Reported UFO sightings and close encounters in Mexico

Mexico's least reputable ufologist, Jaime Maussán, and his actual crazy board.

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Reports of sightings of UFOs and close encounters with "aliens" in Mexico date back to at least 1883, when astronomer José Bonilla took the earliest known photograph of a UFO, and include the 1991 Mexico City flap, which has been described as one of the largest mass UFO sightings ever.

Mexico's UFO phenomenon has, however, for the most part, been a mere reflection of that of its northern neighbor. Prior to the modern phenomenon Mexico experienced a handful of mysterious cigar-shaped craft, assumed to be zeppelin prototypes coming from abroad, akin to the mystery airship flap in the US. Following Kenneth Arnold's well-publicized 1946 sighting in the US of a cluster of nine brightly glowing objects that flew "like a saucer skipping over water," Mexico, too, experienced a wave of flying saucers (or platillos volantes). While, as in the US, modern UFOs (or OVNIs) take on a wide variety of forms.

The 1883 Bonilla Observation

The first, but probably not the last time a goose would be mistaken for a UFO.

The Bonilla Observation was an astronomical event witnessed and photographed by Mexican astronomer José Bonilla (1853–1920) from the Astronomical Observatory in the State of Zacatecas on 12 August 1883. Bonilla spent 48 hours using a the Collodion process to capture ink photographs of the 447 objects he observed partially obscuring the Sun. Bonilla's observation, which was published in the January 1886 issue of L’Astronomie, was immediately dismissed by French physicist Camille Flammarion (1842–1925) as, most likely, insects, dust, or high-flying geese, the latter of which has become the accepted rational explanation. These images have, none the less, been recognized as the earliest known photographs of an alleged UFO.

A highly controversial alternative to the geese hypothesis, proposed in a 2011 study led by Hector Manterola at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, based on Bonilla's description of the objects as 'fuzzy' or 'misty' with 'dark tails', is that it was a comet breaking up. Explaining away the lack of any other observations of this event as being due to parallax, led to the further conclusion that the comet would have been a hair's breadth (some 600-8,000km) from the Earth's surface. As such, if this is true, this was a very near miss with an extinction-level event.

Salvador Villanueva Medina

Salvador Villanueva Medina was a Mexican taxi driver and claimed alien contactee who published a book in which he claimed to have met with visitors from the planet Venus and been taken to their planet for a five-day visit in August 1953. The encounter happened, according to Medina, when his 1952 Buick broke down on the way to the border at Laredo. While working on the transmission, a Nordic alien, similar to those reported by George Adamski and other so-called contactees in the mid-1950s, approached him for a chat. Returning the following morning, as Medina had spent the night asleep in the car awaiting assistance, the alien and his companion offered to show Medina their craft and take him to their home world of Venus. Medina spent five days on Venus taking an interest in such things as their manufacturing processes for tires. After being returned to Earth, Medina, at the suggestion of the aliens, published his account of his time on Venus in the book, Estuve en el Planeta Venus.

The 1974 Coyame UFO Crash

The Coyame UFO Crash is an urban legend about a UFO that crashed intact just outside the town of Coyame following a mid-air collision with a small airplane on August 25, 1974. Mexican soldiers sent out the following day to examine the crash site are said to have discovered a five-meter by two-meter flying saucer which they loaded onto a flatbed truck to return to their base. Within an hour, however, the convoy swerved off the road and all 24 soldiers were dead from unknown causes. A CIA extraction team supposedly monitoring from just across the border allegedly swooped in, swept away the saucer to Hangar 18, and incinerated the site to remove any remaining traces. The story fortuitously came to light in 1992 when UFO investigator Elaine Douglass claimed to have received a package of documents on the incident leaked by someone on the "Deneb Team". Subsequent investigation has turned up little in the way of corroboration and some suspect any grain of truth behind this legend may relate to a downed drug-smuggling plane.

The 1991 Mexico City UFO Flap

The planet Venus visible above Mexico City during the 1991 solar eclipse.

The Mexico City UFO Flap was a mass UFO sighting in which up to 40,000 witnesses, including journalist Jaime Maussán (who would go on to become the country's least respectable ufologist) saw, photographed and filmed a large stationary white light visible above Mexico City for 30 minutes during the solar eclipse of July 11, 1991.

When Maussán broadcast footage of the sighting shot by filmmaker Guillermo Arriaga the following week on Sesenta Minutos (the Mexican version of 60 Minutes) the station received thousands of calls from viewers claiming to have seen the exact same thing, earning this incident the reputation of being one of the largest mass UFO sightings ever.

Subsequent analysis of the numerous reports, photographs and footage, however, indicates that what the vast majority of witnesses saw was, in fact, the planet Venus. Whilst some of the other sightings, it has been suggested, may have been due to a high altitude weather balloon above the location at that time.

The UFO of Las Lomas

Only employees of Publicidad Virtual were lucky enough to spot this.

The UFO of Las Lomas was a large disc-shaped UFO which was supposedly filmed hovering over the rooftops of downtown Mexico City in broad daylight on 6^th August 1997. The footage was sent under a pseudonym to the TV offices of Maussán on September 26^th. Although initially suspicious as no such incident had been reported at the time, Maussán broadcast the footage on his TV show the day after receiving it. It was immediately picked up by international broadcasters and even went viral on the then still nascent World Wide Web.

Maussán quickly located the building where the footage had been filmed and by asking around was able to turn up a few witnesses who claimed to have seen something, but none proved to be particularly reliable. Although initial study by MUFON staff video analyst Jeff Sainio suggested the footage might be genuine, further analysis pointed to several clear signs of fakery. The likely creator was eventually identified as Ignacio Ocampo Valles who was an employee of advertising agency Publicidad Virtual which had its video production facilities near to where the footage was filmed.

The 2004 Mexican Air Force UFO Incident

It may not look like much, but you should have seen the one that got away.

The Mexican Air Force UFO Incident was a filmed encounter between Mexican Air Force pilots using infrared cameras to search for drug-smuggling planes and eleven lights 3.5km high in the sky over southern Campeche on 5 March 2004. Mexico’s Defense Department released the video to the press on May 12 along with interviews with the crew in which radar operator Lt. German Marin confessed “Was I afraid? Yes. A little afraid because we were facing something that had never happened before,” with infrared equipment operator Lt. Mario Adrian Vazquez adding, “I couldn’t say what it was… but I think they’re completely real.”

Maussán, who was personally invited by Mexico’s Minister of Defense, General Gerardo Clemente Vega García, to assist in the analysis and release of the footage, immediately lauded it as "historic news" because it was the first UFO video to have the backing of the armed forces of any country, and, "the armed forces don't perpetuate frauds." He also interviewed Maj Magdaleno Castanon, who told him how he led the pursuit of the lights:

I believe they could feel we were pursuing them. There was a moment when... the screens showed they were behind us, to the left and in front of us. It was at that point that I felt a bit tense.

UFO investigator Alejandro Franz, however, identified the lights as very stationary burn-off flares from oil rigs in the Cantarell Field, with any apparent movement entirely illusory. Michael Shermer, who had appeared on CNN three times the week the story broke, noted how, like a fisherman’s tale, it grew with each retelling.

The Metepec Creature

The Metepec creature is roughly the size and shape of a skinned marmoset.

The so-called Metepec Creature is a small, smooth, whitish-grey creature, which bears a distinct resemblance to a skinned marmoset. The specimen was purchased by Jaime Maussán for US$23,000 in 2007 from taxidermist Urso Ruíz, who claimed to have captured it alive in a rat trap on a ranch in Metepec, Mexico, and shown it to multiple witnesses before killing it. In 2010, however, Ruíz made a truly shocking confession:

It’s just the corpse of a skinned squirrel-monkey. I took its ears out and involved it with all the hair and fluids of all animals I could find, then I dried it. All samples they take of it will come out as being of different animals.

Undeterred, Maussán continued shopping it around and hyping up the indeterminate DNA results which Ruíz had predicted. Analysis of advanced scanning and DNA testing at Imperial College London for Channel 4’s Alien Investigations in 2012 conclusively identified it as a marmoset and, under lie-detection for the same programmme, Ruíz confirmed it to be a Buffy-tufted marmoset he’d been sent by the local zoo for taxidermic preservation.

The 2023 Mexican Congress Public Audiences on UFOs

Maussán still playing with his dolls at a Mexican congressional hearing.

The Mexican Congress Public Audiences on UFOs were two official congressional hearings overseen by representative Sergio Gutiérrez Luna and led by Jaime Maussan, which were held in the Green Room of Mexico's Chamber of Deputies in September and November 2023 to examine the UFO phenomenon.

The speakers presented by Maussán included: Japanese congressman Yoshiharu Asakawa, Mexican pilot Julio Darwish, US Navy pilot Ryan Graves, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, Retired USAF officer Robert Salas, INAI director Mariano Tello, Data science consultant Michael Valliant, Mexican air traffic controller Enrique Kolbeck Vergara and Brazilian Center for Physical Research researcher Rony Tadeu Vernet.

Maussán and his long-term “scientific” advisor Jesús Zalce Benítez stole the show, and all the subsequent headlines, by presenting two dolls from the Nazca Mummy collection crafted by Luis Quispe and Thierry Jamin, which they claim to be recovered alien bodies. Graves, who had also testified at a similar hearing before the US Congress the previous May, responded by Tweeting, "I am deeply disappointed by this unsubstantiated stunt," and describing it as, "a huge step backwards for this issue."