Unclaimed Vehicle
Near the end of the previous (Part 4, final) entry about The Les Crane Show, the transcript indicates that just before the program is over Crane reads a letter from Air Force spokesman Maj. Maston Jacks. Jacks' official letter of reassurance wishes the American people to know that, essentially, there's no evidence that UFOs represent anything of concern.

How strange then, less than three weeks before Maj. Jacks' comforting letter to ABC-TV, that I also received a letter from the same Air Force officer. Widely circulated over the years since January, 1965, Maj. Jacks' letter uses the extremely interesting word, vehicle, in reference to the April, 1964 UFO encounter in Socorro, NM by patrolman Lonnie Zamora. Never, not to this very day, has the U.S. government explained the Socorro event, and the word, vehicle has never again been brought into play officially. Just what, then, was on the Air Force's mind that would precipitate a "no evidence was found which indicated that the vehicle was from outer space" response?

There seems to be some speculation out there in blog land recently that the culprit vehicle was a super-secret government lunar test device or some such. We'll predict right now that hell will freeze over before this theory gains "legs" -- particularly because this thing barely missed a dynamite shack upon takf. First of all, what idiocy would require testing a secret device near a dynamite shack? Surely, the government would know it's there in plain sight. And second, if it were a test vehicle that developed problems in maneuvering, there wouldn't be any sense in attempting renewed propulsion out of the desert in consideration of the very real possibility that you might collide with the dynamite shack, thus risking lives and showering classified bits and secret pieces of said test vehicle all over the place.

Using the letter posted here (click to enlarge), I wrote an article about the Socorro case back in the eighties for Pursuit, journal of the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained, and though SITU is no longer in existence, NICAP posted the article on its web site, and the article may be accessed directly at: http://www.nicap.org/zamora6.htm

Whatever officer Zamora saw on the desert landscape that day, so long ago in 1964, apparently there is one thing the Air Force and the rest of us can agree upon: The thing was a v-e-h-i-c-l-e. A vehicle is a vehicle is a vehicle. Ain't no other way to spell it.