SIGHTING: DATIL, NM

Witness Testimony

"Silver disc flies over mountain in New Mexico dawn April 27, 1990 seen by car driver.I tent camped next to my car overnight on April 26, 1990 at the San Francisco Hot Springs near Glenwood NM. It was a windy night and I actually had to get up in the darkness to put rocks inside my tent to keep it from blowing away. (I had tent stakes for earth not for sand). I got up early since I wasn’t really sleeping and decided to leave early in the predawn to drive back home to Santa Fe.I drove in the darkness on Hwy 180 north through Reserve and past Datil to catch Hwy 60. On an open flat stretch of highway where there were absolutely no other vehicles and as the dawn gave some light to the land I caught the flash of silver in the distance to my front/right.I noticed a silver object flying in the sky parallel and low to the land but headed for the next set of mountains to the north. As I look now at Google Maps I see a section of the Cibola National Forest that rises up from flat valley where I was driving. Once again, it was on Hwy 60 just past Datil. I was driving north and the UFO was flying north. I would say that the UFO was at least 10 miles away and of course in the New Mexico desert you can spot things over some distance.Now I have been an amateur astronomer since my youth in the 1960s and I’ve seen all manner of natural, normal sky phenomena including weather balloons and also identifying Venus and other planets. And I’ve often observed planes, jets and helicopters. But the way this UFO approached the mountain was unlike any earth based flying machine I had ever seen before or since.It did not gain altitude in advance of the mountain which I would expect a jet plane to do but rather stayed low, hugged the mountain and then quickly flew out of sight. I found a safe place to pull over about a mile or two later and just waited and looked to where I’d last seen it but it didn’t reappear. I continued my drive and passed the Very Large Array Telescopes and a few months later I read in the Santa Fe Reporter that other folks had reported UFO activity near the VLA."