New Mexico is a US state located in the south-west of the United States and is bordered with the nation of Mexico. It also makes up the Four Corners monument alongside Colorado, Arizona and a tiny corner of Utah. New Mexico is also bordered with Texas and a small bit of Oklahoma. The capital city Sante Fe is known for its art and historical Spanish colonial history, it is a popular tourist city. The city of Albuquerque is the state’s largest and is also known for its history, both colonial and tribal and is another popular tourist city. Roswell is also located in New Mexico, a place famous among ufologists and extra-terrestrial and conspiracy enthusiasts, of which I will elaborate on later.
Due to its history the state has the highest percentage of Hispanic and Latino Americans as well as the 2nd highest percentage of Native American’s after the state of Alaska. The state of New Mexico contains a number of Federally recognized indigenous (Pueblo) communities, Apache tribes and also part of the Navajo Nation territory (the largest land area retained by an indigenous tribe).
The state is more varied than some may realize, many know it to be semiarid to arid along with deserts and mesas, but the state also has the Rocky Mountain’s running through it and a number of the mountains are also snowcapped, there are also many forests in the state as well, many of which can be found in the North of the state and also frequently mix with the mountainous terrain. Summer’s in New Mexico are often hot, typically more so in the south of the state.
Big drivers of New Mexico’s economy are tourism, the federal government, such as its military and laboratory infrastructure and finally the state’s gas and oil production, 9th and 3rd largest producer in the US respectively.
But now let’s move on to what we all came for… the paranormal and unexplained stuff! And yes, New Mexico does have quite a bit, two of which I can bring up straight off the top of my head.
Due to the state’s strong history with the Navajo and also other Native peoples, creatures of Native American legend such as the Thunderbirds and the terrifying Skinwalkers are also a big part of the paranormal and legendary folklore and mystery of the state of New Mexico. A number of sightings of giant birds and the shape-shifting Skinwalkers have been reported by an array of people in the state.
Something more localized though is the famous incident in Roswell, New Mexico, perhaps… or should I say, it is the most well-known and famous apparent UFO crash in history and still to this day drives much speculation and conspiracy theories, even 73-years after the incident took place. I believe we can give much credit to this incident in really pushing ufology further into the public spotlight and consciousness as well as making more people think on the possibility of the beings other than ourselves out in the depths of space… while for others it is merely a military experimental test that went wrong, as well as a number of other theories.
The Roswell incident has also inspired much pop-culture in TV, movies and books as well around that of UFOs, aliens and conspiracy.
The incident took place in mid-1947 when an object crashed near to a ranch near to Roswell, New Mexico. The debris were discovered in either June or July of that year by a foreman working at the nearby ranch who was called William Brazel. He would report to the Roswell Daily Record that he and his son saw what they described as a “large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, and some rather tough paper and sticks”. Brazel would later tell a Sheriff Wilcox that he “may have found a flying disc”.
The Sheriff would contact RAAF Major Jesse Marcel, who would bring Lt Colonel Sheridan Cavitt and Master Sergeant Bill Rickett to the ranch where they would spend some hours searching for and collecting a few more patches of tinfoil and rubber.
An RAAF public information officer would make a press release saying that personnel of the 509th Operations Group had recovered a “flying disc”, which had crashed near to the ranch. He said five pounds of debris were picked up and that the flying disc appeared to be some kind of device that may have been transported by what would have been a large balloon. He said there was no sign of metal that could have been an engine and no sign of propellers, although there was a paper fin that had been glued on to some of the tinfoil.
Further press releases would say it was a device suspended from a balloon and eventually they announced it was a weather balloon that had crashed, including showing some of the debris in a press conference – although the true purpose was that the balloon was actually being used for nuclear monitoring and not weather monitoring, but this was not disclosed until much later. After the weather balloon explanation not much more came of the incident until about three decades later.
From the 1970s to 1990s, a number of UFO researchers began interviewing hundreds of apparent witnesses to the Roswell incident and hundreds of documents were also obtained through the Freedom of Information Act requests. This led to the bringing forth of what would become a major conspiracy, that of at least one alien craft having actually crashed at the site and that alien bodies had even been recovered and that it was all covered up by the government.
Books, articles and television specials based on this research and conspiracy would be made, further propagating the conspiracy into the national consciousness. A poll conducted in 1997 by CNN/Time even found that the majority of people believed that aliens had visited Earth, that they had landed at Roswell and that it was being kept secret by the government.
The phenomenon would become so huge that eventually in the mid to late 1990s a number of congressional inquiries would take place which led to the United States Secretary of the Air Force to conduct an internal investigation, leading to the revelation of Project Mogul, of which they said is what the crash at Roswell was a part of and a 2nd report would say that the reports of recovered alien bodies were likely a combination of innocently transformed memories of accidents involving military casualties with memories of the recovery of anthropomorphic dummies in military programs and that these were mixed in with hoaxes perpetrated by various witnesses and UFO proponents, and that phycological effects of time compression and confusion about when events occurred explained the discrepancy with the years in question.
Despite these revelations and official investigative conclusions though, the Roswell incident has remained a hot topic of debate between UFO enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists and skeptics and further conspiracies have been brought up since, such as it being an experimental craft of the military or that it was a Nazi-Soviet scare-tactic gone wrong, among other things. I’m sure I will touch on some of the other conspiracies in other posts in the future as there is too much to fit in here.
New Mexico has a strong association with aliens/extra-terrestrials. You may have seen in one of my previous posts here, about a very interesting incident that took place close to Dulce, New Mexico… an apparent firefight with aliens that accidentally took place. These aliens apparently had an uneasy alliance with humans, working together in a series of secret underground bases. But when one of these areas were drilled into, all Hell broke loose apparently leading to many deaths – click the link here to read more on this disturbing event as well as some other interesting alien encounters.
There is also another apparent UFO crash that took place in New Mexico as well, but is nowhere near as well known as the Roswell one. This one happened in 1948, a year following the Roswell incident and was published to the media by Frank Scully in a Variety magazine column in 1949. The incident is widely believed to have been a hoax and confidence trick that was perpetrated by Silas M. Newton and Leo A. Gebauer in an attempt to form a fraudulent scam to sell fake UFO technology.
The apparent story was that a UFO had made a controlled crash landing in Hart Canyon close to the city of Aztec and that the military had come and recovered sixteen alien humanoid bodies from the craft and then the craft was taken for secret research, with the incident then being covered up by the military, this account having been told to Scully (the writer of the column) by the two fraudsmen, who were attempting to sell something known in the oil industry as a doodlebug, which they claimed could locate oil, gas and gold and that they were based on alien technology recovered from the apparent UFO that crashed. Many of the victims who got conned later came forward, including a millionaire called Herman Flader who would press charges against them. The men were eventually convicted of fraud in 1953.
Although many believed it to be thoroughly debunked, there remains some conspiracists and UFO enthusiasts who believe that the incident may have in-fact still been real, including the explosion in popularity of an FBI “The Hottel Memo” that was taken majorly out of context and exploded the “Aztex UFO incident” back into the public consciousness from 2011.
Next up I will touch on a quite famous cryptid or even paranormal/alien being (it has evolved and changed a lot over the years) of which is the Chupacabra and although this legendary creature does not originate from New Mexico, it is still a popular legendary creature there nonetheless, with many reported on having seen it and that livestock have been attacked by these creatures on a number of occasions, with cattle mutilations having been blamed on them.
There are varying descriptions of what the creature looks like, but there are two common descriptions. One is of it looking like some kind of humanoid reptile-like creature, which has leathery or scaly greenish-gray skin with sharp spines running down its back, said to be short, only 3-4 feet in height and that it stands and hops about in a similar fashion to a Kangaroo.
The other common description is that it looks like an unusual breed of wild dog, which is mostly hairless with a pronounced spinal ridge, strangely pronounced eye sockets, fangs and also claws. This particular version has often been debunked as simply an animal, such as a small bear or coyote, that is suffering from mange.
This creature has also been caught on camera on a number of occasions but many of them have been passed off as either misidentification of a normal animal or as an elaborate hoax. You can easily search up on Youtube and find a number of examples.
The Chupacabra is said to have a unique way of getting what it needs from its prey, which is via sucking blood out of the animal, often via three distinct holes in the shape of an upside-down triangle or on other occasions just through one or two holes. Often it is said to entirely drain the animal of all of its blood and sometimes even remove its organs as well, somehow with only leaving as said a few puncture holes. This is why its name means goat-sucker.
Taos is a town located in Toas County found in the North-Central region of the state among the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the town was founded in 1795 (while under Spain) to act as a fortified plaza and also trading post for Native American and Hispano communities. As of today the town has over 5,000 residents and for a number of decades now it has been associated with a strange, but to some, very distressing sound, known as the Taos Hum that has been heard since at least the early 1990s.
This hum is a strange seemingly low-frequency noise that can only be heard by a specific minority of the town of Taos, often described as either a whirring, humming or buzzing sound but not quite sounding the same from one person to another. Research conducted by Joe Mullins of the University of New Mexico found that about 2% of the town’s population could hear the strange noises, but that special equipment was unable to detect it, even when placed in homes of those who could hear the Taos Hum.
Such strange noises are not only confined to Taos though and have often been reported in a number of other places as well, some of which have been debunked as industrial mechanical, machinery and vehicle noises. But the Toas Hum, as well as a number of others, have not been able to be debunked and remain persistent. This has led to a number of conspiracy theories and other possible explanations being put forth, such as secret underground military bases, secret government experiments, aliens, UFOs and the paranormal. Other more rational explanations include people having exceptionally good hearing or spontaneous otoacoustic emissions, which is noise emitted by the ears without external stimulation or simply some kind of auditory hallucination. But it is quite puzzling how these Hums crop up in specific hotspot places in particular.
Finally, to round this post off… which for a change isn’t chock full of cryptids, but rather more alien and UFO focused this time… we will as always look into a haunting within the state.
In this edition we will look into a haunting at the KiMo theatre found in the city of Albuquerque. The theatre was opened in September 1927, showing movies (originally silent movies) and expanding into Vaudville and roadshows as well as continuing to show movies. In 1951 a terrible tragic incident took place, that led to the death of a kid called Bobby. On the day in question Bobby was sitting with some of his friends in the theatre when he was startled by something on screen and ran down into the lobby, unfortunately for him at this moment a boiler exploded in this lobby and killed him. Since then his spirit is said to haunt the theatre as a poltergeist, a type of entity that frequently interacts with its physical surroundings and is often mischievous.
And that is certainly the case for this apparent poltergeist haunting, where the spirit of Bobby is said to disrupt the performances on stage, especially if an offering to the spirit, such as doughnuts, have not been left out. Such interruptions have included the messing with electrical and sound equipment as well as lights and the tripping over of performers on stage among other mischief and disruption.
There is also an apparent residual haunting at the theatre as well of an unidentified female spirit walking the halls, dressed in old attire such as a bonnet.
So, there you have it. An array of strange and paranormal happenings from the US state of New Mexico.
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