UFO News Article: “HOBBS CASE CITED –If There’s Smoke--There’s Also UFO”

22 March 1969

(Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Texas)

Source: NewspaperArchive.com

Quote from the article (the part of the article that focuses on the 2 June 1964, Hobbs, New Mexico, case):

“ALMOST FIVE years ago, a ‘big black top’ whooshed over the top of a laundry in Hobbs and burned a young boy so badly ‘he looked like something out of a horror movie.’

‘You couldn’t see his eyes. His ears and mouth were turned wrong side out. Just to look at him would make you want to go into hysteria.’

‘It Was No Fraud, No Hoax’

Mrs. Joann Idleman, 319 N. Lynch, Hobbs, reluctantly recalled the incident in a telephone interview recently. ‘It was no fraud, no hoax — this thing really happened,’ she said.

It happened to her son, Charles Keith Davis [was eight years old at the time of the incident], now 13, on June 2, 1964. He can remember vividly how the hissing Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) came at him about 4 p.m. on a clear day.

Up to now, there has been little publicity.

*     *     *

Makes Hobby Of UFO Study

C. A. ROBINSON, a Plainview businessman who claims he has been a UFO ‘nut’ for 20 years, says the Hobbs, Levelland and Lubbock Lights cases are examples of ‘something people don’t want to understand and want to forget.’

‘The Air Force,’ he says, ‘has for 20 years attempted to cover up things like that. What could you expect? It’s nothing but a whitewash job.’

Robinson came upon a brief resume of the Hobbs incident while perusing one of numerous books he has read on UFOs. He said it disturbed him.

Young Davis had gone with his grandmother, Mrs. Frank Smith, to a laundry the Smiths operated at 600 E. Marland St. on that unforgettable afternoon.

Relates Story Of ‘Black Top’

WITH NO hesitation in his voice, the teenager told The Avalanche-Journal that he walked out a rear door of the laundry and went into the alley.

‘I looked up in the sky and it came at me . . . it looked like a big black top . . . it burned me, but the ground wasn’t touched or anything,’ he said.

‘The thing just came down and burned him,’ Mrs. Smith said. ‘I could see him under it, but I didn’t know what it was. His hair was standing up on his head, I couldn’t holler and he couldn’t either. He ran into the laundry and the skin was falling off his face.’

Told Story At Hospital

AT THE hospital, Mrs. Smith told the story for the first time. ‘The doctor didn’t pay me too much mind at first. Then I told him: ‘I know this sounds kind of funny, but whatever burned him wasn’t anything in the laundry.’

Mrs. Smith, the only adult witness, said the UFO looked like a long burner. ‘I would say it was about four feet tall, at was ablaze at the end of it. Then there was more of a smoke — real dark carbon-like smoke — that looked like it was coming out of oblong holes. I don’t know what it was.’

The boy’s T-shirt wasn’t burned. Mrs. Smith pulled the boy to her to put out the fire. The blouse she was wearing wasn’t scorched anywhere.

Mrs. Smith remembers hearing a ‘hissing sound, or whoosh, like something blew the building.’

*     *     *

Youngster Laid Up Six Weeks

THE YOUNGSTER was hospitalized for more than two weeks, and spent another month at home recuperating. ‘They wouldn’t even let him have a mirror,’ his mother said.

The family is still in the dark about what really happened.

THE T-SHIRT, burned scrapings and Mrs. Smith’s blouse reportedly were sent to the FBI in Washington with the promise that the family would be advised of the results of the analysis. The Air Force says the incident never has been ‘officially’ reported to it.

‘They told us they would let us know, but we’ve called them and sent letters and haven’t heard a word. They just keep putting us off,’ Mrs. Idleman claimed.

Davis, now an eight grader at Houston Junior High School in Hobbs, suffered second degree burns of the face.

An attending physician, who declined to be quoted by name, said ‘There was nothing any different about the burns — the only question was: What in the world caused them?’

DR. JAMES E. McDonald, senior physicist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona and a leading authority on UFOs, also has become interested in the case.

‘It’s quite puzzling,’ he said. ‘It’s not one paralleled by similar cases. I’m most inclined to take seriously the account given by the grandmother.’

McDonald said Mrs. Smith was sincere, and expressed ‘horror, and an inability to move.’

‘It’s exotic — such a bizarre case,’ he added.

Although McDonald is puzzled by it, he said he had talked with enough people that ‘I don’t see any basis for rejecting it at all.’

The Plainview businessman also was impressed by the case, and urged a full investigation of it.”

newspaperarchive.com/avalanche-journal-mar-22-1969-p-1/ 
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(Page 11)

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(Unknown newspaper article/David Marler image)

600 E. Marland Street, Hobbs, New Mexico

(Google photo)

Satellite photo of Hobbs, New Mexico (tageo.com)

(tageo.com photo)