This strange land is made stranger by the disquieting presence of the unexplained.

In August 1957, less than twenty kilometers from the town of Quilino, Province of Cordoba, a serviceman with the Argentinean Air Force heard a very loud and acute buzzing sound. He got out of his tent to take a look and was startled to see a disk-shaped object coming in for a landing, causing a whirlwind that shook surrounding trees and grass. Frightened, the airman reached for his sidearm but was unable to draw it. "It appeared to be welded to its holster," he would later say. A voice issued from the unknown craft, assuaging his fear and informing him "interplanetary visitors already had a base in the region of Salta" and would soon make their presence known all over the world.

Readers of Coral Lorenzen's 1960s books on the UFO phenomenon were exposed to the case histories that were being collected in these early, memorable years. Cities like Salta became known to readers not just for "flying saucer" sightings, but for mysterious disappearances as well, much like the small towns of La Pampa would become familiar names to readers of the '90s and the '00s, especially those interested in cattle mutilations. Gordon Creighton's Flying Saucer Review presented even more detailed accounts of high strangeness in Argentina: giant multi-eyed entities emerging from glowing saucers, a family trapped in their farmhouse by six heat-ray emitting UFOs, the heroic escape of truck driver Eugenio Douglass from twelve-foot tall helmeted aliens--matching their heat-rays with bullets--and the abduction of Dionisio Llanca, with its startling posthypnotic command implanted by the UFO entities. Argentinean investigators, while little-known in the United States, have distinguished themselves for their scholarship in Latin American ufology: Guillermo Roncoroni, for instance, conducted the first statistical analysis of the myriad cases that have made Argentina famous, thus compiling ARGENCAT, which aided in proving that the BAVIC line indeed had as much influence over Argentina as it did in Spain or France. He went on to publish UFO Express, which was considered for years to be one of the most important journals available on the subject in Spanish.

When Objects Fall From The Sky

Reports on UFO crashes make two demands from the reader, the first being a belief in extraterrestrials engaged in visiting Sol 3 for reasons that we cannot possibly imagine, and the other being that their technology is vulnerable to our own. Both beliefs must be in abundance, to judge by public interest in the Roswell Incident. Perhaps there's room at the table for believing in another, even more spectacular affair: the 1995 crash near Metán.

Click on the 'NEXT' arrow for page 2

Share this article with: