Holloman
LocationMilitary BaseHolloman
LocationMilitary BaseHolloman Air Force Base in New Mexico is a missile and aerospace test base beside White Sands, tied to 1950s instrumented sightings and a disputed 1964 landing film.
Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico is a missile and aerospace test base beside White Sands, tied to 1950s instrumented sightings and a disputed 1964 landing film.
Holloman Air Force Base is a U.S. Air Force installation in Otero County, New Mexico, just west of Alamogordo on the eastern side of the Tularosa Basin. It borders White Sands Missile Range, shares much of its airspace, and is home to the 49th Wing, which trains crews for MQ-9 drones and pilots for F-16 fighters.
The base opened in 1942 as Alamogordo Army Air Field and was renamed in 1948 for Col. George V. Holloman, a pioneer of guided-missile research. Its Air Development Center and later Missile Development Center made it a hub of Cold War aerospace testing: Lt. Col. John Paul Stapp rode a rocket sled to 632 miles per hour there in 1954, chimpanzees including Ham were trained there for early spaceflights, and its test track set a speed record of Mach 8.5 in 2003. The German Air Force ran a flight training center at Holloman from the 1990s until 2019.
Holloman's UAP history begins with its instruments. Between 1948 and 1951, balloon and missile crews from Holloman and White Sands reported objects tracked by theodolite and camera, and Air Force camera teams in Project Twinkle filmed unidentified objects after a V-2 launch in August 1950 without reaching a conclusion. The best-known claim came later: filmmaker Robert Emenegger said that in the 1970s military contacts offered him footage of a craft landing at Holloman, usually dated 1964, for his 1974 documentary UFOs: Past, Present, and Future. The footage was never delivered and the film used a re-enactment, though Emenegger's associate Paul Shartle said he had seen it. Researcher Grant Cameron has linked the story, known as the Holloman UFO landing, to the ending of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, saying Spielberg was shown Emenegger's documentary material.
The claim gained new life in 2026. Physicist Eric Davis gave a talk on the missing footage and has said former President George H. W. Bush told him of a landing at Holloman, filmmaker James Fox released an interview with a man who said he had processed the film, and British barrister Jonathan Caplan's book was reported to describe a briefing about a human-looking non-human at the base. No official record of a landing has been released, and a short clip often shared as the footage has been shown to be an ordinary aircraft. Holloman's significance is as a real, heavily instrumented test base whose name became attached to one of the most persistent claims of filmed contact.