The government’s UFO office has been ordered to re-investigate an alleged 1945 crash of a strange object in New Mexico – dubbed the ‘Roswell before Roswell’.

A new military spending bill signed into law by President Biden last week was specifically amended to incorporate the intriguing case into a historic review of UFO incidents to be conducted by the Department of Defense.

Jaques Vallée, a former contractor for the government’s UFO office and the co-author of a book on the 1945 case, gave an exclusive interview to DailyMail.com about it.

Vallée, a renowned scientist and UFO investigator, was the inspiration for the French scientist character in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, played by François Truffaut.

In his interview, he described the alleged August 1945 crash of an avocado-shaped ‘craft’ on the edge of the atomic bomb testing site near San Antonio, New Mexico – about 100 miles from the infamous Roswell crash two years later.

The National Defense Authorization Act, which passed Congress this month, includes a section requiring the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to review and prepare a report on all previous government investigations of UFOs dating back to 1945.

The bill’s text previously only went back to 1947, but a late amendment changed it to ’45.

‘I was not involved in the drafting of the legislation, but several of my DC friends were, and they got the date of the investigation pushed back to 1945,’ Vallée told DailyMail.com.

‘Several of the Congressmen involved have the book that Paola Harris and I wrote about our research at [the alleged crash site called] Trinity.’

Vallée and Italian UFO journalist Harris’s 2021 book, Trinity: the Best-Kept Secret, was re-released this year with new information, and is mainly based around testimony of three witnesses: a B-52 bomber pilot, and two young sons of a rancher on whose land the UFO supposedly crashed.

The two researchers interviewed the family of Lt. Col William Brothy, who said he revealed in the years after the incident that he was sent out to survey the crash site on August 16, 1945.

‘The first witness was a bomber pilot who was coming in for landing at Alamogordo [the neighboring airbase],’ Vallée told DailyMail.com. ‘He was asked by the controllers to look at a communication tower that had lost signal.

‘He told the story to his family. His son gave us the recollection of what his father had described.

‘Flying over, he saw the tower was bent, as if it had been hit by something very hard. And then he saw in the vegetation some distance away a large egg-shaped object. And there were two little kids that he called little Indians, on their horses next to the object.’

Vallée says those two kids were Jose Padilla, 9, and Reme Baca, 7.

Padilla, now 86, became a Highway Patrol officer for 32 years, and Baca, who died in 2013, became a US Marine and later a senior staffer for Washington Governor Dixy Lee Ray.

They kept their story secret for more than 50 years, at last deciding to come forward in 2003 in an interview with a journalist from their hometown.

Interviews with Vallée and Harris decades after the crash saw them describe stumbling across the wreckage of a craft while looking for a lost cow on Padilla’s father’s ranch by the Rio Grande on August 16, 1945.

‘We heard this sound and the ground shook,’ Baca said in one interview. ‘We saw smoke coming from maybe a couple of canyons down… We worked our way down the ridge.

‘There was a gouge in the earth as long as a football field, and a circular object at the end of it… It was the color of the old pot my mother was always trying to shine up, a dull metallic color.’

He said he could feel the heat from the crash ‘through the soles of your shoes’. Baca said he picked up a piece of foil-like metal that sprung back to its original shape when folded.

‘Strange-looking creatures were moving around inside,’ he added. ‘They looked under stress. They moved fast, as if they were able to will themselves from one position to another in an instant. They were shadowy and expressionless, but definitely living beings.

‘They had big bulgy eyes. Four foot tall, and they were real thin, needle-thin arms… Their heads looked like a campamocha [praying mantis].

‘They seemed like us – children, not dangerous. But we were scared and exhausted.

The boys fled home on their horses and told Padilla’s father what they had seen. Faustino Padillo told them it probably belonged to the Army and to ignore it. But they persuaded him to check out the site two days later with state policeman Eddie Apodaca.

Baca and Padillo said the ‘craft’ was still there, but the debris was gone, the object covered with dirt, and the ground appeared to have been raked.

The next day an Army sergeant named Avila, showed up at the ranch, asking Faustino if they could cut out his fence, put in a gate and grade a road to the crash site for a tractor-trailer, Baca said.

‘We have one of our experimental weather balloons that inadvertently fell on your property,’ Baca remembered the sergeant saying.

Over the following week, the two boys snuck out to the site and used binoculars to spy on a unit of Army officers who stood guard, loaded the 25 by 14 foot, roughly five ton ‘avocado-shaped’ object onto a flatbed truck, and covered it with blue tarpaulins, they told Harris.

There was no sign of the creatures they claimed they saw earlier.

On the last day, the boys plucked up the courage to sneak up and peek under the tarp while the young, bored soldiers were at lunch.

‘Jose said, “I think they’re going to take it tonight.” I said, “Yeah, how about a souvenir?”‘ Baca told Harris.

‘Jose pulls part of the tarp off, exposing the gash on the side of the craft, while I hold the tarp open. Jose climbs into the gash.’

They described ‘ridges’ inside every few feet, ‘silvery colored strands’ like angel hair decorations, and a 2.5ft metal panel attached to the rear wall with pins.

‘No seats or anything,’ Baca said. ‘It must have been cleaned out, or maybe there weren’t any. Couldn’t see any instruments, like gauges, clocks, steering wheel, brake pedals, nothing like that.’

The plucky kids grabbed a crowbar from the tractor, used it to rip the large panel off the wall, and scurried off.

They said they hid the metal under the floorboards of a nearby building, and kept quiet about the case, fearing retribution by the Army against their families – especially after officers came to search Faustino’s house.

Baca and Padilla eventually moved away and lost contact until 2002, when Baca reconnected with his old friend via a genealogy search. It was then they decided to tell their story.

In 2015, Vallée had a spectroscopy analysis performed on the metal panel they said they recovered from the wreckage. It points to a mundane, man-made origin.

The metal is ‘aluminum primarily alloyed to copper and silicon’ the report by Frontier Analysis said, a mix often used for ‘engine crankcases, gas and oil tanks, engine oil pans, typewriter frames, and engine parts.’ The isotopic ratios for the metals in the panel are within the range found on Earth.

The foil-like metal that Baca claimed he picked up has been lost – after he allegedly used it to fix a leaking pipe on the ranch as a boy.

While other researchers have abandoned the case due to the lack of results and paper trail, Vallée says it did not diminish the mystery for him.

‘We have yet to ask what an ordinary, human fragment of some low-tech aluminum gadget was doing aboard a fantastic craft dropping from the sky in the middle of a storm, shattering the Marconi Tower of the White Sands Missile Range as its crew of diminutive insectoids skidded weirdly through the cabin,’ he wrote in his book.

‘You can’t nail an aluminum bracket to the interior wall of a weather balloon, no matter how sophisticated. Every nine-year-old kid in New Mexico knows that.’

Vallée, who worked as a contractor for a previous reincarnation of the government’s UFO office, the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, told DailyMail.com he is hopeful that a review of the Trinity alleged crash by the new UFO office will turn up further evidence.

‘It will re-open the research on a more historically accurate and significant time scale,’ he said.

And the data scientist believes he knows where AARO investigators should go looking: the Department of Energy.

‘Reme Baca assisted Dixy Lee Ray in winning the election as governor of Washington in 1976. She had been chair of the Atomic Energy Commission [1973 to 1975],’ he said.

‘She showed Reme when he was helping her in the campaign, a record of the recovery of the craft. It was secret, she did not leave it with him. But she indicated that there was a record in the files of the Atomic Energy Commission.’

Intriguingly, the new defense budget legislation signed into law last week also includes a whistleblower program for reporting ‘deep black’ UFO programs to Congress.

An amendment to the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) gives protections to any whistleblowers coming forward to congress in classified briefings to disclose any previously hidden programs on ‘unidentified anomalous phenomena’ involving ‘material retrieval, material analysis’ and even ‘reverse engineering’ and ‘developmental or operational testing’.

Former UFO office director Lue Elizondo told DailyMail.com: ‘This language is truly revolutionary in terms of ensuring the American people can finally get to the bottom of a decades-old mystery.’

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Christopher Mellon, added that the new laws mean AARO is no longer a ‘toothless organization, and now has ‘personnel, authority, resources and strong support from Congress.’

Another NDAA amendment requires the UFO office to compile ‘a written report detailing the historical record of the United States Government relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena’ going back to January 1 1945.

The review will include ‘successful or unsuccessful efforts to identify and track unidentified anomalous phenomena’, and ‘any efforts to obfuscate, manipulate public opinion, hide, or otherwise provide incorrect unclassified or classified information.’