IncidentThe "Trinity" / San Antonio (NM) Crash Claim (alleged August 1945)

The only firmly documented backdrop is the Trinity atomic test (16 July 1945) ~20-30 mi southeast. The claim - that Jose Padilla (~age 8-9) and Reme Baca (~6-7) saw an avocado-shaped craft crash, observed tall thin ‘creatures,’ and watched a military recovery, with Padilla keeping a metal piece - has no documentary existence before journalist Ben Moffett’s November 2003 article, told by men in their sixties. Jacques Vallee and Paola Harris promoted it in ‘Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret’ (2021). Archival researchers - including UFO-sympathetic ones - have contradicted it on checkable points: the keystone ‘state trooper who entered the craft’ (Eddie Apodaca) was in Europe with the US Army in August 1945 and not commissioned to the NM State Police until 1951; Padilla’s cited ‘California Highway Patrol officer’ credential had no CHP record and his claimed Korean War combat is chronologically impossible; site features (a late-1950s cattle tank, a renamed-1967 ‘Italian Peak,’ a tower on a 1982 BLM map) post-date or retrofit the 1945 setting; the narrative shifts across tellings; a recording captures Baca pitching incompatible earlier crash stories; and the retained ‘artifact’ is ordinary terrestrial aluminum (metric, which Vallee himself speculated may have been made in Mexico). Brian Dunning, Douglas Dean Johnson, and even pro-UFO researcher Ryan Wood read it as a hoax. The modern counterpart to Roswell and Aztec in the crash-retrieval lineage - and a lesson that a prominent author’s imprimatur is not corroboration.