La Madera, New Mexico: Tank-shaped object spews blue flames, scorched ground found

Around 1:00 a.m. on 26 April 1964, Orlando Gallegos stepped outside his father's ranch at La Madera, New Mexico, to chase away some horses and saw a peculiar structure in the Rio Vallecitos creek bed some 900 feet away. It looked like a butane tank 'as long as a telephone pole', about 14 feet in diameter, metallic, and shooting blue flames out of holes in its sides; over the next minute the flames subsided. The object was still there when he went inside, where no one believed him, and was gone the next morning. State police, including Capt. Martin E. Vigil, David Kingsbury, and Albert Vega, investigated and found the ground still smoldering and scorched, with four depressions, one of them 8 by 12 inches; the charred area formed two overlapping circles about 20 feet across. Hynek was refused authorization to visit the site. The account follows the entry in George M. Eberhart's chronology UFOs and Intelligence (CUFOS) and the sources cited there; it is not an independent determination by From Beyond Space.