Nuclear Test, UFO Crash – Vallee and Harris’s “Trinity” (Part 1)

Jacques F. Vallee and Paola Leopizzi Harris.  Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret.  StarworksUSA, LLC and Documatica Research, LLC, 2021.

(This is the first part of a two-part post.)

Here’s what I would like to write about Jacques Vallee’s latest book, written in collaboration with Paola Leopizzi Harris:

“Trinity is an important and valuable book, though not for the reasons its authors believe it to be.  It is important because it documents a variant of the Roswell myth that makes explicit what is implicit in the standard version: that at the heart of the myth is death.  Specifically, the mass death of nuclear annihilation.”

Dramatic confirmation, in other words, of my interpretation of Roswell in chapter 8 of Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO.

But as a wise man or woman once said: if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.  Am I reading more into Trinity than is really there, because I want so badly for it to be so?  Let’s try to look dispassionately at the tale researched and retold by Vallee and Harris, and and see what conclusions can reasonably be drawn.

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Although the Trinity story is set in 1945, its real beginning is in 2003.  At some point in that year, a writer for the Socorro-Magdalena Mountain Mail named Ben Moffett was contacted by a man named Remigio (Reme) Baca, who’d been a classmate of his many years before at the San Antonio (New Mexico) Grade School.  Baca and his childhood friend Jose Padilla had a story to tell that was extraordinary yet, in the light of Roswell’s notoriety by the time the story surfaced, far from unpredictable.

Moffett recounted Baca and Padilla’s story in a two-part article in the Mountain Mail, November 2 and 6, 2003.  I haven’t been able to get a copy of the original; I’m quoting it from a version published on a website to which I do not want to link because of the gross anti-Semitism of much of its content, but which you can find easily enough with a bit of Googling.

The alleged incident took place in mid-August 1945, on a date specified in later sources as August 16.  This was exactly a month after the test (July 16), at the Trinity Site of what’s now the White Sands Missile Range, of a nuclear weapon of the kind that was soon to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The place was a spot outside San Antonio on the Padilla family’s ranch, some 20-30 miles northwest of the atomic test site.  The accounts of Baca and Padilla’s experience assert over and over that the two events were somehow connected–just how, remains to be determined.

Both were young boys at the time, Baca 7 years old, Padilla 9.  But New Mexico ranch children grow up fast, or at least they did 75 years ago, and on the morning in question the two boys were riding horseback across the ranch in search of a cow that had wandered off to calf.  A thunderstorm loomed; they took refuge under a ledge.  But “another brilliant light, accompanied by a crunching sound, shook the ground around them,” and investigating they found a huge object, evidently an aircraft of some sort, partly embedded in the earth.

There were beings inside the object.  Baca called them hombrecitos, “little men,” and described them as “strange looking creatures” that “moved fast, as if they were able to will themselves from one position to another in an instant.  They were shadowy and expressionless, but definitely living beings. … They seemed like us–children, not dangerous.”

Returning home, Jose told his father about what he and Reme had seen.  Two days later, the boys went back to the site with the elder Padilla and a family friend who was a state policeman.  Amazingly, the fallen craft had vanished–as might be expected of an imaginary entity.  But then it suddenly reappeared.

Over the coming days, the Army launched a major operation to remove the object, immensely heavy and large enough to require a flatbed truck for its transport, but which they nevertheless insisted was a weather balloon.  This explanation, implausible to the point of absurdity, is best understood as having been transferred into the Baca-Padilla story from the normative Roswell tradition, which was its original home.  Ever since its initial discovery, the Roswell debris has been officially explained as a balloon, whether an ordinary weather balloon or (from 1994 onward) an experimental balloon associated with the top secret “Project Mogul.”  This identification may be wrong, but in the Roswell context it at least makes sense.  In the Trinity context, it makes no sense at all.

It took the Army a week or so to get the fallen UFO, as we might as well call it, away from the crash site and bound for destination unknown.  During that time, Reme and Jose managed to retrieve various metallic stuffs from the object and its environs, notably a bracket-like item which was apparently attached to the inner wall of the craft.  Vallee and Harris include a photo of this object in their book.  It’s obviously of terrestrial manufacture–confirmed by analysis of the metal–and the authors go to some trouble to explain what such a thing would be doing as part of an alien spaceship.  They seem reluctant to draw the obvious conclusion: there was no spaceship.  The 60-year-old memories of the two principals must be accounted for in some other way.

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It’s not clear how seriously Moffett took Baca’s and Padilla’s story, even as he was writing it up for the newspaper.  In an Amazon review of Baca’s 2011 book, Moffett stresses that he wrote the story as a Halloween feature, and “while it was written in a serious tone, I was never comfortable with many of Baca’s assertions.”  (He nevertheless gives the book three stars, declaring it “likely valuable and interesting to students of UFO lore in America and especially in New Mexico“–a judgment with which I enthusiastically concur.)

Moffett says that his story went viral, and although this may be an exaggeration–one of the remarkable things about the alleged Trinity crash is how obscure it remained until the publication of Vallee and Harris’s book–it did draw a certain amount of attention to Baca and Padilla.  UFOlogist Timothy Good interviewed the two, primarily Baca, in 2004, and reported on their claims in his 2007 book Need To Know.  In 2010, Harris interviewed Baca face to face, Padilla by phone.  The following year, the two self-published a memoir, Born on the Edge of Ground Zero: Living in the Shadow of Area 51, with the further subtitle The 1945 UFO Crash in San Antonio, New Mexico.

Harris’s contacts with the witnesses continued over the next ten years.  Baca died in 2013 (Trinity, p. 306), although, confusingly, in a 2017 conversation with Padilla he’s spoken of as being still alive (p. 96).  This is one of many marks of imprecision in the Vallee-Harris book which give it, for all its profusion of detail, a nebulous quality.  In the autumn of 2020, against the background of the pandemic, the authors came upon a third “witness,” Padilla’s niece Sabrina, whom Harris proceeded to interview; and there’s a photo of her, Padilla, and Sabrina together, dated February 2021, on p. 269.  Significantly or not, none are wearing masks.

Born in 1953, too late to have witnessed the crash itself, Sabrina remembered having as a child seen and touched the UFO’s supposed physical relics.  These included a tin-foil like substance that sprang back into its original flat shape no matter how it was crumpled or folded–a detail evoking the Roswell traditions–and something like “angel hair” that was used by the family and neighbors for Christmas decoration and yet had a sinister, even poisonous quality.

“It was like a bunch of little razors touching you, I mean cutting you, but at the same time you wouldn’t be bleeding from it. … That stuff, you know, it cuts your hands.  It’s not safe to touch … a bunch of pins poking you … it would bite you.”  It would also glow in the dark, and Vallee and Harris naturally suggest that it might have been radioactive.  Sabrina also tells Harris about rocks she picked up, not from the crash site but from a cemetery; these similarly glowed in the dark.

She talks about visiting the crash site, and the dread it inspired in her.  “I was little when I went and I saw it, uh, it was a terrible sight, you know.  It was very scorched and, yeah, it was a terrible sight … the ground and the whole terrain there was scorched black.  … It just looked eerie, very eerie.”  “It gave me a frightening feeling actually, very eerie,” she tells Harris on another occasion.  “You know, ‘I shouldn’t be there,’ and I was scared.  I’m not gonna lie to you, I was scared.”

Is it possible that she’s remembering or imagining, not the crash site but the site of the Trinity blast, which was genuinely “terrible” in a way that no mere UFO crash could possibly be?

The two events–one imaginary, the other all too dreadfully real–are interwoven.   This is emphasized in Trinity, and is the book’s most convincing aspect.  The title of Baca and Padilla’s 2011 memoir, linking “Ground Zero” and “UFO Crash,” is itself proof.  So is the story Baca told Harris in 2010:

“We didn’t know it was a crash at the 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?”  Harris asks if the sound was the same.  “Similar to the sound as when the bomb went off,” Baca clarifies, “and it was still fresh in our minds.  When the bomb went off, Jose and his mother were up early in the morning … they felt the heat wave, and the rumbling of the ground.”

For the Padilla family, the experience inflicted a permanent trauma.  Jose’s mother, according to Baca, went blind in one eye after glimpsing the brilliant light of the nuclear explosion through a crack in the door.  The Baca house was farther away from the blast site, but even so “my bed crashed against the wall and it bounced me out of it.”

And then there’s the shape of the crashed UFO.  Far from a classic flying saucer, it was “avocado shaped,” and Vallee and Harris convincingly compare its shape and bulk to the “Jumbo” containment vessel used for the Trinity explosion, and to the “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” bombs that were to devastate Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few weeks later.  (See the impressive diagram on p. 150.)  Not identical, but close enough.  They’ve made their case: the UFO and the bomb are somehow the same.

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So the event of August 16 mirrors that of July 16, and we’re bound to ask: why?  How could that possibly be?

Vallee and Harris answer that the crash was not an unfortunate accident, hardly to be expected of beings so advanced and sophisticated as the UFO’s pilots.  It was a deliberate response, rather, by entities–not extraterrestrial, necessarily, but certainly other than ourselves and superior to ourselves–to the unspeakable destructiveness that errant humanity had unleashed upon itself.  “What if these UFO devices had been designed so they could not be reverse-engineered by people with our current level of knowledge and social development?  What if their target was at a different level?  At a symbolic level, about our relationship to life?  At a psychic level, about our relationship to the universe?  What if they contained an existential warning?” (p. 287)

Well, maybe.  But those of us less disposed to positing the intervention of superhuman beings in the affairs of humankind might prefer an alternative:

The memories of the crash took shape in the witnesses’ minds as a fantasized doublet of their more or less accurate recollections of the horrific, world-transforming event that they’d actually lived through.  The contours of this doublet were shaped in some measure by the Roswell story, which by 2003 had become a fixture of the American consciousness, but without effacing its roots in the Trinity test.  (The date is left in 1945, for example, and not shifted to 1947.)

In the next part of this post, we’ll explore this possibility and its implications.