Sighting record / 1965
December 1965. San Miguel, 40 kilometres west of Buenos Aires. A call reached the small Adhara Observatory with a strange report. Objects, it seemed, were passing in front of the Moon. Luis Ferro turned his reflector telescope on the lunar disc and began taking photographs, one every four minutes. At the eyepiece he saw nothing unusual. Then the film was developed. On the sixth frame, a cluster of dark circular spots sat across the face of the Moon. Father Segundo Benito Reyna, the Jesuit who directed the observatory, called it a flotilla of UFOs. The frames before and after showed nothing. Later analysts blamed the darkroom. The photograph still circulates.
In the mid-1960s, the town of San Miguel, 40 kilometres west of Buenos Aires, had two observatories. One was the Jesuit Observatory of Cosmic Physics. The other was Adhara, a private amateur observatory built around 1962 by Luis Ferro. It had no connection to any scientific institution.