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The NORAD Event & The Gallop Incident: Was There a Connection?

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Christopher O'Brien

Back in the Saddle Aginn
Staff member
Article HERE:

By Christopher O'Brien

The following is a comparison between the San Luis Valley NORAD Event of January 12, 1994, and New Mexico's Gallup Incident, January 12, 1983. Little-known outside of the Four-Corners region, both events may be two of the most important ufological events ever reported. The following is a comparison and analysis of the two events.

One of 1994's dark-horse events occurred in Colorado’s San Luis Valley on January 12. 1994 Exactly 11 years before, an eerily similar sequence happened in Northern New Mexico. Both unexplained series of events feature green fireballs, mysterious fires, unexplained explosions and unusual attendant military activity. Obviously, no two ufological events are exactly alike but the parallels between these two cases are beyond striking.

The most comprehensive look at 1983's Gallup Incident can be found in the Project Stigma publication, Pardon the Intrusion or UFOs Over, On & Under (?) The State of New Mexico, written and compiled by the late Tom Adams in 1992, who immediately noticed the similarities between the two events. The following are excerpts from that publication.

fireball.jpg


The Gallup Incident:
The Farmington, New Mexico Daily Times article on January 13, 1983 headlined: "Goodness Gracious - Great Ball of Fire." Written by reporter Rex Graham it stated;

What investigators believe was a meteor smashed into the side of a mountain about 15 miles east of Gallop Wednesday night about 5:50 pm, starting a fire and causing a deluge of calls to the McKinley County Sheriff's Office. The incident is believed to be part of a broad "meteor shower" that caused sonic booms in Gallup, Farmington, Aztec, Bloomfield and north to at least Durango, Colorado. McKinley County Sheriff Benny Padilla said today that his office had received 126 calls after as many as seven "booms" were heard by area residents beginning at 5:50 pm and continuing until about 8:00 pm. Undersheriff Jack Graham quickly drove east of Gallup to investigate a fire burning on a hillside in the Springstead area, thought to be connected with the "explosion-like noises." Padilla and Graham initially feared an airplane had crashed. Graham walked through an empty crater about 25 feet across and six inches deep. There was no sign of plane wreckage. Then, about 10:00 pm, Padilla and Gallup Police Chief Frank Gonzales were driving in the area when they saw a "green-object" traveling toward the ground. "It looked like a fireball," Padilla said today, "and it disintegrated before it hit the ground; it was kinda scary."

Reporter Chip Hinds wrote in an article for the Durango, CO, Herald, on January 13, 1983:

Durango police dispatcher Ruth Mastin reported that her office was told by Federal Aviation Agency officials in Grand Junction that the noise was created by classified military aircraft and that they had been instructed not to answer any further questions. McKinley County Sheriff Benny Padilla in Gallup said that a "green object" which "slowed, struck the ground and went out" was spotted near there. . . A Farmington man, Rick Wilkie, reported seeing hunks of a "meteor falling off" as the meteor came in from the western sky as he was watching from a point about 25 miles from Farmington. Research associate Norman Thomas of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona said authorities should be "skeptical of any meteor theory unless a full investigation is made."

The United Press International release of January 13th reported, in part:

(McKinley County Undersheriff Jack) Graham said he and other officers trying to get to the fire site Wednesday night "saw a falling star or meteorite fall, and it burned longer than it should. I saw three or four falling stars, lasting longer than usual, about 15 or 20 seconds."

One other report written by Rex Graham on Sunday, January 16, 1983, in the Farmington Daily Times stated in part:

McKinley County Sheriff Benny Padilla said the noises around Gallup ceased about 8:00 pm. At about 10:00 pm, Graham, Padilla and other law enforcement officials saw a "green fireball' swing across the sky for about 15 seconds, then disappear. This time there was no sound as the meteor vanished. Residents in the Farmington area reported seeing a similar glowing object in the sky. To many, the booms, meteor sighting and explosion and fire seemed part of the same phenomenon.

Reporter Lynn Bartels wrote the front page story in the Gallup Daily on Friday, January 14, 1983, which contained the following:

Continental Divide resident Cheryl Meyers said today there have been numerous military helicopters and vehicles in the area (just east of Gallup) since the investigation began Wednesday. . . And Chip Hines, a reporter with the Durango Herald, said today that the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) in Grand Junction, Colorado, still denies someone from its office commented on the booms Wednesday. Hinds said a spokesman on Wednesday (the 13th) said there was a classified military aircraft in the area, but not to ask any more questions as "it was over. . ."

On Thursday morning (the 14th), FAA authorities said no one from their office issued any statements about the noises. When Tom Adams contacted Lynn Bartles he found that Chip Hinds had unfortunately been killed in a "mountaineering accident" shortly after covering the Gallup-Farmington events for the Herald.

Other peripheral events and reports that accompanied the events in the Four-Corners area (northern NM) on January 12, 1983. These include, evidence of dynamite and blasting caps at the (possibly diversionary) burn-site crater, noxious gases 15 miles south of the burn-site, and rumors of some sort of crash-retrieval operation near Chaco Canyon.

Were the rumors heard by Tom Adams during and after his immediate investigation an indication of what actually transpired that cold January evening and during the following several days? He shares some of his information from his insider sources about the Gallup Incident.

Then we began to hear rumors, from sources previously reliable. Some of the bits and pieces were said to be 'the word' making the rounds among the military-intelligence-scientific community in New Mexico:

*Some of the confusion resulted from the deliberate injection of mis-or-dis-information. This was necessary to obscure the highly sensitive 'truth' to what actually happened.

*A 'Top Secret' operation was in progress that night, and a classified aircraft crashed or exploded.

*The aircraft was indeed a highly sensitive experimental military device or. . .

*An extraterrestrial craft crashed or crash-landed.

One account says that it sort of skip-crashed, bouncing into or along one site before finally coming to rest at another site.

*The primary crash site was somewhere near Chaco Canyon.

*A 'retrieval' operation ensued, while attention was diverted to Gallup and Farmington and Durango. 'Something' (be it terrestrial or otherwise) was removed from the side of the canyon or ravine into which it crashed. It was transported by air to Kirtland Air Force Base. It was set down and a protective structure was built around it.

*There were reports unconfirmed, of 'silver spheres' descending and ascending somewhere in the Gallup area.

*There were also reports of independent investigators in the technical community in Albuquerque (civilian scientists and technicians working at Kirtland AFB or Sandia National Laboratory) who were threatened and/or harassed or otherwise warned to stay away from the Gallup area, after they had expressed interest in pursuing their own investigations of the event(s).

Was this entire collection of reported events more than a synchronistic array of mundane coincidences? Compare the above to the following. My NORAD Event investigation was initially covered by Mark Hunter for the Valley Courier and in my article published later in the Crestone Eagle.

NORAD.jpg


The NORAD Event
The most comprehensive look at The NORAD Event can be found in my book, Secrets of the Mysterious Valley which details a series of events in the San Luis Valley that occurred over a six-week period (including reports of two green, two blue, one white and two orange fireballs, two orange orbs, two mystery fires, mysterious booms, a flurry of Bigfoot reports, a documented unusual cattle death and many reports of accompanying military-esque activity) that began on the night of November 30, 1993, at 6:05 p.m., and continued until the early evening of January 17, 1994.

The height of these events occurred during the afternoon of January 12, when a NORAD official contacted the Rio Grande Sheriff's office (RGCSO) at 3:40 p.m., and reported "a significant explosion" logged at 2:55 p.m., in the Greenie Mountain-Rock Creek Canyon area by a NORAD DSP satellite scope operator in Cheyenne Mountain. The RGCSO was told to "exhaust all efforts" to locate the source of the heat bloom. As the S&R personal neared the coordinates, Ron Regehr, an engineer who helped develop the DSP satellite system, confirmed to me (and later to the Sightings FOX television program) that he personally saw the detection data that prompted the NORAD phone call to the Rio Grande County Sheriff's Office. He mentioned that the event was unusual in that the event data did not lead to an explanation for the heat bloom.

The RGCSO and Search & Rescue personal, along with a private plane, were immediately dispatched to the coordinates. Maj. McCouch, FEMA supervisor of the NORAD scope operator, then called back and gave undersheriff Brian Norton new coordinates to search a rugged area nearly 25 miles from the original location—which was the probable impact site. The teams diverted to the new location and (you guessed it) found nothing.

Exactly two hours later, at 4:55 pm, Florence, CO, resident Lt. Col. Jimmy Lloyd (ret.), a 30-year veteran SAC fighter pilot and self-professed UFO skeptic reported seeing "a battleship-sized," glowing green group of "six or seven objects in close (crescent) formation" streak overhead just south of him that appeared to "go down into the San Luis Valley." Upon arriving home, he immediately plotted the object's trajectory and they appeared to descend into the Greenie Mountain area which matched the coordinates given the Sheriff by NORAD.

According to Lloyd, the objects were not mundane celestial objects, i.e., meteors, or any type of conventional craft, or missile and were completely silent. This effect-first, fireball-later aspect appears to have had the same two-hour time lag characteristic of the explosions and fireballs heard and seen in the Gallup Incident.... REST OF ARTICLE HERE:
 
It's an extensive story; several pages long, so to get things straight I can see where people would need a lot of time to read it, and time's thin these days for most of us. I wouldn't hold it against them, Chris. :)

I read most of it (home with the flu so I had quite a bit of time). The first event in 1983, The Gallup Incident, sounds like a downed satellite, perhaps military or even foreign in origin. This may explain some of the confusion and back-and-forth from the military. I'm curious as to what elements naturally burn green in re-entry...particular metals or such? If memory-serves, 1983 was also around the time the military was kicking off the Star Wars initiative; place satellites in orbit which should shoot down incoming enemy missiles, but I could be off a few years on that one.

The NORAD incident is more intriguing, but I question why the military would have notified civilian resources to track something top secret to begin with? As the story goes, NORAD contacted the Rio Grande sheriff themselves. If the retrieval was supposed to be on the down-low, why not keep it there? Why engage unclassified resources, then frantically send them on wild goose chases? That makes no sense to me....and I wouldn't entertain the idea that they would do it only to 'ensure' those unclassified, civilian resources remain "busy" during the real retrieval. I don't believe the military would be that proactive, and even if they were, sending civ'ies on a wild goose chase just drew more attention to the event anyway. I'm more of the mind that NORAD may have been picking up heat signatures of UFOs (in this case literally 'unidentified'), and the mis-direction wasn't intentional. They were simply reporting what they were seeing to the civilian population to let them sort it out, and there were no nefarious intentions behind it, but that's pure speculation, of course.

Peace.

j.
 
Huh? I read it. Again. Interesting stuff, all three times. What do you suppose the chances are of ever seeing Tom Adams' book online or even reprinted? Sounds interesting! A hunnerd and sixty-five dollars interesting? Hmmm.
 
I've read it only once but I struggle with how this whole thing couldn't have just been a meteor that broke up in the upper atmosphere and bits came down?

The hovering report could have been the meteor viewed dead on as it came in? Or perhaps it skipped through the atmosphere?

Or maybe as you say here:
Exactly two hours later, at 4:55 pm, Florence, CO, resident Lt. Col. Jimmy Lloyd (ret.), a 30-year veteran fighter pilot and self-professed UFO skeptic reported seeing “a battleship-sized,” glowing green group of “six or seven objects in close (crescent) formation” streak overhead just south of him that appeared to “go down into the San Luis Valley.” Upon arriving home, he immediately plotted the object’s trajectory and they appeared to descend into the Greenie Mountain area which matched the coordinates given the Sheriff by NORAD.

According to Lloyd, the objects were not mundane celestial objects, i.e., meteors, or any type of conventional craft, or missile and were completely silent. This effect-first, fireball-later aspect appears to have had the same two-hour time lag characteristic of the explosions and fireballs heard and seen in the Gallup Incident.

Perhaps there were two instances? One was the meteor, one was something weird?

I don't know what to say about the deaths, there seems little in the way of directly connecting them to the event. It's more suggestive.
 
I'm surprised no one has bothered to read this! It'll make me think twice about posting anything substantial that I've written...

? I read it enthusiastically as soon as it was up - literally my favourite UFO conspiracy type stuff, though I wasn't in a position to sit and type any thoughts about it at the time. I could happily listen to a whole show on this case alone, I'm sure plenty others would too.

I continually am surprised at which shows/posts generate the most responses. Politics, global warming etc. The most interesting stuff for some reason is passed by. But please don't stop posting stuff like this!
 
Sometimes I wonder why I bothered to spend 13 solid years running my ass off investigating and researching hundreds of anomalous events. BION I only was able to properly investigate maybe 25%-30% of the cases that came to my attention! Five or 6 of me—maybe—could have handled the load, pre-cell phones and Internet. Obviously, most of the reported activity wasn't spectacular, but there were many, many reports that were impressive—some amazing! The NORAD Event (and the three weeks surrounding it) are some of the most compelling (and possibly most revealing) of all the thousands of stories I heard and the hundreds of reports I investigated.

At the very least, the case would make a really cool screenplay...

greenie-mtn-1.jpg


Greenie Mountain
 
I've read it only once but I struggle with how this whole thing couldn't have just been a meteor that broke up in the upper atmosphere and bits came down?

The hovering report could have been the meteor viewed dead on as it came in? Or perhaps it skipped through the atmosphere?

Or maybe as you say here:


Perhaps there were two instances? One was the meteor, one was something weird?

I don't know what to say about the deaths, there seems little in the way of directly connecting them to the event. It's more suggestive.
I read it as well and came away with the same thoughts as @marduk.
 
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