'I watched UFO crash to ground - I still have a piece of the wreck to prove it'
Jose Padilla, who grew up in New Mexico, says he was just nine years old when he discovered an "avocado-shaped" alien craft with a childhood friend.
A Los Angeles man insists he saw aliens fleeing from a UFO after it crashed into a desert in New Mexico and even took a piece of the mystery craft as proof of the encounter.
Jose Padilla grew up in San Antonio, and was just nine years old when he claims to have discovered the "avocado-shaped" alien craft there with a childhood friend.
According to his account, the two boys were horse riding 13 miles from the Trinity nuclear test site, where the first nuclear bomb was detonated by the US in 1945.
It was in that year that the suposed encounter took place, and at first Padilla assumed the sound that accompanied the "crash" was a bomb test.
"I told my friend, 'it must be another test from the bomb' and he said, 'no, it's not a bomb, look at the smoke coming out of the ground,'' Padilla told CBS News Los Angeles.
He claims when they investigated what had caused the sound at his father's ranch, smoke seemed to be coming from a crashed aircraft. Mr Padilla said three extraterrestrials then emerged from it and started "sashaying and running in circles."
But Mr Padilla says he wasn't scared and believed the creatures "needed help".
He claims the military cleaned up the wreckage over the next ten days and warned the boys to stay away, but they watched on from a nearby ridge hidden behind cactuses.
Mr Padilla says he and friends of his took their chance when the soldiers were on a break and entered the aircraft. The craft was empty and he decided to remove a small "dial" from the wall of it, and hide it in his family's garage.
The odd artefact was examined by Frontier Analysis, a chemical testing lab based in Ohio, in 2015 who said in their report that it was made of aluminum mixed with silicon and copper, a common mix in engine parts, and that the isotopic ratios were terrestrial.
But the firm added that they could rule out the the metals having an extraterrestrial source, CBS News Los Angeles reports.
DON'T MISS:
'Declassified US Government messages' suggest 'crashed UFO recovered and hidden' [REPORT]
UK MoD sent two intelligence officials to classified Pentagon UFO summit [INSIGHT]
Man baffled after spotting 'huge white cube' rotating in sky above him [LATEST]
To this day Mr Padilla insists that, "No one knows what it is." In the intervening years, he moved to Rowland Heights, an unincorporated area of Los Angeles, California, where he raised a family, but clung on to the mysterious souvenir.
Investigative journalist and UFO researcher Paola Harris interviewed him and the friend who also claims to have witnessed the alien craft back in 2012.
It came as she was investigating a claim put forward by the son of World War II army pilot William Brophy who said one of his dad's last missions was to fly over the area where the crash is said to have taken place.
Harris told the outlet that during on of these flights, Mr Brophy's father had seen two young boys on horseback, who she believes was a young Mr Padilla and his friend.
