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"Born on the edge of Ground Zero, living in the shadow of Area 51, two little Hispanic children experienced an extraordinary event occurred? Jose Padilla, age 9 and Reme Baca, age 7 witnessed a saucer crash on Padilla land in the town San Antonio, New Mexico. They were witness to one of the most spectacular events in UFO history."
| This new book entitled, Born the Edge of Ground Zero, Living in the Shadow of Area 51, will be released February 2011 and is Jose Padilla’s and Reme Baca’s detailed account of what happened in their childhood. They explain what they saw; the actual crash, the creature’s appearances, the pieces they took, the military clean up and an in-depth analysis of the significance of this case. First printed in The Mountain Mail, Soccorro, New Mexico on |  www.paolaharris.com 11-30-2010 |
It is one of the most astounding cases I have ever covered in my career and it helps complete the puzzle of why there has been so many crash retrievals in New Mexico. As journalist Ben Moffet, who so beautifully describes the cover-up - we can begin to see where it fits in UFO history.
“It was in this crucible of suspicion and disinterest bred by familiarity that a small contingent of the U.S. Army passed almost unnoticed through San Antonio in mid-to-late August, 1945 on a secret assignment.
Little or nothing has been printed about the mission, shrouded in the "hush-hush" atmosphere of the time. But the military detail apparently came from White Sands Proving Grounds to the east where the bomb was exploded. It was a recovery operation destined for the mesquite and greasewood desert west of Old US-85, at what is now Milepost 139, the San Antonio exit of Interstate 25.
Over the course of several days, soldiers in Army fatigues loaded the shattered remains of a flying apparatus onto a huge flatbed truck and hauled it away. That such an operation took place between about Aug. 20 and Aug. 25, 1945, there is no doubt, insist two former San Antonioans, Remigio Baca and Jose Padilla, eyewitnesses to the event. Padilla, then age 9, and Baca, 7, secretly watched much of the soldiers' recovery work from a nearby ridge.”
Thanks to the work of Ben Moffet, and now thanks to the witnesses themselves, currently in their 70’s, the world will know see that there was certain extraterrestrial interest in our discovery of the atomic bomb. It opened up a Pandora’s box in human history that cannot easily be closed. It put humanity and possibly other dimensional visitors in danger of total destruction. San Antonio was more than a crash, a sighting - an event. It was a warning that the military today is not heeding, whether it is in the US, or abroad. If we add the courageous testimony Air Force panel led by Robert Hastings and seven retired USAF officers at the Washington Press club on September 27th of 2010, then we realize the time has come to speak. If these visitors have the capacity of UFOs to either disable or shoot down our nuclear missiles, then we can see that 70 years later, they are taking action.
Ultimately, the 1945 San Antonio case presents a peaceful message, a powerful warning to the planet.
Jose Padilla in California (On the Telephone)
July 5th, 2010
Paola Harris: After you saw the crash you brought people back there. And who did you bring back? You brought back who?
Reme: Well, not me.
Paola Harris: Who brought them back?
Reme: What happened is that after the crash, we went home, back to the ranch.
Paola Harris: Can you tell me the date of this? The approximate date of this? We know it’s 1945.
Reme: 1945, August.
Paola Harris: It’s in the month of August.
Reme: And it was like the 15th.
Paola Harris: Around the 15th. That 15th of August, you know, is the Feast of the Madonna. It’s the greatest feast in Italy. Okay, never mind. It’s a major date. Okay, so it’s around the 15th, so whose dad was it that sent you, and you were how old?
Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: And you were on two separate horses.
Reme: Yes, we were on two separate horses.
Paola Harris: So it was during the day you went?
Reme: Yes. Here’s what he told us. You know, Faustino said, when you get a chance, I want you to go out and check that cow because it’s getting ready to calve, and we want to make sure that we get it before somebody else gets it, and puts their brand on it. And so you need to, as you get a chance, to go do that. What we were doing periodically, is that we’d get on horseback and go up and check all the fences, “riding fence” is what we called it. Check the fences - make sure they weren’t broken. If they are, you repair them, you have a small tool kit, If a post is down you prop it up and later on you come back and replace it. So we’d ride the fences, and when we were done with that, we’d go up to the top of the hills and take inventory. Jose would look through his binoculars and count the stock. I’d write the numbers down. Count the cows. While twenty-five head of Cattle may not sound like much, Faustino had purchased some white face cattle from Spain, and was in the process of starting a white face herd. They seemed to do well in that type of terrain.
Paola Harris: Count the cows? Okay. No, I believe you.
Reme: So that’s what we’d do. And then of course in the winter when it snowed, we’d sometimes have to break up the ice in the water trough, so that the animals could eat, and transport bales of hay or alfalfa to windmill area, so the animals could eat.
Paola Harris: This was during the day that you guys went?
Reme: Yes, this was during the day. Jose would come over on his horse and we saddled mine and we took off. My mom was aware that we’re going to go do some work on the Padilla Ranch.
Reme: Yes. 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. Then we continued on. We had dismounted because the terrain was steep and rocky and horses don’t do well on rocks, they hurt their hooves.We replaced the bridles with rope and tied them so they could graze and we continued on foot. We walked and came up to where there was a clump of mesquite bushes, creosote, or greasewood as they called in the day, pine, sage, and cactus. As we walked towards the clump of mesquite we heard a moan and we discovered it was the cow we were looking for, and it had given birth to a calf. This was part of the beginning of the start of a new herd called a “whiteface” herd. A red cow with a white face and white feet. Faustino had purchased a cow and a bull from Spain and was breeding them. Whiteface was one of the cattle breeds they used in the United States for meat at that time. So we found it and then we went down into a little area where there was 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.
Paola Harris: You heard the actual crash.
Reme: We didn’t know it was a crash at that time. We heard this sound, like when the bomb went off.
Paola Harris: The same sound as like when the bomb went off?
Reme: Similar to same sound as when the bomb went off and it was still fresh in our minds. When the bomb went off Jose and his mother were up early in the morning. The bomb went off after his dad left for work. Jose’s mother looked at the flash through the crack in the door jab and as a result of the exposure, she lost sight in that eye. According to Jose, they felt the heat wave, and the rumbling of the ground.
Paola Harris: So the sound was familiar?
Reme: Very familiar. They were closer to the bomb explosion than I was, my bed crashed against the wall and it bounced me out of it, my mother got up and tried to explain that it was probably that storm that that was causing all this.
Paola Harris: Going back to the actual story, you heard this sound?
Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: He was 9 and you were 7.
Paola Harris: And do you remember around what time it was?
Reme: I didn’t have a watch. Probably 4 or 5 in the afternoon, maybe later.
Paola Harris: I’m asking because you can see what you’re looking at, it’s not dark.
Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: The path that the grader left?
Reme: The path that the craft left. 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.
Paola Harris: 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?
Reme: I would estimate about a couple of hundred feet.
Paola Harris: Oh, you did get a couple hundred feet close?
Reme: Yes, about a hundred feet.
Paola Harris: And then you saw the inside of the hole from the couple hundred feet?
Reme: No, not the inside of the hole. Jose says, “look at this.”So I was looking through thee binoculars at these little creatures moving back and forth.
Paola Harris: Were they moving really fast?
Reme: They were “like“ sliding.
Paola Harris: They were sliding?
Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: Oh, really?
Reme: I’m seeing them and I’m feeling this crazy stuff, like I really feel sorry for them.
Paola Harris: Um, hmm…
Reme: And I really feel sorry, like they’re kids, too.
Paola Harris: And you had a concern for them. And you’re thinking, did you feel something because of the accident?
Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: I find this interesting. So you heard this same sound?
Reme: And so that was pretty moving to us. Then we saw these pictures in our heads.
Paola Harris: You did see pictures in your head?
Reme: Yes, but I didn’t know what the heck they were.
Paola Harris: In other words, you got a telepathic transfer from these beings - you think?
Reme: Yes, if that’s what it was.
Paola Harris: But you can’t remember what they were. But you remember that you got pictures.
Reme: I can remember what they are, I got pictures, but I didn’t know what they meant then, and I still don’t know.
Paola Harris: So they obviously knew you were there?
Reme: Yes, they must have known we were there.
Paola Harris: Could they see you if they ever looked out?
Reme: I don’t know..
Paola Harris: But I mean, there was a hole…if they looked up, could they see these two little boys?
Reme: Yes, I’m sure they could, if they could see.
Paola Harris: This was about 200 feet?
Reme: Yes, it was about 200 feet from us. However, there was smoke and dust, so it was not very clear.
Paola Harris: 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 to, run away?
Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: He wanted to go inside the ship? Jose wanted to go inside.
Reme: 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.”
Paola Harris: So you had a whole conversation about this?
Reme: Oh, yes. And so he says, well okay, let’s just watch for a little longer and then we need to get back home. Your mom’s probably worried, it’s getting late, and I sure dad’s worried….
Paola Harris: Can I ask you if you and Jose had a conversation about this, about what you saw, in these years?
Reme: Jose left San Antonio in 1954 and I left in 1955. During the years we were there, yes we talked about it. From 1955 to 2002, we had no contact. Since 2002, we have compared notes.
Paola Harris: Have you compared notes? And does he remember things?
Reme: Better than I do.
Paola Harris: Better than you do. Oh, good. Okay.
Reme: He has a photographic mind.
Paola Harris: Okay. All right.
Reme: He started school at the age of 4.
Paola Harris: Okay, that’s wonderful but we have already got a testimony. 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…
Reme: We know. We stepped it off. Remember when we went and pulled that Tesoro off, and the object had been loaded on the tractor trailer.
Paola Harris: Yes?
Reme: That’s when we stepped it off.
Paola Harris: So you stepped it off. What are we looking at? How many feet?
Reme: About twenty-five or 30 feet long.
Paola Harris: Thirty-feet long. Okay.
Reme: Fourteen-feet high. How do I know? Because of the rafters of a house are fourteen-feet tall
Paola Harris: So you got that much information? Okay. So at what point then did you guys turn around and walk away? I mean, you were trying to figure out what to do and then what? Did you just turn around?
Reme: Well, we finally agreed that we ought to go home because it was getting late.
Paola Harris: Okay.
Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: Yes.
Reme: 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 thereAnd 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.
Paola Harris: Oh, okay.
Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: Where were they employed before?
Reme: W.P.A (Work Projects Administration) – C.C.Camps, (Civilian Conservation Corps). Conrad Hilton, who owned several businesses in San Antonio and Mr. Alliare who owned a mercantile business there also, also employed them.
Paola Harris: Before that?
Reme: Yes, before that.
Paola Harris: In their younger days?
Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: What do you mean, did you get very close to the crash site?
Reme: We are not talking about flat land here. We are talking about hills, canyons, and arroyos. 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.
Paola Harris: You’re saying it was almost invisible.
Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: So, Reme, they went in. So what did they find?
Reme: What ever they found, they did not tell us. What I do know is they found a complete change of attitude. When we were coming down the hill towards the crashed object, they were doubting us a lot.
Paola Harris: Yes, I know, I know.
Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: But did they ever tell you what they saw inside?
Reme: No.
Paola Harris: They never described it?
Reme: No. They didn’t say what they saw.
Paola Harris: They didn’t? But obviously they didn’t see any of the creatures because they weren’t there.
Reme: They weren’t concerned. Because we asked them about the creatures, where are they, because we can’t see them through that big hole. There’s no creatures there. They said, “Well, you know, maybe they took off. Maybe somebody took them. Maybe.
Paola Harris: Was there any evidence the Army had been there? Any?
Reme: Evidence? We saw something like a broom, or rake mark, but then again, it could be some animal, insect or snake that made those marks.
Paola Harris: Because logically if the military had taken the creatures, they would also have had to show that they had been there in some way. In other words, they waited at least 24 hours before taking the craft.
Reme: Maybe they did show that they had been there, but we were not aware. Well, before taking the craft?
Paola Harris: The craft.
Reme: No, the craft itself took days to get taken out of there.
Paola Harris: How many days?
Reme: Oh, probably, several days. First they would bring in some road building equipment, build a gate, bring in a semi-truck with a low-boy trailer, build a frame on the trailer, bring in a crane and load the craft on to the tractor trailer.
Paola Harris: Two or three days, or more? Did you go back just that once to that area? No, you went back to see it again. Correct?
Reme: 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?
Paola Harris: Had both of you talked about going inside yourselves? Is that why you guys were going back there?
Reme: Yes. And we went there the second day, we were curious.
Paola Harris: Okay. You were going to go in there.
Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: Before Apodaca and Faustino went with you?
Reme: That’s right.
Paola Harris: You went back on your own on the second day.
Reme: Not on our own, we were working in that area. We checked that fence too. We had some fences to fix and fence poles to replace.There were cattle with calves around there also
Paola Harris: So what happened?
Reme: 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. Paola Harris: Okay. Well, that’s what I had just asked you before. How did you know the military was there before, you said the creatures weren’t there? Reme: The military wasn’t there all the time. Paola Harris: But the creatures were gone and I was wondering, the military must have been there to take them?Reme: We did not see the military take them. If they did, it was before we arrived. 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.
Paola Harris: And that’s the dig that you ultimately someday want to do.
Reme: Yes, that’s the one.
Paola Harris: 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?
Reme: Kind of like this piece that I’m holding in my hand.
Paola Harris: It was like this?
Reme: 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…
Paola Harris: Whatever happened to that?
Reme: I used it to repair the windmill cylinder.
Paola Harris: 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.
Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: The thing was left there and then the next day Jose’s father and Apodaca went.
Reme: Right.
Paola Harris: And you took them there. Okay. And then did you see it again? The craft?
Reme: Yes, it was still there.
Paola Harris: I mean, you went there a fourth day, yourselves?
Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: He called it an weather balloon? Those words?Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: And they weren’t wearing protective clothing?
Reme: Yes they were wearing fatigues. They put up a tent, played a radio, western music.
Paola Harris: You were watching them, then?
Reme: Yes, 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.
Paola Harris: Did they tie it up or put a tarp over it?
Reme: Yes, put a tarp on it.
Paola Harris: And tied it up.
Reme: These soldiers were kids, and they went to the Owl bar and café a lot.
Paola Harris: Was that the Owl Cafe?
Reme: The Owl Bar and Café. And so the Owl Bar and Café was run by Estanislado Miera. In the parking lot, they had a basketball hoop, where we played. They had what they called a Fountain where they sold ice cream and shakes, food. They also had a jukebox. So that’s where the soldiers went to socialize. And so we would go there and play hoops and then sometimes Estanislado would come out and ask us to help him. Sometimes we would help grind up meat for hamburgers, wash dishes, clean the place up.
Paola Harris: And so these guys went there?
Reme: And yes, that’s where they went for lunch, that’s where they went for dinner.
Paola Harris: And you saw them pick up debris at the crash site?
Reme: Yes
Paola Harris: They left the ship. And explain to me how you got this metal.
Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: Did they ever see you?
Reme: I don’t know if they ever did, or cared.
Paola Harris: In other words, you were like part of the scenery.
Reme: Well, you know, they weren’t looking for us, and there was vegetation on the side of the hills Reme: and we weren’t very tall, so it was easy for us to hide.
Paola Harris: But you didn’t go and talk to them or anything.
Reme: Oh, we would sometimes talk to them at the café, but not much, because we didn’t have anything in common. The work they were doing didn’t seem all that important to them. It did not seem to be a great deal to them. We don’t believe anyone was aware of how important this object might have been, certainly not us.
Years later, one of the soldiers married Jose’s cousin.
Paola Harris: 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?
Reme: With Jose?
Paola Harris: No?
Reme: With Jose’s dad.
Paola Harris: With Jose’s dad, this military guy did. Do you remember what was said?
Reme: I was not there. But Jose would know. It is my understanding that throughout the years, he became more unconvinced that it was a Weather balloon.
Paola Harris: That’s what he said? He did not think it was a weather balloon. But he never went one step further and said what was inside?
Reme: 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
Paola Harris: He didn’t know. So his job was just to do the recovery. But he thought it was not a Weather balloon. Okay. So, anyway, you guys were at the fountain and then what happens?
Reme: We’d go there, buy a coke, and listen to the music. It seemed that the guys were not even aware that we existed. They were predictable. We pretty well had it figured out, and on the last day, Jose came and got me and we went to the site, sitting in the brush where they can’t see us. We watch them drive the truck outside the gate and they got the tarp tied up nice and neat. Jose said, “I think they are going to take it tonight.” I said, “Yea, how about a souvenir?
Paola Harris: And you said that?
Reme: Yes, during the war we lost so many relatives that it was not unusual to have something to remember them by when we said our prayers. Because when they died in the war they never came back. They brought a lead coffin and a couple of guards with it and they buried them. 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.
Paola Harris: Well, maybe they were for the landing pad. Maybe some kind of feet came out of it.
Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: Inside the hole?
Reme: Inside the hole.
Paola Harris: He went inside the hole?
Reme: Yes, and I was partially in, holding the tarp letting the light in. First, there’s nothing hardly in there.
Paola Harris: 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.
Reme: Jose said there were like ridges every so many feetPaola Harris: Did he see any panels, like control panels?
Reme: No. He didn’t see like a big panel. We were talking maybe about two and one half-foot panel.
Paola Harris: Was it attached to the wall, this panel?
Reme: To the bulkhead, the rear wall, maybe?
Paola Harris: This was a panel which is inside, which is you said was on the bulkhead. But it’s against the wall, this panel. It’s attached to the bulkhead.
Reme: Yes, to the bulkhead.
Paola Harris: Okay.
Reme: What would be the rear wall to us.
Paola Harris: So how fast could he pull that thing off? I mean, did he pull it off?
Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: You described the pins and what were they like?
Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: 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?
Reme: 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.
Paola Harris: I’ve heard that it could be burned fiber optics. Was it gray inside?
Reme: Part of that ship was darker on the bottom part than the top. Lighter gray.
Paola Harris: But did Jose race out of there because he thought they’d discover him, or were you guys relaxed because you knew where the military were and they were going to take their time so you just took your time?
Reme: We tried to hurry. We were afraid of being discovered. Relax? You gotta be kidding. I haven’t relaxed since then.
Paola Harris: This is pretty heavy metal, though, not really, no? Did it feel like an earthly metal? You couldn’t tell. But the aluminum type piece like the Phillip Morris package was different. Where did that come from?
Reme: When it first crashed and we first went in to the crash site, there were some pieces of material that looked like angel hair. It was used in that era, when people didn’t have electricity to decorate their Christmas trees. The material was similar to angel hair. I also found a piece of shinny metal.
Paola Harris: That was moving back and forth…
Reme: Under a stone, is where I first saw it. I pulled it out. It had its own mind. I folded it, and it unfolded, kind of unusual.
Paola Harris: How much of that stuff did you guys throw in the trench?
Reme: We threw some of that stuff in there.
Paola Harris: That’s the stuff that I’m really curious about.
Reme: That’s the stuff everybody wants to get their hands on.
Paola Harris: It’s very interesting. You said it had a “mind of its own”.
Reme: I mean that if I folded it, it would return to the way it was originally.
Paola Harris: Sure. Well, that’s very interesting. That’s what they say the Roswell pieces were like, what Jesse Marcel, Jr., said that his father brought home. He strewed it all over the kitchen floor. There was a lot of it. Were there I-beams?
Reme: I would not have known what an “ I” beam looked like.
Paola Harris: You didn’t see any structural beams? So you got to go in it, too. So both of you went in it. So how long did you stay in there?
Reme: Not that I remember. I don’t know. Not very long. Here’s what was on the craft, when we went in there. We didn’t have any electricity at our house, so when Christmas came around, we decorated the tree with non-electric decorations like popcorn, icicles, foil, and angel hair. That year we had a few strands of angel hair that came from a crashed object on the Padilla ranch. You know what that is?
Paola Harris: Yes, I know exactly what that is.
Reme: That’s what we had. That’s what was all over the inside of that craft.
Paola Harris: Okay. I got another story once and the witness told me that that stuff was burned fiber optics. It was fiber optics. It was whitish angel hair. Perfect. Because that’s part of the mechanism of the craft. So you wanted a piece of the metal?
Reme: And so we took that.
Paola Harris: Did you both ever, when you were discussing as kids, did you ever discuss the beings?
Reme: Yes. Their heads were comparable to a campamocha. That’s what we saw. Paola Harris: What do you mean, you saw them and they looked like a bug?
Reme: Yes, they were ugly to us at first. Their heads looked like a campamocha.
Paola Harris: Would you say it in English?
Reme: The closest translation would be like, heck, a bug, praying mantis.
Paola Harris: Oh, that would have been?
Reme: Big, bulgy eyes…you know. Everybody calls them grays, I guess, but I haven’t seen a gray, so I wouldn’t know.
Paola Harris: But these could have been a total other thing.
Reme: They had big bulgy eyes; we don’t know whether they were exactly four feet tall. It’s just an estimate. Four-foot tall, and they were real thin, needle-thin arms.
I don’t know how many fingers. But I mean, they seemed to glide.
Paola Harris: Were they wearing outfits?
Reme: Well, either they were wearing real tight coveralls, or their skin was real tight.
Paola Harris: What color, still gray, the coveralls?
Reme: Yes, light gray.
Paola Harris: And the head was pretty big? I mean proportionally.
Reme: The head seemed pretty big, and it was similar to a campamocha.
Paola Harris: No, no, I understand. No, no, no, because I’ve heard this before. It’s okay. It protruded, right? So it was a protruding head and big eyes, and a kind of a slit for a nose. Maybe as kids, you didn’t even notice the nose because the eyes were so big. They were thin, you know, thinly means skinny. It was thinly built.
Reme: If you see one, I’ll have to get a picture of one, but Campomocha well describes it.
Paola Harris: And you said they slid instead of walking or running.They “seemed” to slide.
Reme: It seems like they did. Like they willed themselves from one place to another.
Paola Harris: But you knew something, they must have connected with you at some point. Well, you said you had images coming in your head.
Reme: Yes, I’m sure.
Paola Harris: You know, I wouldn’t see eyes unless eyes were looking at me.Reme: Jose and I were looking at the craft through one set of binoculars. We were taking turns. He was looking, but we couldn’t directly look into their eyes, that I can remember, it’s pretty far. I know, but what we felt was this pure sorrow, really felt sorry for them because we could feel their pain. They seemed like us, children.
Paola Harris: Oh, okay. That was certainly interesting. Reme, I have no words for that, to compare something like that.
Reme: They seemed like they were hurt.
Paola Harris: They were hurt and they also knew they were looking at your eyes. Anything else about you and Jose? Did you talk about them at all?
Reme: Yes. Did we get together and discuss this when we were little, you mean? We talked about them when we were sure no one else was around.
Paola Harris: Them, the beings?
Reme: The creatures. Did they talk to us?
Paola Harris: No, what did Jose say about the beings? I know how you felt about them. What did he say about them? Did he feel like you? Did he feel sorry for them?
Reme: Not as much as I did, but he did.
Paola Harris: Were you terrified when you looked at them or did you want to get closer, or did they just disgusted you, or you just felt sorry for them, or?
Reme: Normally, I would feel sorry for friends, relatives if something happened to them. I didn’t know these creatures. We were curious. They were strangers, we didn’t know who they were, but we knew they were different.
Paola Harris: Oh, okay. So you felt their emotion.
Reme: That’s right.
Paola Harris: Oh, my. You felt their emotion.
Reme: And so those sounds, we tried to figure out what the sounds were. We attributed it to them. It was coming from them.
Paola Harris: That’s probably where they were coming from. How long do you think that experiences lasted when you were standing there doing that?
Reme: All the time they were there.
Paola Harris: Which was?
Reme: Probably a half-hour to forty-five minutes.
Paola Harris: You stayed a half hour to forty-minutes where those beings were? You weren’t scared?
Reme: We were scared, yeah.
Paola Harris: And you still stayed?
Reme: We still stayed there. Jose was curious about the creatures too. He wanted to help them. Yeah, Jose tried to talk me into going into the object to help them, and I was trying to avoid it, yet I was concerned too.
Paola Harris: Jose was going to go in?
Reme: We didn’t know what the heck they are, who they were, and what they were doing there. I didn’t feel good about it.
Paola Harris: You’re not quite sure what that experience produced…Well, I can see that you could be confused about. That’s a long time. I mean, I think regular people would get scared and run away after they saw them, but you stayed.
Reme: Something kept us there.
Paola Harris: Something kept you there. Maybe, because you were trying to figure it out?
Reme: Yes, trying to figure it out. So then eventually we had to leave. We had to go back to ranch.
Paola Harris: You didn’t notice any writing or hieroglyphics on the outfits? You were too far to see? You saw them “sliding” back and forth and how many were there again, three to four?
Reme: Yes, three to four.
Paola Harris: Nobody heard anything? You just heard this high-pitched sound. Well, their craft was crashed.
Reme: It was still smoky in the area and it was partially buried.
Paola Harris: So you got the piece and then who kept it?
Reme: Jose kept it for probably a couple of days and then after that he brought it to me and I hid it under the floorboards at the storage place across the street. Jose told me that some soldiers had contacted his dad, and wanted permission to look through his tool shed and his house, and he didn’t want to get his dad into any trouble.
Paola Harris: And then what?
Reme: They took metal, weather balloons, and voter registration material he had stored there. Then the sheepherder, a long time friend of my dad’s, came into town herding the sheep to the stockyards, where they were kept overnight and loaded into railroad cars the next day and shipped out. In fact we went with him over to the stockyards, where they camped out overnight They used to make such good soup, and we joined them for dinner, then come home. On the following day, the sheepherder moved in the storage house, and gave my dad a young lamb. When Jose and I pulled that piece of that craft, our souvenir, we had named it “Tesoro”. We were the only ones that knew its name. Translated, it means “Treasure.”
Paola Harris: Okay. Treasure.
Reme: So that was our Tresoro. The sheepherder came over to the house one morning while we’re just finishing breakfast. My dad’s home on vacation, and he is not aware of our tightly held secret. The sheepherder knocks on the door. I answer it and he says, “Can I talk to your dad?” “Sure, come on in.” Dad says,” Come on in, Pedro, lets have a cup of coffee; we’re just finishing up our breakfast.” So, we’re sitting, finishing up and so he says, “Alejandro,” he says, “You know, I’m going to have to leave this place.” “Why?” “Well, he says, you know, last night I was asleep and I got woke up. I saw this light out there by the well. There was this light out there and I”….
Paola Harris: Who is this man?
Reme: He’s Pedro, the sheepherder.
Paola Harris: The sheepherder. Okay.
Reme: A good friend of my dad’s.
Paola Harris: Okay, okay. He saw a light by the well.
Reme: By the well and he says,” I looked out the window and the next thing there’s these three critters in my room, in my house, and the door’s locked.” And so he pointed towards the floor and they’re saying “Tesoro.”
Paola Harris: Oh, no. You never told me this part of the story. This is incredible. Oh, my Lord. Okay, and?
Reme: And so, they’re pointing there. And so he says,” Tesoro, there’s treasure down there.”
Paola Harris: Okay.
Reme: And so these guys are doing that, Pedro says, “and I got my rifle and I’m going to shoot them because they have no business in my house. And so I got my rifle and they’re gone. But you know what, they went right through the wall. Can you believe that, Alejandro?” My heart is pounding, and I am silently praying, I didn’t want to get in trouble with my dad. He doesn’t know anything about the Padilla ranch experience.
Paola Harris: Okay.
Reme: So my dad says all right. He says to my older brother, Dave,”let’s go over and check, bring a shovel and a crowbar.”
Paola Harris: The eldest brother of?
Reme: Mine.
Paola Harris: Yours. Okay.
Reme: And so he gets the crowbar and undoes the floorboards and he steps down and says, “Where?” And Pedro pointed, “Right there. Right in the center of the room.” I’m, silently praying, ‘Oh God, I hope they don’t find it.’ So he digs in the center he can’t find anything and he digs around with the shovel, and there’s nothing. He says, “There’s nothing here,” so they nail the boards back on, and then my dad says, “Well, it’ll probably never happen again. Don’t worry it. If it does, let me know and we’ll check it out again.” So everybody was happy and that was the end of that. I saw Jose the following day at the Post Office and I says, “Hey, you need to come and get that Tesoro because there is too much happening around.” So he comes over and gets the Tesoro and takes it home, and puts it with some other stuff underneath his house. At that time we had space under the buildings, due to floods. So Jose puts the Tesoro in some boxes underneath his house and that’s where it lay 1963 when he went back after he had moved to California. He moved to California in late 1954. In 1963 he went back to repair his windmill since he had purchased some used windmill parts. The caretaker drank a lot and Jose had a hard time finding him. Jose decided to take all the boxes home to California and put them in the attic in his garage in California.
Most of the contents of the boxes were old dishes, bottles, odd papers, letters, magazines and useless junk, and that’s where it all remained until 2001-2002. When I met his son on the internet, and his son informed me that his dad’s name was Jose and was from San Antonio, I called him and rekindled our youthful experiences and the discovery of an object that was shaped like an avocado, that had crashed on the ranch when we were little kids looking for a cow that was ready to have a calf. I said, “What the heck did we call that piece that we took off that object? Del Oro, Socorro. Ah, Tesoro. Yes, that’s it! Tesoro.” “You know what?” Jose says, “I bet you it’s still there, way back in the attic. It’s been so long that I had forgotten about it. Let me take a look and see if I can find it.”
Paola Harris: This the same piece that you remember, that very same piece? Okay.
Reme: Yes. Tresoro. He found it and so he Fed-Ex’d.it.
Paola Harris: He Fed-Exed it to you because you wanted it. Right?
Reme: Yes. Because I wanted to get it tested.
Paola Harris: How did you Jose and you, Reme get together to talk about your experiences?
Reme: Well, I began to begin to research it. Find out.
Paola Harris: Okay, so 1994, then ten years, more than ten years?
Reme: We had to find Jose. After he found Jose, then everything started coming out.
Paola Harris: When did you find Jose?
Reme: You know, what my problem was, was trying to recollect from way back when…
Paola Harris: But what year do you think you found Jose?
Reme: In 2002. It was after his surgery. He had open-heart surgery. So I was doing everything. In fact I took a trip to New Mexico with some guys from California and…
Reme: Yes, we lived in California. It was in July, I think.One of the first projects after retiring was to do our genealogy, and I was using the internet and by chance met a person by the last name of Padilla and we started talking back and forth, and I asked him who his dad was, and he said Joe and that he was born in San Antonio, and I informed him that we were friends.
How big was San Antonio?
Reme: Well, they had six original families. The population was not that big, between fifty and seventy-five people in the area.
Paola Harris: So at the same time, do you remember the year this happened?
Reme: It happened around late 2001 or early 2002.
Paola Harris: So it’s 2002. After all of these years you were able to connect with the other little boy who was on that hill. You were 7 and he was 9, and you were able to connect and compare notes.
Reme: Yes.
Paola Harris: And you said that he said something very significant when you called him.
Reme: He says, did you mention what we discovered to any members of your family? And if you did, what was their reaction? And I said, they didn’t believe me.
Paola Harris: Okay.
Reme: And he says he had the same problem.
Paola Harris: But you were telling me that for the longest time your wife, Ginny, didn’t believe you until you had a sighting and then everything turned around.
Reme: That’s right.
Paola Harris: And then she’s become a very good partner in this search.
Reme: Very supportive, yes.
Paola Harris: Very supportive of it. Okay, so for the people that wanted to have this described, very quickly, you’ve made a model of the craft.
Reme: Yes. That’s a replica of the craft and the hole that was there.
Paola Harris: This hole looks like it had an explosion and it’s all opened up in different pieces here. It wasn’t like a clean hole.
Reme: No. Essentially in reenacting what we called the fly-by, that came by a tower and it was either radio or radar tower about fifty feet tall, and that tower had what they called at that time a wind charger. It generated the electricity for the light up on top. And so in talking to other engineers and so forth, this craft may have been traveling by there and may have been affected by lightning hitting the tower. Since the tower would have been grounded the juice goes into the ground. If the craft was not grounded, and it got caught in between it, some part of it might get fried.
Paola Harris: Okay and then later you got other pieces of metal which you took in the space of like a week that they did the clean-up, but is a piece of metal that you just looked at recently that has a lot of little bubbles on it that looks like it has been subjected to heat.
Reme: I believe they call that EMT heat. And that’s a very high, intense heat that melts, that has to be really hot to melt that.
Paola Harris: So what makes us think that this piece, which has ridges and little circles, what makes us think that this is an ET piece or an extraterrestrial? You’ve had it analyzed?
Reme: That particular piece has a little carbon type of hairs in it and so if you notice that piece, even though it melts, has a few melts around there.It transfers that heat from one side to the other. And so that prevents meltdown.
Paola Harris: It’s a conductor?
Reme: Like tiles that they use on the space capsule.
Paola Harris: Okay, and you have had this analyzed, and you have all the analyses of this saved.
Reme: Yes.
Paola Harris: But this was found in the area, this is not the piece that Jose jumped in and got, which was the piece off the panel. It’s a substantial sized piece, that piece. And that had, you said, someone using the book The Day After Roswell where Colonel Corso described the cracker-like shapes that look like little squashed insects and that’s on Page 45. It describes the inside mechanism of the analysis of the piece. This is how it appears with electron microscope, right?
Reme: Yes.
Paola Harris: The one that was on the panel that Jose took off. And you recognized what Colonel Corso said, “they were like a circuit.” And they looked like, what he said, “animals that were squashed”, and you got that in the analysis that you had done, also with the electron microscope. Now there’s another piece. The one that everybody talks about, that I would love to see too. That was the piece that looked like aluminum foil that resembled the inside of a Philip Morris cigarette box, which was a light piece of aluminum. And can you describe that piece or what you did with that piece?
Reme: Well, when we first started down the road to that crash site, this piece was under a rock and I saw it glitter and it was moving up and down, and so I pulled it out from under the rock and kind of rolled it up and folded it up and you would fold it and it would go back into the same position as it was. Today they call it “memory metal”, but at that time we didn’t know what it was. So I took that and put it in my pocket and took it home and showed it to Jose and played around with it for a while. I had a can in which I had a few Indian head coins that I was saving. And so I put it in that and then I took that can of Prince Albert and put it in the well. The well is a hole about maybe 6x6 wide and about eight foot deep, and in that well is where the cylinders to the pumps on the windmill are located. The well has a casing, made out of cedar, to keep it from falling in on itself. I put it behind one of those and that was the place where I kept things. And it was there for quite a while until one day my dad had come home on vacation. We were lucky if he came home once a month because he worked in Albuquerque at the Veterans Hospital. When he came home, he was working on the windmill and he said, “I can’t fix this thing. Maybe you and Jose can take it and get it welded.” Well, the idea was that we would take it and get it welded and put it back on. So we took it apart. I talked to Jose and so we went in his pickup to Socorro and took it to a blacksmith and asked if he could weld it. The threads were worn. And so he looked at it and he says, Well, you can’t do that because it’s made out of brass and I have no way of welding brass.” So that didn’t turn out very well. We came back to the well to see what we could do with it. We’d tighten it and then it would slip. So we were ready to put it back together and in an act of desperation I said, “Jose, reach back there behind that piece of wood and there should be a can of Prince Albert there.” He reached back there and found the can. There was that little piece of aluminum type foil that we had found at the crash site. Maybe this would work. We took that aluminum-type foil and we wrapped it around the threads and then we tied the ends tight and it didn’t slip so then I took one of the Stilson wrenches, Jose got the other one, and we tightened it up. We went and turned the windmill on and it started pumping some water. It worked.
Paola Harris: It worked?
Reme: It created a vacuum, and pumped water.
Paola Harris: Very, very ingenuous thing to do with a piece of extraterrestrial material.
Reme: We didn’t know. No way of knowing.
Paola Harris: I know.
Reme: And so as time went on, Jose left there and then I left there, and went to Washington and went to school and then I eventually got married, and we were raising a family. Sometimes both my mom and dad would visit us. This time my dad came alone to visit and he stayed at our house overnight. Jeannie fixed lamb chops for him. That was his favorite meal. While we were sitting at the table having dinner, my dad turns over to me and says, “Reme, I don’t know if you remember or not, but you know that cylinder that you fixed on that windmill? It’s still working. Don’t know what you did to it.” I responded that I was glad it worked out. I couldn’t bring my self to tell him the real story, because he was not supposed to know.
Paola Harris: Where that came from…
Reme: That this was some form of advanced alien technology at work. He would never have believed it. And he wouldn’t believe that we have phones today, cell phones that you can carry in your pocket. And so that would have been a lot for him, so I just thanked him, great, I was glad to do it.
Paola Harris: Well, your story is very important. It certainly is very important to archiving and historically recording the UFO phenomenon in general. And everybody knows and everybody uses as a marker the Roswell case, which was 1947. But I had told you that I had discovered an MJ-12 document with Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein, where they talked, before Roswell of what an extraterrestrial biological entity was, had come to the conclusion that there were crashes before Roswell and this was one of them because it was at least two years before Roswell. So if we research this case with you and Jose, what would you like to have happen? How do you envision this, this disclosure that you have to offer everybody? The world? America? The young people of the future? How do you hope to disclose this? Because it’s a real story and you guys are still here and it happened a long time ago. So how would you like to bring this forward?
Reme: Well, Jose and I and both families are in agreement that the public needs to know about it and also we’re in possession of the piece. It really doesn’t belong to us. Never did. It belongs to somebody.
Paola Harris: They didn’t come back and get it. They haven’t claimed it so maybe they left it as a gift. And that’s a possibility because they could have claimed it. From different stories you told me they could have come back and claimed it. So what would you like to do?
Reme: I think that somehow or other it should be someplace on public display so people could have access to it.
Paola Harris: And your story should come out how? How can we best present your story to the general public? What did you have in mind?
Reme: Well, I would imagine one of the areas would be at one of the yearly conferences that they have. That would be a good place, I think.
Paola Harris: And also your book. You have a manuscript here of your case and your memories of what happened, you know. The book, which would be- we were thinking of a title, Before Roswell, and then you’re thinking of maybe doing something about seeing if there are other pieces.
Reme: We’d like to have a dig. You know, go over and dig. Either call it a trench or whatever, where some of the soldiers threw some of the pieces and we threw some pieces in there. And that’s been covered over, over time, and we’d like to dig that up and see if there’s any pieces remaining. We think there are.
Paola Harris: Okay now. When you were throwing the pieces, what was going through you mind? Were you throwing them there so you could come back and get them?
Reme: We were throwing them so we could come back and get them later on.
Paola Harris: And the soldiers, why were they throwing them in there? Because they didn’t want to carry them?
Reme: I believe so. You have to, I guess, give those soldiers credit. We discovered this craft exactly 30 days after the bomb test at Trinity. They were restricted to base camp at stallion site for 90 days. They couldn’t go out of there nowhere and talk to anybody or have a drink of pop or anything else. They were restricted to that area until the bomb test was done. And then after the bomb test was done, they released them so they could have a little liberty and so forth. And then this crash took place and they were working again, doing the recovery. These were young men that took every opportunity to socialize with the people there, it was probably the first time they had been able to do that in 90 days.
Paola Harris: So they really didn’t. In other words, it was not a methodical, paranoid picking up of pieces. In other words, let’s get this stuff cleaned up and go have some ice cream or some beer, and who cares whether any part gets left behind.
Reme: I don’t believe there was a formal alien craft recovery-training course. We were at war.
Paola Harris: And you even said they weren’t even wearing biological suits because they were not available.
Reme: They weren’t aware that this was an alien ship, and we weren’t either.
Yes, it was before they were very careful about any of this. And I asked Jose about this. He said that we were really sneaky. He said, “We were hiding.”
Paola Harris: So they didn’t even see that you were there. But they did visit actually. It wasn’t your dad, it was Jose’s dad, to make sure that they could get a handle on what it was that they thought he saw and he was involved in. And he handed over some pieces to them?
Reme: Yes, but these were different military people.
Paola Harris: Because they wanted any pieces he had. Being 1945, it becomes the first real big, huge UFO case. And it will be very, very important for the whole UFO scene. I expect a lot of researchers will be extremely interested in it. So, tell us about how your family and your children are supportive. Are they supportive of this?
Reme: Very supportive. In fact, all of them are supportive of us doing this.
Paola Harris: And in the last couple of years you’ve been really intent on how to do this. I mean, it’s been in your brain about how to get this, how to do it, how to present it, and so forth. But it’s something you’ve lived with 60 years.
Reme: That’s a long time. Well, not really lived with it for 60 years because at a certain point in time I could see that it really wasn’t possible to do the things that we wanted to do, you know, while I was here in Washington going on with my life and such, raising a family and so forth. Jose was doing the same thing in California. So there was a point in time that we were not concentrating on this. Perhaps we weren’t ready for it.
Paola Harris: The timing wasn’t right. Can you think of other than the book, The Day After Roswell by Colonel Philip Corso where you recognize the piece, the description of the integrated circuit piece, were there any other times that you said, “now it’s time to talk about it,” or so forth? I know Ryan Wood’s Majic Eyes Only book. I read your crash retrieval story in it and you were on the Jeff Rense show. We could talk about that.
Reme: Okay.
Paola Harris: How did you get on the Jeff Rense show?
Reme: When I came back from California and retired in Washington, and then when I talked to Jose and Jose and I were communicating back and forth on genealogy, etc. We started getting together and gathering data on what we had discovered there in Walnut Creek. And Jose was sending me information that his son had found and I was going through it. There was a newspaper article that Ben Moffitt, a friend of ours whom we had gone to school with had written in one of the Socorro news papers that he had written a couple of years before. This included a visit to the San Antonio Elementary School where he talked to the teachers and so they were briefing him on the present teaching methods. Ben was still thinking back about, Dick, Jane and Puff when we used the Weekly Reader, to keep up on current events.
Paola Harris: Sounds like a historical picture he was trying to deal with San Antonio.
Reme: They were trying to update him in the use of computers as teaching tools. So in the process of doing that, he named some of his students that were in his class in the article, and omitted Jose and I. Jose and I discussed this.We thought he might be surprised that we were still around so I gave a call.
Paola Harris: You noticed the lack of your names in the article he had written about his classmates and you kind of felt like he didn’t remember you.
Reme: So I called him up and as soon as I said, this is Reme, he said, “oh, oh, you know, I couldn’t remember your name. That’s why I didn’t.” And he apologized for that. We got to talking and he was retired and was working for the paper. And so as we exchanged information because there were some projects that he was working on. He would often call me to get my opinion. In any event, he kept on pressuring me as to what else I was doing. “Well, you’re retired. You must be doing something.” I said, “Well, I’m working on genealogy.” “ What else are you doing?” “ Oh, I’m trying to research this object that we discovered on the Padilla ranch when we were kids.” His response was that he wasn’t into UFOs. A few weeks later Ben called me and informed that he wanted to do the story, and that’s how this all began.Paola Harris: Okay, so in 2002. So when did Moffett write the story?
Reme: In 2003, I believe.
Paola Harris: Because you know, I read it in Italy, a story. I was blown away because it hit me. I couldn’t understand how people hadn’t researched it.
Reme: Well, what happened, you know, is that like I said, I couldn’t remember the place. I had a green pickup that I knew we had traveled in, and I didn’t have the location exactly where, so I went to New Mexico.
Paola Harris: But he acknowledged to you that he knew, even though he didn’t talk about it.
Paola Harris: Hello Jose. I heard that you’d love to do a dig with Reme? You want to do it soon because of the water that erodes the ground. There might be pieces there. Maybe people might be walking around over there.
Jose: Born and raised there, and outsiders too.
Paola Harris: Oh, they were born and raised there?
Jose: Some were, some weren’t..
Paola Harris: Oh, no. I know you do. I know you know what happened, but do you think they’re not tourists, right? They’re just curiosity seekers?
Jose: Curiosity seekers and hunters, and there’s a lot of rifle shooters doing target practice there.
Paola Harris: Well, that’s not going to be fun.
Jose: That’s just target practice; they set up targets, like bottles, and cans. I can understand city folks would have a hard time understanding this.
Paola Harris: I know, but they’re not target practicing on this stuff, are they?
Jose: No, no.
Paola Harris: No, I know that.
Jose: Yes.
Paola Harris: Have any of those guys approached you?
Jose: No, they were probably just target practicing, but it’s a big area.
Paola Harris: You’re the one that actually took that crowbar or whatever you took and pulled that piece off, right?
Jose: Right. I’m the one that used the cheater bar to jerk the piece of the panel.
Paola Harris: And you saw the panel it was on.
Jose: Yes.
Paola Harris: Yes, it’s here somewhere.
Jose: You can see that, that it’s clean, the pieces that are there now….
Paola Harris: This would be 62 years later. Yes, you know it’s a lot of years.
Jose: The piece was taken care of.
Paola Harris: Great. Was there any of that funny metal that Reme had thrown into the crevice.
Jose: No, Reme kept that.
Paola Harris: Oh, okay.
Jose: It was on his ‘tesoro”. His treasure.
Paola Harris: So is there any more of that anywhere?
Jose: I don’t think so.
Paola Harris: Well, can I just ask you really quickly what do you remember the creatures looked like?
Jose: Well, we were little kids then. I was only about three feet tall. They were a little shorter than me-kind of light gray.
Paola Harris: Do you remember if they looked directly at you?
Jose: I don’t know whether they were looking directly, I know they were running back and forth, squealing.
Paola Harris: Well, that’s actually a good word because Reme was saying they seemed to be squealing in pain.
Jose: I think they were hurt.
Paola Harris: Okay.
Jose: Because I wanted to go in there to help and
Paola Harris: You were the 9-year-old, right?
Jose: Right.
Paola Harris: But you had three days’ worth of going back and forth there.
Jose: We had two days. Okay.
Paola Harris: Oh, two days.
Jose: We had a whole week when they cleaned it up.
Paola Harris: You had a whole week?
Jose: We used to take our horses on that ridge.
Paola Harris: Did they see you? They didn’t see you, did they?
Jose: We were pretty sneaky. I know my territory.
Paola Harris: You were pretty sneaky. So you saw the soldiers throwing stuff in that ditch, too?
Jose: Yes, whatever they didn’t want to pick up, I guess, those pieces were too many.
Paola Harris: Well, if you feel very good about going ahead with all of this, you know, it’s your story and Reme’s, and my job is just to do an interview. I’ll just do the interview part and help break the story. Okay? All right. I’ll just do my best to record it word-for- word what you say, what Reme says and I’ll have it transcribed. And thank you very much for being willing to do that.
Jose: I’m glad I can help.
Paola Harris: I know. I very happily will do this and thank you for trusting me, and you can trust me because my work is all to just record and archive it for the future, so that’s what I want to do.
Jose: There’ll be no problem.
Paola Harris: There’ll be no problem. Oh, that’s easy.
Jose: It’s not the target shooters, the ground needs to be warm. I’m sure some pieces are still there after all this time.
Paola Harris: well, we will look into this part in the future. Right now, thank you for the testimony and your verifying the 1945 San Antonio Crash.
* Special Thanks To Paola Harris
* Special Thanks To James Neff
Does the Padilla family still own the property? If they do, there should be no major obstacles to the "dig".
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