Interview with 1945 UFO crash witness

Extract of Paola Harris Interview With Reme Baca, Washington State July 5th, 2010.

[P. Paola Harris. R. Reme Baca.]

P: After you saw the crash you brought people back there. And who did you bring back? You brought back who? …

R: What happened is that after the crash, we went home, back to the ranch.

P: Can you tell me the date of this? The approximate date of this? We know it’s 1945.

R: 1945, August…. And it was like the 15^th….  I was age 7 and Jose was 9.  Jose’s dad Faustino had asked us a couple of days earlier, to find a cow that was ready to have a calf…. We went over looking for that cow. And so while we were there, it was not abnormal in late summer, to have thunderstorms and lightning and this time was no different so we took refuge under a ledge. …  Jose had packed a lunch, a couple of tortillas and I think a couple of apples. We sat down to eat that and the storm and rains came. We got under there so we wouldn’t get too wet. Then it just kind of sprinkled a little bit and was all over. We were getting ready to go up and take another look at the cow and see if it was eating and take a closer look at the calf.  While we were doing that, we heard this loud bang.

P: You heard the actual crash.

R: We didn’t know it was a crash at that time…. We heard this sound and the ground shook, and so memories came back of the atomic bomb explosion.  Are they testing again or what?  So we looked around, saw smoke coming from maybe a couple of canyons down, up that way. So Jose says, “let’s go over and take a look, see what’s going on.” We started walking, and we saw a little smoke coming from that direction. As we reached the ridge, the smoke became intense.  Then we worked our way down the ridge so we could see what appeared to be a big gouge in the ground.  It looked like a road grader had been in there. We were not aware that anyone had a 100-foot wide grader, but it sure looked like a 100-foot wide blade had been here, grading about a foot deep.  We started walking up this graded road, it was pretty rough on our feet and it was warm. The bottoms of our feet felt hot.

P: And do you remember around what time it was?

R: I didn’t have a watch. Probably 4 or 5 in the afternoon, maybe later.

P: I’m asking because you can see what you’re looking at, it’s not dark.

R: No, it’s not dark. But as we look up this graded road, there’s a lot of smoke. So we retreated to where we could get some air and take a drink from the canteen and kind of recollect our thoughts and try to understand what this is all about.  I asked Jose, “is that a plane that went down?” I’ve only seen planes in the air. We live in a small town. Don’t see many planes.  Jose says, “Don’t know, maybe somebody might be hurt and maybe we need to help them. “I said ok, okay, and so we continued trying to get closer. We could see something over on the edge of that graded gash…. It doesn’t go just straight. It goes and then it makes a right turn, like an “L”. We could see something but you know, there’s so much dust in the air, and it’s humid from the rain and then some of that brush, that oily brush is burning so the smoke’s coming into your eyes, it’s really hard to see and make any sense of it at all.  We went back up and rested, returned, and Jose has his binoculars out and starts looking to see what it are. He says,“You know there’s something over there. Let’s see if we can get any closer.”  Again, we try to get closer and finally it starts clearing up a little. The time seems to be going by very fast. We’re looking through the binoculars and I could see the hole on the side of this object.  The object is avocado shaped.

P: So it’s a round object like an avocado and you could see there’s a hole. How far would you say you guys were from the object?

R: I would estimate about a couple of hundred feet….

P: And then you saw the inside of the hole from the couple hundred feet?

R: No, not the inside of the hole. Jose says, “look at this.” So I was looking through these binoculars at these little creatures moving back and forth.

P: Were they moving really fast?

R: They were “like“ sliding…. Not sliding, but more like willing themselves from one place to another-that type of sliding.  And as I’m looking at that, things began happening to my mind.

I’m seeing them and I’m feeling this crazy stuff, like I really feel sorry for them…. And I really feel sorry, like they’re kids, too.

P: And you had a concern for them.  And you’re thinking, did you feel something because of the accident?

R: Yes, I think so; I’m hearing this high-pitched sound coming from there. We didn’t know what to think.  The only high-pitched sounds we were familiar with were of Jack Rabbits when they were in pain, and also the sound that comes out of a newborn baby when it cries.

P: I find this interesting. So you heard this same sound?

R: And so that was pretty moving to us. Then we saw these pictures in our heads….  I didn’t know what the heck they were.

P: In other words, you got a telepathic transfer from these beings – you think?

R: Yes, if that’s what it was…. I can remember what they are, I got pictures, but I didn’t know what they meant then, and I still don’t know.

P: So they obviously knew you were there?

R: Yes, they must have known we were there.…

P: If the beings looked out and they were looking at you, you not only could see them, maybe they were transferring those images to you.  So what did you guys do, run away?

R: We looked at them and now it was starting to get dark and we had a long hike to get to the horses and back to the ranch.  But Jose wants to go in, and I don’t…. And I’m saying, Jose, “what is it? “  His response is “I don’t know.”  Okay. If you don’t know what the heck this is, I ain’t going into it.  There’s no way. “I wanna go home. I don’t want to go in. You’ll have to go by yourself.  I’m going home, I’ll meet you at the ranch.”  And he says, “Well let’s watch for a little while.  You know, maybe you’re right. I don’t know what they are. They kinda look like kids, very strange kids.”…

P:  So if I was to ask you about the diameter of this thing, how big would say it was?  Did you try to compare to something or….

R: About twenty-five or 30 feet long. Thirty-feet long. Okay. R:  Fourteen-feet high. How do I know? Because of the rafters of a house are fourteen-feet tall…. Well, we finally agreed that we ought to go home because it was getting late. So we started off, went down and got on our horses and started off. It was getting dark then and it was pitch dark by the time we got to the ranch. And Jose’s dad was waiting for us. He was worried. So we went in and Jose told him the story about the cow and then he started telling him about the crash…. And I told him what I saw and so his dad says, well, the first thing we got to do is we got to get you home. We’ll look into this in the next day or so. It probably belongs to the government, and that’s probably it. We need to maybe stay away from there. And so they drove me home, I left my horse there and they took care of it. They drove me home and Faustino had a long talk with my mom regarding the object that we had discovered on the Padilla ranch.  Faustino emphasized it might endanger his job, since my dad worked for the government…. My dad worked for the Veterans Hospital in Albuquerque, and Jose’s dad worked for the Federal Refuge in development, El Bosque Del Apache near San Antonio…. And so that was basically what happened that night. The following day, Jose came over to my house, and I went with him to his house, where we met Eddie Apodaca who was a State Policeman, and a friend of the family. Faustino had asked him to go with us to the crash site. They rode in the state police car, and we rode in the pickup truck.  We drove as far as we could get with the vehicles, and we walked the rest of the way to the crash site.   When we got close to the crash site, looking down from the hill, we couldn’t see the object…. Standing on top of a hill, looking downwards where we had seen the object, it was no longer visible to us, at that time. No explanation why.  We simply could not see it.  It seemed gone.  Jose says well, “I don’t know what’s going on here.” Eddy and Faustino said, “What did you say you saw?”  My response was, it’s down there, but we can’t see it.  Faustino said let’s walk down there and take a look. We started walking down and then we saw it.  The object had a lot of debris over it and so I’m asking Faustino, how come we couldn’t see it from up there. His response was that he didn’t know.

P: You’re saying it was almost invisible.

R: I almost couldn’t see it. Then we got there and they said okay, you guys stay here and we’re going to go in…. So they went in and we stood there, sat down and watched them. And they were in there 5 or 10 minutes and came out. They had a change of attitude, a complete change of attitude. They were almost like different people. They had seen something they’d never seen before. They came out and said, okay. Here’s the way it is. I want you guys to listen. This is very difficult. You’re under oath. You don’t tell anybody about this, not your brother, not your cousin, not your mother, not your father, that’s our business. We’ll take care of that. And the reason for this is that you can get in trouble. We want to keep you out of trouble. So we agreed to that and they gave us a really big lecture, and so we took it very serious. …

We went back several times.  Jose went sometimes with and sometimes without me.  You know, we were kids. We worked that area. As kids our dad gives us a little money for doing that work, and if we didn’t, who would? … Then we were going in there, and we were going to go and see what we could find. We went there on a workday, before Faustino and Apodaca went with us. It was in the afternoon, after we had gotten done with our work…. Finally, we got there in the late afternoon, we were on horseback and came in from a different direction looking from the opposite side of the ridge, we saw some military people picking up stuff.

… But we never got to check the craft, all we got to do was go down and get some of the debris and threw it in this crevice and we tried to cover it with dirt and rocks.  After the two jeeps left, it was already getting dark and we had to get home.

P: What did that material feel like, the material that you threw into the trench? Was it like, you know, like lead or was it soft or like aluminum, or how was it? Do you have a piece of it? Was it like stone?

R: Kind of like this piece that I’m holding in my hand…. It was hard.  On the first day, I had gotten a piece of that aluminum foil type, and showed it to Jose.  It reminded me of the aluminum foil that came in the Philip Morris cigarettes that my mother smoked.  I took that and put it in my pocket…

P: Whatever happened to that?

R: I used it to repair the windmill cylinder.

P: So the second day basically you waited until the military went away. And you got more pieces, dragged them into the trench, but you didn’t see the beings then.

R: Too far from the crevice and it was getting dark.  The military had been there, we saw them, but I don’t think they saw us.

P: The thing was left there and then the next day Jose’s father and Apodaca went.

R: Right.

P: And you took them there. Okay. And then did you see it again? The craft?

R: Yes, it was still there.

P: I mean, you went there a fourth day, yourselves?

R: No, no. Then after, probably the third or fourth day Jose came over to my house and we picked some chilies, green peppers, tomatoes because we had a vegetable garden and they didn’t, and we filled a couple of bags with vegetables and we took one to his house.  We went in the back door. And as we go in there was a military vehicle in front and there’s a soldier there at the screen door talking to his dad, so we go around the back and in through the kitchen to join them. Faustino says, come on in here boys.  So we joined him and he’s talking to a Sgt. Avila, and he invites him in.  Sgt. Avila says “I’m with the US Army and what I need to do is permission from you to go in and cut the fence and put in a gate because we have one of our  “experimental weather balloons” that inadvertently fell on your property.

P: He called it a weather balloon? Those words?

R: An experimental weather balloon, and so we need to recover that, so we need permission to do that. So his dad says, “Why can’t you come in through the cattle guard like everybody else does instead of cutting my fence down?” And he says, “Because the equipment that we’re going to bring in is wider than your cattle guard, it won’t fit through there. He says, “In the mean time, you have a gate that locks that up and we need to have a key so we can get in there and cut that fence and put in a gate.” He says, “We’ll put in a good gate for you. And then we need to bring in some road-building equipment, some graters and so forth and see if we can grade a road to get that truck in there to get that weather balloon out of there.” So finally Jose’s father says, “Okay,” and they both spoke mostly in Spanish. He says, “Okay, go ahead and do that.” He says, “Keep an eye on the place and make sure nobody goes there because you know, this is really important, you know, we don’t let anybody know about it.” We don’t want to cause any trouble for anybody, and so try and keep an eye on it, so nobody that hasn’t any business going there, doesn’t go there. And so, Faustino say, “Okay”, and Sgt. Avila left and that’s when they officially began the process of preparing the area to take the object away.  The recovery wasn’t like what we read in UFO books, people in purple uniforms dropping in from helicopters, everything sanitized. Nothing like that.

P: And they weren’t wearing protective clothing?

R: Yes they were wearing fatigues. They put up a tent, played a radio, western music…. We were watching them, as often as we could, sometimes in the morning, and evening. It was our job to check and maintain the fences, keep track of the herd, including horses. We could hear the radio music going. There was one guy there at the tent, and two or three working, picking up the debris.  They bring in this tractor-trailer, they have a welder, acetylene welder, and they build this rack so they can get the craft on it because it’s got to go on sideways. Then we figured out they were doing that because they had to go under the overpass at a forty-five degree angle in order to clear it.

P: Did they tie it up or put a tarp over it?

R: Yes, put a tarp on it.

P: And tied it up…. And you saw them pick up debris at the crash site?

R: Yes

P: They left the ship. And explain to me how you got this metal.

R: On the final day when they brought in a small crane, about I imagine a fifteen to twenty foot crane and they dragged the craft onto the tractor-trailer.

P: Did they ever see you?

R: I don’t know if they ever did, or cared…. Well, you know, they weren’t looking for us, and there was vegetation on the side of the hills, and we weren’t very tall, so it was easy for us to hide.

P:  But you didn’t go and talk to them or anything.

R: … Years later, one of the soldiers married Jose’s cousin.

P: You just said one of them married Jose’s cousin and the obvious question everybody would have would be did this military man who married Jose’s cousin ever talk about this incident?

R: Don’t believe he knew. He was just doing his job, picking up the debris, looking forward to completing his assignment and going home.  The war had ended, and a lot of the soldiers had been restricted near the base near Trinity site for the last 90 days….

Jose say’s “Let’s head down and wait a little while until they leave and then we’ll go.” We waited for a while and then everybody took off. They had these military pickups and they took off. So we know where they’re going, they’d be gone for a while. We worked our way up there and where the crevice was, they had run the grater through it, so nobody would even know that a crevice existed. Then we worked our way outside the fence, towards the back of the truck and stepped it off. If you made a big enough step it was three feet. Maybe we were off a few feet, but that’s the measurements we had.  Twenty-five to thirty long and about fourteen-feet tall.  And then we looked at the underneath part of the craft, because we had not seen this part of it, it was partly under ground.  So now we get to see the whole thing. Boy, this thing is a monster; it’s big. Now we can see the bottom. And in the bottom it’s got like three little indentations, little grooves under there, on each side.

P: Well, maybe they were for the landing pad. Maybe some kind of feet came out of it.

R:  Could be. And so Jose pulls part of the tarp off, exposing the gash on the side of the craft, while I hold the tarp open.  Jose climbs into the gash… I was partially in, holding the tarp letting the light in. First, there’s nothing hardly in there.

P: But he could see the shape of it? Like if there were any rooms? Was it smooth all the way around. Were there any panels? If there were, try to explain it to me.

R: Jose said there were like ridges every so many feet

P: Did he see any panels, like control panels?

R: No. He didn’t see like a big panel. We were talking maybe about two and one half-foot panel.

P: Was it attached to the wall, this panel?

R: To the bulkhead, the rear wall, maybe? … What would be the rear wall to us. He tried to jerk it off and he couldn’t so then he went and got a cheater bar from the front of tractor-trailer.  Something like a crow bar, it’s called a cheater bar in the trucking industry. It’s used for testing the tightness of the chains holding the load down on the tractor-trailer.

P: You described the pins and what were they like?

R: Yes, a one-way fastener. They go in one way and they can’t come out. They were serrated fasteners that were inside the holes, and that’s what was holding this bracket-type piece on the panel that was located on the bulkhead (rear wall.)The pins were yellow.

P: The pins were like yellow? That was my next question. What kind of color did you have? What kind of colors are we dealing with?

R: Yellow. The pins were yellow. Silvery colored strands of what I would compare to angel hair.  No seats or anything, nothing. It must have been cleaned out, or maybe there weren’t any.  Couldn’t see any instruments, like gages, clocks, steering wheel, brake pedals, nothing like that.

The full version of this interview along with confirming phone testimony of Jose Padilla is published at: PaolaHarris.com