Green Fireball Sighting in New Mexico

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. — A man claims he saw a green fireball in the skies of New Mexico in 2004.

Green Fireball image from Life Magazine April 7, 1952

The witness, J. Marks, told Cryptozoology News via e-mail that he noticed the strange object one night after he and his father arrived home, and that he had never reported the incident before.

“I saw what I thought was a huge green meteor moving overhead,” Marks said. “It appeared a little smaller than the moon and was bright green. It moved at a steady speed for about a second before disappearing behind a nearby mesa. My dad didn’t see the fireball and I didn’t think about it for a long time until I did some research on UFO’s. While doing the research I came across accounts of Green Fireballs, particularly ones in Los Alamos, and I remembered having seen the fireball in 2004,” he added.

The witness also explained that the fireball did not move with “any particular pattern or intelligence”, and that there were no “other peculiar events”.

Green fireballs are classified as a type of UFO by researchers, with reports going back to the 1940s. Initially, these odd unidentified lights began making spectacular appearances in the skies of the southwestern United States, specially in New Mexico. The sightings prompted the intervention of the United States government as they were of special concern regarding national security. It was widely speculated that these moving green lights were part of a new secret Russian spy device.

Initial reports were dismissed as military green flares or meteors, but further investigations performed by Dr. Lincoln LaPaz determined the lights had too many anomalous characteristics to be a type of meteor. LaPaz investigated the Roswell incident in 1947, also involving green lights, and after a few witness interviews -including the affidavit of Earl L. Zimmerman- he concluded that the object was an unoccupied extraterrestrial probe.

NY Post article by former Patton officer Robert Allen

The phenomenon also prompted the creation of Project Twinkle, established at Holloman Air Force Base in February 1950. They concluded that the green lights were a natural event, probably related to the sun or meteors. The project was dismantled in 1951.

Robert Hastings, in his book UFOs and Nukes, conducted an extensive research on the lights and proposed the theory that extraterrestrial beings were possibly snooping on nuclear facilities. Hastings painstakingly documented the UFO-Nuke connection; numerous interviews with former and retired U.S. Air Force personnel revealed the incredible encounters that were regarded as a threat to national security. Perhaps motivated by the dangers of full scale nuclear war, these green lights usually showed up around weapon storage facilities and nuclear testing ranges, to the point of creating malfunctions as reported in some cases. In 2010, Hastings hosted a press conference in Washington D.C. to explain the possible connection between the green fireballs and nukes.

A compilation of the UFO-Nuke connection can be found here.

Other researchers propose different theories, as it was the case of Dan Wilson explaining the lights were possibly caused by the nuclear debris, or William K. Hartmann with his idea of the lights just being lunar material ejected during meteor impacts on the Moon’s surface.

Unlike extensive studies conducted about the Marfa Lights, to this day and regardless of what some studies keep repeating, ufologists continue to investigate with the help of new technologies as there is not enough conclusive evidence to determine that the green fireballs are caused by a natural phenomenon.

Similar reports of green lights in the sky have been archived in the United Kingdom, specifically around the nuclear power plant in Suffolk in 1983 and in Alberta, Canada in 2011.

A more recent report, similar to what eyewitness J. Marks describes, occurred in 2012 in Vancouver, Canada. “Peripheral vision made me look up at the object. Green ball of light, comet like movement with a trail behind it similar to a comet, consistent and maintained speed,” the witness told the Canadian newspaper.

A well documented chronology of the green fireball phenomenon is available here.

We were not presented with any pictures or video taken during the incident.

 

Special thanks to J. Marks for the report. Anybody with additional information or in the knowledge of conclusive evidence about the green fireballs phenomenon and would like to help, is encouraged to contact us or to alternatively use the comments section below. As you know, we periodically publish eyewitness accounts submitted to Cryptozoology News. If you have witnessed a strange sighting of any type and are interested in sharing your story, please send us an e-mail with your report detailing the events.