UFO Files: The New Mexico Green Fireball Investigation

On May 24, 1950, personnel from the private contractor Land-Air, Incorporated, stationed near Vaughn, New Mexico, logged the sighting of eight to ten unexplained aerial objects. This was not a civilian report, but a coordinated observation by a scientific team operating under a United States Air Force contract as part of Project Twinkle, a twenty-four-hour watch established to monitor mysterious phenomena appearing repeatedly near sensitive military installations.This episode examines FBI memorandum 62-HQ-83894, a declassified document authored by A.H. Belmont that outlines the government's formal investigation into these objects. The records detail how Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, Director of the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico, analyzed the reports and proposed two startling possibilities: that these were secret United States guided missiles or, more alarmingly, weapons launched from the Ural region of the Soviet Union capable of reaching New Mexico in fifteen minutes.Episode 5 follows the bureaucratic trail of this investigation, walking through the FBI's role in monitoring Project Twinkle, the specific categorization of these sightings into green fireballs and discs, and correspondence from J. Edgar Hoover regarding these phenomena. No hype, no lore, no premature verdict. Just the files, the Evidence, the gaps, and the questions the record leaves open.Sources for this episode are available at: https://nbn.fm/ufo-files/episode/ep5About The UFO FilesThe UFO Files is an investigative podcast analyzing declassified UFO and UAP records, document by document. Every claim is grounded in primary source records, with sources and transcripts published on the Neural Broadcast Network website for verification.