Ummo
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In ufology, Ummo is a fictitious planet orbiting the star Wolf 424[note 1] in the constellation of Virgo
, which was very popular even outside ufologist circles in both Spain and France between the decades of 1960 and 1980.
This affair began in 1966, when José Luis Jordán Peña claimed to have seen in Madrid "an enormous circular object with three legs and, on its underside, a curious symbol: three vertical lines joined by a horizontal bar. The two exterior lines curved outward at the edges, which made the pictogram resemble the alchemical sign for the planet Uranus.". Not long afterwards, the author of a UFO book who also lived in such city received several photographs in an anonymous mailing of a craft similar to the one reported by Peña, and bearing the same symbol. Within a few weeks, a Spanish contactee became involved when he began receiving lengthy, typewritten documents which purported to come from a spacefaring race called the Ummites who lived among humans disguised such way and claimed to have come to Earth in 1950, landing in France.
Most supposedly Ummite communications took the form of letters and pictures sent such way and telephone calls[note 2]. However, besides skeptics showing their objections, few ufologists outside Spain took Ummoism seriously —the photographic evidence was highly suspect and, while the Ummite letters were more sophisticated than most contactee communication, there was nothing in them that could not have originated on Earth even if people who have studied such communication note that, whatever their origins, considerable effort had gone into the supposed hoax with the science described there being knowledgeable but unremarkable, lacking anything unknown to science of these times, and while to date in the '60s obsolete by the standards of later decades helping how what was described in such purported alien letters appeared in foreign scientific journals that were difficult to obtain in Francoist Spain.
Eventually José Luis Jordán Peña claimed responsibility for having written the letters and produced the pictures, claiming to have wanted to test human credibility with such hoax and also noting how "Ummo" came from the Spanish Humo (which means "smoke")[note 3]. According to him, Wolf 424 as the star of origin of the Ummites was chosen at random and Ummoism was instigated with the help of some random collaborators, stoppping when he felt the Ummo affair had escaped out of control producing up to religious cults as Edelweiss, that marked its members with Ummo's symbol. Despite that, some still believe on it as precisely a religious cult in Bolivia[1].
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Notes[edit]
- ↑ As noted in the Wikipedia's article actually a double star system. That they do not specify which star of both such planet orbits should be a red flag
- ↑ So much for a supposedly advanced race
- ↑ An expression in Spanish is "vendedor de humo" ("smoke seller"), which can be translated as "snake oil salesman"