NUFORC UFO Sighting 32330

Occurred: 1988-08-01 05:30 Local - Approximate
Reported: 2003-10-18 01:08 Pacific
Duration: 10 minutes
No of observers: 45

Location: Tecate, CA, USA

Shape: Light
Characteristics: Lights on object

I am a retired U.S. Border Patrol supervisor, having spent 37 years in the Border Patrol and INS. I was a patrol agent in charge on both Canadian and Mexican borders for last 20 years of my career. I was also a special agent for a time in San Francisco with the Office of Insector General, USDA. I worked as head of intelligence unit for the Border Patrol, working as liaison officer with RCMP in Canada. I am not a flake. I have had a couple of UFO sightings myself and have known several people over the past 40 years, many in law enforcement in different parts of the country who have told me credible UFO stories that they experienced. I reported most of these to MUFON several years ago and in 1977 I was contacted in Indio, California where I was agent in charge of that station about a UFO sighting there.

The UFO sighting that I refer to above was reported in the San Diego Union-Tribune and I contacted the reporter/columnist about what I saw after I read his story. He plead with people who may have seen what he saw to call in or write him. I called him and told him who I was and what I had seen. He wanted me to go on the local TV station in San Diego and confirm what he had sighted as he felt I was the most credible of the 45 witnesses who had called him. Another Border Patrol supervisor confirmed that he had seen the same UFO as he departed his apartment in East San Diego to come to work. When I asked permission from my chief patrol agent to go onthe TV show I was told, "you are not going to make the Border Patrol look like a bunch of nuts...permission denied." The other supervisor acknowledged in front of the chief that he had seen it, also. But when the chief made his statement to me, the other supervisor said, "I am out of here...don't include me in this." What I saw and described, and drew a diagram of, and can still vividly remember it and am able to draw a diagram, was a light that was travelling along a ridge along highway 94 as I drove west on that highway in the Tecate area. I was going to San Ysidro to go to work at the Border Patrol sector HQ. I was stationed and in charge of the Campo BP station at the time but had been detailed to work at the HQ for a month to fill in for a vacationing asst chief. I had to negotiate highway 94 and try to watch the object at the same time. But it must have moved along the mountain tops in what I thought was the Jamul area. I was looking west towards SD and I saw a heavy bank of low clouds or fog which was not unusual in the early morning as one approached SD. The light moved from behind the cloud bank and it had a conical beam that was extremely bright. I thought at first it was one of our helicopters that was searching the ridge for illegal aliens in that arae. But I found out that none of our helicopters were out at that time of the morning. The beam was just too bright for a helicopter light and it could shine through the clouds almost as brightly as in front of them.

I watched the light, and negotiated the highway, which is very curvy in that area, and I had to take my eyes off it from time to time. The strange part was when I got to the bottom of highway 94 at Barrett Junction, i started back up the hill to the ridge where I thought the light had come from. It was gone at that time. I was very surprised when I topped the ridge in the Dulzura area, that there was no cloud bank and no fog. It was very clear that morning and the city lights from San Diego could be seen plainly. The incident went out of my mind until I read the newpaper article a couple of days later.

The reporter told me, and wrote in the paper also, that there were 45 people who called him and reported almost the same thing as we had seen. The other BP supv also confirmed that was what he saw, too, but he saw it further out to the west, probably over the ocean. Some people who called the reporter were jogging on the beach and they saw it over the ocean and said there was a small airplane moving towards SD from the west over the sea and the UFO swallowed the plane in it's beam. There was no official confirmation from the Navy or any govt agency.

The one incident that I reported to MUFON...and my report should be on file with them from back around 1977 was something told to me. This is a really wierd story but I believe it.

In 1977 there was a story that came to me through a BP agent at my station in Indio that one of his classmates stationed at Alamogordo BP station (White Sands) had gotten into some real trouble. It seems that he and another agent went onto the missile range that was south of Alamogordo. I think it is called the McGregor missile range.

Anyway, as it was reported to me, the two agents drove quite a ways down the range in their 4 wheel drive vehicle which they were not supposed to do. If there were illgals walking up from the El Paso area, it was customary for the Air Police to pick them up and bring them out of the restricted area to the BP. So, the guys were just going down to scope out the area and track aliens if there were any walking in the area.

Quite a ways into the restricted area, they spotted what they thought was a small cone shaped mountain which looked strange to them. It looked like a small volcano cone, as they described it. They reportedly parked there vehicle and climbed up the cone shaped mountain which wasn't too high, but I was not told how high it was. When they got to the top they could look down into the crater part and saw a flying saucer parked in the bottom being attended by Air Force personnel. They apparently realized they were seeing something they shouldn't and they crept back down the hill and got out of the area.

AFter work, that afternoon the two agents are reported to have met some other agents and people in a local tavern where they guys hung out, and after a couple of beers they started telling the others what they had seen in the restricted area. AS the story goes, it was not very long when a couple of men in "black suits" showed up, showed their IDs and requested the two agents accompany them, to what is assumed an office at White Sands base.

As the story goes, they were debriefed, their agent in charge of the station was called in, and the two were immediately transferred to other duties with a day, and admonished in strong terms not to tell what they had seen.

The agent in charge of the station was an very old friend of mine whom I worked with as partners in Carlsbad, NM for 5 years. He passed away of cancer last year. I called him on the phone and relayed the story as I had heard it and asked him if it was true. We were using a government phone line. He was an ex-Marine, very patriotic person, and the way in which he answered me led me to believe that it was true. In a very measured voice he replied, "Don't know anything about it...never happened." And he made no further comment. He left me to believe that he would not discuss the subject any further.

Some years later, after I had retired, another retired agent in charge and I stopped by this retired agent's home in Alamogordo. This was in about 1995. We were having a couple of drinks and I reminded him of the call I had made to him about the UFO incident in 1977. I asked him if he remembered my call. He said he did. I then asked him again..."We are all retired now, you can tell me the truth about the UFO thing." He looked at me, and in almost identical words and same measured tone, "Don't know anything about it...never happened." That told me that he definitely knew and that he had been sworn to secrecy never to tell..probably by the people at White Sands. His ex-wife was a long time government employee, a secretary and she worked at White Sands. So there were reasons that he could not talk. He was the kind of person, had he been sworn to secrecy about a national security issue, he would take it to his grave...which he did. But he let me know in his answer that it happened. That was my take on it.

The investigator from MUFON was very interested in that story alone. He didn't seem to be interested in any of the other things that I had seen or had relayed to me.

When I was stationed in Carlsbad, NM in the early sixties there were UFO stories all over the place. There were some vivid sightings by state policemen. One, who was station at Alamogordo even took out his accident investigation camera and took photos of a flying saucer that had landed off the highway early in the morning, only to have the men in black suits from White Sands confiscate his film. He personally told me about that incident. That happened in about 1962 or thereabouts.

I heard about another incident involving a state police officer driving north of White Sands when his car went dead. Everything electrical on it went dead, according to him...no radio no anything. He got out and walked a little down the highway and every other vehicle was dead along side the highway also.

He walked back to his patrol car, got in and after a few minutes everything came back on and all the other cars were starting up a moving. He said that someone told him that they were conducting some kind of experiments at White Sands but he couldn[t find out exactly what it was.

Strangely enough, part of our working area out of Carlsbad was Roswell and the ranch area to the west. We contacted the air police people at the air base there which was still a SAC base and we never heard a word about the July, 1947 incident during that time. But there were some other strange things that went on around the SAC base in those days.

In about 1964 my partner and I were driving up to Clovis, NM to pick up some aliens that were in custody. We had left Carlsbad abou 4am because it was a long round trip drive. We passed through Roswell while it was still dark, and as we turned on to the highway to Portales, about 2 miles up the highway we ran into a state police roadblock. There were two state police officers that we knew and they stopped us. As I remember we were the only car stopped there. They came over, and I was driving. My partner (the same man who was in Alamogordo in 1977 that said "never happened") was working with me. We asked what was going on because there were helicopters flying over the sand hills there, and jeeps moving all around on the sand dunes. They had spot lights and were obviously looking for something.

The state police said, since we were federal officers and had security clearances, they could tell us what was going on. They said that the Air Force people told them that one of the Atlas missiles in a silo (there were about 20 missile silos that ringed the base and Roswell) had "accidentally" been fired and it had a nuclear warhead on it. They said they were told the missile was able to rip through part of the covering steel and concete doors on the silo, and that the nuclear warhead had flown off it and landed somewhere in the area and they were frantic because they could not find it.

After we sat there for a few minutes, they finally told us to drive on through since we were in a marked patrol vehicle, and we did. We were warned if we saw anything laying in the road not to get near it. We drove through, seeing all kinds of AF vehicles prowling over the sand dunes with search lights, and drove on to Portales and Clovis.

About a month later we saw one of the same state policemen in their Roswell office and remembered the missile incident. We asked him what had happened. He said that the AF told them that they had located the warhead somewhere back east...I think Cleveland. they said that an old Indian was dying in a hospital from radiation poisoning. The AF people said that they figured someone had stopped and picked up the warhead when it landed in the highway, put it in their car and drove away with it. They said that is what the old Indian told them. He had seen it on the highway, stopped and put it in the trunk of his car and drove to Cleveland, getting sick about two weeks later.

The story didn't really make much sense to us but that was what the AF said. We also heard that one other silo had been blown up by and accidental missile shooting in it. I recently heard some retired AF captain or something talking about how the missile silos (around Roswell, I believe) were harrassed by UFOs and there had been some major accidents in the silos caused by the UFOs. I always wondered if that wasn't what really happened that morning and that the AF gave a cover story about the warhead being stolen by and old Indian.

It was strange because had an Atlas missile been shot off in a silo, the crew in the control room down under would have been killed or something. We never heard a word about anything like that. It was a very strange incident that has always stuck in my mind.

There are other stories that I have heard over the years from other officers, but am getting writers cramps right now.

I enjoyed hearing you on the radio tonight as on occasions before. Keep up the good work. I will bet that your job is fascinating.

((name deleted))((city deleted)), New Mexico



NUFORC Note:

Date is approximate. PD


Posted 2003-10-31

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