A Los Angeles man claims to have seen aliens fleeing a UFO that crashed in the desert, and he has a piece of the spacecraft to prove it.
Jose Padilla was a nine-year-old boy growing up in San Antonio, New Mexico, when he and his friend discovered the “avocado-shaped” UFO.
To this day, he swears that what he witnessed was real.
Jose Padilla claims to have had an actual alien encounter when he was a child living in San Antonio, New Mexico – he even has a piece of the UFO to prove it.
The encounter occurred while the two boys were riding through the desert, just 13 miles from the Trinity nuclear test site, where Robert Oppenheimer and other members of the Manhattan Project detonated the world’s first nuclear bomb in 1945.
The encounter happened that same year, and at first, Padilla thought the crash sound was just another bomb test, he told CBS News Los Angeles.
“I told my friend, ‘this must be another bomb test’ and he said, ‘no, it’s not a bomb, look at the smoke coming out of the ground,'” Padilla said.
Upon closer inspection, the smoke looked like it was coming from a crashed plane.
Then, suddenly, three aliens emerged from the plane and began “waddling and running in circles,” he said.
But Padilla was not afraid of these creatures.
“They had crashed at my father’s ranch and needed help,” he said.
For the next ten days, the military cleared the debris while Padilla and his friend watched from a nearby ridge, despite being warned to stay away.
Artist’s impression of the crashed spacecraft that Padilla claims to have discovered in San Antonio, New Mexico, in 1945.
“We were hiding behind the cacti,” he said.
When the soldiers took a break from cleaning up the wreckage, Padilla and his friends entered the plane.
The ‘aliens’ had disappeared, giving Padilla the perfect opportunity to extract a souvenir from inside.
He took a small dial out of the wall, took it home, and hid it in the garage.
Frontier Analysis, an Ohio-based chemical testing lab, analyzed the device in 2015. Its report revealed it was made of aluminum mixed with silicon and copper, CBS Los Angeles reported.
This mix of metals is commonly found in engine parts and the report claimed the isotopic ratios were terrestrial.
Artist’s impression of the ‘dial’ that Padilla removed from the interior wall of the crashed spacecraft.
But an extraterrestrial source for the metals cannot be ruled out, the report says.
“Nobody knows what it is,” Padilla said.
Years passed and Padilla moved from San Antonio to Rowland Heights, an unincorporated area of Los Angeles, California, and quietly raised a family.
But he always clung to that strange artifact from his childhood.
Padilla has kept the strange metal artifact for all these years, claiming it is proof of his encounter with aliens.
In 2012, Padilla and the friend who was with him when he witnessed the UFO were interviewed by investigative journalist and UFO researcher Paola Harris.
At the time, Harris was investigating a complaint from the son of World War II Army pilot William Brophy.
Brophy’s son told Harris that one of his father’s last missions was to fly over the area where Padilla claims the UFO crashed. During one of those flights, he saw two young children on horseback, Harris told CBS Los Angeles.
She believes those two little boys were Padilla and his friend.