Argentina UFO Sightings
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1977 Photos
Eyewitnesses spotted four UFOs over Bariloche, a city in southern Argentina, immediately prior and during two citywide electrical blackouts. Bariloche is a popular ski resort in the Andes, on the south shore of Lago (Lake) Nahuel Huapi, located 1,040 kilometers (650 miles) southwest of Buenos Aires.
The first blackout took place at 7:45 p.m. on Sunday, April 12, 1998 and lasted until 10:11 p.m. "Spokesmen for Cooperativa Electricidade Bariloche (CEB) said the origin of the electrical blackout that darkened a great part of the city has no explanation. No cause exists to explain the occurrence."
CEB linemen traced the source of the power shutdown to transmission lines leading to the Cipresales transformer substation.
Power was briefly restored for four minutes. But at 10:15 p.m., Bariloche's lights went off again, and the city remained without power until 1:30 a.m. Monday, April 13. According to the newspaper Diario Rio Negro, "Gustavo and Beatriz Riveros saw strange lights hovering above Cerro Carbon (hill) in the eastern section of the city Beatriz saw two of the lights 'fuse together' over the Lions (a land feature on the hillside--J.T.) just as the lights went out. Other witnesses reported strange illuminations over Lago Nahuel Huapi."
"In the barrio San Francisco, a woman saw 'a ball of red light' descending in a zigzag pattern toward the large pedestrian stairway at Tiscornia." A "luminous disc" was also seen near the intersection of Calle Fernando Beschtete and Calle La Paz. In the barrio Nicolas Lavalle, eyewitnesses saw four luminous UFOs hovering overhead. One witness, Sara Salizar, said, "They are a large spacecraft and three smaller ones that attached themselves to the larger one over and over again." Andrea Capararo told the Argentine news agency TOLAM that she and her sisters, Natalia and Carolina, "at 11:30 (p.m.) we observed in the sky a kind of large plate with twinkling red, yellow, green and blue lights, and another object a little bit longer with red and yellow lights. The luminous objects seemed permanently supported in the air for several minutes, then moved away towards the lake." Natalia and Carolina Capararo described the saucer as resembling "a tomato bigger than an airplane" and flying toward Cerro Carbon, east of the barrio.
"Various inhabitants of the upper (highland) region of the city, for their part, told radio and TV reporters that they had first seen a formation of stars moving across the sky with twinkling lights colored red, yellow and green and with a brilliant white radiance, between 10:30 and 11:45 p.m. Sunday night."
"The moving lights appeared to be attached to an elongated form and another form resembling a small bottle, the inhabitants said. The union of the two objects produced 'a great star,' like a great electrical discharge, and the lights of the city went out."
Bariloche is the site of two of Argentina's most famous incidents, the Dr. Tarda case in December 1968 and the jetliner pilot case in June 1995. (See the Argentinian newspapers Diario Popular of Buenos Aires and Diario Rio Negro for April 14, 1998. Muchas gracias a Carlos Iurchuk, Luis Pachecopy ALFANET para esas noticias.)