August 19451949.
The core scientific content involves attempts to link green
fireballs to physical evidence. After a prominent green fireball
sighting over Socora on July 24th, 1949, researchers, notably
Dr. William Crozier and Ben Seeley from the New Mexico
School of Mines used impactor collectors and it's air sampling
devices with adhesive slides treated to detect copper, nickel
and cobalt to collect airborne particles tells us key findings.
Early collections hours after the event showed unusually large
copper bearing particles up to 100 microns from solid slash
opaque, others granular. That seems a little weird to me
that you would have these fireballs show up, these green
fireballs, and then when they would test, you would have
copper. Well, you know, you associate
copper with the color green. Some nickel and cobalt
indications were found, including spherical particles,
which raised questions about possible meteoric origin.
And it says particle sizes and counts varied over days.
Smaller particles appeared later.
However, conclusions were cautious or inconclusive.
Many particles could be of local terrestrial origin, stirred up
by Rd. dust or from nearby buildings.
No definitive link in the fireball was established.
Well I guess it would have been nice if they would have got a
before and after, but you really couldn't do that because nobody
bothered to test till after they saw these fireballs.
It says these documents that they released sheriff and
department were includes tables or particle counts by size and
date, plus discussions of collection methods and
limitations. Basically, they just created a
scientific paper now. Broader contexts and
recommendations. References to Doctor Lincoln La
Paz Institute of Meteorites, University of New Mexico, in
coordination with military intelligence.
Suggestions for improved collection mentions a Project
grudge early USOUS Air Force UFO investigation.
Yeah, what an aptly named project there.
Project grudge. Well, they really held a grudge
because we were being forced to go out and investigate all these
wacky UFO claims, huh? And overall tone and
significance. It says the document reflects
early Cold War era concern over unexplained aerial phenomena
near key nuclear weapon sites. Sandia, Los Alamos scientist and
military personnel took the green fireballs seriously enough
to conduct physical sampling and lab analysis, but results
remained ambiguous. Typical of the era's UFO
investigations. No exotic conclusions were
reached. Emphasis was on rigorous
evidence based study. The PDF has OCR imperfections.
It says old type art text, but the content is coherent.
Yeah, thank you very much for doing that.
Chat, GP or Crock. I went over to Google, got a
little bit of AI on this because let's just face it, there's so
much stuff here, I could spend 20 hours trying to read it all
and I haven't got that kind of time.
And I don't suppose you do either.
This, says the 1949 Scirocco Fireball, is best remembered as
part of the infamous Green Fireballs phenomena, a wave of
highly unusual bright glowing aerial objects that frequently
streaked over the New York, the New Mexico's sensitive Cold War
nuclear installations. Well, here we are again seeing
this very, I guess, fascination these things seem to have with
nuclear installations. It says key details of the
sightings what happened starting in late 1948 and peaking heavily
through 1949, witnesses, including commercial and
military pilots reported brilliant, luminous green balls
of fire. Socorro Connection, a
declassified 1949 Sandia based document, detailed unusual
copper bearing airborne particles discovered after one
of the fireballs events near Socorro and military concern
because of the Because these green fireballs consistently
appeared over top secret facilities like Los Alamos
National Labs and the Sandia base, it caused major alarm.
The Air Force established an organized reporting system for
them, leading to a specialized military and scientific study
called Project Twinkle. But they love these names, don't
they? Project Twinkle Astronomer
Lincoln La Paz Dr. Lincoln La Paz, A pioneering meteors at the
University of New Mexico who investigated the 1949 Socorro
events, pointed out that the flight path and behavior of
these fireballs were highly uncharacteristic of conventional
meteors. So you have the guy that's an
expert on meteors and he's saying, boy, these don't look
like meteors to me. The Soviet spy fear In early
1940, Army intelligence officials expressed deep concern
that these objects could be radiological warfare experiments
or guided missiles launched by a foreign power such as the USSR,
targeting US atomic installations.
Yeah, the very same people who had to steal the nuclear weapons
technology from the United States.
Remember the Rosebergs? They're so advanced they're able
to ignite green fireballs over our nuclear facilities.
It seems kind of laughable, doesn't it?
Official conclusion. Ultimately, government
investigators like Project Twinkle were discontinued, and
the official stance was that the fireballs were likely rare
natural phenomena such as high copper meteors or atmospheric
anomalies. Well, nothing says swamp gas
like swamp gas, I guess. I mean clearly something very
strange happened there and the best they could do was just
write it off to a natural phenomena.
Before I get into this project, twinkle a little bit, I just
want to remind people Socorro NM was famous for UFO sighting.
You might be thinking about that.
This was the Lonnie Zamora event and if we go to Google AI it
tells us a famous Socorro NM UFO event actually occurred on April
24th, 1964. So this is 15 years later rather
than 49. But local police officer Lonnie
Zamora witnessed an egg shaped craft land in the desert.
It left physical landing gear, indentations and burned brush
remaining officially unexplained by the Air Force.
Now remember Mr. Zamora, he never changed his story.
Up until his death, he always had the same consistent story.
While the major Sakura event took place in 1964, government
files, including records released by the Pentagon, show
that New Mexico experienced a massive wave of green fireball
phenomena and unidentified sightings in 1949.
This prompted physicists, astrophysicists and the FBI to
hold secret conferences in Los Alamos to investigate the
sightings. Now as far as this 1964 Sakura
incident, just the highlights of this.
We've talked about this on the podcast before, probably should
do another story. It says the sighting while
pursuing A speeding car, Officer Lonnie Zamora heard a roar and
saw a flame in the desert. He diverted to investigate and
found an egg shaped metallic craft on four legs.
The occupants, Zamora observed 2 figures and white coveralls near
the object. Here we go with the coveralls
again. We we hear about these coveralls
clear back into the 1800s when people were seeing these
airships, it says. Frightened by a sudden loud roar
and a blast of blue to orange flame, Zamora took cover.
When he looked back, the UFO was speeding away horizontally
across the desert floor. Is that weird?
So the police officer, he's chasing somebody, he looks over,
he sees this flame, whatever, not sure, pulls over, looks out
the desert, and here's this egg shaped craft, metallic craft
perched on 4 legs, sitting out there in the desert.
He gets out, has a look, sees 2 figures outside of this craft
wearing these white coveralls. White coveralls, Weird.
And then I was watching him. Apparently this loud blast
happens. A blue orange flame comes out of
the craft. It doesn't go U in the air like
you'd think. Instead it says it seeds away
horizontally across the desert floor.
That's strange, the physical evidence.
Investigating officers and scientists found wedge shaped
landing impressions in the soil and scorched brush.
I believe there's still pictures of those things around the
Insignia. Zamora reported seeing a
distinct red Insignia on the side of the craft, which he
sketched for investigators. Yeah, that was quite strange.
This has got a lot of of of depth to the story.
Like I said, we'll have to come back to this.
Now getting back to this idea of this Project Twinkle, let's take
a look at that real quick. Project Twinkle, we're told, was
a short lived secret United States Air Force investigation
launched in 1950 to study a massive wave of mysterious green
fireballs reported over New Mexico.
Operated by the Air Material Command in the Air Research and
Development Command, it served as a specialized sub project
under the broader military UFO investigation of Project Grudge.
Between late 1948 and 1950, military personnel, civilians,
and elite scientists working at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory witnessed over 150 incidents of strange bright
green lights in the sky. Does not seem odd to you that
this all happened right at this time where they're doing all
this research on nuclear energy, nuclear weapons.
Unlike typical meteorites, these objects flew on flat, horizontal
trajectories parallel to the Earth.
Just like the spaceship, that line Zamora saw flat,
horizontal, not up and down. They made absolutely no sound.
They never left impact craters or crashed to the ground.
Because these sites occurred directly over sensitive nuclear
weapons laboratories and military bases like Holman Air
Force Base, the government feared they might be secret
Soviet spy technology or reconnaissance flares, the
investigation method. Following a secret military
conference in Los Alamos in 1949, the Air Force established
Project Twinkle to capture hard data.
They hired Dr. Lincoln La Paz, A renowned meteor specialist, to
head their research. The plan was to set up
specialized 12 hour observation post equipped with Escania
Syntholidyte tracking cameras around Vaughan, New Mexico.
If two different posts photographed the same fireball
simultaneously, scientists could calculate the object's exact
speed, altitude, and size. Project Twinkle was never fully
implemented and was plagued by funding issues.
Huh. How amazing.
So they can talk about it all day long, but they can't provide
funding to figure out what these things are?
Plagued by? Funding issues, equipment
delays, and bad luck. Ironically, as soon as the
Systematic observation watch was established, the green fireball
sightings abruptly abruptly ceased in the area.
The cameras never managed to capture simultaneous, measurable
data of a fireball in action. Well, this is something we
certainly have heard before. The Air Force officially
discontinued Project Twinkle in late 1951.
The Project Twinkle final report concluded that the fireballs
were not a national security threat and were likely natural
phenomena such as atypical meteorites or atmospheric
electrical anomalies. However, Doctor La Paz and
several other scientists remain publicly unconvinced,
maintaining until their deaths that the fireball were
artificial and unexplained. Yeah, well, I mean, let's be
honest, How often do you hear about a fireball moving
horizontally across the the the desert landscape like that?
I mean, we've all seen meteorites.
They come down from the sky and sometimes they look like
they've, you know, landed nearby.
Usually they have it because if they have, they're going to make
quite an quite a lot of explosion.
Yeah. Very wild stuff.
Now, I do want to give some credit to John Greenwald over at
the Black Fall, because he's, he's been on this story for a
while. That's kind of kind of a little
bit of an issue because a lot of the stuff's being brought up and
it kind of gives the appearance of, you know, this is all brand
new information, really. It's not.
And that's kind of the problem. It's like John Greenwald has
been spending decades, I think by now putting in FOIA request
for this stuff. And lots of times he gets out,
he gets back blacked out pages of stuff.
If they want real disclosure, just give John the documents he
asked for, but quit blacking them out.
And so I want to look at this article right here because he
does deserve some credit in this.
It's it. The articles is by lanl.gov.
It says lost. This is a lost Alamos
publication. Queries.
Queries from the public can sometimes be otherworldly.
Laura McGinnis, Librarian, National Security Research
Center. It almost feels like they're
trying to get ahead of head of him a little bit on this on this
subject. This is written, I believe,
what, back in 2018 or something. I don't see a date here on the
article itself. Did you know that a conference
was organized at the lab in 1949 to discuss green fireballs
reportedly observed above Los Alamos?
Were it not for the Freedom of Information Act, the lab
scientific probes into these mystery sites might have been
lost to time. So the concern I have right, you
see right there is that a lot of this stuff's already been
released to John through FOIA request and now they're
releasing it on the on the Department of War website.
Almost like they're pretending like this is all brand new stuff
and it's not. So I'm a little concerned about
this document dump. Are we getting really new
relevant stuff or it's just maybe stop there re releasing it
with a few less lines blacked out?
I don't know. Signed into law in 1967, FOIA
gives any person the right to access records kept by federal
agencies so they can better understand the US government's
operations and activities. Well, I really have questions
about that statement. Agencies are required to
disclose information requested under FOIA unless that
information falls under one or more of nine exemptions
protecting interest such as personal privacy, national
security, and law enforcement. Yet often times we see these
these pages released and they're just completely blacked out.
Often described as the law that keeps citizens in the know about
the government, FOIA is a vital part of the US democracy.
Again, I really question that statement.
The Laboratories FOIA program fields over 100 requests for
records each year as the labs classified research and
technical library dedicated to information stewardship and
education. The National Security Research
Center regularly assists with these requests, close to half of
the yearly volume. Yeah, in a perfect world, maybe
fulfilling FOIA request is an important part of what we do
here, said NSRC Senior Archivist Daniel Alcazar.
It's critical to our mission to ensure the public has access to
information it has a right to see.
Public queries over a spectrum of topics that most involve
requests for Manhattan Project era technical reports and member
and Los Animals produced historical and scientific films
were documents pertaining to former employees.
While less common, Alcozar estimates that he also receives
a few FOIA requests every year related to unidentified flying
objects and other unexplained aerial phenomena.
I bet it's a few more than that. Project Twinkle.
A mysterious hypothesis. Oh boy.
Over the years, general FOIA request about UFO studies at the
lab have led to some fascinating vines.
One such example is the rediscovery of archive materials
related to the evening of December 5th, 1948, when
witnesses reported a green fireballs across the sky over
Los Alamos. The fireballs appeared several
times over the next three months, flying noiselessly and
just with an eyesight of residence on the Mesa.
Yeah, I read somewhere where it was like 209 different
sightings. Similar phenomena were reported
near the Hanford Site, a now decommissioned plutonium
production complex in Washington state, and within 400 miles of
Oakridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, another site of
nuclear fuel production during the Manhattan Project.
So whatever's going on with that nuclear fuel production has got
these things interested. The number of sightings of these
phenomena and their proximity to sensitive facilities were of
concern to the US government. Could the fireballs be a threat
to national security? In response, a conference was
organized at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, the labs
post war name, on February 16th, 1949, to discuss the strange
phenomena. The conference was attended by
scientists such as then Laboratory Director Norris
Bradbury and physicist Frederick Ryan's and Edward Teller.
That's the atomic bomb guy, as well as members of the FBI, the
Atomic Energy Commission, the precursor to today's Department
of Energy, and the US military. Also attendance was Lincoln La
Paz, head of the University of New Mexico's Institute of
Meteoritics and first hand observer of the green fireballs.
The NSRC collections contain the conference minutes.
While the minutes attest that Antindees were skeptical of
attributing unexplained aerial phenomena, the extraterrestrial
activity participants from the Army confirmed that the
fireballs had been classified alongside Flying Disk within
Project Grudge. 1948 to 1949, one of three consecutive US Air
Force studies have reported UFO sightings.
The others were Project Sign 47 to 48 and later Project Blue
Book 52 to 69. After further discussion, the
notion that green fireballs were a significant national security
threat was ultimately dismissed, as were hypothesis involving
meteorites, Aurora borealis, and weather balloons.
And in other words, they're telling you we just don't know
what these things are. However, the 1949 Los Alamos
Conference was the beginning of a study called Project Twinkle
that aimed to capture further data on the fireball sightings
through a network of observation, post and
photographic units. Project Twinkle was never fully
implemented and was discontinued after two years with the
official conclusion that the green fireballs were likely
natural origin. Now they concluded they were
natural origin, but they just didn't know how.
The NSRC does not appear to have material salon Project Twinkle,
although not all the millions of items housed in this collection
are easily searchable yet. How long we had the Internet?
2530 years and they still can't scan these things so we can
search them. Forgotten pieces of history are
being rediscovered all the time in the ongoing process of
digitation and cataloguing. Whether a four year request
unearths one of these treasures often depends on how effectively
the submitted keywords direct the archive search.
Now I have to call complete BS on this.
I've seen requests that that Greenwald's made and still
nothing. Crickets, silence or blocked out
pages. So you can see here.
This is this to me is a government employees getting
ahead of the game a little bit. If terms provided by a requester
are overly specific, even irrelevant materials could
remain undiscovered. In cases where a query is too
broad in scope or does not indicate a specific date range,
the LABS FOIA team may suggest the National Nuclear Security
Administration, which funnels the information request to the
Lab ask the sender to narrow the topic of trying frame.
Once more specific perimeters are established, the search for
responsive materials can begin. Keyword searches can also be
hindered by natural evolution of language.
Now it just continues on with this word salad.
That's what I'm going to call. This is just a giant word salad.
This is why we can't tell you what you're asking us about.
I don't know. I guess I want to go ahead and
just look at this article because see, we're, we're being
told the stuff that's released today is it's being applied that
it's all brand new information. But what I'm seeing is a lot of
the stuff that they're releasing to us in these document dumps, a
lot of it is stuff that's already been referred to already
been partially released. It's kind of along the edges,
along the fringes of what's of what actually what we need to
see. And, and I still have not been
hearing anything about the Black Vault getting the documents that
they already have, but getting the versions that are not
blacked out. Now I want to finish up with
this last article from the from the Daily Mail.
I really hope to be able to find some contemporaneous newspaper
articles from the time, but everything I came across is
behind a pay wall and it's almost like they really want to
keep the stuff, you know, the original witness accounts out of
our hands, that's for sure. This article here though, is
just today, May 22nd, 2026. It says UFO files reveal
hundreds of sightings over America's nuclear weapons
headquarters, from glowing green orbs to flying disc.
Written by Stacy Liberatory, US Science and Technology Editor
The Trump administration's second wave of UFO disclosures
has revealed a chilling series of mysterious sightings near
America's principal nuclear weapons installation during the
earliest years of the Cold War. Newly released documents tied to
Sandy, a base in Albuquerque, NM, headquarters of the Armed
Forces Special Weapons Project, the military successor to the
Manhattan Project, detail at least 209 reports of unexplained
aerial phenomena between December 1948 and May 1950.
Now, they keep saying this stuff is new, but I just read you the
article from 2000, I think it was 18 talking about this stuff.
So a lot of this stuff has kind of been regurgitated.
The files describe bizarre green fireballs, glowing disk and
unidentified objects streaking across the skies near sensitive
atomic facilities as intelligence officers scrambled
to determine whether the incidents posed a national
security threat. One report warned that the
frequency of the sightings had become so alarming that military
and government intelligence agencies agreed an organized
plan of reporting these observations should be
undertaken. Scientists and military
investigators were so disturbed by the incidents that they
launched airborne particle collection emissions in the
hopes of discovering physical evidence connected to the
mysterious objects. The documents reveal that
investigators detected unusual copper bearing particles in the
airborne dust samples after one fiery object exploded over New
Mexico in July 1949. Now, I'm not sure, she says
exploded here because and the other writings, we were told
they didn't explode. They just kind of pass through.
Researchers even debated whether the strange material drifting
through the atmosphere could have originated from the
unidentified fireballs seen over the desert skies.
In one extraordinary passage, investigators admitted that if
copper particles truly came from the glowing objects, then the
fireballs are not conventional meteorites.
Well, I'm pretty sure they're not if these things are moving
sideways horizontally, goes on and says the bombshell records
were part of the latest UFO document released published by
the Department of Work as part of President Donald Trump's
disclosure initiative involving unidentified aerial Phenomena,
also known as Uaps. Among the most striking files
was a May 19/25/1950 intelligence summary from the
Air Force Special Investigations describing repeated sightings
across New Mexico during a period when Sandia Base served
as one of the nation's most sensitive nuclear weapons hubs.
The report explained that military and intelligence
officials became increasingly alarmed after waves of
unexplained aerial sightings begin appearing near atomic
research and weapons facilities. Their frequency of the
unexplained aerial phenomena in the New Mexico area was such
that an organized plan of reporting these observations
should be undertaken. The report stated Sandia Base
handled military aspects of America's nuclear weapons
programs following World War 2. The newly released files
repeatedly referenced Sandia Base's connection to spatial
weapons operations and inspections tied to Strategic
Air Command nuclear facilities. The several reports focused on
mysterious green fireballs repeatedly observed over New
Mexico during 1949. The detailed scientific
investigation, dated August 10th, 1949, outlined attempts by
researchers at the New Mexico School of Mines to collect
airborne particles associated with the fireball seen over
Socora, New Mexico on July 24th, 1949.
Investigators used special equipment capable of collecting
microscopic airborne material in the hope that debris from the
unexplained object might still be floating in the atmosphere.
I don't know. It seems kind of like a stretch
to me. Goes on down and says.
According to the report, researchers found a large number
of copper bearing particles in one collection sample taken
along Hwy. 84 N of 66. Now it doesn't say that came out
of the dirt if it came out of the air, really.
Scientists described materials unfamiliar granular particles,
some measuring up to 30 microns across, while others appeared as
opaque solid fragments. Another report noted that
investigators found remarkable spherical particles showing
strong cobalt indications, with some particles described as
perfect spheres roughly 12 microns in diameter.
This reminds me of that search the Avi Loeb and Charles
Hoskinson's financed down there in Papa Noguini where they
recovered that stuff at. They're talking about these
Spears. They recovered tiny little
spheres on the ocean floor where they thought that some kind of a
UFO had had had crashed into the ocean there.
The documents repeatedly stressed the uncertainty
surrounding the strange material quote.
It seems very hazardous to draw any definite conclusion
associated associating the copper bearing particles
collected with the fireball. One report caution.
Still, the reports acknowledge that the possibility could not
be dismissed. One intelligence memo stated
that if future studies prove the particles were truly falling
from the green fireballs, then the objects could not be
explained as ordinary meteorites because copper was one of the
rarest of the elements found in meteorites.
Well, that makes sense. I mean, if you don't have copper
meteorites, but still the green collar.
The files also reveal that investigators consider deploying
high altitude aircraft above 40,000 feet to intercept
material falling for the mysterious objects Shortly after
settings occurred. Researchers believed rapid
response airborne missions could potentially capture particles
directly from the objects atmospheric trails before
contamination from terrestrial dust occurred.
One memo described plans for aircraft to fly through the
exact atmospheric region beneath the Objects of Light Pass as
soon as possible after the occurrence of future incidents.
The newly released files stop short of concluding the objects
were extraterrestrial, but they make clear that Cold War
military and scientific officials view the incidents
seriously enough to involve intelligence agencies, meteor
specialist and classified weapons personnel.
The disclosures are likely to intensify long running
speculation surrounding Sandia Base and New Mexico's so-called
nuclear triangle, where UFO sightings have been repeatedly
linked to America's nuclear weapons infrastructure for
decades. Wow.
Well really cool stuff overall. Like I said, I'm glad this
stuff's being released. I'm not sure how much of its new
new and how much of its just kind of new looking at it from
this new perspective. Hopefully we'll keep seeing more
stuff and I'll keep you updated on what's going on with the
Department of War UFO document dump.
Hey, if you'd like to program, don't forget to hit like follow,
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Until next time. This is UFO warning over and
out.