A promotional poster for the 1968 science-fiction comedy film "Che Ovni". Photo courtesy of inexplicata.blogspot.com

Scott Corrales - Editor's Note: The Vidal Case was deliberately excluded from the INEXPLICATA monograph on the subject of UFOs in the 1960s in South America and Spain due to its complexity. This article by our good friend and contributing editor, Guillermo Gimenez, will give readers the most complete approach to one of South America's most fascinating and controversial cases.

The story concerning the teleportation of a car from Chascomus, Province of Buenos Aires, to Mexico in 1968, became world famous and it remains today an undisputed classic of Argentinean ufology. Furthermore, it was a the catalyst for the tremendous Argentinean UFO wave of 1968, when all newspapers took to publishing UFO accounts, including older cases that had never appeared in the press.

Chascomus is halfway between Buenos Aires and Necochea, the beach front city that is the home of Guillermo Gimenez, the author of the following article. There can be no doubt that explaining this case was always among his goals, but the alleged witnesses were always impossible to locate and the rumor mill would kick up people who claimed having known them or were otherwise relatives of the Vidal family. When researchers endeavored to delve into the subject, they would find that these were all false leads. The tip of the iceberg was found by Alejandro Chionetti in the 1980s and it subsequently it was his namesake, Alejandro Agostinelli, who managed to solve a plot that involves the presence of well-known figures from the [Argentinean] entertainment industry, such as Pipo Mancera, Anibal Uset, el Muneco Mateyko and Tito Jacobson, an entertainment journalist.

Date: May 1968

Place: Chascomus, Prov. of Buenos Aires, Argentina

Summary: A dense fog enveloped a Peugeot 403 belonging to the Vidal couple. The next thing they remembered was finding themselves on a rural road in Mexico, some 6,400 kilometers away, 48 hours later and still aboard their car.

There have been countless incidents within the Argentinean UFO case histories that have called attention at the domestic and international level alike due to the characteristics of the events. One of them is without a doubt the Vidal Case, which occurred in May 1968 when a family surnamed Vidal drove along Buenos Aires Route No.2 from the town of Chascomus to Maipu, blacking out upon driving into a fog bank and awakening 58 hours later in the vicinity of Mexico City, in North America.

This incident received global attention and weeks later a "cloak of silence" fell over the events. Neither journalists nor researchers could secure access to the main protagonists, and those upon whom the mantle of silence fell were no longer inclined to speak. Conjectures and suppositions would surround the event.

The Vidal Case would remain among one of Argentina's spectacular cases of teleportation or teletransportation, a term employed in Ufology to describe cases involving persons and/or objects (in this case the vehicle and its occupants) when they are transferred in a short space of time through means unknown from one place to another, disregarding the space-time barrier. Here, from Argentina in South America to Mexico in North America.

The incident

Numerous Argentinean newspapers took note of the story. La Razon, the Buenos Aires daily newspaper published the information under the headline "Que es esto? (What is this?) - others did the same, such as La Nacion (which did not mention the fog bank) and La Manana (the only one to report the presence of UFOs in this case), among many others.

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