Argentine Ufology Hits Different: Pioneers and Witnesses of UFO Cases

Argentina, besides having a rich catalog of events associated with UFOs, boasts a long ufological tradition. This means that not only do we have many sighting cases that sparked long-running controversies, but we are also prolific in the investigation of the UFO phenomenon as a human experience.

After a brief but intense investigation, I discovered that the modern Argentine ufological tradition has distanced itself from American ufology, which paranoidly and obsessively dedicates itself to dismantling the conspiracy between CIA agents and extraterrestrial beings, to offer a phenomenological perspective that has every chance of rescuing ufology from the realm of pseudoscience.

The American narrative and conspiracy theories

It is hard to talk about ufology without thinking of holograms of big-headed aliens, flying saucers floating in the middle of the desert, and special agents collecting evidence. It is a natural response to decades of exposure to the American narrative about the UFO phenomenon, which combines scientific-sounding discourse with new age fantasies, injected into the collective imagination in a techno-kitsch, ultra-marketable pastiche.

Representations of celestial messengers coming on peace missions to Earth coexist without conflict alongside theories about intergalactic civilizations approaching our planet with cutting-edge technology to set up bases on the ocean floor, control our behavior, and eventually dominate us. It is an aesthetic dispute within a field where nobody has proof but nobody doubts that extraterrestrials exist, are smarter than us, and are definitely in cahoots with the CIA. The extremes always converge in the same place: conspiracy theories.

This paranoid-transcendental approach made debunking the axis of ufology, whether from the State to discredit the testimonies of those who had experiences with UFOs (see the AARO report), or from independent organizations that, on the contrary, seek to dismantle the bureaucratic web hiding the "real" data. And this is no small thing, because even in those cases where the research methodologies respect the rules of modern science, the lore of ufology remains shaped by the cultural conditioning of Americans who live at odds with the sensible world and its contradictions.

Argentine ufology: between empiricism, mysticism, and phenomenology

Fortunately, Argentines do not hold our intelligence agencies in such high regard, and we developed a less conspiracy-prone ufological tradition, nourished by essays, magazines, and authors dedicated to investigating the UFO phenomenon that, from my perspective, can be organized into three major currents.

The first group consists of researchers who take a technical-scientific perspective, for whom ufology's mission is to objectively determine what happened each time a sighting is reported and to document as precisely as possible those events that cannot be explained. Its leading figures include Roberto Banchs, Carlos Ferguson, and Luis Burgos, along with magazines such as OVNI, un desafio a la ciencia, directed by Oscar Galindez (1974 and 1976); UFO Press, published by the national franchise of Hynek's CUFOS (1976 and 1987), and Vision OVNI, created in 1991 by Silvia Perez Simondini, continued today by her daughter Andrea, who also directs CEFORA, the Commission for the Study of the UFO Phenomenon in Argentina.

The second current is a sort of new age with telluric undertones, which shifts the physical-material aspect away from the center of ufology to focus on the UFO phenomenon from a symbolic, cultural, and my(s)tical perspective, where the possibility of experiencing other levels of reality emerges, along with discovering messages, warnings, and energies coming from other galaxies to teach us something. Led by celebrities like Pedro Romaniuk and Fabio Zerpa, this current spread mainly through the magazine Cuarta Dimension (1974-1990) but also resonates in authors like Antonio Las Heras, Raul Avellaneda, and Diego Viegas, who are more influenced by Carl Jung and his offshoots in disciplines like psychosynthesis, parapsychology, and transpersonal anthropology.

Finally, the current I want to dig deeper into synthesizes, Hegelianly, the other two, creating a sort of third position within ufology that, in my view, is a real find.

Alternativa OVNI is a magazine that was published irregularly between 2014 and 2017, but which has the distinction of having brought together different voices from the national ufology scene, who individually fit into the currents described above but who collectively end up assembling a rather promising direction for ufological research. As a collective project, and although it did not have a declared editorial director, the magazine fostered the emergence of an integrative perspective within the field, one that allows us to think of ufology as a discipline, beyond the personal beliefs or convictions of the researcher.

In fact, its opening pages contain the following manifesto:

"The UFO Researcher DOES NOT BELIEVE, they INVESTIGATE. And to investigate, they must distance themselves from their own prejudices that cloud their work.
There is only one kind of UFO researcher, not two. Field and 'desk' research are complementary.
We do not investigate UFOs, but rather testimonies of people who claim to have seen UFOs.
Unidentified flying objects are nothing more than UFOs, without extra add-ons.
It is impossible to directly access the phenomenon in order to investigate it, given its fleeting nature.
Without testimonies there are no UFOs. Therefore, a trace, or any other manifestation in which a potential witness is not present, does not necessarily point us to the phenomenon itself."
Alternativa OVNI, October 2014.-

What they are proposing is a methodological framework that positions ufological research closer to the human sciences than to the hard sciences, shifting away from the problem of whether extraterrestrial beings or UFOs exist or not, to place at the center the only possible object of investigation: the subjective experience and its conditions. Something akin to Kantian transcendental phenomenology -- the kind Juan likes -- which distinguishes the thing in itself (in this case UFOs, USOs, and objective extraterrestrials, which may or may not exist) from the phenomenon, which is nothing more and nothing less than the way something appears in consciousness, curiously not to evaluate whether they match or not, but to draw conclusions about that remainder of meaning and determination that comes from the subject. Yes, Kant was a bit Deleuzian.

Translated into concrete ufological research, this approach would mean studying witness testimonies meticulously, looking for common patterns in the accounts, without the pretension of finding in them a truth that transcends the opacity of subjective representation. In this context, the testimony works on its own, independent of its truth-value in relation to the thing-in-itself to which it ghostly refers, expressing a truth about the conditions of the human experience of the unknown.

The joy of the unresolved

In UFO or USO sightings, a positive case is one in which it is not possible to establish a known cause that explains the event. In other words, if the authorities in charge of investigating reported cases -- in Argentina, the Aerospace Identification Center -- fail to determine whether what the witness experienced was, in fact, a plane, a star, a satellite, a fireworks show, or one of those dreadful fire lanterns people buy for New Year's, then for ufology it is plausible that we are dealing with an event of extraterrestrial origin. That is why unresolved cases are the juiciest in this field, because they are basically those in which it has not been possible to refute that the event is, as Antonio Las Heras would say, uncanny.

In Argentina, as in most of the world, testimonies come mainly from two types of profiles: people trained in observing the sky and the sea, such as military personnel, pilots, or sailors, and people who live in rural areas, without formal training but accustomed to observing what happens in the natural environment.

In the first group we find Frondizi's USOs, detected intermittently between 1958 and 1960 by the Navy in the Golfo Nuevo area, Chubut, which ended with the deployment of an operation involving ships, planes, and depth charges aimed at destroying them -- which, obviously, failed.

There are also the UFO sightings at Deception Island in Antarctica in 1965, witnessed by Lieutenant Daniel Perisse, which coincided with declarations from observers at Chile's Arturo Prat base, more than 100 km away, and also from members of the British scientific mission at Port Foster. The State Department report, moreover, indicated that "two variometers in operation registered, at the time of the sighting, disturbances to the magnetic field, recorded on the tape of said instruments."

Another emblematic case is that of pilot Jorge Polanco, from Aerolineas Argentinas, who in 1995 was followed for 17 minutes by a luminous object while preparing to land in Bariloche. This is perhaps the most striking of all, because the incident was confirmed by air traffic control and witnesses on the ground. "It was a disc about thirty meters in diameter that must have been about 50 meters from the plane. It accompanied me during the descent phase to the airport. My first reaction? 'What the hell is this, what the hell is this?!' But my crew didn't respond -- they were just crying out of fear."

On the other hand, among the cases involving civilians, there are three that are very well documented and attracted the attention of the entire international ufological community. In 1963, in Trancas, Tucuman, three women had a UFO parked at their ranch for 45 minutes. In their testimonies, they said they saw a hologram with multiple figures emerge and could make out five more craft over the train tracks, a bit farther from the house where they were. Additionally, one of them suffered burns on her face and body as a result of the impact of a sort of light beam fired by the nearest craft. According to an issue of the magazine OVNIS, un desafio a la ciencia from 1974, this was one of the most documented cases in history, at least up to that point, due to the quality of the testimonies, the marks on the grass, and the evidence collected at the site, among which they found residue from the craft composed of calcium in a nearly pure state.

Another highly spiced testimony is that of Carlos Diaz, a railway worker who in 1975 claimed to have been abducted in Bahia Blanca during the early hours and transported to Constitucion in 18 minutes, where a neighbor found him unconscious in his backyard. In his account, Carlos says that during his stay on the craft he was terrified and that the beings inside "levitated." He also recalled that every time he touched them he lost hair and it stuck to them, which is consistent with the clinical report done at the hospital after the event. Could they have come to solve the intergalactic baldness problem?

But my favorite case of this kind is that of Juan Perez, a gaucho from Venado Tuerto who, in 1978, when he was 12 years old, stumbled upon a flying saucer in his family's field and entered the craft. Juan's accounts are spectacular and can be seen in the documentary directed by Alan Stivelman, Witness of Another World, in which the protagonist tells of his experience and the marks it left on his life, which remain palpable 40 years after the event. A bonus? On the same day as Juan's encounter, two other residents of Venado Tuerto reported strange events involving a UFO.

There are a ton more cases I am not mentioning, but you can find them browsing the web or chatting with AI. I just wanted to leave you a little compilation for those who are tired of watching American UFO documentaries with mind-numbingly boring bureaucratic plots. Fortunately, Argentines assumed from the get-go that mystery is a thing of nature and not of institutions, an attitude some might consider naive, but which allowed us to develop a ufological tradition that is more fun and has a better shot at escaping accusations of pseudoscience, without the need to cynically renounce the latent irrationalism in the UFO phenomenon.