Alien Sightings and OVNI Culture in Arge

Alien Sightings and OVNI Culture in Argentina
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American

History
David M. K. Sheinin
Subject: History of Southern Spanish America, 1945–1991, Cultural History
Online Publication Date: Mar 2018 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.468
Summary and Keywords
During the Cold War, there were thousands of Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) sightings
in Argentina (in Spanish, Objeto volador no identificado or OVNI). The mainstream media
reported on many of them. In a field termed ufología, some events were explained
scientifically or somewhat scientifically; most were not. These sightings and their stories
lived on in a culture of thousands of OVNI aficionados and their literatures, frequently
spilling into larger popular cultures.
OVNI culture disrupts chronologies. It offers a picture of Cold War Argentina that breaks
with longstanding popular and academic chronologies that stress a dictatorship-versus-
democracy binary. That binary is real. However, OVNI culture superimposes an often-
neglected Cold War chronology on the mid- to late 20th century. OVNI stories and their
cultural consumption evolve and vary not with reference to violent Argentine political and
historical change, but in the context of a larger transnational Cold War culture in an
Argentine context. Hallmarks of OVNI culture in Argentina include the enormous
influence of U.S. popular culture, as well as references to apocalyptic nuclear weapons,
and unscientific notions of psychoses in explaining late-night sightings of spacecraft and
extraterrestrials.
Keywords: Unidentified Flying Object (UFO), Objeto volador no identificado (OVNI), ufología, Cold War, science
fiction, flying saucer, armed forces, Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica, film, psychology
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Cold War Cultures

Argentines don’t generally organize their past in a Cold War strategic or cultural
framework. During the Cold War and in the years after 1990, an unlikely consensus
emerged in Argentina and the United States casting Argentina’s post–World War II era as
anti-American. In the United States, that narrative was launched by the mid-1940s when
U.S. diplomatic antagonism toward the rapidly rising military officer Juan D. Perón began.
Perón served both as labor minister and vice president before the end of World War II.
After he was elected president of Argentina in 1946, many Americans wrongly tagged him
a Nazi sympathizer. Although U.S.-Argentine relations improved markedly by the end of
the decade, leading Washington to supply Buenos Aires with an experimental nuclear
reactor in 1958, the idea of Argentina as a haven for Nazis stuck. It was bolstered by the
Israeli capture of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960 and by low-level white noise in
American popular culture linking Argentina with ex-Nazis. (This was a recurring theme,
for example, in the 1960s Mel Brooks-Buck Henry television situation comedy, “Get
Smart!”).1
The United States was a more important object of political antagonism in Argentina than
Argentina was in the United States. Historians and others exaggerated the extent of
bilateral antagonisms in the late 1940s and wrongly insisted that relations between the
two countries were poor after 1950. The presidency of Cristina Fernández often made it
politically expedient for leading political leaders to remind Argentines of their supposedly
troubled relationship with the United States. Writers so commonly reasoned that
Argentina had consistently adopted strong anti-American foreign and economic policies
for most of its post-1945 history—without focusing on Argentina’s anti-Soviet Union
leanings—that U.S. enmity became a false truism regularly reproduced by intellectuals
and in the media. Perón’s tercera posición, a purportedly unique, nationalist diplomatic
position outside superpower orbits, fueled the idea of Argentina’s break with the United
States. For some observers, Argentina’s geographical and strategic distance from the
worst of Cold War violence, including the Guatemalan genocide, confirmed the idea that
Argentina was apart from Cold War power politics and cultural influences.2
According to a corresponding story, the Cold War reached Argentina but only within a
narrow framework.3 In that context, the Cold War in the underdeveloped world was
defined by the brutalization of subject peoples through U.S.-sponsored state terror. As
such, it touched Argentina only at times and peripherally. The most important case
occurred during the period of dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 when marginal Argentine
military and intelligence intervention in Central American conflicts took place. More
important still, Argentine scholarship and political culture stressed the severe breaks
from government to government—through peronismo, military rule, and postdictatorship
democracy. This approach has cast Cold War continuities as peripheral to Argentina’s
historical processes. It has also masked the extent to which the Cold War shaped
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Argentina in a manner that is often tied to U.S. cultural, political, and strategic
leadership.4
Some have noted the wide-ranging influence of the United States on Argentina’s cultural
Cold War in the Ford-Chevrolet rally car-racing rivalry, in the impact of playwrights Lillian
Hellman and Tennessee Williams, in U.S. child-rearing guru Dr. Benjamin Spock, in the
1960s sexual revolutions, and in cartoonist Robert Crumb’s work for the counterculture
magazine Fierro, among others.5 Yet no one has yet considered in this context the
historian Penny Von Eschen’s maxim that cultural exchange “was the commodity that
closely pursued the quintessential Cold War commodities, oil and uranium, along with
many others critical to America’s seductive abundance.”6 None of these or other
reference points highlight U.S. cultural influence as central to understanding Argentina
after 1945.
Argentina’s UFO story predates the Cold War and has unique components. But the period
when UFO activities were most intense coincides with the years of the Cold War. In its
contours and its evolution, the UFO narrative corresponds to the growing influence of
U.S. culture and, as such, reflects an important case of both U.S. influence in shaping an
Argentine cultural Cold War and of the Cold War period itself as a meaningful way to
understand post-1945 Argentina.
From Early Imaginings to Cold War Touchstone

Argentines first became aware of OVNIs and extraterrestrials two hundred years ago in
the larger contexts of the occult, spiritualism, and the literature of the fantastic, all of
which were tied to nation-building and how to achieve a modern society. Esteban
Echeverría and other distinguished fiction writers addressed mysteries of the spiritual
world. Key political figures, including Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Juan Bautista
Alberdi, invoked the occult and the mystical to rehearse political arguments. Alberdi
advocated European immigration to Argentina’s rural areas in his famous dictum, “to
govern is to populate,” and helped shaped the 1853 constitution through his political
essays. In his fictional Peregrinación de Luz del Día (1871), the character “la Verdad” (the
Truth) arrives mysteriously in Argentina as an alien, disguised as a woman called “Luz del
Día” (Light of Day). Her search for moral integrity is in vain.
Eduardo Holmberg launched the OVNI genre in Argentine fiction. In 1875, he published
Viaje maravilloso del señor Nic-Nac, the first Argentine novel on interplanetary travel.
Like other works in the fantastic literature genre, Viaje links the resolution of scientific
problems to spiritual, moral, and political themes. The protagonist, Nic-Nac, travels to
Mars where he comes across “Aureliana,” an allegorical Argentina. In an anticlerical jab,
Holmberg describes the city of Theopolis, home to religious fanatic humanoid Martians.
Like later OVNI aficionados, Holmberg saw himself as (and in this case was) a scientist.
He trained in medicine, zoology, and botany at the University of Buenos Aires. Beginning
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with Viaje a Patagonia (1872), in which he reported on an expedition to collect flora and
fauna specimens for the Museo Nacional de Buenos Aires, through the end of the century,
Holmberg wrote over a dozen books and tracts on natural history. At the Museo Nacional
and in other venues, in the company of the explorer Francisco “Perito” Moreno and the
paleontologist Florentino Ameghino, among others, Holmberg helped advance a scientific
revolution in Buenos Aires that was framed by Darwin’s theories and advances, but also
by “frontier” sciences that included early psychiatry, phrenology, and the “occult
sciences,” of which spiritualism was a central element.7 In Argentina and elsewhere,
medicine and the hard sciences would break firmly with the occult after World War I,
consigning practitioners of the occult to a fringe status. Those who explained UFOs,
however, clung to the overlap, asserting their often-doubtful scientific credentials
throughout the Cold War.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the linked cultures of science, the occult, and
politics were also evident in Europe and the United States, as reflected in Arthur Conan
Doyle’s notorious fascination with the occult and with spirits of the dead. In Argentina,
distinguished members of the late 19th-century literary movement “La Generación del
80” met to contemplate such matters. They included the prominent political essayists
Leopoldo Lugones and José Ingenieros, and Socialist Party leader Alfredo Palacios. Also
part of the group was the Danish immigrant Nicolás Kier who, in 1907, founded
Argentina’s most prolific publisher of spiritual, occult, and OVNI-related books. During
the Cold War, visitors to Editorial Kier’s bookstore in downtown Buenos Aires included
Queen Sofía of Spain and the Argentine film star Tita Merello. In 1967, Kier published the
first edition of Jorge Luis Borges’s El libro de los seres imaginarios. The publisher also
released important OVNI studies by Argentine and non-Argentine authors whose works
often reflected the fantastic imaginings of 19th-century writers, the occult, and the
seriousness of purpose evident in more mainstream fiction writers, like Borges, who saw
connections between their everyday lives and the spiritual world. At the same time, Kier’s
Cold War era library reflected new elements specific to the rapid expansion of popular
interest in OVNIs during the Cold War—to which OVNI writers appealed.8
The physicist José Álvarez López was keen on applying science to understanding the
purportedly inexplicable. In search of Atlantis, he developed arguments based on what he
claimed were modern paleontological, geophysical, and archaeological methods.9 In
Argentina, as elsewhere during the Cold War, the study of mysterious “intraterrestrials”—
humanoid and like beings living in deep, undiscovered cave networks or under the oceans
—emerged as an adjunct to the search for extraterrestrials. Like other “scientific”
interpreters of OVNIs and the occult, Álvarez López reached a larger and more
sympathetic popular audience than academic scientists. All the same, ufólogos and other
interpreters of the unexplained correctly saw themselves as shunned and unappreciated
by academic scientists. Álvarez López dedicated Reconstrucción de Atlántida (1978) to
Florentino Ameghino, the paleontologist whose discovery of prehistoric remains came to
be known as “Argentine Man.” Initially confirmed by experts as one of a small but
growing number of human ancestors that, in this case, once roamed the pampas, the
finding was hailed as a triumph of Argentine science. Among the many tributes that
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followed was a monumental bust of Ameghino carved into a rock wall in Mar del Plata.
Later, the discovery was discredited, though never as a fraud as Piltdown Man was. Many,
like Álvarez López, remembered Ameghino as a misunderstood hero of Argentine science,
which is how Argentine ufólogos tended to see themselves after 1945.10
The cover photograph of Reconstrucción de Atlántida (1978) touches on another

important backdrop to the Argentine beguilement with the occult during the Cold War. As
in the United States at the same time, the fascination with UFOs collided with popular
atomic fears and fascinations. The illustration depicts an Egyptian pyramid with the
familiar mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion in the background. Álvarez López
wondered whether an atomic explosion might at some point in the near future reduce
human civilization to an Atlantis-like underground or underwater existence. In another
Kier publication, La astrología sobre el fenómeno OVNI (1978), the astrologer Boris
Cristoff raised the specter of nuclear ruin by suggesting that recent OVNI sightings
signaled a massive atomic disaster for 1983. In a reprise of a longstanding association
cited by ufologists in the United States, Cristoff explained the first foo fighter sightings as
being mysteriously connected to the first atomic explosions. He also argued that
extensive flooding in Uruguay had been caused by a nuclear explosion, and he claimed
that the human immunodeficiency virus was a mythical invention of Big Pharma.11
Kier was far from the only publisher of OVNI-related material. In 1988, the largest
publishing house in Argentina, Planeta, brought out Los hombres de negro y los OVNI
(originally published in 1978) and in 1990, El reino subterraneo, both by Fabio Zerpa.
During the Cold War, Zerpa became the foremost Argentine interpreter of UFOs. In 1966,
he launched one of several long-running popular radio shows on the subject, followed
soon after by an equally well-liked television series, “Más allá de la cuarta dimension.”
Tens of thousands of copies of Zerpa’s magazine Cuarta Dimensión sold in kiosks in cities
around the country, while Argentines bought thousands of books in the “Cuarta
Dimensión” series edited by Zerpa for the Cielosur publishing house. Zerpa published not
only his own works, but also those of other Argentines, like Gustavo Mário Fernández,
and foreign authorities, including James MacDonald.
As they did in science fiction and other genres in the United States, atomic fears and
extraterrestrials came together in film and print. The most famous of these included
Héctor Germán Oesterheld’s postapocalyptic graphic novel El Eternauta, first serialized
in the magazine Hora Cero Semanal from 1957 to 1959, and filmmaker Emilio Vieyra’s
Extraña Invasión (1965) and Placer Sangriento (1967).
Cold War Stories

On July 3, 1965, at 7:40 p.m., a naval meteorologist stationed at Argentina’s Base
Decepción in Antarctica spotted a strange sight in the sky. An Argentine Navy
communication would later describe the object as a “lenticular mass”—that is to say, a
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body with two concave, connected shells. In addition to other Argentines on the base,
personnel from British Base “B” and Chilean Air Base Pedro Aguirre Cerdá also identified
what the media would call a flying saucer. The journalist Guillermo dos Santos Coelho
described what followed in Argentina over the next three months as an agitated
“collective psychosis.” The photographer Jorge Hugo Stanich took pictures—but they
didn’t come out. Scientists reported strange reading shifts in their geomagnetic
instruments. Testimonies followed from Mendoza to Chaco to Mar del Plata. Those in the
stands on August 1 at the Hipódromo de Palermo racetrack heard an announcement that
the powerful binoculars normally trained on the horses had been shifted to the night sky,
just in case. For weeks, Argentines reported hundreds of new sightings.12
On October 28, 1973, at 1:15 a.m., Dionisio Llanca was changing his tire on a road
outside Bahía Blanca. He noticed an intense yellow light about 2 kilometers away. The
light came up behind him, above the trees. When he tried to stand to look toward the now
bluish, brilliant light, he found he didn’t have the strength to move. He then saw a large
disc above the tree line. Three humanoid figures stood behind him. Llanca would later
describe the extraterrestrials as “Nordic”—two men, and a woman with long blonde hair.
They spoke to one another in a language Llanca didn’t recognize—the words sounded like
a radio improperly tuned. Llanca blacked out. He woke up several hours later about 10
km from where he had had his close encounter. He remembered nothing of these events.
On November 5, Llanca was placed under hypnosis. In this state, he remembered having
been taken onto the spaceship. At one stage, the woman humanoid had made an incision
on his head, then struck him by accident, causing a bruise.13
On June 14, 1980, at 7:00 p.m., from a runway at the Jorge Newberry Airport (Buenos
Aires) an Austral Airlines pilot asked the tower for permission to take off. “Please hold for
a few moments,” came the reply from the tower. “I see a flying saucer to the northeast.
Hold position.” The pilot held. “Can you see the phenomenon?” the tower asked. “Yes,”
the pilot replied. “I’ll hold position until the object disappears.” Widely reported in the
mainstream media, Argentines saw the OVNI at 7:06 p.m. in Corrientes, as well as in
Rosario, Córdoba, and Resistencia. By 7:11 p.m., it was gone. One pilot who didn’t believe
in OVNIs told the popular magazine Gente that there had to be a reasonable explanation
for what people had seen. “But I have to say,” he went on, “I haven’t found one.”14
These three UFO stories deviate from the more cerebral tradition of ufología represented
in Kier and other publications targeted at OVNI aficionados, though the latter drew on
these stories in constructing larger arguments to explain the phenomenon of OVNIs. In a
departure from how the public followed UFOs in other countries—where a subculture of
fans remained largely apart from the mainstream—as they did hundreds of other
sightings, these three stories crossed into the media mainstream and into broader
international Cold War cultures. On October 4, 1976, for example, the widely read
newspaper La Razón revealed in a front-page story that one night in 1944, the U.S. armed
forces shot 20,000 rounds of antiaircraft fire at UFOs over Los Angeles. More striking
than the story as the newspaper’s lead (and an important error—the infamous “Battle of
Los Angeles” took place in 1942 according to American specialists) was the
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pseudoscientific rationale for the information. This included the unfounded assertion that
NASA’s Apollo XI rocket had proved the existence of OVNIs with photographic evidence.
During the Cold War, La Razón and other mainstream newspapers published dozens of
OVNI-related front-page headlines.15
In 1947, there were 11 UFO sightings in Argentina. The number increased to 14 in 1950,
24 in 1954, 71 in 1962, and 127 in 1968. By and large, through the early 1970s, sightings
by province corresponded roughly to population size, with 240 in Buenos Aires, 54 in
Córdoba, 54 in the federal capital, 22 in Tucumán, and 3 in Formosa. The first recorded
OVNI landing in Argentina came on February 20, 1949, in a remote region of southern
Chubut province. Edmundo C. Sánchez, a member of the Gendarmería, was guarding a
military base at the time when he saw the UFO land. Like many other sightings, this one
evokes the question of Argentine national security and frontiers during the Cold War
period, as did the unusually large numbers of sightings over Antarctica.16 A July 3, 1965,
Antarctica sighting prompted a statement in the Boletín Informativo de la Secretaría de la
Marina Argentina (a publication of the Argentine Navy) on July 7, 1965 (No. 172)
confirming that Lieutenant Coronel Daniel Perissé had reported spotting UFOs a few days
earlier. According to the ufólogo Antonio Las Heras, a military cover-up followed to
conceal evidence in this and other cases of UFOS.17 Las Heras reproduced a central
narrative of UFO followers in the United States. Using the most modern technologies, the
U.S. military had gathered some of the most crucial information on the first UFO
sightings. At the same time, the armed forces were responsible for hiding that same
information, as in the case of the 1941 Cape Giradeau, Missouri, UFO crash. UFO writer
Leonard H. Stringfield maintained that the U.S. military forced witnesses to keep quiet
after they had seen alien bodies at the crash site.18
OVNI specialists became convinced that another military cover-up took place after an
incident on July 19, 1968 in Olavarría, Buenos Aires province. Shortly before 2:00 a.m., a
large area where military exercises were being conducted was illuminated. Soldiers of
the Segundo Regimiento de Tiradores de Caballería Blindada armed with machine guns
approached the light in a Jeep. They spotted an oval flying object and quickly found
themselves facing three humanoids, each 2 meters 78 inches (unusually tall) in height, in
silver uniforms. The three figures advanced toward the soldiers. One soldier fired on the
extraterrestrials.
At that same moment, the three humanoids each lifted a hand, revealing a small
illuminated ball. The soldiers suddenly felt ill and tired. They were unable to use their
weapons. The beings returned to their spaceship and left earth without, it seems, having
been affected by machine gun fire. The armed forces refused to confirm the “attack.”
On August 31, 1968, two casino workers, Fernando Villegas and Juan Carlos Peccinetti,
were returning to their homes at 3:42 a.m. when they were surprised by five
anthropomorphic figures that transmitted messages to them, punctured their fingers, and
left strange marks on the door of their car. By midday, news of the encounter was being
reported on local radio and television stations in the city of Mendoza, where the
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encounter took place. Shortly after, people began to gather at the site of the apparition
and at the police station where information was being provided to the media. Transmitted
messages had included instructions not to be afraid, delivered in a persuasive voice that
was Spanish but with a strange accent. The monologue ended with the phrase,
“Mathematics is the universal language.” On the vehicle door, among the signs were the
Greek letters for alpha and pi. Alongside the spaceship was a circular screen, appearing
much like a giant television, 70 centimeters in diameter. At first, the screen projected a
waterfall, then the image of an atomic explosion. Villegas and Peccinetti maintained that
the humanoids held their hands and made three incisions each on their fingers. The
spaceship then departed with a sonic boom, and the two ran to a nearby military college.
They were then transferred to a police station where an investigation began immediately.
The forensic physician who assessed Villegas and Peccinetti reported a high level of
psychomotor activity and verified the three small punctures each had described on their
fingers. On testing, there was no alcohol or drugs found in the blood of either.19
That morning, technicians from the Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica (CNEA)
arrived, led by Francisco Muñiz. CNEA officials checked the car with a Geiger counter, as
they also checked the metal objects the men had in their pockets. Radioactive levels were
normal, as they were on the landing site. The CNEA was founded in 1950 with a federal
government mandate to conduct research into and develop policy on all commercial and
experimental aspects of the nuclear sciences. It was roughly equivalent to the Atomic
Energy Commission in the United States and the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited.
Unlike its two counterparts, CNEA quickly became well known to Argentines and a
source of pride in the modernizing state. CNEA never commented on the Villegas/
Peccinetti or any other OVNI investigation, nor did it report publicly on the results of its
findings. A CNEA presence likely signaled a concern that whatever may have fallen to
earth was, in fact, earthly and potentially radioactive. That said, like other aspects of
most OVNI reports that reached the media, stories were rehashed so many times that a
clear-cut historical record is hard to come by. Whatever objectives the CNEA
investigators may have had, it is certain that their presence in probing reports helped
legitimize OVNI stories in the public mind.
Several days later, a judicial investigation was launched into Villegas and Peccinetti’s
declarations. Judge Jorge Marzari Céspedes sought to determine their veracity, despite
the fact that no criminal complaint had been made. The police reminded an agitated
public that the Argentine penal code called for the imprisonment of anyone convicted of
creating public fear without grounds. According to OVNI writer Roberto Banchs, the
reasons for the police communication were clear. They wanted to intimidate those who
saw OVNIs, to put an end to reports of OVNIs in Mendoza, and to consign sightings to
hallucinations or to a range of psychopathologies under study at the University of
Colorado in the late 1960s. According to the Mendoza chief of police, Roberto G.
Hartkopf, the goal of officials was to avoid in Mendoza the panic caused by Orson
Welles’s infamous 1938 radio drama, “War of the Worlds.”20
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The details on the hundreds of OVNI observations ranged from the form of dress
extraterrestrials wore to their number (most often, three), to the nature of the light
emanating from the OVNI and resembled equivalent stories, witness accounts, and
fictionalized versions in print and on film from the United States. In Perico de San
Antonio, Jujuy, postal worker Dominiciano Díaz reported that on July 23, 1965, a bright
light in the sky had surprised him and burned his skin. The light descended to earth. In
its details, the story precisely replicated a 1954 event in the south of France well known
to Argentine OVNI aficionados and a second UFO sighting from New Berlin, New York, on
November 25, 1964.21 On March 18, 1950, Wilfredo H. Arévalo, the owner of a wool and
leather factory in the Lago Argentino tourist district saw two lenticular-shaped lights
moving quickly in a circular formation across the sky, descending toward the earth.
Arévalo thought at first that they were falling stars but soon noted that one of the two
remained in the sky while the other descended to earth. Still, Arévalo who was about 3
km from the landing, calculated on a reasonable explanation, possibly an airplane
accident. As he approached the light on the ground from about 160 m away, he realized
he was seeing something else: an unidentifiable form generating a circular, fluorescent
otherworldly light, giving off green-blue vapors. Inside what he now believed was an
OVNI, Arévalo saw four tall, slim “men” dressed in white robes. Their flying saucer
gyrated constantly and appeared to be made of aluminum with a glass circular cabin in
the center. Each of the details in Arévalo’s story reconstituted equivalent reports that at
the time were coming from the United States.
The Argentine release of Bert I. Gordon’s blockbuster film, The Cyclops, in 1958 launched
a late 1950s and early 1960s deluge of translated U.S. dime store novels and Hollywood
films with Martian themes in Argentina. This was followed, long after the 1875
publication of Eduardo Holmberg’s novel, by the first recorded Martian sightings in
Argentina. In early February 1965, witnesses described extraterrestrials that landed in
Torrent, Corrientes province, as “Martians.” News spread rapidly after a farm worker, in
the company of family and co-workers, spotted five bright lights over the horizon moving
rapidly toward them. The lights, they concluded, were Martians who had descended from
a spaceship. They were 2 meters in height, slim, and with only one eye. One of those who
witnessed the Martian arrival had a gun. The Martians, having apparently perceived
danger, surrounded the group and grabbed one of the men by the arms. They then let him
go, after which the man developed a strange inflammation on his skin. The Martians
retreated to their vessel and fled.
As in the United States, OVNI observers sometimes came up with alternative explanations
that were quickly dismissed by ufólogos, who were anxious to add data to their growing
compendium of sightings. On July 20, 1965, 18 kilometers from Buenos Aires, Ramón
Eduardo Pereyra was driving his delivery truck on a bread and milk route. He saw what
he called a glowing parachute descend from the sky. He stopped his truck and walked
about 500 meters toward the sighting where he found what he called a small “airplane,”
which was 1.8 meters in diameter and oval in form. Inside, he saw a man with a hood.
Pereyra retreated into the surrounding nearby forest. At about 30 meters from the vessel,
he spotted a second individual with a paper in his hand looking at the sky. When Pereyra
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began walking, the individual with the paper noticed him and moved quickly toward him.
Pereyra asked him if he needed something, convinced that the airplane had simply
experienced engine trouble. There was no response. Pereyra watched the second person
return to the craft and then seat himself. The airplane took into the air where it hovered
30 meters above the ground and then headed sharply upward, like a meteor ascending.
The two people Pereyra had seen were about 1.75 meters in height. His immediate
conclusion was that he had spotted “Russians.” He had had no previous encounters with
OVNIs and waited several days before telling anyone about his sighting, worried that it
might simply have been a bad dream for which he would be ridiculed. Even though many
of the details were difficult to explain, such as the vessel’s meteor-like ascent, and proved
impossible to document from Pereyra’s original remarks, years later Pereyra still believed
that what he had seen was not otherworldly. But those obsessed with OVNIs considered it
another extraterrestrial sighting.22
Like Roswell and other notorious UFO cases in the United States, many stories—like that
of Dionisio Llanca—lived on in debates among experts for decades. Llanca became the
most famous foil for a handful of UFO experts who considered themselves “scientific”
observers of OVNIs and who buttressed their work by disproving the supposedly frivolous
reports of flying saucers. The prolific OVNI writer Roberto E. Banchs was among several
Argentines to style themselves after the American Stanton T. Friedman, a self-identified
ufologist whose writings combined a belief in the existence of UFOs with a scientific
background that formed the basis for what his readers considered an informed ability to
determine methodically which UFO accounts were credible and which were not. An
atomic physicist—that is, an expert in an area that screamed Cold War scientific
modernity—Stanton worked for McDonnell Douglas on nuclear aircraft prototypes before
dedicating himself to investigation of UFOs after 1969. He concluded famously that the
1947 UFO sighting at Roswell, New Mexico, was legitimate. More than forty years later,
he is still cited on that point.23 By debunking “crackpots” like Llanca, Stanton and Banchs
saw an opportunity to establish their authority on UFOs through their scientific expertise.
Each invoked what their readers viewed as cutting-edge science and hard-boiled
detective work.
Banchs picked apart the details of Llanca’s claims. He reasoned that the location where
Llanca claimed to have seen the OVNI was frequented late at night by romantic couples
seeking privacy and by truckers looking for a spot to spend the night by the side of the
road. Curiously, however, Llanca saw no one but the extraterrestrials. When he recovered
from his ordeal, Llanca claimed to have not known who he was, what he was doing in the
middle of nowhere, and how long he had been there. Banchs found it incongruous that
despite this profound state of disorientation at 3 a.m., Llanca managed to walk 9
kilometers to the city. Though Llanca claimed not to have profited from his ordeal and the
media frenzy that followed, a group of physicians in Bahía Blanca claimed to have given
him money, as did another group in Monte Grande. In April 1974 in Bahía Blanca,
according to witnesses, Llanca announced in a loud voice in the restaurant “El Rincón de
Ramoncito” that 80% of what was being reported on the case in the media was false.
However, those who accepted Llanca’s testimony after the sighting argued that its details
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corresponded exactly to the media reports he was now repudiating. In March 1976,
Llanca claimed publicly that he had had new contacts with the extraterrestrials that had
captured him in 1973 and that they would come for him again in 10 days. Nothing came
of it and Llanca continued to travel, repeating his story in different parts of the country,
until he was interned at the Hospital Neuropsiquiátrico in Rawson, Chubut. Sadly
perhaps, the hint of mental illness helped confirm in the public mind the “irrationality” of
his specific OVNI claims. In 1986, Llanca was falsely reported dead. More recently, he has
come forward to state that because of what he considers negative attention, he wishes he
had never told anybody about the abduction.24
While Llanca’s insistence that the extraterrestrials would be back for him coincided with
the March 1976 military coup d’état, like other U.S.-inspired cultural influences, UFO
sightings in Argentina rarely correlated to important cultural, social, or political
moments. On June 1, 1978, in another exceptional case, during the inaugural celebrations
of the 1978 World Soccer Cup, held in Argentina, a “terrible ball of fire” appeared over
the Río de la Plata. According to an air traffic controller, Omar Vera, the fireball rendered
the electronic instruments at Carrasco Airport in Uruguay inoperable for a short time. It
was like an atomic bomb to Vera, and it set off airport alarms while shutting down all
lighting. There were several reports of encounters between indigenous Argentines and
extraterrestrials, linking discriminatory tropes of first peoples’ “mysticism” with the
“mysteries” of OVNIS. On February 21, 1965, for example, an OVNI supposedly landed in
a Toba indigenous community in the northern province of Formosa. Three
extraterrestrials were said to have left the craft. Indigenous witnesses called the police,
but by the time the police arrived, the beings had returned to the spaceship, which was
now airborne. The police reportedly took photos of the departure, which the public never
saw. Some fifty Toba people claimed they met with the humanoids, but their
communications were never explained to other Argentines.25
Eliseo Subiela’s film Hombre Mirando al Sudeste (1986) portrayed the intersection of
psychopathologies and humanoid–human interactions. The film’s protagonist, Rantés,
mysteriously appears in a Buenos Aires psychiatric hospital in the present, a time when
Argentines were coming to grips with the desaparecidos (“the disappeared”) of the
1976–1983 dictatorship. Rantés self-identifies as an extraterrestrial who has come to
earth to study human beings. At a crucial moment in the film, the psychiatrist working
with Rantés has a moment of doubt when he wonders if his patient might be telling the
truth. While in other countries, as in Argentina, psychologists and a host of amateurs
often raced to analyze the mindset of OVNI observers, the Argentine psychology of
extraterrestrial sightings emphasized the everyday psychoanalytical aspect as a reflection
of the force of that therapeutic orientation in middle-class urban popular culture. There
were numerous OVNI apparitions at psychiatric facilities, for example.
On July 22, 1968, Adela Casalvieri de Panasitti, a psychiatric nurse on duty at the
Hospital Neuropsiquiátrico de El Sauce in Mendoza, was surprised by a deafening noise.
At first, she thought it might be a broken heater in the building. When she walked out
onto the patio, she saw a large aluminum-colored object with a series of square windows.
Page 11 of 20


In one window she saw various humanoid figures moving around. Casalvieri suffered
first-degree burns on her hands and face from light emanating from the object. In
addition, she was left paralyzed in both legs. When the OVNI took off, it apparently left
stains on the patio and a sulphur smell in the air. Testing later showed a high level of
radioactivity in the area. CNEA investigators were called on the scene. Some parts of
Casalvieri’s story anticipated Subiela’s film. Like the patients at the hospital Hombre
Mirando al Sudeste, those at the Mendoza hospital responded to the extraterrestrials
with a strange tranquility. On the night of the sighting, the patients were unusually quiet.
Whereas normally at bedtime, there were fights and screams, that night, according to
Casalvieri, there was perfect calm. Some have offered a psychological interpretation for
the sighting, positing that it had been fueled by Casalvieri’s delirium resulting from a
state of semiconsciousness produced by an overheated office.26
On January 5, 1975, Carlos Alberto Díaz was working as a waiter at a wedding reception
in Bahía Blanca. Walking home at 3:50 a.m., he spotted a strange light in the sky. His
arms and legs would not move. An instant later, he felt as though an air current had
absorbed him. He lost consciousness. When he regained awareness, he found himself in a
fetal position inside a 3-meter-high sphere. There was no instrumentation inside the
sphere. Three humanoids appeared behind him. They were normal height and moved
toward him slowly. They had no mouths, noses, or eyes. Despite his fear, Díaz was unable
to yell and the extraterrestrials were silent. Díaz struggled with the extraterrestrials until
he blacked out again. He was awakened at about 3 p.m. about 30 meters from a road. His
watch was stuck at 3:50 a.m., when he had first spotted something in the sky. Díaz was
far from Bahía Blanca. The man who woke him told him that he was near Buenos Aires,
650 kilometers to the north and offered to give him a lift to the capital. Díaz accepted.
Almost immediately, those who heard his story questioned it because of the distance Díaz
would have had to travel from his sighting to Buenos Aires. At the Hospital Ferroviario in
Buenos Aires, he was checked over for injuries. None were found, nor was there any
evidence of violence.
Though not a psychologist, Banchs undertook a study of Díaz’s personality based on

material that appeared in the press and without interviewing the subject. He used that
assessment to discredit the case. Díaz, argued Banchs, was pudgy and bipolar, of
sanguine temperament, intelligent and quick, but lacking in analytical depth. He had a
rich imagination, was impulsive, and had a tendency to distraction. Díaz was skilled at
mechanical work and best at concrete thinking. He did not like to be alone, and his
dreams were a reflection of his daily life. What Banchs called a psychometric study
resulted in the finding of an insecure, conflicted, isolated, and inhibited personality
inclined to exaggerate but with a strong memory and deep sentiments. Banchs referenced
Freud who had established that all round or concave forms had a feminine tendency. As a
result, OVNIs had a fecund quality. For Díaz, the OVNI became a uterus. By his own
account, he appeared inside the spaceship in a fetal position and unconscious. For
Banchs, Díaz’s description of himself corresponded to that of a fetus at the moment of
birth. The light he saw inside the OVNI was equivalent to the light inside a mother’s
womb. As for Díaz’s claim that he had been left briefly paralyzed, Banchs argued that
Page 12 of 20


during pregnancy, the mother transmits powerful emotions to the fetus that can prompt
uterine contractions and momentary paralysis. The intense light that Díaz saw at one
point represented a similar light that a child sees on emerging from the womb. That the
three extraterrestrials were unknown marked a newborn’s perception of others, as did
the absence of facial features on the humanoids. The movement of the humanoids toward
Díaz made him feel powerful, which, according to Banchs’s Jungian interpretation,
indicated a reaction of the unconscious where a person experiences feelings of inferiority
and a lack of psychological signification that can threaten the individual’s personality.27
The unusually prominent place of OVNI reports in popular media reflected the influence
of often-cited U.S. equivalents to Fabio Zerpa. How Argentines told OVNI stories faithfully
reproduced the ways in which Americans understood UFOs. Argentine OVNI culture
reflected a larger Argentine interest in and affection for U.S. cultural trends in film,
clothing, music, and many other areas. Local OVNI clubs, in twenty locales across
Argentina, as well as mainstream media all used American terminology such as “foo
fighter.” The clubs frequently published mimeographed monthly newsletters. Some had
sections in English, anticipating—or more likely, hoping against hope—that their findings
on local sightings would be read and recognized as authentic and similar to those in the
United States. Periods of especially heavy UFO sightings and activity in Argentina—in
1947 and 1978, for example—correspond exactly to equivalent waves of sightings in the
United States. As in the United States, those in Argentina who followed OVNI sightings
and searched for meaning were wary of what they believed were federal government
efforts to conceal “the truth.” More striking still, was how Argentines’ skepticism of their
government reflected little of the typical Argentine criticism of their state but rather the
same sorts of tropes that Americans used in denouncing Washington’s UFO cover-ups in
the 1950s and 1960s. In criticizing their own government, Argentines did not distinguish
between its military or democratic components. After the U.S. Air Force began to study
the possibility of UFOs, the Argentine Air Force did the same. And when the U.S. Air
Force closed down that branch of study in 1969, the Argentine Air Force shut down its
investigations as well.
Humanoid forms and their evolution in sightings and in the popular Argentine
imagination dovetail with trends in the United States. In the 1950s, for example,
extraterrestrial sightings varied considerably among a range of animal-like and humanoid
forms. By the early 1970s—in keeping with developments in the United States—
extraterrestrials reported in Argentina had bodies that were increasingly human-like,
almost always walking upright with four limbs and large heads. Moreover, as in the
United States, by the 1970s, as in the Dionisio Llanca case, abductions increasingly
accompanied sightings. American UFO experts such as J. Allen Hynek were regularly
cited and their reports disseminated in Argentina, as were non-Americans with wide
appeal in the United States, especially the British writer Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke’s
famous dictums on the intersection of science and the supernatural and the notion that
any sufficiently advanced technology could not be distinguished from magic appeared
frequently in print in Argentina. After 1970, both Hynek and Clarke buttressed
“scientific” ufología. A former adviser to the U.S. Air Force on the subject; a believer in
Page 13 of 20


extraterrestrial life; and a debunker of “false” sightings, Hynek influenced an entire

generation of Argentine “scientific” observers including Roberto E. Banchs.28 The
“science” of OVNI investigation was reminiscent of 19th-century botany. As did Hynek,
Banchs and other Argentines catalogued reported sightings and encounters. Banchs
touted his scientific training as an urban planner and, oddly, in something called “ology.”
In 1970, he organized the Second Argentine National OVNI Symposium where he
proposed the first national network of OVNI information. In 1970, Banchs published the
first index of UFO observations for Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile.29
In addition to OVNI information circulating in books published by Kier and by other

publishers, there were many other media reports and stories. The Spanish writer Juan
Gallardo Muñoz published the dime store novella Espía cósmica in Buenos Aires under
the pseudonym Addison Starr, as a tribute to American pulp fiction of the day.30 Printed as
a pocketbook novel, Espía was part of a genre that revived the tradition linking science
fiction and the study of OVNIs. It was also part of a larger genre of cheaply made pulp
novels published immediately after their English-language equivalents appeared in the
United States. Neil MacNeil’s La muerte elige was one of dozens of hardboiled crime
novels and Oscar J. Friend’s El jinete nocturno part of a series of dramatic westerns.31
Printed in six issues between May and October 1984, PARSEC was among the numerous
cheaply manufactured, short-lived science fiction magazines of the period. Four of the
five featured stories in the second issue were by popular American science fiction writers
such as Zenna Henderson, Robert F. Young, Harlan Ellison, and Alfred Bester.32
Frequently, stories of extraterrestrial life overlapped with a steady stream of headline

news on the U.S. space program. Written to be read to children under 10 years of age, the
1973 oversized children’s book Fanfán viaja en un cohete, printed by the publishing giant
Atlántida, tells the illustrated story of a white, middle-class boy who is magically
transformed when he puts on a space suit. He is now able to float as in space and to
travel to the moon and the sun. Twenty years later, Rodolfo Otero published Un viaje muy
“especial” for an adolescent readership. Like the protagonist of Fanfán, the children in Un
viaje are blond and light skinned. The fun begins when one of them spots an OVNI.
Adventures follow in which the children meet extraterrestrials in space and then beam
back to familiar places in Argentina, like the zoo in La Plata and Plaza Francia in Buenos
Aires.33
Page 14 of 20


After the Cold War

In February 2016, a helicopter crashed in Capilla del Monte, Córdoba. Immediately, on
television programs and in other venues, Argentines began speculating about OVNIs. But
in a departure from Cold War OVNI reports, the question of aliens was quashed by an Air
Force inquiry that found pilot error to have been the cause of the crash. Capilla del Monte
residents had first witnessed an OVNI in 1986. The report took on many tropes of the era
—an intense light, an oval flying object, and burn marks on the ground where the saucer
had landed. A year later, residents of the town claimed that a forest fire nearby had
mysteriously bypassed the 1986 OVNI landing site. In 1991, Mercedes and Sonia
Anchorena, two sisters who had first reported the OVNI, bought a large tract of land
around the landing site. In 2000, there were media reports that the 1986 sighting had
been staged to generate tourist activity in the area. No more OVNIs were observed, but
Capilla del Monte became a tourist destination drawing 10,000 visitors annually and in
2012, the municipality celebrated the first Carnaval Alienígena.34
After 1990, times and attitudes changed. Argentines became more skeptical, and like the
Capilla del Monte case, other sightings were frequently debunked, generally far more
quickly than previously. Popular interest in this phenomenon had waned. Mainstream
media abandoned uncritical reports of OVNIs. With few exceptions, local OVNI societies
disappeared. Mimeographed newsletters for a handful of followers faded as related
websites proliferated. Where once local OVNI societies proclaimed such events in their
mimeos, now OVNI websites did so, though they remained culturally isolated from the
mainstream, making claims that nobody bothered to assess “scientifically.” No new
generation of OVNI experts like Zerpa or Banchs emerged with the capacity to break into
the mainstream of popular culture. The end of the larger Cold War and the decline of the
nuclear threat and U.S. space program may have made an impact on these altered
perceptions, along with changes in media venues and advancements in information
technology.
Primary Sources
There are no accessible, archived Argentine government primary sources on this topic.
The Fuerza Aerea Argentina (Argentine Air Force) likely has relevant, classified
documentation from the 1960s, 1970s, and perhaps later. Works cited by Antonio Las
Heras and Roberto F. Banchs in “Further Reading” have photographic evidence either of
OVNI landings or of the cultural reception of those “landings.”
Newspapers and magazines contain thousands of articles on these phenomena. They

include the Buenos Aires dailies Clarin, La Nación, La Opinión, and La Razón, as well as
the popular magazines Gente and Siete Dias. These sources are available at the Biblioteca
Nacional (Buenos Aires) among many other libraries.
Page 15 of 20


Newsletters and small-run magazines dedicated to OVNIs in private hands include Atom
(Buenos Aires), the untitled newsletter of the Centro de Investigación de Vida
Extraterrestre (Avellaneda, Argentina), Investigación: Organo de difusion del Centro de
Estudios de Fenomenos Aereos Extraños (Buenos Aires), and Canopus (Buenos Aires).
Links to Digital Materials

Comisión de Estudio del Fenómeno OVNI, República Argentina.
Visión OVNI - Investigación científica del fenómeno OVNI.
Realidad OVNI - Las últimas noticias, imágenes y videos sobre la realidad OVNI
en Argentina y Latinoamérica.
OVNIS - El Despertar de la Conciencia.
Further Reading
Abraham, Carlos. La literatura fantástica argentina en el siglo XIX. Buenos Aires:
CICCUS, 2015.
Alonso, Ricardo N. Ciencia y pseudociencias: Ovnis, extraterrestres, profecías,

apocalipsis, fin del mundo, seres fantásticos y demás creencias. Salta, Argentina: Mundo,
2012.
Banchs, Roberto F. Los OVNIS y sus ocupantes. Buenos Aires: Tres Tiempos, 1980.
Carreras, Sergio. Turistas espirituales: gurus, ovnis y otros tesoros de Córdoba. Córdoba,
Argentina: Recovecos, 2013.
Felitti, Karina. La revolución de la pildora: Sexualidad y política en los años sesenta.

Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2012.
García Blanco, Javier. Humanoides. Encuentros con entidades desconocidas. Buenos

Aires: Edaf del Plata, 2003.
Las Heras, Antonio. O.V.N.I.S. Los extraterrestres entre nosotros. Buenos Aires: Rueda,
1978.
Morales, Rubén. Los Ovnis de la Antártida. Buenos Aires: Marimbo, 2016.
Rein, Raanan. Argentina, Israel, and the Jews. College Park: University Press of
Maryland, 2003.
Scolari, Carlos A. Historietas para sobrevivientes: Comic y cultura de masas en los años
80. Buenos Aires: Colihue, 1999.
Page 16 of 20


Sheinin, David M. K. Argentina and the United States: An Alliance Contained. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2006.
Notes:
(1.) Raanan Rein, Argentina, Israel, and the Jews (College Park: University Press of
Maryland, 2003); and David M. K. Sheinin, Argentina and the United States: An Alliance
Contained (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006).
(2.) Carlos Escudé, El estado parasitario: Argentina, ciclos de vaciamiento, clase política
directiva y colapso de la política exterior (Buenos Aires: Lumiere, 2005); Mario Rapoport,
“Argentina: economía y política internacional. Los procesos históricos,”Diplomacia,
Estrategia, Política 10 (2009): 26–50; Mario Rapoport and Noemí Brenta, “La gran
inundación,” Página/12, March 26, 2013; and David M. K. Sheinin, “Peripheral Anti-
Imperialism: The New Revisionism and the History of Argentine Foreign Relations in the
Era of the Kirchners,” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 25.1
(2014): 63–84.
(3.) Leandro Morgenfeld, Relaciones peligrosas: Argentina y Estados Unidos (Buenos

Aires: Capital Intelectual, 2012); Mario Rapoport and Claudio Spiguel, Relaciones
Tumultuosas: Estados Unidos y el primer peronismo (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2009); and
Martin Edwin Andersen, Dossier Secreto: Argentina’s Desaparecidos and the Myth of the
“Dirty War” (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993).
(4.) Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Germán Ferrari, 1983, el año de la
democracia (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2013); and Horacio Gaggero, Alicia Iriarte, Humberto
Roitberg, Argentina, 15 años después: de la transición a la democracia al menemismo,
1982–1997 (Buenos Aires: Proyecto Editorial, 2000).
(5.) Irma Emiliozzi, Los Emiliozzi: De la historia a la leyenda (Buenos Aires: Claridad,
2015); Carlos A. Scolari, Historietas para sobrevivientes: Comic y cultura de masas en los
años 80 (Buenos Aires: Colihue, 1999); Karina Felitti, La revolución de la pildora:
Sexualidad y política en los años sesenta (Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2012); Isabella Cosse,
Pareja, sexualidad y familia en los años sesenta (Buenos Aires: Siglo veintiuno, 2010);
Matias Raña, Guerreros del cine: Argentino, fantástico e independiente (Buenos Aires:
Fan, 2010); Mabel Bellucci, Historia de una desobediencia: Aborto y feminismo (Buenos
Aires: Capital Intelectual, 2014); Valeria Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina:
Culture, Politics and Sexuality from Perón to Videla (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2014); and Raúl Manrupe, Breve historia del dibujo animado en la
Argentina (Buenos Aires: Libros del Rojas, 2004).
(6.) Penny M. Von Eschen, “‘Satchmo Blows Up the World’: Jazz, Race, and Empire during
the Cold War,” in “Here, There and Everywhere”: The Foreign Politics of American
Page 17 of 20


Popular Culture, eds. Reinhold Wagnleitner and Elaine Tyler May (Hanover, NH:
University Press of New England, 2000), 164.
(7.) Carlos Abraham, La literatura fantástica argentina en el siglo XIX (Buenos Aires:
CICCUS, 2015), 190.
(8.) Editorial Kier, “Historia,” retrieved from http://www.editorialkier.com.ar/home.php.
(9.) José Álvarez López, Reconstrucción de Atlántida (2d ed.) (Buenos Aires: Kier, 1989
[1978]), 95–106,
(10.) Carolyne R. Larson, “‘Argentine Man’: Human Evolution and Cultural Citizenship in
Argentina, 1911–1940,” in Making Citizens in Argentina, eds. Benjamin Bryce and David
M. K. Sheinin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), 51–69.
(11.) “Tres grandes mentiras de nuestro tiempo,” retrieved from http://

www.boriscristoff.com.uy/predicciones.htm.
(12.) Guillermo dos Santos Coelho, “El OVNI que paseó por la Antártida y disparó la
psicosis argentina,” Clarín (Buenos Aires), July 2, 2015. Retrieved from http://
www.clarin.com/especiales/paseo-Antartida-disparo-psicosis-
argentina_0_1386461474.html.
(13.) “Si me volviera a pasar, no se lo contaría a nadie,” La Nueva (Bahía Blanca),

December 8, 2013. Retrieved from http://www.lanueva.com/sociedad-impresa/212094/-si-
me-volviera-a-pasar-no-se-lo-contar-237-a-a-nadie-.html.
(14.) “¿Que fue?” Gente (Buenos Aires), 15.778 (June 19, 1980): 4–9.
(15.) “Revelan que se Dispararon 20.000 Cañonazos Contra 3 OVNI que Sobrevolaron Los
Angeles en 1944,” La Razón, October 4, 1976: 1.
(16.) Roberto E. Banchs, Los OVNIS y sus ocupantes (Buenos Aires: Tres Tiempos, 1980),
9.
(17.) Antonio Las Heras, O.V.N.I.S. Los extraterrestres entre nosotros (Buenos Aires:
Rueda, 1978), 45.
(18.) Leonard H. Stringfield, UFO Crash/Retrievals: Amassing the Evidence: Status

Report III (Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2015) [orig. 1982 self-published].
(19.) “Los platos voladores,” La Razón, September 2, 1968, 6.
88–92.
(21.) Richard H. Hall, The UFO Evidence: A Thirty-Year Report, vol. 2 (Lanham: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2001), 472.
Page 18 of 20


(22.) “Caso Pereyra: El incidente ‘Roswell’ de San Francisco Solano,” La Tercera, August
25, 2016. Retrieved from http://www.diariolatercera.com.ar/nota/22494-caso-pereyra-el-
incidente-roswell-de-san-francisco-solano/.
(23.) Stanton T. Friedman and Kathleen Marden, Fact, Fiction, and Flying Saucers
(Wayne, IN: Career Press, 2016).
131–133.
(25.) “Chalac, Formosa: Aterrizaje en una toldería de idios tobas (21 Feb 1965),” Visión
OVNI, November 11, 2008. Retrieved from http://www.visionovni.com.ar/archivos/927.
(26.) “Relato Fantástico,” El Andino, August 13, 1968. Retrieved from http://
marcianitosverdes.haaan.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/mendoza5.jpg.
(27.) Banchs, Los OVNIS y sus ocupantes, 162–165.
(28.) Roberto E. Banchs, Los OVNIS y sus ocupantes (Buenos Aires: Tres Tiempos, 1980);
and Javier García Blanco, Humanoides. Encuentros con entidades desconocidas (Buenos
Aires: Edaf del Plata, 2003), 97–100.
(29.) Roberto E. Banchs, Fenómenos Aéreos Inusuales (Buenos Aires: CEFAI, 1970).
(30.) Addison Starr, Espía cósmico (Buenos Aires: Toray, 1969).
(31.) Neil MacNeil, La muerte elige (Buenos Aires: Acme, 1961); and Oscar J. Friend, El
jinete nocturno (Buenos Aires: Acme, 1952).
(32.) PARSEC, 1.2 (1984).
(33.) “En pos de otra hazaña,” Clarín, June 3, 1965, p. 1; María Alicia Domínquez, Fanfán
viaja en un cohete (Buenos Aires: Atlántida, 1973); and Rodolfo Otero, Un viaje muy
“especial” (Buenos Aires: Sigmar, 1994).
(34.) Sergio Carreras, “El día que llegaron los aliens,” La Voz, January 3, 2016. Retrieved
from http://www.lavoz.com.ar/ciudadanos/el-dia-que-llegaron-los-aliens.
David M. K. Sheinin
Department of History, Trent University
Page 19 of 20


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Alien Sightings and OVNI Culture in Argentina

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American

Summary and Keywords

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Cold War Cultures

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From Early Imaginings to Cold War Touchstone

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The cover photograph of Reconstrucción de Atlántida (1978) touches on another

Cold War Stories

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Though not a psychologist, Banchs undertook a study of Díaz’s personality based on

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extraterrestrial life; and a debunker of “false” sightings, Hynek influenced an entire

In addition to OVNI information circulating in books published by Kier and by other

Frequently, stories of extraterrestrial life overlapped with a steady stream of headline

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After the Cold War

Newspapers and magazines contain thousands of articles on these phenomena. They

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Links to Digital Materials

Visión OVNI - Investigación científica del fenómeno OVNI.

OVNIS - El Despertar de la Conciencia.

Alonso, Ricardo N. Ciencia y pseudociencias: Ovnis, extraterrestres, profecías,

Felitti, Karina. La revolución de la pildora: Sexualidad y política en los años sesenta.

García Blanco, Javier. Humanoides. Encuentros con entidades desconocidas. Buenos

Morales, Rubén. Los Ovnis de la Antártida. Buenos Aires: Marimbo, 2016.

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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 29 March 2018

(3.) Leandro Morgenfeld, Relaciones peligrosas: Argentina y Estados Unidos (Buenos

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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 29 March 2018

(8.) Editorial Kier, “Historia,” retrieved from http://www.editorialkier.com.ar/home.php.

(11.) “Tres grandes mentiras de nuestro tiempo,” retrieved from http://

(13.) “Si me volviera a pasar, no se lo contaría a nadie,” La Nueva (Bahía Blanca),

(18.) Leonard H. Stringfield, UFO Crash/Retrievals: Amassing the Evidence: Status

(19.) “Los platos voladores,” La Razón, September 2, 1968, 6.

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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 29 March 2018

(27.) Banchs, Los OVNIS y sus ocupantes, 162–165.

(30.) Addison Starr, Espía cósmico (Buenos Aires: Toray, 1969).