Last Saturday I attended a presentation on a historic UFO landing complete with extraterrestrials disembarking and interacting with humans, which occurred mere miles down the road from my new adobe abode back in 1964. It’s known as the Holloman Landing. And, yes, I do believe it actually happened.
First, some background. Despite writing novels featuring extraterrestrial beings and also having worked for the Air Force, I moved to New Mexico in close proximity to Alamogordo and Holloman AFB base without previous knowledge of this astounding event. Some might call that uncanny. And also annoying. How odd is it that I never once dealt with Holloman while working as an AF JAG environmental attorney?
On my birthday this year, I joined an organization long of interest, MUFON, which stands for Mutual UFO Network, established in 1969 and engaging in “the scientific study of UFOs for the benefit of humanity.” This group also actively investigates reports of UFO sightings, so who knows where this membership might lead me?
MUFON meets monthly in downtown Alamogordo, because the New Mexico MUFON director lives here. Hence, last month I first attended the local gathering, named Coffee Cups & Flying Saucers (got to love that, as well as the delish donuts involved), and this month the presentation was on the Holloman Landing of April 30, 1964.
To begin with, it’s not surprising that there’s a White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) connection, given its proximity to Holloman AFB and its Trinity Test nuclear weapons history. At 5:45 a.m. on April 30 at the North range of WSMR, a B-57 pilot was recorded in communication with the tower—via a Range Radio Network Transmission—as follows:
Pilot: “I’m not alone here. I’ve got a UFO.”
Tower: “Any markings?”
Pilot: “The same as Socorro…It’s on the ground.”
The UFO had just landed at the Stallion gate and airfield at WSMR, and it had the same appearance—white and egg-shaped—of a UFO that landed just seven days prior in Socorro, less than fifty miles north of the WSMR Trinity Site.
But it gets even more interesting. Because what happened at WSMR wasn’t classified information, but the events occurring at the exact same time that morning on the west side of Holloman AFB ultimately were, though both were recorded on radar and were visually witnessed.
Indeed, there were multiple eyewitness accounts of three objects above the tarmac at Holloman, filmed from a helicopter by an Air Force photographic crew as well as by ground crew members. The UFOs were described as white and egg-shaped (or bathtub shaped).
One craft landed, and other two flew off—was one of them the craft that landed at WSMR? And here’s where it gets astoundingly fascinating. Three entities emerged from the craft looking more like humans than a sci-fi movie depiction of alien beings. One entity carried a staff, later described as a translator, an interesting detail that I find lends credibility in terms of the human interaction that ultimately followed.
Because the entities and their craft were initially taken to Building 830 known as King One, after which the aliens were met in Building 930 by the base commander and base chief scientist, among others. Then, these three extraterrestrials allegedly remained at Holloman AFB for two to three years, helping the US decode space messages from other alien civilizations. Supposedly performing this task in a Military Auxiliary Radio System, aka MARS, located in a trailer identified as Building 930.
Titillating tidbits include the base scientist was Dr. Ernst Steinhoff, a German rocket scientist from Operation Paperclip. Col. Henry (Hank) Godman, Holloman AFB commander from July 1963-July 1964, is curiously not included among the photos with dates showing all Holloman commanders, nor is there anything on the base named for him. Problem is, he’s clearly identified in yearbooks as the base commander at that time.
Otherwise, it’s as if Godman doesn’t exist in the annals of Holloman AFB existence, despite having been a decorated WWII fighter pilot who was celebrated by the city of Alamogordo when it threw him a retirement party covered in the local newspaper. Plus, Col. Godman remained in Alamogordo upon his retirement.
That ridiculously ludicrous coverup alone by the Air Force (akin to it still insisting on calling Area 51 “Groom Lake” even after the CIA acknowledged its existence), is for me practically all the “proof” needed to lend credence to the lore of the Holloman Landing. If Col. Hank Godman didn’t engage with extraterrestrial beings visiting the military base he commanded in April of 1964, why exclude him from a historic display of base commanders?
Yet another odd tidbit I find to hold a tinge of truth: Physicist Dr. Eric Davis, known for his work on top-secret Pentagon projects and for testifying in UAP (Unidentified Arial Phenomena) briefings on Capitol Hill in May 2025, claimed that former President George H.W. Bush told him he was inadvertently briefed on the Holloman Landing (because he evidently wasn’t supposed to be) when being vetted for the position of CIA director, and that it “was real and the security was obscene.”
But the most unexpected info learned at last weekend’s presentation involves the 1977 Steven Spielberg film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. An airman who drove the base commander and base scientist to see the alien spacecraft in the hangar where it was stored in Building 830 also watched it being unloaded. According to Spielberg himself, the scene at the end of Close Encounters, where we see the spacecraft being unloaded (including abducted humans) is actually about what happened at Holloman AFB in 1964. And real-life researcher and scientist Jacques Vallée is portrayed in the movie as a French scientist.
There’s more bizarre stuff involving extreme (obscene according to Bush senior) security at the MARS known as Building 930, including an infestation of ants possibly indicating the presence of high electromagnetic energy. But most puzzling is why the trailer wasn’t removed until 2022, a pile of giant rocks replacing part of the site.
Here’s hoping the DoD footage of aliens landing and disembarking at Holloman AFB will someday be released. I don’t know how much of this will end up in my final Other Worldly novel in progress, Alien Origins, or how I will interpret it from a literary license standpoint, but I’m thinking it definitely has to be included.
It’s already downright uncanny that I created a character from Alamogordo (former CIA clandestine officer Oswald Winslow aka Win) in book two, Feeling Alienated, back in 2020, when I had no idea I myself would be landing in this region and calling it home.