December 7 – The mysterious red light reportedly pulsed in the sky over Albuquerque’s South Valley for about an hour in October 2023, captured on camera by a stunned man who says, “I’ve never seen a light so bright.”
A solid, bright sphere hovered with angular grace over Jal, near the state’s southern border, in February, startling an observer. As the nighttime scene unfolded near an oil field in Lea County, the observer reported that it felt like the air was moving with a leaden static electricity.
Videos of these stargazing episodes turning bizarre in a state known for mysterious nighttime events are among those cataloged by a popular UFO reporting platform and mobile phone app operated by Enigma Labs. The company, founded in 2020, has released a new report calling New Mexico the top state in per capita sightings, with several strange videos submitted this year showing lights over Albuquerque.
“New Mexico is a hotbed for UFOs,” said Alejandro Rojas, a consultant for Enigma Labs. “But what’s really interesting is that New Mexico has really emerged recently in our data as a leader in terms of entries per person.”
The data set stems from an obsession with unidentified flying objects that continues nationwide even after a congressionally mandated Pentagon report released in February found no evidence that the federal government covered up knowledge of alien technology and no evidence that UFO sightings are signs are of aliens visiting Earth.
A Pentagon office known as the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office was created in 2022 to track what the government calls UAPs — unidentified anomalous phenomena — with 757 reported to the office between May and June of this year, according to a November report.
Yet people continue to see things.
In the fast-paced digital age, Enigma Labs offers an online treasure trove of oddities: an endless proliferation of images and sounds.
The private company offers a website and mobile app that allow UFO enthusiasts – and regular people who think they’ve encountered the anomalous – to upload videos and photos with descriptions, aggregate the data and crowdsource it.
“It’s like millions of ants crawling around us,” the person who saw something in Jal said in the Enigma post.
‘I hate to say it. Those are ships!’ said a man who claimed he witnessed alien plasma ships in Gallup, near the Arizona border.
All told, Land of Enchantment’s rate of 12.2 Enigma entries per 100,000 people is much higher than that of the next closest states Nevada and Arizona, which have a submission rate of about 9 per 100,000 residents, according to the company.
UFO researchers have theories about the large number of entries here, citing how alien mythology and lore has been woven into the state’s cultural fabric for decades. According to the National UFO Reporting Center, there have been 1,708 reported sightings in New Mexico, most of them since 2000.
“We have a relatively small population, but all we have, and I think this plays a role in your question, is a preponderance of military operating areas and scientific development areas – Los Alamos [National Laboratory]Sandia [National Laboratories] – a rich history of sightings,” says David Marler, a longtime UFO researcher who lives in the Albuquerque area and is director of a new UFO registration center in Rio Rancho.
While the Roswell incident has long been a dominant talking point, Marler says there are many more intriguing accounts of encounters over the past 75 years in New Mexico: April 1964, Socorro; April 1964, La Madera; March 1950, Farmington; November 1957, Kirtland Air Force Base.
A ruling state for observations
Enigma Labs runs a page in New Mexico that archives and catalogs observations, and rates and categorizes videos.
According to an email from Rojas, the company had received 278 observations directly in New Mexico by the end of November. Combined with publicly available sources, a total of 3,531 observations have been archived in New Mexico.
“If you look back at early magazine reports and military reports going back to the 1950s, there were magazine articles with maps showing a lot of UFO sightings. One of the most common states was New Mexico,” Marler said.
A fascination with the unknown has long gripped New Mexico. It is a state that – thanks to its dry climate, low population density and vast deserts – is known for its night sky observation.
“One of the most spectacular reports is from last August. A witness said they were watching TV when they saw this strange object out of the corner of their eye. They were able to capture a few seconds of video before it disappeared behind nearby trees,” Rojas said of video footage taken in Chaparral, a community in southern New Mexico near El Paso.
The video shows a floating gray object with a television in the background.
New Mexico sightings logged into the Enigma Labs database are broken down as follows: Albuquerque, 754; Las Cruces, 159; Roswell, 143; Alamogordo, 107; and Deming, 95. Rojas said eight sightings have been reported to Enigma from Santa Fe and one in Los Alamos.
Two friends were driving along San Mateo Boulevard in Albuquerque late one evening in February when a moving craft lit up in the sky with lights flashing in a diagonal pattern.
In an episode that lasted about a minute, “it went from a long craft to a triangular craft with only three lights, then to something resembling a helicopter with one light, and quickly disappeared,” according to the front-page caption. video posted on the Enigma Lab site.
New Records Center in Rio Rancho
Tens of thousands of files, the earliest dating back to 1947, are housed in Rio Rancho. They tell the stories of witnesses, captured in the diction of reports written seventy years ago by law enforcement officers or members of the military.
The files can be viewed at the new National UFO Historical Records Center, a facility that recently opened and can be visited by appointment.
“It is the largest historical archive ever compiled on the history of this subject in the history of the United States,” said Marler, the director.
The volunteer-run research center, at 1301 Nicklaus Drive SE, opened in October.
It contains reels of decades-old microfilms, hundreds of thousands of audio recordings, an extensive library of foreign and domestic magazines, newsletters and periodicals – all of which deal with reports of mysterious craft spotted from Earth. There are approximately 2,000 books on the shelves, along with an endless supply of UFO investigations and intrigue, with stories and testimonies for those who believe.
“It’s really aimed at academics and the general public who have a serious interest in the subject. It’s not necessarily for the casual enthusiast,” Marler said.
The center holds files from the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, documents maintained by the largest civilian organization in the US and dedicated to cataloging UFO reports from 1956 to 1980, the year the group published its last newsletter . The center is currently digitizing the files for the first time.
Also in her possession are collections from the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization, once based in Alamogordo, with tens of thousands of files – as well as collections from the UFO Research Committee of Akron, active mainly in the 1950s in Ohio.
“We’re literally bringing in these interests from all different parts of the world,” Marler said.
Well documented cases outside of Roswell
Academics of unexplained phenomena have descended on the Land of Enchantment for a beloved UFO festival in Roswell. But the mythical stories do not stop there.
“Unfortunately, Roswell, Roswell, Roswell. That always dominates the conversation and there are better, better documented cases available,” Marler said, referring to the 1947 vessel crash near the southern New Mexico city. While many believe it was an alien spacecraft, the federal government has said it was a secret military balloon intended to detect Soviet nuclear bomb tests.
Marler said many New Mexicans are unaware of other cases in their own state.
In November 1957, a UFO was tracked on radar and “violated” the boundaries of Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, hovering around restricted locations, according to reports Marler reviewed. He said the Rio Rancho Registration Center has the original file for “Project Blue Book,” the Air Force’s name for a project that investigated UFO reports between 1947 and 1969.
“Two air force personnel observed it at night with binoculars. They described it as a car standing vertically upside down and emitting a white light from the bottom. The object had the ability to hover, accelerate quickly and move slowly. Marler said.
The April 1964 Socorro incident – unsolved in the Air Force investigation taking place at the time and widely reported in New Mexico news publications – was observed by local police officer Lonnie Zamora, who claimed to have witnessed two humanoids next to a shiny , egg-shaped object. which later rose into the air from an arroyo as flames erupted from the rising craft.
Marler said he thought the Socorro case was an isolated case. However, this past year he received the APRO files and came across an account published in the Santa Fe New Mexican of a similar report four days after the Socorro incident from La Madera, a remote community north of Ojo Caliente in Rio Arriba County.
“Eyewitness Recounts Passage of ‘Thing’ Burning in Sky,” reads a headline in the April 28, 1964 edition of The New Mexican.
“It’s about Socorro, but it’s about a landing in La Madera… and it described an egg-shaped object,” Marler said. “…New Mexico State Police [investigated and] drew a detailed diagram of the landing site and took photographs and color photographs.”
