During my teenage years in Albuquerque I experienced several strange things. As a rational person I can explain most of them away. There is one however that still puzzles me to this day.
In August of 1980 my best friend, myself and members of our respective families witnessed a large glowing green orb in the night sky directly over Albuquerque. It hovered there, motionless, for well over an hour before it disappeared.
On this particular evening it was warm but not to hot so my buddy and I were hanging out on my patio. My mother was washing the dishes in the kitchen and my buddy’s dad was outside watering his garden. It was a typical late summer night.
I don’t know which one of us noticed it first but something in night sky grabbed our attention. There was an extremely large bright light hovering over the city. My friend and I got up from the table and walked out to the cinder-block wall at the edge of my backyard. As it were, my house sat up on a hill that overlooked an elementary school below. From this vantage point we could see over the whole city. This was one of the perks of living in the NE Heights.
Our first thoughts were that the object was a helicopter, though are minds soon changed because the object simply didn’t behave like a helicopter … and it didn’t make any noise. Generally, any aircraft flying over the city made some sort of sound that you could discern even from a long distance. The Rio Grande valley that Albuquerque sits in had great acoustics and sound would travel through the thin air and reverb off the Sandia Mountains.
My friend’s dad, who was doing his watering, a few feet away inquired what we were up to. We pointed out the light to him and he was perplexed by it. He had mentioned that in all his years living in the Southwest he hadn’t seen a star that bright. He was intrigued, but not enough to stay out with us once his watering was done.
My mother had come outside and noticed all of us talking and joined the group. Like my friend’s dad, my mother was interested in the phenomena, even speculated a bit about it, but ultimately returned to the house.
We just stared at the thing for awhile before I remembered that my dad had a pair of his army binoculars in the garage. I raced to retrieve them.
Once I was able to locate the object and focus on it, I quickly realized that what were looking at was no chopper, or planet for that matter. What I observed was not one single light, but a honeycomb of multiple smaller lights. I handed the specs over to my friend to see if he was seeing what I was seeing. His expletive laden response was all I needed.
We pondered on what it was we were looking at for some time, but in true ADD teenager fashion, we soon grew bored of looking an object that just sat there and did nothing (even it may have come from another universe) and retreated to our respective homes.
After about a good solid hour of early 80s television I decided to venture back outside to see if anything was happening with our celestial visitor. To my surprise the object was gone.
Of course, the thing had to zip off while I wasn’t looking!
As you can imagine, we weren’t the only people to notice a giant green light in the sky over Albuquerque that night. According to the media, the police, the local TV stations, the Albuquerque Journal (our hometown newspaper) and even the Air Force at nearby Kirtland AFB received calls regarding the phenomena.
As is the case in most of these kinds of incidents someone with an advanced education stepped up to the plate to explain what everyone was getting all worked up about.
The official answer: the planet Jupiter.
A lot of people bought that explanation, but my buddy and I weren’t having it.
As it were, our theories, or at least our belief that the lights weren’t Jupiter would be proven right a few days later.
Our strange green illuminated object would return, though this time it was over different part of town. When next we spotted it, the lights were hovering over Kirtland AFB to the south. This, of course, makes you believe some real X-Files stuff was going on because it’s directly over a military facility.
Just like last time it hung out there for a good hour or so, my buddy and I got bored, then it was gone.
There was no media buzz about the phenomena this time, which was weird. At least nothing was said about it publicly anyway.
After that night, we never saw the object(s) again.
Yet, the story doesn’t end there.
Recently I was doing a little research and stumbled on several reports of green glowing UFOs that were spotted in the skies over New Mexico dating as far back as the late 1940s.
Check this out:
Why Mysterious Green Fireballs Worried the U.S. Government in 1948
On February 29, 1949, the Los Alamos, New Mexico Skyliner newspaper ran a piece on what it referred to, in typical newspaper parlance, as “flying saucers”—and a possible conspiracy around them:
“Los Alamos now has flying green lights. These will ‘o wisps seen generally about 2 a.m., have alerted the local constabulary and their presence is being talked about in Santa Fe bars. But local wheels deny any official knowledge of the sky phenomena. Each one passes the buck to another.”
The story ended with, “Have you seen a green light lately?”
In fact, a great many had, and would continue to do so—enough to prompt TIME magazine, in November 1951, to publish a piece on the phenomenon called “Great Balls of Fire.” What makes the multiple sightings of “flying green lights” in New Mexico in 1948 and onward such a significant chapter in UFO history is exactly that—there were multiple sightings.
That was unnerving enough. But most alarming—particularly to the United States government—was that the sightings were concentrated around the Los Alamos and Sandia atomic-weapons laboratories. And other highly sensitive military installations, including radar stations and fighter-interceptor bases, weren’t far away. That meant the sightings were reported by typically cool-headed pilots, weather observers, scientists, intelligence officers and other defense personnel, and led many to suspect the fireballs were Soviet spy devices.
Cold War spy craft…or extraterrestrial probes?
This potential explanation could not have occurred to those on the ground in New Mexico in 1948. After interviewing more than a hundred witnesses, Dr. LaPaz went on to advise the military and the Atomic Energy Commission of his opinion that the fireballs were likely either top-secret “unconventional defensive devices” being tested by the U.S.—or Soviet spying devices.
When Edward J. Ruppelt, director of the U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book UFO investigations, visited the Los Alamos National Laboratory in early 1952 to interview scientists and technicians, he noted that they became particularly animated when the idea of interplanetary vehicles was suggested.
“They had been doing a lot of thinking about this, they said, and they had a theory,” wrote Ruppelt in The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (1953). They thought the fireballs were actually extraterrestrial probes “projected into our atmosphere from a ‘spaceship’ hovering several hundred miles above the Earth.”
Officially, government investigators concluded that the green fireballs were some kind of never-before-seen natural phenomenon. Interest in, and investigation into, the fireballs dropped off at the outbreak of the Korean War.
“Writing these off as natural phenomena did not solve the problem,” says UFO researcher Jan Aldrich, who believes the green fireballs were related to aerial phenomena spotted in Fort Hood, Texas, in 1949. “It just pushed it under the table.”
You can read the rest of the article here - Why Mysterious Green Fireballs Worried the U.S. Government in 1948.
And even weirder yet, here are some reports from August 1980. These would seem to back up the assumption that these objects are indeed spying on our military, in this case Kirtland Air Force Base just south of Albuquerque. It should be noted that my best friend's brother, who worked for the US government as a photographer documenting top secret tests at the base, told us that he witnessed some sort of laser weapon being used that could blow up boulders. Of course, he could have just been trying to impress us, but I never knew him to make up tall tales, so I always took the report to be a factual one. Oh, and before I forget, it was always rumored that there was a large stockpile of nuclear warheads stored in the adjacent Sandia Mountains.
I can see why you would want to keep the fact that an arsenal of nukes was being stored in the outskirts of a city of some five hundred thousand people under wraps.
Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico
8 August 1980
2350 MST
Three Security Policemen on duty in Charlie Sector, East Side of Manzano Weapons Storage Area, observed a very bright light that traveled with great speed and stopped suddenly in the sky over Coyote Canyon. They at first thought the object was a helicopter, but after observing the object perform unusual aerial maneuvers, they felt it could not be a helicopter. The light was observed to land in the Coyote Canyon area. Sometime later they observed the light take off again and proceed straight up at a high speed until it was no longer visible.
9 August, 1980
0020 MST
A Sandia Security Guard was driving east on the Coyote Canyon access road on a routine building check of an alarmed structure. As he approached the structure, he observed a bright light near the ground behind the structure. He also observed an object that he at first thought was a helicopter. As he came closer, he observed that it was not a helicopter, but a round disk shaped object. When he attempted to radio for backup, he found that his radio was not functioning. He approached the object on foot armed with a shotgun, and the object thereupon took off in a vertical direction at high speed.
22 August, 1980
Three other unnamed Security Guards observed a light over Coyote Canyon that behaved in a similar manner as the one seen on 8 August. Coyote Canyon is part of a large restricted test range used by the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, Sandia Laboratories
The truth is out there my people!
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