It’s likely a long shot that he’ll respond to this question, but noted UFO skeptic Jim Oberg does on occasion take a look at this forum. I would find it interesting to hear his opinion, as a space technology historian and former NASA engineer, on the specific question of whether a craft resembling the look and capabilities of the Socorro object would have existed in April 1964, and even if it did whether it would have been allowed to go winging its way across open public desert unaccompanied and unmonitored.
I suspect that no one here is saying the Socorro object was a test of the actual LM (which could not function in the earth’s gravity and atmosphere, and was not completed until over 3 years later) or that it was an LLRV/LLTV Lunar Lander Training Vehicle (which was not designed to fly any significant distance horizontally, did not carry sufficient fuel for the Socorro flight, would never have been allowed to fly off an AFB, was never flown without being observed by monitoring team, was not capable of flying silently, and did not make its first test flight until 6 months after Socorro).
If in April 1964 we had something as advanced as the Socorro object, it has never made sense to me that they would have allowed the astronauts in the late 1960s to be risking their lives in something as comparatively primitive, crude and dangerous as the Lunar Landing Training Vehicles (of the five built, three crashed)
It would be interesting for someone with the background and expertise on our technology of Jim Oberg to provide their opinion on what we were capable of having in April 1964, and whether that would had been allowed to go flying loose unaccompanied across the countryside. The 1968 LLRV crash that almost killed Neil Armstrong.
