Witness Recalls Farmington Armada UFO Incident

Local press heavily featured the Farmington Armada incident a day after it happened, but only 65 years after an in-depth research into the northwest New Mexico took place.

David Marler recently presented details about an investigation of the incident for the New Mexico Chapter of the Mutual UFO Network, which was the first public lecture on the subject.

According to James Neff, half of the population of the town wasn’t sure that time of mass sighting whether they saw spaceships or some strange craft. Hundreds of residents saw unknown flying objects seemed to play tag high in the air. These objects streaked away at times at nearly unbelievable speeds, the report added.

Marler said that he wasn’t there in March 1950, and he did not know what these witnesses saw like most other people today. So, he did the process of elimination. Marler made sure if they saw aircraft or if they spotted some atmospheric phenomenon. He said that when you can systematically rule out all conventional explanations, and left with the real unknown, it’s a mystery.

Marler looked for the witnesses but found that most of them were no longer living. Fortunately, there were few left, including Virgil Jerry Riggs. The 73-year-old Riggs, currently lives in Wyoming, made a trip to Rio Rancho to be part of Marler’s presentation. Riggs said that he was happy to know that a researcher preserved the history of what took place in 1950.

Riggs said that he was aware of the skeptics out there, but all he can tell was what he saw and what he observed.

He was then an 8-year-old student at Aztec Elementary School in 1950. He went outside to take for recess and saw some middle, and high-school students pointed out the objects in the sky.

He said they saw square-looking formations that were made up of dots, which would shift from one formation to another. They saw few of these on the first day and too many to count on the second day, approximately 30 to 40, Riggs said.

According to Riggs, the mysterious objects were high in the sky, and they needed to look hard to see these things. He felt disappointed when they went away, as well as the children. In an official government statement, a high-altitude naval research balloon exploded, and people witnessed floating pieces of plastic in the sky. But Marler believes this doesn’t match up with what occurred.

Marler said that the government made it sound like the incident only happened over a day in Farmington, but his investigation revealed many witnesses saw hundreds of objects not only in Farmington, but also in Tucumcari, Las Vegas, New Mexico, and Albuquerque for two days. Marler further claimed that he found government documents talking about eyewitnesses at Kirkland Air Force Base. Marler said that the could only accept the government explanation if the incident lasted for only a day, but it was two to three different days’ worth of sightings.

Riggs is a former commercial pilot and was a free fall parachutist. Riggs said he never saw strange objects like he witnessed over Farmington when he was a child in all his time in the sky.