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The sun has long ago set on the New Mexico desert, and the night’s blackness has clamped itself onto every stunted tree, every shock of sagebrush, and every sandy rise. Owls, crickets, and coyotes sing unseen from the cooling shadows, and their voices move without form through the airy, inky nothingness.

So, too, does something else—a ball of fire, burning lime green and bright, hurtling silently across the moonless sky for a few long seconds before disappearing. The fireball emits no discernible smoke, but its fiery course seems to trace a metaphorical question mark in the sky, punctuating a question first asked more than a century ago.

The first known accounts of airborne fireballs over New Mexico come from various old-time Spanish villages, and don’t generally describe the phenomena as being green. They do, however, agree that these fireballs were the transportation of witches. According to Jack Kutz’s 1988 Mysteries and Miracles of New Mexico, all a witch had to do was pick up an egg, a gourd, or a pumpkin, and she could “pop like a flashbulb and streak off in a fireball.”

Such stories may very likely be attempts to explain a genuine phenomenon—that is to say, genuine fireballs—but their explanations of that phenomenon seem best understood as the products of a simpler time, an isolated region, and the mixing of Catholic fears with Native American lore. As the writer Anaïs Nin once wrote, “We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.” That is, we view events through the lenses of our time and our world—and that was true in the late 1800s, and true in the late 1940s.

It was June 19, 1947 when Kenneth Arnold, a businessman flying near Yakima, Washington, reported seeing a group of strange, unidentified flying objects from the window of his airplane, and June 26, 1947 when he described those objects to the Chicago Daily Tribune as “saucer-like” and “shaped like a pie plate.” Those descriptions soon gave rise to the term “flying saucer,” to nationwide talk of the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors, and to a country primed and ready to interpret any fiery aerial phenomena as signs of otherworldly visitation.

The February 29, 1949 Los Alamos Skyliner reported green fireballs appearing multiple times over Los Alamos, “generally about 2 a.m.” The December 18, 1950 Albuquerque Journal told of an airline pilot and his co-pilot who allegedly watched for ten minutes as a green fireball circled above Los Alamos before the fireball sped away at an estimated 700 miles per hour, turned white, and then disappeared. The February 12 and March 12 issues of the Alamogordo Daily News reported sightings of green fireballs over Alamogordo. The April 7, 1952 issue of Life Magazine examined, among others, a sighting between Clovis and Clines Corners. Other accounts told of mass sightings in Roswell and Santa Fe. And the February 1953 issue of New Mexico Magazine highlighted additional area sightings over Las Vegas, Taos, and Albuquerque.

UFOs and aliens were offered most frequently as explanations for the fireballs—oftentimes, aliens interested in America’s atomic testing—but people also suggested weather balloons, solar flares, fireflies, animal eyes, and top-secret Russian or American aircraft.

Said UNM meteoritics expert Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, in the February 12, 1953 Alamogordo Daily News, “If they are man-made, for the sake of civilization, let's hope they are made in America.”

This concentration of fireball sightings in the late 1940s and early 1950s coincided neatly with the country’s flying saucer mania, and also with fears forged in the Atomic Age and the Cold War, but it was clear that a large number of people were seeing something.

The U.S. Air Force thought so anyway, because from 1949 to 1951, personnel from Alamogordo’s Holloman Air Force Base conducted Project Twinkle, an official investigation into the matter. Their final report ultimately concluded that most of the green fireball sightings could be explained by meteors—hypothesizing that the Earth may have been rolling through an especially rocky patch of outer space—and suggesting that reports of such meteors would naturally be more likely in the clear skies of the American Southwest than, say, in the smog over Maryland. They also left room for human imagination, and for the proximity of government airfields, to explain such details as the objects changing course in midair.

In Socorro, the New Mexico School of Mines (now New Mexico Tech) tested a sample of meteoric dust from the purported impact site of a green fireball that had fallen on July 24, 1949, and found that it was rich in copper, an element that, when burned, turns fire bright green. Some of the more unusual sightings can no doubt be attributed to aircraft or missiles, and certain other sightings were very likely hoaxes as, according to the 1953 New Mexico Magazine article, one lab test of an alleged fireball “turned out to be burned toast.” For most of the sightings, however, meteors containing copper ore suggest the best and most likely explanation.

But the problem with that explanation, Lincoln LaPaz and others have said, is that meteors don’t typically contain copper. Most often, meteors are made up of rocks and dust, or of iron, or of rock-and-iron composites. Copper is not usually an ingredient of meteors, and yet sometimes it is. It’s uncommon, but it isn’t unheard of. Green-burning, copper-containing meteors were sighted and photographed as part of the 1998 Leonid Meteor Shower, and the lab test mentioned earlier suggest they may have been played a significant part in explaining the streak of New Mexico’s green fireball sightings in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The question of what the green fireballs actually were—and are, for people still sometimes report seeing them—has been answered to the satisfaction of most, though it will likely never be to the satisfaction of everyone. That fiery green question mark that scorched across the desert sky has burned and faded, and now there is only the night. For some, that night still seethes with a fiery, chartreuse mystery. For the rest, it holds the emptiness of the desert, the shadows of a nocturnal realm and, somewhere in the dark-soaked sand, broken pieces of another world.

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Don't miss the exciting sneak preview of Roswell, John LeMay's imminent and much-awaited first book; you can see it now as part of My Strange New Mexico: Roswell Edition.