The Socorro case is in the declassified archive, but nothing about the catalogue entry says so. The document is filed as UFOP-38, titled 65_HS1-834228961_62-HQ-83894_Serial_438, agency FBI, incident date listed as N/A. That is the whole label. Open it and the first legible page is a Bureau letterhead from Albuquerque, New Mexico, dated May 8, 1964, headed in three lines: UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT / SOCORRO, NEW MEXICO / APRIL 24, 1964.
Two things sit inside that serial. One is a short memo by Special Agent D. Arthur Byrnes, Jr. describing what he saw on the ground. The other is a ten-page statement taken from Officer Lonnie Zamora, recorded, per its own heading, "the night of April 24, 1964, and early morning, April 25, 1964." Both appear more than once in the scan, in different generations of copy quality, which is how these Bureau serials usually come.
Byrnes was already in town
The memo opens with a coincidence that reads like paperwork because it is paperwork. Byrnes, stationed at Albuquerque, "was at Socorro, New Mexico, and at the State Police Office there on business late afternoon of April 24, 1964." At approximately 5:45 to 5:50 P.M., Nep Lopez, radio operator in the Socorro County Sheriff's Office, located about thirty feet down the hall from the State Police Office, walked in and told M. S. Chavez of the New Mexico State Police that he had just received a radio call from Officer Zamora to come to an area about one mile southwest of Socorro. The call concerned an unknown object that had "landed and has taken off."
Byrnes finished his work at about 6:00 P.M. and drove out. By the time he arrived, Zamora, Socorro County Undersheriff Jim Luckie, Sergeant Chavez, and Officer Ted Jordan of the State Police were all at the site.
The memo then does something the Bureau's UFO paperwork almost never does, which is vouch for a witness. Byrnes writes that Zamora, "known intimately for approximately five years, is well regarded as a sober, industrious, and conscientious officer and not given to fantasy," and that on the night in question he was "perfectly sober and somewhat agitated over his experience." Worth keeping in view where that assessment comes from. Byrnes had known the man personally for five years in a small town, which is a different basis than a background check.
What was measured
The physical description in the memo is the most useful part of the file, because it is the only account in it written by a federal agent looking at the ground himself.
Byrnes noted four indentations at what the memo puts in quotation marks as the "site" of the object Zamora described. The depressions "appeared regular in shape, approximately sixteen by six inches rectangular." Each one seemed to have been made by an object going into the earth at an angle from a center line. Each was "approximately two inches deep and pushed some earth to the far side."
Inside the four depressions were three burned patches of clumps of grass. Other clumps in the same area appeared not to be disturbed. One burned area was outside the four depressions.
Separately, there were three circular marks in the earth, "smooth, approximately four inches in diameter," pressed into the sandy soil about one-eighth of an inch, which the memo compares to the way "a jar lid had gently been pushed into the sand."
Then the negatives, which are worth as much as the measurements. No other person was noted in the area that night. No other objects were noted that might connect to the incident. And: "So far as could be noted, there were no houses or inhabited dwellings in the area or in sight of the area."
A Bureau stamp shows up more than once in the scan, mangled by the OCR but readable: the document contains neither recommendations nor conclusions of any kind, it is the property of the FBI, and it is a loan to the receiving agency, not to be distributed outside it. The stamp is accurate here. There is no assessment in this serial, no lab result on the burned brush, no follow-up.
Zamora's own account
The statement reads like a duty log that keeps having to describe something the format was not built for.
He was in Socorro 2, a white 1964 Pontiac, chasing a speeding car south from the west side of the Courthouse at about 5:45 P.M. The chased car, possibly driven by a seventeen-year-old, stayed about three blocks ahead. Then Zamora heard a roar and saw a flame in the sky to the southwest, maybe half a mile or a mile off. His first thought was that a dynamite shack in that area had blown up. He dropped the chase.
The flame was "bluish and sort of orange too," narrow, funnel shaped, wider at the bottom than the top, descending slowly. He could not see the bottom of it because a hill was in the way. The sun was to the west and did not help; he had green sun glasses over his prescription glasses. The noise was "a roar, not a blast. Not like a jet." It fell from high frequency to low and then stopped, lasting maybe ten seconds.
The hill to the site was about sixty feet long, fairly steep, loose gravel and rock. His wheels started skidding about halfway up on the first try, and he had to back down and try twice more before making it. Starting up the third time, he noted no noise and no flame.
Driving slowly west along the gravel road, he saw a shiny object 150 to 200 yards to the south, off the road. His first read was an overturned car, whitish against the mesa, "like aluminum" but "not chrome." He saw what looked like two legs from the object to the ground, slanted outwards, with the object maybe three and a half feet up. And he saw people: "Saw two people in white coveralls very close to the object." One "seemed to turn and look straight at my car and seemed startled." He stopped for about two seconds, took it for a traffic accident, and radioed in a possible 10-44 while driving toward the scene.
Starting to get out of the car, his microphone fell, and he reached back to replace it. As the mike fell and he got out at the scene area, he heard "about two or three loud 'thumps,' like someone possibly hammering or shutting a door or doors hard," a second or less apart, just before the roar. The two persons were not seen when he got up to the scene area.
The rest happened fast. A very loud roar started low and rose in pitch and volume. Flame was under the object, light blue with orange at the bottom. The object went straight up, slowly. Zamora ran, bumped his leg on the car's back fender, lost his glasses and left them, and ducked down about fifty feet out, just over the edge of a hill. He describes the object as smooth, with "no windows or doors," and notes "red lettering of some type," an insignia about two and a half feet high and two feet wide, in the middle of the object. The symbol itself is drawn into the statement rather than typed, so it does not survive into the extracted text.
When the roar stopped he looked up. The object was moving away to the southwest in a straight line, ten to fifteen feet off the ground, and "it cleared the dynamite shack by about three feet." The shack was about eight feet high. He got back to the car and radioed Nep Lopez to look out the window. Lopez asked what it was. Zamora answered: "It looks like a balloon." The object seemed to just clear Box Canyon or Six Mile Canyon Mountain and was gone.
He notes he was in good health, that his last drink was two or three beers over a month earlier, and that he noticed no odors. Just before Sergeant Chavez got to the scene, he took out his pen and drew a picture of the insignia. He went down to where the object had been and noted the brush burning in several places. Chavez called on the radio for his location, then came up and asked what the trouble was, because Zamora was sweating and, Chavez told him, "white, very pale." Zamora asked him to look at what he had seen, the burning brush. The two went to the spot, and Chavez pointed out the tracks.
What the file settles, and what it does not
The serial gives you an independent federal record that four rectangular depressions, three circular impressions, and burned brush existed at that spot on the evening of the report, on ground with no dwellings in sight. It gives you a same-night account from the witness with no editing for coherence, including the parts that make him look worse, like calling the thing a balloon on the radio. It gives you no explanation, because the FBI did not write one here.
That gap is normal for this collection. The serial sits in FBI case file 62-HQ-83894, which the catalogue describes as investigative records, eyewitness testimonies, and public reports on UFOs and flying discs documented between June 1947 and July 1968. Eighteen of the archive's 104 FBI records come out of that one file. Elsewhere in the same file the Bureau spends its energy on debunking, as in UFOP-25, where investigation of a 1947 plane crash at Kelso, Washington found the plane was "definitely not carrying parts of a disc" with "no substantiation of a sabotage charge." Socorro gets no such treatment. Byrnes measured the holes and went home.
Socorro shows up in the archive once before, under a different phenomenon entirely: DOW-UAP-D017 records a fireball reported to have passed over "the general neighborhood of Socorro" at 8:26 p.m. on July 24, 1949, and the airborne-particle collections made afterward at the New Mexico School of Mines that turned up copper-bearing particles. Fifteen years apart, the same pattern holds: careful field measurement, no conclusion.
For the wider Bureau collection, the FBI files topic page lists what else survived, and the close-range structured-craft reports are grouped under disc and saucer sightings. A note on the OCR seams, duplicate scan passes, and stamps to watch for is in how to read these documents.