By Charles Lear
When it comes to reported UFO crash locations in New Mexico, everyone has heard of Roswell, many have heard of Aztec but few have heard of San Antonio. San Antonio is a small village, 12 miles south of Socorro just northeast of White Sands Missile Range. It was the childhood home of two men, Reme Baca and Jose Padilla who, in 2003, came forward with the story that they had discovered a crashed UFO there in 1945.
In 2002, Reme Baca and Jose Padilla were living in Washington State and California respectively. Padilla left San Antonio in 1954 and Baca left in 1955. According to Baca, there was no contact between them from 1955 to 2001. They renewed contact after coming across each other while searching their ancestry on the internet. In the course of their conversations, they revisited an unusual series of events from their childhood. They got in touch with an old schoolmate, Ben Moffett, who was a reporter for the Socorro newspaper, The Mountain Mail. They related the events to him in 2003 and he published their tale as a two-part series in the November 2 and November 6, 2003 editions.
On July 16, 1945, the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated at the Trinity site, which is approximately 40 miles from San Antonio. Jose Padilla and his mother were up early that day and when the bomb went off, his mother observed it through a crack in the door and lost her sight in one eye. Residents of the area were told that what they had witnessed was the accidental explosion of a munitions dump. A month later, on or near August 16th, Reme Baca, age 7, was with Padilla, age 9, helping out on the ranch owned by Padilla’s father, Faustino. They were tasked with finding a cow that had wandered off to give birth and they set out on horseback. That children that age would be helping out as ranch hands may seem extraordinary to us modern folks, but a picture of Baca on horseback confirms that he was, at least, able to ride at that age.