Logo of the Commission for the Study of Aerospace Phenomena

Since we broke the story in our website last Friday about the creation of an official UFO Commission of the Argentinean Air Force (AAF), their press office has now posted a communiqué in the official website of the AAF, providing the basic facts and contact information for citizens to submit reports of UFO sightings. The Comisión de Estudio de Fenómenos Aerospaciales (CEFAE, which stands for Commission for the Study of Aerospace Phenomena) also has a logo showing a man looking at a sky phenomenon over an outline of Argentina’s map. The communiqué can be accessed here and this is full translation of the text from Spanish:

ARGENTINEAN AIR FORCE

Commission for the Study of Aerospace Phenomena

Mission

“To document, analyze and study unidentified phenomena in an orderly, systematic and truthful manner by means of conventional control systems on the airspace under the National Jurisdiction.”

Creation

Due to the increment of information given by the population regarding sightings of unidentified aerospace phenomena, the Chief of the General Staff of the Argentinean Air Force created the Commission for the Study of Aerospace Phenomena through Resolution Nº 414. Its goal is to contribute in the search for a scientific and technical explanation of those aerospace phenomena which have not been identified.

The commission is composed of full time personnel of the Argentinean Air Force and specialists with a proven record in different fields of research that can contribute an invaluable support to the analysis of each field of study from different perspectives.

It is fundamental for the investigation to count with true information that can describe with the highest precision the observed phenomenon, for which the collaboration of our citizenry is very important.

To that end the Commission can be contacted through the email address fenomenosaerospaciales_sg@faa.mil.ar in which we request to add to your information your personal data so that you can be contacted personally if required by the investigation.

Comisión de Estudio de Fenómenos Aerospaciales

Pedro Zanni 250 – Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires –

fenomenosaerospaciales_sg@faa.mil.ar Tel/Fax. 4317.6000  int 15930

FUERZA AEREA ARGENTINA (ARGENTINEAN AIR FORCE)

*          *          *

The official communiqué about the UFO commission in the Argentinean Air Force website.

For our American and international readers, please don’t send any sighting reports to that address since CEFAE is charged by law to investigate UFO cases in Argentina only. The military is not responding at this time to requests for interviews from the international media either, as Mexican journalist Yohanan Díaz found out when he tried to interview Capt. Marcelo Mohaupt, who is in charge of the commission. He did interview Andrea Pérez Simondini, one of five external members from Argentina’s UFO community, who is also the person dealing with the media. Andrea stated that the big achievement “consists in the recognition from the Argentinean Air Force of the existence of a phenomenon with anomalous characteristics reported in our country. The goal now is to permit that the tools and scientific knowledge will allow us to deepen the possibility of finding the necessary evidence and prove the existence of a phenomenon of extraterrestrial origin. For that we need to follow a path of responsibility and compromise.”

Some of the AAF and external members of the brand new commission. Andrea Pérez Simondini is on the left and Capt. Marcelo Mohaupt on the right. (image credit: El Universal Gráfic)

We contacted Andrea Pérez Simondini as well, whom I met several years ago at a UFO Symposium in Viña del Mar, Chile. She gave us some additional background via email about the early stages of the project: “For starters, the commission will investigate cases from qualified witnesses such as pilots, air traffic controllers, specialized aeronautical personnel, etc. They will also receive via their website photos and videos where the witness saw what he captured in the photo or video. For now those are the first steps. On the other hand, every air base will receive a questionnaire so that the personnel from that base can report any experience that they may have.”

Andrea Pérez has also been recently appointed the Director of CEFORA (Spanish acronym for Commission for the Study of the UFO Phenomenon in the Argentinean Republic), an umbrella organization of several UFO groups and researchers created in 2009 to lobby for the declassification of government UFO files. Last year CEFORA submitted a formal request to President Cristina Fernández, but the files have yet to be released. Now that official and civilian ufology have been integrated in Argentina and both camps are working together instead of against each other, there is a much better chance that those old records, going back to the 1960s, will eventually be located and released.

We’ll keep you posted here on any new developments regarding CEFAE and CEFORA.

Argentina has had it’s fair share of UFO news and history. You can read more about the UFO Commission and other Argentina UFO news here.

The Condor Building in Buenos Aires, headquarters of the Argentinean Air Force, where CIFA will function. (Image credit: Elsapucal/Wikimedia Commons)

The event was presided by Captain Mariano Mohaupt, an AAF spokesman who has been interacting with several Argentinean ufologists in recent months. But to give weight to the event, a brief statement was also given by Brigadier General Ernesto Omar París, Secretary General of the AAF. “This Commission will undertake a scientific study of aerospace phenomena,” said Gen. París, adding that “with this action we have reached an important goal for our institution.”

Captain Mariano Mohaupt, press spokesman of the Argentinean Air Force, who presided at CIFA’s launching ceremony. (Image credit: AAF)

Capt. Mohaupt provided more details about CIFA’s goals, composition and methodology. CIFA will function under the General Secretary of the AAF and will have members from the National Meteorological Service, engineers, radar technicians, pilots from the National Administration of Civil Aviation, computer experts, and satellite experts like Marcelo Módica from the National Commission of Space Activities (CONAE). One reason to launch the Commission, explained Capt. Mohaupt, was “the increment of [UFO] sightings by people. However, the intention is not to prove that there is life in other planets, but to confront from a scientific perspective these unknown phenomena and arrive at the truth, because undoubtedly they are the reason of our study.”

The officer added that “the Argentinean Air Force can confirm that aerospace phenomena which have not been identified are sighted and studied,” but clarified this didn’t mean they are acknowledging visits from other planetary civilizations. CIFA will launch in the coming weeks an official web page within the portal of the AAF where the public can report UFO sightings. Capt. Mohaupt then summarized the Commission’s methodology in three phases:

The first phase will consist in the acquisition of data from primary and secondary sources and “the contribution of citizens and institutions will be crucial in this process. The intermediate phase contemplates a detailed study of each particular case and its documentation. Those phenomena which cannot be explained will pass to a third phase of statistical analysis and cross-referencing of data brought by each specialty.”

Cooperation with civilian ufologists

One of the facets of CIFA that will seem highly unusual for North Americans, but not so in South American where cultural attitudes towards ufology are far more open, is that the AAF reached out to several civilian UFO groups and researchers to act as outside members and advisors of the Commission. These include Alberto Brunetti from the Investigative Group of Unknown Aerospace Phenomena (Spanish acronym GIFAD); Carlos Fergusson, coordinator of the Argentinean Ufological Network (RAO); the independent researcher, computer expert and well known local ufologist Carlos Alberto Iurchuk; and Andrea Pérez Simondini, a chemist with CEFORA, an umbrella group of Argentinean UFO groups which requested, in a letter to President Cristina Fernández several months ago, the declassification of military UFO documents —a story also covered in this website at the time.

Capt. Mohaupt (sitting on the right) meeting a group of Argentinean ufologists on May 5. Sitting next to him is the prominent researcher and author Roberto Banchs. (Image credit: RIO54OVNI)

Needless to say, these outside Commission advisors as well as others in the Argentinean UFO community are delighted with the launching of CIFA and have made enthusiastic comments to the local media and in many UFO websites and forums in Argentina. Fergusson, for instance, observed that the integration of civilian researchers and military personnel “will produce a great improvement in terms of means and methodology. It’s crucial to be able to reach the site of an event and count on scientific help. In addition there will be a system to interview witnesses, which can be very useful.”

Silvia Pérez Simondini, the director of CEFORA who also runs the Visión OVNI UFO Museum in Victoria, a city in the province of Entre Ríos famous for its many UFO sightings, told the newspaper Clarín that “it’s wonderful that this Commission has been created because whenever we need to conduct analysis we’ll have access to official laboratories.” Silvia’s daughter Andrea Pérez cautioned that it’s important “not to create false expectations in the people, that’s why we’ll have now a decisive body that will evaluate what is certain and discard what is supposition.” Iurchuk noted that “the first step is to exclude satellites, space junk, balloons and meteorological devices, rockets, meteors and even the International Space Station (ISS) can be confused” with a UFO.

Dr. Oscar Galíndez, a retired judge and highly respected jurist who was also a pioneer of serious UFO investigations in Argentina in the 1960s and ’70s, serving as representative for the Americans groups APRO and NICAP and Britain’s Flying Saucer Review, commented in a web column that “the scientific investigation of the UFO phenomenon requires the collaboration of many interdisciplinary fields joined in a common goal. I am happy to see that the Argentinean Commission is oriented towards this correct way.” Another highly respected Argentinean ufologist who also met Capt. Mohaupt during his informal meetings with the UFO community is the architect Roberto Banchs, author of several important UFO books and monographs.

The first case?

Until the AAF Commission launches its official web page and really gets underway on the field, it’s hard to say for sure which cases they will actually investigate. According to the web daily ELINTRANSIGENTE.COM and the Visión Ovni forum, the first case that they will probably look into is a photograph taken in 2005 during maneuvers of the IV Aerial Brigade in Mendoza. The picture shows a luminous unidentified object underneath and to the right of a Mirage M3 fighter. According to Visión Ovni, “the event occurred on November 18, 2005 and was seen by several witnesses, whom will be interviewed to obtain more data as to what happened. An attempt will be made to determine if the small white dot close to the aircraft is an unidentified flying object or has some atmospheric explanation.”

AAF Mirage M3 fighter and UFO taken during maneuvers of the IV Aerial Brigade in Mendoza on November 18, 2005. (Image credit: Visión Ovni)

The newspaper Tandil Diario, on the other hand, speculates that the Commission should mobilize and look into a series of UFO sightings that were reported in the city of Tandil in Buenos Aires province. Yet another good case for CIFA would be to reinvestigate the important multiple-witness case in the town of Joaquín V. González in Salta province on the early hours of November 26, 2009, which was linked to a power blackout after a large cylindrical-shaped object was seen beaming one of the turbines of the El Tunal Dam of the local power company EDESA. We also covered this UFO case in detail in this website.

Regardless of which cases CIFA investigates—time will tell obviously—it is worth noting a couple of comments of a sociological nature. One is that Argentina’s fledging military UFO commission is not the first but rather the latest such agency in South America. Three of Argentina’s neighbors—Uruguay, Brazil and Chile—already have official UFO investigation projects. I expand on this subject at length on the next issue of Open Minds magazine (August/September), discussing the official UFO projects in Uruguay (CRIDOVNI), Chile (CEFAA) and Peru (OIFAA).

The second point worth noting is the lack of adversarial relationship between the official South American UFO projects and civilian ufologists. This is almost the complete opposite of the history of this subject in the U.S. Even when there were official UFO investigations like Project Blue Book or the Condon Commission, there always tended to be bad blood between the government and private UFO groups and researchers. The government investigators would tend to ignore or belittle the civilian ufolgists who in turn would accuse the government of bad faith and censorship. In South America, on the other hand, the dynamics is exactly the opposite, as illustrated by Capt. Mohaupt’s meetings with the Argentinean UFO community and the fact that some of their more prominent researchers were invited to participate as external members and/or advisors of the AAF Commission.

A lot has happened in the last year. We couldn’t include everything, because we were trying to keep the video to less than 15 minutes, but we packed in a lot. It is another demonstration of how active this field is on a regular basis.

Note: One book that is not in the video which I have written about quite a bit, and thoroughly enjoyed is A.D.: After Disclosure. In the frenzy to get everything ready for the conference somehow I left it out. However, there are other books I left out also. If you feel there is a story or book that I left out that you think needs attention, feel free to comment below so others can be aware.

23 May 1974, Caleta Olivia, Pcia. Santa Cruz, Argentina 19:40

Cesar Elorda's UFO picture.

At 19:40 on 23 May 1974, as Sr. Cesar Elorda was driving between Caleta Olivia and Comodoro Rivadavia, a coastal highway paralleling the shoreline of Golfo San Jorge, he noticed a strange aircraft approaching from east to west, across the highway, at not a very great speed. When he first saw it, it was coming from the gulf, from over water and was about 200 meters from land. It continued its course and passed over the highway as he came abreast of it, passing over his car also. He could see clearly now that, it was no airplane like he had ever seen before.

Close-up of the object.

He stopped the car and got out with his camera, and was able to get one photograph before the object was too far away and passed on into the sunset.

The object was a circular lens-shaped craft with an indistinct flat bottom and a dome on the top. It was a dark dull gray and looked metallic. It flew lazily along, making no sound, and leaving no trail. He did not see any lights of any kind. The sun was already below the horizon when he snapped the picture but the sky was still quite bright.

People in that area see UFOs quite regularly, especially around Golfo San Jorge where many think that they go into and come out of the clear waters of the gulf. Some UFO researchers think there may be a submarine UFO base near there.

E.I.F.E. Archives – Courtesy Sr. Guillermo Carlos Roncoroni

Press spokesman of the AAF, Captain Mariano Mohaupt. (image credit: AAF)

The Argentinean Air Force (AAF) announced yesterday that it was in the process of creating an official commission to investigate UFO reports in the country. Captain Mariano Mohaupt, a press spokesman of the AAF, told the Agence France-Presse (AFP) that “the Commission of Investigation of Aerospace Phenomena is in the process of being formed.” The military officer added the AAF already has some cases experienced by its pilots which have not been explained, but that “now it will deal with this issue in a formal and professional manner that contributes to its own mission of controlling our airspace.”

The Commission will be formed by an inter-disciplinary team composed of meteorologists, air controllers, pilots and radar experts and will receive reports of UFO sightings from the public. “There are many reports that are later clarified as not unconventional phenomena,” Capt. Mohaupt told the AFP. The AFP story spread like wildfire throughout the Latin American press, appearing on all the websites of major newspapers, TV and radio stations.

The Spanish news agency EFE also interviewed Capt. Mohaupt, basically confirming the same story. “The Commission will contribute to the mission of the Air Force, which is precisely to provide security in our airspace and therefore has an interest in knowing any phenomenon that occurs there,” the AAF spokesman told EFE. He also added that this Commission responds to “the interest of the people,” which has been on the rise in Argentina, as well as in the rest of the world, in recent months.

THE TELEFE INTERVIEW

The first sign that the AAF was about to announce the formation of a UFO Commission was revealed a couple of days before Christmas by Tamara Hendel, a young reporter with the Argentinean TV network Telefe, where she directs the segment “MundosParalelos” (Parallel Worlds) within their 8 p.m. news broadcast. On December 22, Tamara interviewed Commodore Guillermo Tealdi, Chief of Communications in the AAF, about the institution’s policy towards UFOs. (The rank of commodore in the AAF is equivalent to a colonel in the U.S. Air Force.) Right after the interview, Tamara told the news anchor that she had a big scoop. Although Tealdi didn’t say it on camera, the reporter was told that the AAF was about to launch an official commission to investigate UFOs. The Telefe interview was immediately posted on YouTube and led to a series of announcements by prominent Argentinean ufologists, including Silvia Pérez Simondini, the director of the Visión Ovni UFO Museum in Victoria, a city in the province of Entre Ríos, Mercedes Casas of OVNI Salta, Raúl Avellaneda, and others.

Here is the Telefe clip of the interview with Cdr. Tealdi:

Here is English translation of  the Tamara Hendel interview with Commodore Tealdi:

Tamara Hendel (image credit: Telefe)

Tealdi: The airspace is the responsibility, is under the control of the air force through the available operative means which are the radars installed in different parts of the country.

Hendel: If there was some type of unidentified craft or a UFO, could you tell?

Tealdi: Radars have the capacity of identifying, according to the surface of a celestial phenomenon or object in space there is a bounce in the radar which is identified as an echo; starting from that which appears as an echo the air force has the responsibility of investigating to see what it is, in other words, what are we talking about with regards to that echo.

Hendel: Could we say that they are UFOs?

Tealdi: The air force does not speculate with regards to the existence of manned or craft sent here, that is something that people deal with in a personal way, what the air force does is to try to identify what we are talking about in terms of the security of the air traffic which is our responsibility.

Hendel:  What amount of registered echoes are archived?

Tealdi:  There are really very few, there about two or three cases but there was not enough time or motive to intercept them [scramble fighters] because they were very brief situations in terms of time.

Hendel: And until now you have not been able to identify an extraterrestrial existence?

Tealdi: Correct.

Following this brief exchange, the reporter told the anchorman about the impending announcement of the creation of an official commission “to investigate celestial phenomena.” Capt. Mohaupt’s announcement a few days later officially confirmed her scoop.

A LITTLE HISTORY AND BACKGROUND

Argentinean Air Force (AAF) Logo

The announcement of the creation of a Commission of Investigation of Aerospace Phenomena in reality reopens an official military UFO inquiry that was active in Argentina for several decades, although not for the last fifteen years or so. I discussed the history of these efforts undertaken by the Argentinean Navy, Air Force and a quasi-official group called CEFE (Spanish acronym for Commission for the Study of Space Phenomena) in previous articles in this website—see “Argentina’s X-Files – Pt 1” and “Argentina’s X-Files – Pt 2“. The last official AAF study was the UFO desk under Capt. Augusto Lima at the National Commission on Space Research, which closed down in 1987. CEFORA (Spanish acronym for Commission for the Study of the UFO Phenomenon in the Argentinean Republic), an umbrella organization of several UFO groups and researchers, requested officially President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner last May for the release of all official UFO documents. The government acknowledged receipt of the petition but so far has not released any files.

Commodore Tealdi expanded the scope of the new Commission in an interview just published by the newspaper Tiempo Argentino. He explained in an interview with reporter Ramiro Barreiro that the members would be composed of “people who have knowledge” from key agencies like the National Meteorological Service, the National Administration of Civil Aviation, experts in Electronic Warfare, medicine and from the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) to look into possible landing trace cases. But Tealdi also acknowledged the power of average citizens who lobbied both the air force and the Ministry of Defense, admitting that the commission was created in part because of “the messages sent by people to the institutional [web] page of the agency and by requests from the Ministry of Defense that came from the same source: the people.”

Argentine Air Force IAI Finger during Air Fest 2010 show at Moron Air Base, Buenos Aires Argentina. (image credit: Jorge Alberto Leonardi)

There can be little doubt that the creation of the Air Force Commission is a great step forward. Besides the domestic aspect of citizens requesting that the government do something about the UFO issue, there is no doubt that there was also an international, or rather regional, aspect to this move since most of Argentina’s neighbors already have official government UFO projects and it was beginning to look like Argentina was falling behind in this new frontier of the 21^st century. The oldest is CRIDOVNI (Spanish acronym for Commission for the Reception and Investigation of UFO Reports) which belongs to the Uruguayan Air Force, has been functioning since 1979 and is currently headed by Colonel Ariel Sánchez Ríos. In Chile, the Civil Aviation Agency DGAC created in late 1997 the Committee for the Study of Aerial Anomalous Phenomena (CEFAA) directed by Air Force General (Ret.) Ricardo Bermúdez. In Peru, the Air Force launched the OIFAA (Office of Aerial Anomalous Phenomena) a decade ago under the direction of Commander Julio César Chamorro. Brazil doesn’t have a UFO agency per se, but it has acknowledged that UFO cases in its airspace are investigated by the Aeronautical Command. Brazil has also undertaken a systematic release of its official UFO files during the last few years.

So Argentina is really catching up with its neighbors in what is definitely becoming a very interesting trend for South American countries, a trend in which having an official UFO agency is good politics both domestically and regionally. Anybody listening back here in the good ‘ol USA?

UPDATE JUNE 2011:

Read the latest updates regarding the Argentina UFO Commission:

Argentinean Air Force launches new UFO commission

Argentinean Air Force UFO Commission states mission

The Commission for the Investigation of Airspace Phenomenon is in the process of being formed by Argentina’s air force. The Argentine Air Force already documents UFO sightings, but this new commission will include reports from meteorologists, air traffic controllers and civilian pilots.

A full article regarding Argentina’s UFO commission will soon be published on OpenMinds.tv.

Irene Granchi (image credit: ufo.com.br)

Irene Granchi, one of the great pioneers of Brazilian ufology, passed away in Rio de Janeiro at the age of 97. Although she had effectively retired for many years due to advanced diabetes and other health complications, Brazilian ufologists are in deep mourning over her death. The country’s most influential researcher and publisher of Revista UFO, A. J. Gevaerd, posted a long obituary in their ufo.com.br website titled, “We lose our matriarch.” The article begins with a quote from Granchi that shows her practical philosophy of what is required to solve the UFO enigma: “Ufology is done collectively. No one alone will understand what these visitors want. There must be an exchange, a sharing and discussion of the results of our work.”

I am fortunate to have known Irene Granchi quite well and I can certainly attest that she lived by these principles of sharing the data. I met her back in December of 1983 at an International UFO Symposium in Santa Fe, Argentina, and she invited me to talk at a conference in Rio in April 1984 organized by CISNE (Portuguese acronym for Center for the Investigation of the Nature of Extraterrestrials), a UFO research group she created in 1982. My older brother, who was married to a Brazilian, lived in Rio and so I spent a whole month at his apartment and had plenty of opportunities of visiting Irene at her apartment in the Rio neighborhood of Botafogo. She was extremely generous with her time, opening her files and introducing me to the cream of Rio’s ufologists. Among others, I met João Martins, the legendary journalist with O’Cruzeiro magazine who had reported all the classic stories in the fifties; Fernando Cleto Nunes Pereira, a gentleman who had close ties with the Brazilian Air Force UFO investigation project led by Brigadier General João Adil Oliveira also in the fifties; and José Victor Soares, another pioneer of Brazilian ufology who was born in the Azores Islands in 1931 but lived in Porto Alegre, a city in sourthern Brazil. Soares was a speaker at the same CISNE event and sadly passed away on December 10, just two days before Irene.

I just found my notebook from that April 1984 Brazilian trip, which contains a wealth of information about Brazilian cases and researchers, none of which would have been possible without Irene Granchi’s generosity and contacts. But let’s see first some basic facts about her life and work.

Irene Granchi had an interesting international background and knowledge of languages which became very useful later in her UFO investigations and contacts with foreign ufologists. She was born in Germany on November 26, 1913, although she was a British subject. She lived in various parts of Europe and the Middle East in her youth, including Cairo and Milano, where she studied and met her husband, the Italian musicologist Marco Granchi. They came to Brazil probably in the late 1930s, since she became a Brazilian citizen during the long era of General Getulio Vargas, who ruled the country between 1930 and 1945 as a dictator and between 1951 and 1954 as an elected president. It was right at the beginning of the modern UFO era in 1947 that Irene had her first UFO sighting, the catalyst for what later became a full-time effort. She described this sighting in a lengthy interview given to Brazilian researchers Claudio Tsuyoshi Suenaga and Pablo Villarrubia Mauso many years ago, which is posted (in Portuguese) in the ufo.com.br website. The researchers asked what was the genesis of her interest in UFOs and Granchi responded:

“It was when I saw a flying disc for the first time, in July of 1947. In that time my family was living in a place in Vassouras, in the interior of Rio de Janeiro [state]. It was more or less 15 h 30 when I went to the orchard to get some lettuce for dinner when I saw an object appearing on the horizon, at about the height of an eucalyptus tree. It had an impressive brightness, was metallic and looked circular like the lid of a cooking pan. I was a housewife at the time, that’s why the comparison. Since people back then were not talking about flying saucers and I was quite rational, even Cartesian [from the French philosopher of rationalism René Descartes], I started to enquire what could be this strange object that moved slowly in an oscillating manner over the local railroad station. Suddenly some weird ideas appeared in my head, which at that time I didn’t know what they were but now I know were telepathic messages. The first one was: ‘This is a manufactured object.’ The second: ‘But it was not manufactured here on Earth.’ And the third: ‘You will not have peace until you devote your body and soul to the study of these objects.’ Several thoughts came to my head in that moment, but what remains is that I would never be able to rest so long as I didn’t do my best to understand what I had just seen. And from there to now, five decades later, I am still trying.”

Irene Granchi with Wanderlay Penna in Casimiro de Abreu, 1984. (image credit: Antonio Huneeus)

A TIRELESS INVESTIGATOR

Irene was fortunate that one of her mentors was the late Dr. Olavo Fontes (1924-1968), the famous Rio gastroenterologist who is considered the father of Brazilian ufology. Fontes was the foreign representative for the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), the pioneering UFO group run by Coral and Jim Lorenzen in Tucson, Arizona, and investigated all the classic Brazilian cases from the fifties and sixties such as the attack on Fort Itaipu and the sexual abduction of Antonio Villas Boas in 1957, and the famous Trindade Island photographs taken from a Brazilian Navy ship in 1958. Irene’s thorough knowledge of English came handy as she translated all of Fontes’ reports to APRO and various English UFO materials into Portuguese. After Dr. Fontes passed away in 1968 she became the APRO representative in Brazil and later she represented Dr. J. Allen Hynek’s Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) as well. She corresponded and exchanged cases with researchers from all over the world. During a second trip to Rio de Janeiro in 1986, where I lectured at another CISNE event, I remember meeting for the first time at her apartment in Botafogo the famous African ufologist Cynthia Hind from Zimbabwe. Another frequent correspondent of hers was my old mentor from New York, the late Hungarian-American Col. (Ret.) Colman von Keviczky of ICUFON, who lectured at the IV International Congress of Ufology in Rio in September 1986.

On August 17, 1968, at about 9:15 pm, Irene and her whole family had a second UFO sighting as they waited for a bus in the Rio neighborhood of Leblon. By 1978 she had amassed sufficient UFO materials and contacts to launch a professional magazine, OVNI Documento, published by Hunos Editorial in Rio. It contained collaborations from all major Brazilian ufologists, including General (Ret.) Moacyr Uchoa, Nunes Pereira, Flávio Pereira, etc., as well as important foreign consultants like Dr. Hynek, Bill Chalker from Australia and the late American reporter Bob Pratt, who visited Brazil frequently. OVNI Documento lasted only a couple of years but it was the direct predecessor of today’s Revista UFO.

UFOs e abduções no Brasil book cover.

“Tireless and feisty, Irene conducted countless investigations (among them the abduction of the truck driver Elias Seixas) and participated as a lecturer in dozens of events, symposia and congresses,” wrote Gevaerd in his obituary. She would go to remote fazendas (farms) carrying the bulky tape recorders used back then, cameras and other equipment to document UFO sightings, close encounters and abductions. In time she probably became Brazil’s number one expert on alien abductions, publishing in 1992 her book UFOs e abduções no Brasil, which was released in English in 1995 as UFOs and Abductions in Brazil (Horus House Press). In this book she finally laid out her extensive files on abductions, including the case of the truck driver Elias Seixas in 1980 (whom I met at her apartment in one of my trips to Rio); the missing time of the pianist Luli Oswald in 1979, who was a close friend of Irene; the teleportation incident of Onislon Pattero in 1973; the case of an army general and doctor in 1972 identified only by his initials Dr. H. B.; and many more.

In my notebook of that April 1984 trip to Brazil, where I spend countless hours with Irene at her apartment and visiting other researchers, I wrote down numerous interesting anecdotes. We even went on a field trip to the interior of Rio state accompanied by Wanderlay Penna, a Brazilian Army Captain in Reserve, attorney and ufologist. We visited Casimiro de Abreu, known as the Brazilian UFO Woodstock because some sixty thousand people gathered there in 1979 in expectation of an official UFO landing that had been announced by a UFO contactee. Needless to say, nothing happened and the police took the man away for his own protection. We also spend the night at a fazenda (farm) in Macaé, where the farm owner, Don Silvio, had built a UFO landing pad with blinking lights. Some thirty people gathered to meditate and call for the aliens—sort of a Brazilian version of Dr. Greer’s C-SETI with the added elements of local folklore like lighting candles for the Orixas, the nature spirits of the Candomblé Afro-Brazilian religion. There was no UFO landing but it was a fascinating experience.

Many more anecdotes are written down in that 1984 notebook, but I want to end with a particularly interesting one concerning the visit of Dr. Hynek to Brazil in 1975. Irene knew all the ins and outs of this visit because she was Hynek’s interpreter throughout his trip. I wrote in my notebook in Spanish that, “by the influence of [Gen. Moacyr] Uchoa, Hynek talked to a full session of the Congress in Brasilia (Irene was the interpreter) and also met with Figueiredo, who was then chief of SNI (National Intelligence Service).” Gen. João Figueiredo later became the last military president of Brazil between 1979 and 1985 before the country returned to a full civilian democracy. According to the notes of my interview with Irene, “Hynek wanted to achieve a big official score with the Brazilian government” and obtain all their official UFO files (the same ones that are now being released officially by the air force). “However, a journalist accused him of attempting to take all the official records for CUFOS and that Brazil, as a sovereign nation, could not accept this. Hynek had to return to the USA quite frustrated.”

I could go on telling interesting anecdotes and fascinating cases documented by Irene Granchi. Her energy and generosity were limitless and she will be missed and remembered for a long time by all those who knew her. Rest in peace, old friend.

Those who can read Portuguese can check A. J. Gevaerd’s long obituary and tribute to Irene Granchi here and read the lengthy interview conducted by Tsuyoshi and Villarrubia here.

You can read more about CEFORA’s efforts in the August/September 2010 issue of Open Minds Magazine.

1960’s: PATAGONIAN USOS

When UFOs are reported entering and leaving bodies of water, whether the oceans, seas, large rivers or lakes, they are designated USOs for Unidentified Sea (or Submarine) Objects. In the 1960’s, the Argentinean Navy seemed to have its hands full with mysterious USO activity around the southern Patagonian coast. Official USO reports were rarely released by the Navy, but some cases were nevertheless tracked by two pioneer civilian ufologists. Both had excellent qualifications: Dr. Oscar A. Galindez was a judge and Oscar A. Uriondo worked in the Library of Congress in Buenos Aires. The two “Oscars” were the first to conduct a systematic scientific field investigation in the open, publishing their reports in books and articles. We can outline the following USO cases in Patagonia:

• Feb. 1960: The Navy detected two USOs in Golfo [Gulf] Nuevo and tried to catch them for two weeks. US Navy experts came to help with special sub-hunting equipment, but to no avail. Tons of explosives were used but the USOs got away, still unidentified. The late Ivan Sanderson, a British author specialized in USOs, wrote that the Golfo Nuevo subs “were able to stay submerged for several days and could outrun the surface ships… All nations owning submarines denied emphatically that the subs were theirs.”

• Nov. 12, 1963: Oscar Uriondo in his classic 1968 book, The Scientific Problem of UFOs, summarized another intriguing case from Golfo Nuevo: “The Navy transport ship ‘Punta Medanos’ was navigating on the South Atlantic facing Golfo Nuevo. Suddenly, a large UFO crossed rapidly at 2 km from the ship; although the passage was very quick, the needles on the compasses onboard jumped off course abruptly and continued to do so for 55 minutes.” The Navy Commission was unable to explain the case, and recruited the assistance of the Hydrographic Service to check the electromagnetic effect (EME) on the compasses. In the end, they could find no conventional explanation for the EME other than “the presence of the UFO.”

• July 28, 1964: Several USO cases are mentioned by Dr. Galindez in a 1974 article entitled, “Marine Implications of the UFO Phenomenon.” The judge revealed another USO case in the Patagonian Golfo San Jorge, involving two Argentinean oil tankers and the Norwegian vessel ‘Sumber.’ All these ships observed after 9 PM the apparent fall of an object, perhaps “an aerolite or small comet.” However, it was flying “horizontally” and “emitted a luminosity that, at times, became intense,” according to the official report submitted by the ‘Sumber’ skipper to Argentinean naval authorities. The ships looked for possible survivors, but nothing was found. This case has certain similarities to the famous Canadian 1967 UFO crash in Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia.

• March 18, 1966: The crash of a cigar-shaped object on the ocean was reported and sketched by farmer Carlos Corosan from a deserted beach near Deseado, south of Golfo San Jorge. Corosan had a good view of the object at 4 PM, estimating it was 65 to 70 feet long, with a metallic appearance and no wings, windows or markings. The UFO seemed to be in trouble, emitting “a short, muffled blast of smoke,” and then began to hum and “vibrate all over as though it were coming apart,” said Corosan. The farmer added the object finally hit the sea, but “it did not float at all, it just hit the water with a huge splash and went down quickly.” As far as we know, Corosan was the only witness, although Navy ships were reportedly seen in the area later on. The military neither confirmed nor denied his account.

1965: ANTARCTICA WAVE

Navy Captain Daniel Perissé (image credit: MUFON Proceedings)

One of the best documented Navy cases occurred at Deception Island, which belongs to the South Shetland Islands west of the Antarctic Peninsula in the Argentinean sector. Three nations (Argentina, Chile and Britain) maintained research stations in 1965 in this island of volcanic origin, formed by the remains of a crater flooded by the sea [see Map]. A detailed report of these sightings was prepared by Captain Daniel A. Perissé, who was in 1965 commanding officer of the Argentinean Navy garrison in Deception Island with the rank of Lieutenant. A total of seven UFO sightings occurred there between June 7 and July 3, 1965. An eighth incident followed in August at the Argentinean post at the South Orkney Islands.

On July 7, the Argentinean Navy Bulletin #172 stated that, “Lt. Perissé confirmed… that all the garrison personnel observed an extremely brilliant object, moving toward the north with variable speed, sometimes hovering, displaying sudden accelerations and changes of direction. The characteristics of the object and its motion, added Lt. Perisse, were such that the possibility of a weather balloon, a plane or a star were ruled out. The object was observed by a total of 17 persons, including three visiting Non-commissioned officers from the Chilean base ‘Pedro Aguirre Cerda’.”

The Chilean Air Force, in charge of the Antarctic bases ‘Aguirre Cerda’ and ‘Arturo Prat,’ confirmed their own UFO sightings in Deception Island with an official communiqué released the same day. “According to a message sent by Commander Mario Jahn Barrera from the Antarctic Chilean base ‘Arturo Prat,’ a luminous object was sighted for about 20 minutes by nine members of the garrison who were performing routine meteorological observations. It changed colors, speeds and direction, moving with an oscillatory motion at high speed.”

Capt. Perissé published later a thorough analysis of the sightings and particularly the more spectacular one on July 3. First seen by nine witnesses at the Chilean base beginning at 7:20 PM, the object moved to the Argentinean base by 7:42, where it was seen by 17 witnesses for 62 minutes, until 8:44 PM. Perissé wrote that “the shape of the object was similar to a rugby ball… with a red center and ill defined edges of changing colors (yellow, green, orange, blue and white)… The actual size of the UFO was somewhere between 75 and 90 meters.” There is still one more mystery concerning the July 3 event. The Navy Bulletin #172 quoted above added that, “from the Navy post at the South Orkney Islands comes a message of extreme importance: during the passage of the strange object over the base [earlier the same day], two magnetometers in perfect working condition registered sudden and strong disturbances of the magnetic field (at 17:03 Hrs.), which were recorded on their tapes.”

The public interest generated by these cases led the Navy to rescue the “problem from semi-clandestiness,” as put by the Director of the Navy UFO project, Capt. Pagani. In a famous 1965 press conference quoted in Part I, Pagani declared that “UFOs exist” and “their presence and intelligent displacement in Argentinean airspace has been proven.” There were no known photos taken during the July and August 1965 UFO flap in Deception Island, but in late 1967 the well known Argentinean weekly magazine Siete Días (Seven Days) published a very interesting UFO photo reportedly taken by a navy officer in the island during an underwater volcanic eruption on December 11, 1967 (see photo). Its authenticity, however, remains in question because the photographer’s name was never disclosed or identified.

Flying disc next to an underwater volcanic eruption reportedly taken on Dec. 11, 1967 by a Navy officer at the Antarctic Station in Deception Is., leaked to the weekly magazine Siete Días. The disc on the top is the real size of the object; the second an enlargement. (image credit: ICUFON Archives)

The Deception Island UFO flap was also covered in some detail by the U.S. military attachés stationed in Buenos Aires and Santiago, Chile, who digested and translated the local press coverage and the reports published in the Argentinean Navy Bulletin. These documents, released by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) years ago under the Freedom of Information Act, can be downloaded here.

Interestingly, the Deception Island incidents launched Capt. Perissé’s ufological career: first under the Navy Commission and, after his retirement from the service in 1984, as a civilian ufologist with the groups CEFAI and CIU, and in the 1990s with a semi-official study group within the Institute of Scientific and Technological Research of the Armed Forces (CITEFA in Spanish). Perissé presented a scientific paper full of charts and mathematical formulas entitled, “Correlation Between the UFO Phenomenon and Its Associated Entities,” at the MUFON International UFO Symposium at the American University in Washington, DC in July 1987, where I had the opportunity of meeting him.

View of Deception Island (image credit: Jerzy Strzelecki)

Location map of Deception Island in the South Shetland Islands (image credit: Giovanni Fattori over a GMT free license map)

THE AAF TAKES OVER

As the Navy UFO project was winding down and finally closed in 1974, the Argentinean Air Force (AAF) investigation was taking shape. The first public hint was provided by Brigadier Adolfo Alvarez, Commander in Chief of the AAF, in a radio interview in July 1968. The transcript was published in the influential Buenos Aires newspaper La Razón. When asked about flying saucers, Gen. Alvarez responded that “the Air Force has a specialized agency that has conducted investigations about this field for some time.” He cautioned, however, that he was not yet able to give a definitive opinion about the subject since “there are no sufficiently concrete facts.” Also in 1968, the military president of Argentina, General Juan Carlos Onganía, declared that, “I believe that flying saucers exist.”

AAF Captain Augusto Lima, head of the last UFO desk at the Air Force’s National Commission on Space Research. (image credit: Alejandro Agostinelli)

With the exception of the early reports published by the National Review of Aeronautics, the AAF UFO policy was never as open as that of the Navy. It eventually transpired that the man in charge of UFO investigations was Captain Augusto Lima, who worked at the AAF’s National Commission for Space Research (Spanish acronym of CNIE), Argentina’s main space agency. Unfortunately, the CNIE investigations were kept confidential and no reports were leaked to the press or to civilian ufologists. Moreover, according to journalist Alejandro Agostinelli, “Capt. Lima attempts to project a dispassionate image, but in private conversations he confesses that the totality of UFO sightings can be reduced to conventional explanations. Lima keeps busy receiving and particularly filing UFO data from the different military services. He conducts eventually an official investigation of cases which, in his view, have received too much publicity. He then proceeds to explain them away… Most investigators agree that Capt. Lima continues to hold a ‘chair’ in that Department for purely bureaucratic reasons.”

Nevertheless, a few interesting cases did leak to the press. During a flap in 1971, for instance, AAF pilot Francisco Sartorio filmed an unidentified object with a 16 mm movie camera while flying in Mar de Plata [see picture]. As far as we know, neither the full film nor the official report and analysis have been released. There are also reports that the CNIE obtained some metallic debris which reportedly came down from space. In early January 1979, news about small metallic pieces recovered in the rural area of General Ocampo in  Entre Rios province, surfaced briefly. The discovery was tied to a multi-colored UFO observed by hundreds of witnesses in the region on the night of December 21, 1978. On the following days, peasant Miguel Angel Romero went to work in the rice fields as he usually did, when he came across a piece of semi-hollowed bluish metal with a diameter of about 15 cm and a thickness of 2 mm. Another similar piece made its way during the same period to the newspaper El Heraldo in Concordia. Both were eventually requested by the CNIE for laboratory analysis.

AAF pilot Francisco Sartorio filmed this object with a 16 mm movie camera while flying in Mar de Plata in 1971. (image credit: J. J. Benítez)

When contacted by the weekly magazine Siete Días, AAF officers indicated that the piece, popularly referred to as “a door handle,” was made out of a very strong alloy resistant to the friction produced by contact with the atmosphere. They added that the piece was not part of a plane or a weather balloon, although they did not say what it was. More sensational was the crash of another alleged UFO on the evening of October 3, 1980 in a remote Andean area in the province of Río Negro, close to the Chilean border. The UFO had been sighted in the provinces of Río Negro and Neuquén, as well as in Chile, and there were several accounts of a loud explosion which shook the earth.

Despite the efforts of a group of Buenos Aires ufologists to reach the site in the high Andes, it was the Border Police and Capt. Lima who eventually located the crash site from a helicopter. They retrieved ash-like samples from what appeared to be three charred circular marks on the ground, but no further information on the contents of the samples was published. To this day, no final report on these or other cases investigated by the CNIE were ever released. By the mid-1980’s, however, the CNIE UFO project had practically faded away. The military lost political power after their defeat in the Falklands War with Britain in 1983 and were now facing budgetary cuts and renewed scrutiny from the new civilian democratic government. UFOs were no longer a priority. The CNIE project was finally closed officially with Capt. Lima’s retirement in 1987.

This attitude became evident in the case of airline pilot Capt. Jorge Polanco, who reported a close observation of a UFO while his Aerolinas Argentinas flight 734 from Buenos Aires was approaching Bariloche airport around midnight on July 31, 1995. The sighting coincided with a power blackout in the city (not uncommon in South America). Although Capt. Polanco was very outspoken to the media afterwards, stating that he thought it was an “extraterrestrial spaceship,” both AAF and the Civil Aviation authorities declined to make any public statements, giving the impression that they were not at all interested in the incident.

UPDATE: THE CITEFA EFFORT

Captain Daniel Perissé (left) with journalist Alejandro Agostinelli (right) during a UFO Congress in San Lorenzo in 1991. (image credit: Rubén Morales)

This total lack of official interest, however, was not entirely true. In the 1990s, a group of retired military officers and some scientists associated with the Institute of Scientific and Technological Research of the Armed Forces (Spanish acronym of CITEFA) attempted to revive an official military UFO project, tentatively named Commission for the Study of Space Phenomena (Spanish acronym CEFE) or National Investigations Commission for Anomalous Phenomena (Spanish acronym CNIFA). Although the group avoided any publicity and media attention whatsoever, veteran Buenos Aires journalist and ufologist Alejandro Agostinelli was eventually able to track them down. The group’s leader was Commodore (Ret.) Juan Carlos Mascietti, who served as chief of planning for the General Staff during the democratic government of President Alfonsín in the 1980s and secretary general of CITEFA. Other key members were Capt. Perissé and speleologist Julio Goyén Aguado, president of the Argentinean Center of Speleology, who had close links with the military. After being dodged by Agostinelli for months, Commodore Mascietti finally agreed to do a very short interview for the science magazine Descubrir (Discover).

“We are acting prudently because we are not interested in getting involved in any noise,” said Mascietti. “Moreover, we need to protect the privacy of scientists who are not interested in seeing their names in the headlines. Also, due to the characteristics of this type of work, we don’t want to contaminate or being contaminated.” When asked by Agostinelli if the CITEFA group had official backing, Mascietti responded that, “not yet, the group is formed by military and scientific personnel linked to official circles, but the support it receives is informal. We are hoping that the Ministry of Defense will officialize our activities, that’s all.”

Agostinelli then asked him for his opinion on UFOs and Mascietti’s response was very cautious: “Our compromise is not to reveal personal opinions. One shared criteria is that we must be skeptical. Another is that there are certain phenomena that must be explained. We are not interested in games: more than ufologists, we are scientists who are searching for the truth.” Despite Mascietti’s cautious statements, the CITEFA members were seen in various parts of Argentina investigating UFO cases and collecting data. They compiled eventually a 300-page report that was officially given to the Ministry of Defense in 1997. This report has never been released, but according to Agostinelli, it concluded that there are “unidentified phenomena which leave physical effects that can be proved,” even though “this does not show evidence on the nature of this phenomena, which remains without explanation.” Despite the group’s efforts, however, the Ministry of Defense never gave the go ahead for the UFO project, which faded away by the end of the decade due to several circumstances—some tragic—with its key members. Commodore Mascietti left CITEFA and moved out of Buenos Aires, Capt. Perissé became seriously ill and passed away a few years later, and Goyén Aguado died in an accident in 2000.

We contacted Alejandro Agostinelli by email recently to ask him about the CEFORA motion to request President Cristina Fernández to release official UFO documents in Argentina. His response was not optimistic: “In our country, you have to fight in government offices with lower level personnel to obtain these types of documents, not request them politely with signatures to a president that has to deal with very serious problems every single day. At best, she will smile and pass the request to an official with the recommendation of giving an evasive answer. To show interest in cooperating with a UFO request represents for a government reasonably paranoid with the press like this one, a risk of negative publicity that they don’t want to face.”

Agostinelli added that he doesn’t want to discourage the efforts made by CEFORA, especially since “my own efforts to obtain any type of documents came empty handed. But I understand that the reasons why I didn’t succeed in obtaining official documents become harder with the passing of time. The middle level civilian or military official usually doesn’t stay too long in his post; if they don’t give much importance to these papers, they can be lost; and if they are interested, they take them to their homes.” In any event, time will tell if the CEFORA motion will succeed.

Those who read Spanish, can check the CEFORA website here.

Alejandro Agostinelli’s complete report in Spanish, “The UFO Dossiers of the Argentinean Armed Forces,” can be read here.