Jose Padilla (born Joseph Lopez Padilla, November 1936, San Antonito, New Mexico) is the primary adult claimant behind the alleged "Trinity UFO crash," a story asserting that he and childhood friend Remigio "Reme" Baca — aged approximately 9 and 7 respectively — encountered a crashed extraterrestrial craft on the Padilla family ranch on or around August 16, 1945, roughly four weeks after the nearby Trinity atomic bomb test.12 The account surfaced publicly in 2003, nearly 58 years after the alleged event, and attracted wide attention when UFO researchers Jacques Vallee and Paola Harris co-authored "Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret" in 2021.13 Subsequent investigation has documented severe credibility problems, and in September 2023 co-author Jacques Vallee himself conceded that the earliest version of Reme Baca's crash story is best described as "fiction."2
The Claimed Event
According to Padilla and Baca, the two boys discovered an avocado-shaped metallic craft embedded in earth near Padilla's family ranch in San Antonio, New Mexico, with small insectoid humanoid creatures alive inside.14 They later said military personnel conducted a multi-day recovery operation and that soldiers subsequently visited the family, warned them to stay silent, and claimed the debris came from a weather balloon.1 The two boys allegedly removed small fragments of material from the crash site, which were later described as possessing unusual physical properties.3
The story first reached a public audience in 2003 when local journalist Ben Moffett published accounts from Padilla and Baca in the Socorro County Mountain Mail.4 UFO researcher Paola Harris took up the case around 2009 and eventually partnered with physicist and longtime UFO investigator Jacques Vallee to produce "Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret," which framed the incident as a pre-Roswell crash retrieval.34 Vallee drew comparisons to the 1947 Roswell incident, describing alleged "memory metal" fragments and creature appearances likened to praying mantises or Jerusalem crickets.
Background of the Witnesses
Padilla grew up in San Antonio, New Mexico, in a ranching family. The Trinity site where the first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, lies in the Jornada del Muerto desert nearby, and the proximity of the alleged crash to that test became a central element of Vallee and Harris's framing.1 Remigio "Reme" Baca, Padilla's childhood companion, provided corroborating testimony that was presented in the book alongside that of Padilla's niece Sabrina Padilla, who was born in 1953 — eight years after the alleged event — making her contribution entirely hearsay.3 Baca died before the second edition of the book was published; Padilla also died at some point after its release, though the date has not been widely reported.
Evidentiary Problems
Investigation by researcher Douglas Dean Johnson, published beginning in May 2023, documented a pattern of fabrications by both primary witnesses.25
A central corroborating figure in the witnesses' account — New Mexico State Police officer Eddie Apodaca — could not have been present in 1945: Apodaca was not commissioned as a state officer until January 1951, and in August 1945 he was serving in the U.S. Army in Europe.56 Padilla claimed to have joined the New Mexico National Guard at age 13, to have served in the Korean War, and to have sustained combat wounds.5 The Korean War ended on July 27, 1953, when Padilla would have been only 16 years old, and the National Personnel Records Center found no matching military record.5 Padilla's own son stated that his father was never in the military and had been deaf in one ear since age 3, a condition disqualifying for service.5
Padilla was also described in the Vallee-Harris book as a decades-long California Highway Patrol officer. When Johnson disproved this, Vallee revised the claim to state that Padilla had been a "truck inspector," without providing verifiable details.2 Johnson additionally obtained audio of an earlier interview in which Reme Baca described an entirely different UFO crash — a 1946 incident — to Roswell researcher Tom Carey, directly contradicting the 1945 Trinity story that Baca and Padilla would soon publicly promote.2 Researcher Paola Harris acknowledged that Baca had demanded 250,000 for an alleged artifact fragment.2
Skeptical Assessment
In September 2023, Jacques Vallee conceded that the UFO crash story Baca presented to researcher Tom Carey in late 2002 or early 2003 is best described as "fiction."2 Skeptic Brian Dunning of the Skeptoid podcast characterized the Trinity account as "a literal hoax, made up by people who knew they were making it up."7 UFO researcher Kevin Randle, a longtime proponent of serious UAP investigation, reviewed the Vallee-Harris book and concluded the account bore hallmarks of Roswell narrative contamination rather than independent corroboration.8
No physical artifact, military record, official document, or corroborating eyewitness has been produced to support the 1945 Trinity crash claim.25 The case illustrates a pattern in which a compelling personal narrative, repeated over decades without contemporary documentation, can achieve wide circulation despite the absence of verifiable evidence and in the face of direct contradictions from public records.