The last encounter occurred in May 2015 near Nogal

Richard “Bill” Thorp has lived in Lincoln County 31 years, he’s a retired educator and past vice president of the Lincoln County Historical Society. He also claims to have encountered unidentified flying objects three times, twice in the Nogal area and twice when others saw the phenomena too.

“The second experience was thrilling. I wish I could experience it again over and over,” he said Monday. “I am a believer.”

The first sighting

The first encounter occurred in 1953, when Thorp was working as a roustabout in the oilfields around Loco Hills, a small village 25 miles east of Artesia, where he had graduated from high school. He’d worked in that capacity since he was 16, but two years later still was the youngest at the job rod and tubing on the Caprock about eight miles south of Maljamar.

“The driller had stopped the machine and suggested we get a drink” a short distance away where the water was sitting in a truck. When the break was over and everyone moved back to the platform, Thorp returned to the truck where he had forgotten his gloves. As he turned to join the crew, “There it was,” he said. “Coming out of the southwestern sky at an unbelievable rate of speed was a small dish-shaped object. The disk was shiny and bright, but strangely appeared to be tumbling end-over-end in the sky. It was alternating from shiny bright to less bright over and over. It did this until it went out of sight in the northeastern sky.”

The whole experience took less than six seconds and he didn’t mention it to his fellow workers. He knew it wasn’t a satellite, because Sputnik, the first Russian satellite was not launched until years later.

“This was July 1953,” he said. “Everyone was aware that flying saucers might exist, because of the Roswell incident, which happened just a few years before in 1947.”

A UFO crashed near Corona. The debris and some say bodies of aliens were transported to Walker Air Force base in Roswell. The military later claimed the object was a weather balloon, but many dispute that statement, including descendants of Major Jesse Marcel Sr., an intelligence officer at Walker, who insisted the debris and bodies were not from earth.

The second sighting

The second incident was in 2000, and took place on the front deck of Thorp’s home in Nogal.

“This incident was much closer, perhaps as close as 1,000 feet,” Thorp said. “It traveled at a fantastic rate of speed, but much slower than the first. I had time to look, to analyze, to calibrate. But perhaps the best thing about the second sighting was that I had a witness. This thing passed directly over my house. My wife, Beverly was standing beside me and she witnessed everything.”

His wife is known for not embellishing a story, he said.

The incident occurred about 10:35 p.m., because the couple just watched local news from Albuquerque. Thorp went out to the front porch to soaked in the cloudless night with bright stars and a new moon. Their house sits at 7,300 feet elevation and the stars added just enough light to silhouette every mountain range and landmark for 20 miles, Thorp said. Carrizo Peak is nearly due north from their house and between the house and the peak is an 18-mile wide valley.

“As I stood admiring the silhouette of the Carrizo Mountains, suddenly coming up from behind the main peak there appeared three lights that (seemed to) clear the peak by perhaps 500 feet,” Thorp said.

He knew from the space between the lights and their brightness, it was not a plane from Holloman Air Force Base. He called to his wife.

“We stood together and watched the object as it approached us with an incredible speed,” he said. “In just a few seconds, another light appeared.”

They determined the object was diamond-shape, because it blocked out the stars. An intense white light was on the front point of the diamond, with another on the back point. Two green lights were on the side points and a red light was located in the middle on the underside of the diamond, he said.

The couple was struck that the craft seemed to be using their house as a beacon, he said. They wondered if the building materials that came from Walker Air Force Base might have retained some sort of fingerprint. As it approached the house, they never moved or looked to the right or left, they just kept bending their heads and necks straight back until the craft went out of sight over their house. They immediately ran to the back deck upstairs on the opposite side of the home.

“As we reached the back deck, it was still in sight and was very low heading directly toward the soft glow of lights given off by the village of Ruidoso,” Thorp said.

He estimated that the object began to descend over Carrizo Peak at 9,656 feet. and over their house at about 8,000 feet, which is 700 feet above their house.

“It was a huge flying object, not to be estimated in feet,” Thorp said. “I would estimate the width to be between a quarter of a mile to a half mile,” at the widest point. Even more startling, the passage was almost silent.

“There was no jet sound, nor any sign of a jet wash, no movement of air, no sonic boom,” he said. “There was one faint sound. If you listened closely, there was a very faint hum.” The type of propulsion was unknown on earth, he concluded.

The Thorps thought surely others would see the craft and there would be reports in the newspaper or on radio and television, but nothing appeared. They talked to another person, who said she saw the craft and lives in a direct line two miles south of the Thorps. The woman described the exact shape and lights. The couple looked all summer, but the craft never returned.

The third sighting

The last incident happened at 9:15 p.m. May 11, 2015, as Thorp, his wife and their youngest daughter, Bonnabeth, were about five miles from home returning from Las Vegas, Nev. They were on the alert, because driving at night meant wildlife could be near or on the road.

“Bev was the first to see it,” Thorp said. She saw a single large amber light high in the sky, but soon all three were straining to look through the windshield or out the windows of the car as six brilliant large amber lights appeared in a straight-line. They seemed to be in pairs with a slight separation between each twosome.

“The lights were close, probably within 500 feet to 1,000 feet above the ground,” Thorp said. He pulled the car off the road at the first safe place to get a better view.

“I thought it was very unusual that the lights never broke their formation,” he said. “They were pretty round and perfectly distinct from one another, there was no diffusion of light rays that you see when lights are in the distance.”

Then as if all were controlled by one source, they went off. The sky went black.

“If I had to make a judgment, I would say they were not observation lights, but the cabin lights of a craft,” Thorp said.

He pulled back on the road and started home again when two lights reappeared, this time in the eastern sly on the left side of the highway. They weren’t moving and went out after about four seconds. Twenty seconds later, the lights came on again. Thorp believes they were viewing multiple crafts, again with absolutely no sound.

The women were a bit unsettled by the experience and considered the lights ominous and unfriendly. When they reached the house, they propped chairs up against the doors.

“If these beings had the technology to travel from planet to planet, they probable can overcome the technology of small wooden chairs propped up against doors,” Thorp told them.

Within days, the Thorps spoke to two other people in the area who said they also witnessed the lights. His daughter pulled up background on the Internet about the Phoenix Lights that appeared in March 1997. Descriptions were extremely similar. It turned out, that literally thousands of such sighting have been reported over the planet. Authorities have dismissed most as either natural phenomena or military.

But Thorp said he doesn’t believe they were natural, some sort of fragment from the borealis, a reflection of his own headlights, an airplane, a satellite or secret military testing. While he expects family and friends to believe what he’s described, he doesn’t expect those from the outside to accept the experiences.

“Like most people in the world, seeing is believing and if they don’t see it, they don’t believe it,” he said. “Just don’t tell me that I saw an airplane. I’m 83 years old and I know what an airplane looks like. I also know what one sounds like.”