CHAPTER 20: A UAP CRASH IN NEW MEXICO?
A UAP "CRASH" IN NEW MEXICO
BY STEVE DOUGLASS
One day in 2013 I got a call from Mark right out of the blue. Usually when he called, it was brief and logistical—where can you meet, how soon can you be there. This time was different.
He didn’t ask to meet.
He didn’t even bother with small talk.
Instead, after a pause that felt deliberate, he said, “I need to know if you’re somewhere you can talk.”
That alone was enough to change the temperature of the room.
Mark was not prone to drama. In the years I’d known him, he treated discretion as muscle memory. If he was calling instead of arranging a face-to-face, it meant either the clock was running—or the rules had shifted.
I told him I was alone.
Another pause.
“What I’m about to tell you,” he said, “is not something I should be saying over a phone. But you need to hear it now, not later.”
That was the first time he ever framed a conversation that way.
“Something went wrong he said,”. “And before you ask—no, it’s not being reported. It won’t be, either.”
I asked him what kind of wrong he meant.
“That depends on who you ask,” he replied. “Engineering would say ‘unexpected termination.’ Operations would say ‘loss of asset.’ And public affairs—if they’re ever looped in—will say ‘nothing happened.’”
That was when I realized this wasn’t about an accident.
It was about recovery.
Mark told me that airspace along the western border of New Mexico was about to get very busy , very fast. That people who weren’t supposed to notice would notice anyway. And that explanations, when they eventually came, would be deliberately incomplete—not lies, exactly, but carefully shaped absences.
“There are things,” he said, “that aren’t designed to be found intact. And there are contingency plans for when they are.”
I asked him why he was telling me.
Another pause. Longer this time.
“Because,” he said, “you’re going to hear rumors. And when you do, I want you to understand that some of them will be closer to the truth than anything officially confirmed—but even those won’t tell the whole story.”
Before I could press him further, he ended the call. No goodbye. No follow-up.
Just silence.
It wouldn’t be until much later—after the NOTAMs, after the sealed airspace, after the month-long TFR that officially meant nothing—that I understood why he’d broken his own rules.
Whatever came down out there wasn’t just sensitive.
It was never meant to come down at all.
When the United States Air Force request a Temporary Flight Restriction over a remote region of western New Mexico, the official justification—search and rescue—appeared innocuous. But the scope, duration, and handling of this TFR suggest something far more deliberate: a controlled recovery operation tied to sensitive or classified material.
This is not speculation born of imagination. It is speculation born of pattern recognition.
A TFR That Behaves Like a Containment Zone
The most striking element of the restriction is its 30-day duration. Standard SAR operations do not require prolonged airspace denial unless:
-
The recovery site must be secured and sanitized
-
Debris fields are widely distributed
-
Materials involved pose environmental, intelligence, or national-security risks
The use of 14 CFR 91.137(a)(2) is particularly notable. This section is often invoked when the government needs rapid authority to exclude all non-participating aircraft, not merely to protect responders, but to control observation.
This is the regulatory equivalent of saying: nothing flies here unless we say so.
The Intelligence Tell: Tracking Civilian Aircraft
According to an air traffic controller at ZAB, the USAF requested detailed reporting on any unauthorized aircraft that violated the TFR—including type, tail number, and destination.
That request is not about flight safety.
That is counterintelligence behavior.
When the military is concerned about foreign intelligence collection, private ISR contractors, or civilian platforms capable of high-resolution imaging, tracking who looked is just as important as preventing them from doing so.
The site lies within a region that quietly checks every box for a sensitive recovery:
-
Extremely limited public access
-
Embedded within the RESERVE MOA
-
Traversed by multiple military training routes
-
Within operational proximity of White Sands Missile Range
-
Far from population centers and major highways.
If something unexpected came down—whether from orbit, high-altitude flight, or hypersonic testing—this is where the government would want it.
What’s Missing Is the Loudest Signal
There are no reports of:
-
Emergency responders staging publicly
-
Local law enforcement briefings
-
NOTAMs referencing a crash or hazard
-
Press confirmations of missing aircraft
Even controlled exercises usually leave a paper trail. This has not.
The absence of information strongly suggests compartmentalization, where only individuals with a need-to-know are informed—and everyone else, including local authorities, is kept deliberately in the dark.
Plausible Black Scenarios
Without claiming certainty, several scenarios align with known historical precedents:
-
Loss of a classified ISR or test platform, possibly operating out of White Sands or another restricted range
-
Recovery of foreign technology, such as a satellite, payload, or vehicle of non-U.S. origin
-
Containment of hazardous materials, including exotic propulsion components or nuclear-related power sources
-
Failure during a hypersonic or space-adjacent test, where public acknowledgment would reveal capability or vulnerability
Something not of this earth.
Each of these would justify:
-
A prolonged TFR
-
Strict observation control
-
No public statements
Expect a Narrative—Not Transparency
If history is any guide, an official explanation will eventually appear once the recovery phase is complete. It will likely be framed in the least remarkable terms possible—training exercise, routine SAR, or misidentified debris.
That explanation will be designed not to inform, but to close the file.
The real story, if there is one, will remain classified, buried in after-action reports, and discussed only in secured rooms.
For now, the facts are simple:
-
A month-long airspace lockdown
-
An unusually quiet military
-
And a government that is watching not just the sky—but who is watching the sky
In intelligence work, those signals rarely appear together by accident.
Fortunately, I wasn’t relying on a single source.
A group of friends of mine—interceptors by trade, the kind of people who notice patterns because it’s their job—just happened to be operating in the general vicinity of whatever had struck the mountain. Within minutes of Mark hanging up, I reached out to them.
They didn’t hesitate.
There was, they confirmed, an unmistakable increase in military presence. Not the kind that comes with a scheduled exercise or routine training rotation, but the kind that appears suddenly and without explanation. Vehicles arriving at odd hours. Convoys moving with purpose but no visible markings. Personnel who didn’t linger and didn’t talk.
What stood out most wasn’t the uniforms—it was the equipment.
Heavy equipment. Cranes capable of lifting far more than a downed light aircraft would require. Flatbed trucks arriving empty and leaving covered. The kind of logistics footprint you only bring in when you expect to recover something large, dense, or extremely important.
One of them mentioned something else that stuck with me: the choreography was too clean. Roads secured before anyone asked questions. Temporary access points cut where no permanent infrastructure existed. Everything moved as if the site had been rehearsed—even though the event itself clearly had not been.
“This isn’t crash cleanup,” one of them said. “This is extraction.”
Another pointed out that the military assets weren’t just guarding a perimeter—they were shielding line-of-sight. Positioning vehicles and equipment in ways that blocked views from ridgelines and air approaches. That’s not about safety. That’s about denying observation.
And then there was the silence.
No local agencies talking. No briefings. No off-the-record comments. Even people who normally couldn’t resist hinting that something was happening had gone quiet. When professionals stop speculating, it usually means they’ve been told—explicitly—not to.
That was when it became clear this wasn’t simply about something that had gone wrong.
It was about controlling what was recovered, who knew, and how long the story could be contained.
Mark’s words came back to me: There are contingency plans for when they are found intact.
Standing alone, each detail could be dismissed. Together, they formed a picture that was uncomfortably familiar to anyone who’s studied how sensitive losses are handled—not publicly, but operationally.
Whatever struck that mountain wasn’t being treated like wreckage.
It was being treated like an asset.
And assets, especially the kind that require cranes and secrecy and sealed airspace, are never meant to exist outside controlled environments—let alone be seen.
In the years that followed, the site never fully let go of its gravity.
Some of the inner- and outer-core interceptors—people who don’t chase stories but revisit anomalies—made quiet treks back to the area. Not all at once. Not coordinated. Just individual returns, spread over time, the way professionals double-check something that never quite resolved.
What they noticed was subtle, but unmistakable.
There were drone overflights—not hobbyist platforms, not the kind you hear or see clearly, but high-altitude passes that followed consistent patterns. Too consistent. They weren’t persistent enough to draw attention, but they returned often enough to suggest monitoring, not mapping.
Then there were the roads.
Fresh caliche cuts leading toward mountainsides where no roads had ever been needed before. Switchbacks carved with modern equipment, not ranch traffic. Routes that terminated abruptly at nothing visible—no structures, no facilities—just rock faces and scrub. Infrastructure without a public purpose.
That’s when the civilian accounts began to surface.
Jim Goodall, who has spent decades earning trust in aviation and military communities, spoke with residents around Grants. These weren’t excitable witnesses or attention-seekers. They were ranchers, highway workers, locals who knew what normal looked like—and knew this wasn’t it.
They described the military arriving quickly and decisively. Access to ranch land blocked without explanation. Secondary highways temporarily closed. Traffic rerouted with minimal signage and no press notices. And always the trucks—military vehicles moving through at odd hours, hauling objects covered in tarps, shapes that didn’t match conventional equipment.
No insignia. No explanations.
Just presence.
One resident told Goodall it felt like the land had been borrowed without permission. Another said it was as if someone had flipped a switch—overnight, the area no longer belonged to the people who lived there.
And then, just as abruptly, it ended.
Within a few months, the convoys stopped. Barriers came down. Roads reopened. Ranch access returned. The drones vanished. The caliche roads remained, slowly blending into the landscape, unexplained but undeniably intentional.
No apology. No announcement. No acknowledgment anything had ever occurred.
Life went back to normal.
That, perhaps, is the most telling detail of all.
True accidents leave scars—investigations, paperwork, litigation, stories that refuse to die. This left only alterations. Quiet ones. The kind designed not to be noticed unless you already knew where to look.
Whatever had happened out there was not ongoing.
It had been resolved.
Recovered. Removed. Accounted for.
But as Peter Merlin taught me long ago, nothing is ever completely recovered.
No matter how thorough the cleanup, no matter how many trucks roll in or how many tarps roll out, something is always left behind. A fragment overlooked. A mark in the terrain. A detail that doesn’t belong. You can erase evidence, but you can’t unwrite physics—or human error.
Over the years, the Interceptors talked about going back.
Not impulsively. Not recklessly. Planned missions. Careful ones. The kind where the goal isn’t to take anything, only to observe. To confirm whether the land still remembered what had happened to it.
But time has a way of thinning even the most determined circles.
Some of us retired. Some of us grew old. Some of us became workaday joes, trading long weekends and expendable income for responsibilities that don’t pause for unfinished questions. The window never quite opened wide enough.
Maybe someday soon it will.
Until then, the site remains where it has always been.
Hidden in plain sight.
The crash lies in the middle of that TFR box.
It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t want to be found. All you have to do is notice what doesn’t belong.
And once you see it, you’ll understand why they worked so hard to make everyone forget it was ever there.
Some things fall out of the sky only once.
What remains afterward is up to those patient enough to look—not for answers, but for what was missed.
Comments
Post a Comment