Daniel Fry / White Sands contact

Daniel Fry placed his White Sands encounter on the night of July 4 while he was working in New Mexico. The date is not stable across his retellings: the original published narrative says 1950, while later versions moved it to 1949. According to Fry, he had missed transportation into Las Cruces for the Independence Day celebration and walked alone into the desert outside the White Sands proving grounds. There were no independent witnesses to what followed. Fry wrote that a dark object approached slowly and silently, settling about seventy feet away. At close range he described it as an oblate spheroid roughly thirty feet wide and sixteen feet high—more like an inverted bowl over a shallow dish than a conventional flat saucer. Its surface appeared polished silver with a faint violet iridescence, without obvious seams or an entrance. His curiosity overcame his caution, and he walked around the object examining it. When Fry attempted to touch the hull, a voice allegedly warned him away. The speaker later identified himself as A-Lan, an operator communicating from a much larger craft while remotely controlling the vehicle on the ground. Fry said an opening appeared and he was invited inside. The compartment had seats but no ordinary windows. Once the craft began moving, a deep-violet projection or ‘viewing beam’ made part of the wall appear transparent. The account then became a journey narrative. A-Lan offered to take Fry to New York City and back in about thirty minutes. Fry described seeing the city’s nighttime light pattern from high altitude while the voice explained propulsion, inertia, gravity, and the history and social problems of the alleged visitors. He claimed that the craft returned him safely to the same New Mexico desert before the night was over. Fry did not publish the story until 1954, when The White Sands Incident presented it as the beginning of continuing communication with A-Lan. The delayed disclosure, solitary witness, extraordinary claimed speed, and later change of year remain central evidentiary problems. The Atlas therefore records the 1950 date as the date printed in the original account while explicitly preserving the later 1949 revision. The portrait depicts the reported event, but neither the flight nor A-Lan’s identity is treated as independently established.