Coyame is a small ranching town in the high desert of northeastern Chihuahua, west of the Texas border crossing at Presidio. In UFO literature it is the site of Mexico’s Roswell: a supposed mid-air collision in the summer of 1974 between a light aircraft and a flying disc, followed by a race between two governments to recover the wreck. The account is detailed, specific and widely repeated. Its sourcing is the story.
What the story says
The fullest version is a typed memo headed Research Findings on the Chihuahua Disk Crash, dated March 23, 1992, addressed to “All Deneb Team Members” and signed only with the initials JS. It says that at 10:07 on the night of August 25, 1974 American air defense radar picked up an unknown object coming in from the Gulf of Mexico at more than 2,000 knots and 75,000 feet. The object slowed, turned west, crossed into Mexico south of Brownsville and descended in steps over about 500 miles before vanishing from radar near Coyame. Within the hour, the memo says, radio traffic reported a civilian plane down in the same area, a flight from El Paso to Mexico City.
Searchers the next morning are said to have found the plane’s wreckage and, a few miles away, a second, circular craft, damaged but intact, after which the Mexican military imposed radio silence. The memo describes a CIA recovery team assembling at Fort Bliss with unmarked helicopters, reconnaissance flights watching a Mexican convoy truck both wrecks south, and then photographs showing the convoy halted and its soldiers dead. The American team, it says, flew in, slung the disc under a heavy-lift helicopter, blew up the trucks, bodies and plane debris, and carried the object by road toward Atlanta and possibly Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The disc is given as about sixteen feet across, silver and seamless, with a hole in its rim from the collision.
Where it came from
The memo explains its own origins vaguely: its facts, it says, were gathered in 1978 by a now-dead person from two eyewitnesses, illegally copied documents and a partly destroyed file, and reached the writer’s group in early 1992. Who JS was, what the Deneb Team was, and what those documents were has never been established. The memo came to wider attention through Leonard Stringfield, a long-time collector of crash-retrieval stories, who printed it in full in his self-published Status Report VII in February 1994. He had it from Elaine Douglass of Operation Right to Know, who had it from JS. Stringfield said he was publishing despite the risk that it was nonsense, in the hope that someone could confirm it or expose it as misinformation.
Nothing in the memo can be checked against an independent record. No radar log, Mexican military document, accident report or FAA file has been produced; the memo itself concedes the FAA has nothing on the civilian crash. The pilot and passengers of the light plane have never been named.
The fieldwork
From the mid-2000s the Texas writers Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte took the story to Chihuahua. Their 2007 book Mexico’s Roswell and its 2014 follow-up, The Coyame Incident, describe trips into the desert north of Coyame, interviews with older residents, and the recovery of bits of wreckage from a spot where a small aircraft had come down and burned at high heat. An independent laboratory could not identify every element in the debris and soil samples, which, as one reviewer pointed out, is not the same as finding something alien. Some witnesses remembered a streak in the sky, soldiers or a crash around that time; one man recalled a strange small creature, though his grandmother had told him of similar sightings before 1974.
Reviewing the 2014 book, the UFO researcher Kevin Randle credited the authors’ legwork but concluded the evidence was thin. That a small plane crashed in the area is not disputed, he wrote, but almost nothing is known about it, not even the pilot’s name, and recollections gathered decades later could as easily describe the plane crash itself. Torres, by Randle’s account, agreed that the evidence was thin and said it needed more data. A self-published local history cited on Wikipedia goes further and traces the UFO talk to a drug-running Cessna that came down in 1974 and was recovered by the army, an explanation that is plausible for the region but no better documented than the disc.
Where it stands
The Coyame incident is a case built backward: a precise, unattributed memo first, local memories gathered more than thirty years after the event. A small plane appears to have come down near Coyame at some point in that era. A collision with an alien craft, a dead convoy and an American snatch operation rest on one anonymous document that has never been authenticated.