Two children, a wreck and three figures: the summer Jose Padilla never left behind
They went looking for a cow. In the story they told as adults, they returned with a memory of an unfamiliar craft and small figures. The early accounts also name a policeman whose documented history complicates their testimony.
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Jose Padilla returns to the summer of 1945
The video supplied to Alien News records Padilla recounting the encounter he says he experienced as a child.
They had a cow to find
In Paola Harris's 2010 interview, Remigio Baca said he and Jose Padilla were sent as children to check a cow due to calve. He said he was seven and Padilla nine. They heard a noise, followed smoke and found an object he compared to an avocado.
The figures he felt sorry for
In the transcript, Baca says he felt sorry for the figures. According to him, Padilla wanted to approach while he wanted to return home. These are details he gave Harris decades after the alleged event.
The boys grew up before the story reached print
Ben Moffett published their account in the Mountain Mail in 2003. His report describes the two reconnecting after decades apart and discussing the encounter again. They also recounted soldiers recovering the object. The time gap belongs in the narrative: these were adults recalling childhood, rather than a report filed at the ranch that summer.
One name runs into a different chronology
The published story places state policeman Eddie Apodaca at the site with Padilla's father. Researcher Douglas Johnson reproduced service records and newspaper material placing Apodaca in Europe in August 1945 and his entry into the New Mexico State Police in 1951. That is a specific contradiction concerning a named participant. His supposed presence cannot serve as independent corroboration of the encounter.
Watch the witness, then follow the record
The video lets Padilla tell his story in his own voice. Beside it are links to the extended interview, early reporting and the documents behind the dispute. They give the reader a more useful question than a demand to believe or disbelieve: which parts of the account connect to records created outside the two friends' recollections?
Sources and context
Interviews, a 2003 newspaper account and footage of Padilla telling his story survive. They document later testimony, not the alleged 1945 encounter itself.
The alleged object's origin has not been independently established. Records concerning Eddie Apodaca contradict a specific part of the published account.