La Madera, New Mexico UFO Sighting (April 26, 1964) — FBI Files (D8P263)
A cold war / blue book era case from La Madera, New Mexico. On April 26, 1964, Orlando Gallegos reported observing an unidentified object approximately 300 feet from his home in La Madera, New Mexico.
Background
On April 26, 1964, in La Madera, New Mexico, U.S. government investigators recorded an unidentified-object incident later released to the public on May 8, 2026 as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). The incident is a Cold War-era case investigated under the Air Force’s Project Blue Book or its predecessors. The case was filed with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose Knoxville, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, and other field offices routed UFO reports to headquarters under the Bureau’s standing protocols for the protection of vital installations.
What the document records
On April 26, 1964, Orlando Gallegos reported observing an unidentified object approximately 300 feet from his home in La Madera, New Mexico. He reported this to Officer Marvin Romero. The following day, FBI Agent Byrnes and Major Connors from Kirtland AFB inspected the site.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Type of case
The case is a visual sighting reported by ground or air observers.
Status
All records released under the PURSUE program are designated unresolved by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) by default. The federal government has not concluded that the events were anomalous, has not concluded that they were conventional, and has not ruled out either possibility. Conventional candidates for sightings of this period include experimental aircraft, weather balloons (especially the Project Mogul series in the late 1940s), atmospheric optical phenomena such as sundogs and lenticular clouds, and astronomical objects including Venus, the Moon, and meteors near the horizon.