Tularosa Basin / Trinity Site
33°41′N, 106°28′W
Otero, Doña Ana, Sierra, and Socorro Counties, south-central New Mexico — closed basin between the Sacramento and San Andres mountains
[from the public record]
33.6833, -106.4667 · view on OpenStreetMap →
What's documented
The Tularosa Basin is a closed (endorheic) desert basin in south-central New Mexico, bounded by the San Andres Mountains to the west and the Sacramento Mountains to the east. It contains the White Sands Missile Range (the largest U.S. military installation by area, ~9,335 km²) and within it the Trinity Site, where the first nuclear weapon was detonated on 16 July 1945. Holloman Air Force Base, the White Sands National Park, and the McGregor Range artillery training area occupy additional regions of the basin. Within the basin in 1947, two months after the Roswell Army Air Field 'flying disc' press release, then-12-year-old Jose Padilla and seven-year-old Reme Baca later reported witnessing a crash and recovery on the Padilla family ranch near San Antonio, NM — the so-called 'Trinity' or 'San Antonio' 1945 crash claim, popularized in Jacques Vallée and Paola Harris, *Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret* (Documatica, 2021). Vallée's investigation includes physical-trace evidence from the site. The claim has not been confirmed by the U.S. military and is contested in parts of the research community; it is included as a documented research claim rather than as established fact.