The EPEC truckers' missing time between Arroyito and Tránsito

San Francisco, in the east of Córdoba province. Late December 1978. Three men from EPEC, the provincial power company, had a simple job: take a company vehicle west along National Route 19 to the city of Córdoba. At the wheel was Orlando Carrizo, an experienced trucker who knew the route. With him rode Severino Brunetto and his son, Daniel Brunetto.

It was about 4:20 in the morning. They had just left Arroyito when a vehicle came toward them, high beams on. Carrizo later wrote: "As that vehicle passed ours, I switched to high beams, and when I did we found we were in the town of Tránsito, which surprised us because at no point had we driven that stretch." Tránsito lay about 15 km further on.

None of them remembered the Río Segundo bridge or the Rivarola meat plant, landmarks they knew well. The version carried by the Buenos Aires Herald adds one detail. The cigarettes they had been smoking were still burning.

Further west, near Pedro Vivas past Santiago Temple, they saw an intense, diffuse luminosity surrounded by mist. Then a shape emerged. The Herald described a flattened rhomboid about 25 meters across, on a hill some 150 meters from the road. It revolved on a vertical axis.

Flashes came through what looked like rotating windows. A faint reddish mist came from its lower part, and a powerful white searchlight on top swept the sky. At times it "oscillated as if it were a top on a wave." It moved slowly, about 200 meters, toward the witnesses. Other truck drivers had stopped to watch, and one shone a flashlight at the object.

Then, Carrizo wrote, "Suddenly the powerful beam was turned toward our truck, and Mr. Brunetto threw himself to the ground." The Brunettos signed a joint statement on the ending. "Its powerful searchlight blinded us for a moment, and when it went out we were surprised to find the object was no longer there; it had disappeared."

The Buenos Aires Herald ran the story on 29 December. La Prensa followed a day later with an EFE report headlined "Teletransportó un Ovni a un grupo de camioneros". After the coverage, Benito Peludero, head of EPEC's Zona D office, asked the men for written statements. They called the event "insólito".

The sources still disagree on the date. The EPEC statements give 27 December. The Herald and the MUFON UFO Journal give the 28th.

The MUFON UFO Journal summarised the case in early 1979, in a report by Jane Thomas. Richard Hall, in Uninvited Guests (1988), called it "suggestive of a possible abduction." Patrick Gross, cataloguing it decades later, found "no sign that the case was investigated" and rated the information insufficient. No hoax finding and no conventional explanation have been published.

March 2025. The son of a deceased EPEC employee brought documents his father had kept to the UFO Museum in Victoria, Entre Ríos. Andrea Pérez Simondini, director of CEFORA and of the museum, said: "He told us about a case we didn't know." Infobae published the statements, and many Argentine outlets followed, their headlines calling the case "desclasificado". Pérez Simondini chose careful words: "Here, in the EPEC case, there is a probable lost-time event."