The Bajada Grande three-eyed giant (Ricardo Mieres encounter)

Bajada Grande lies in the northwest of the city of Paraná, in Entre Ríos, on the left bank of the Paraná River. From the 1930s it had a Portland cement factory, the city's first industrial zone. The whole case rests on one news item. La Razón of Buenos Aires carried it on 29 July 1962, under a Paraná dateline. The encounter took place on 27 or 28 July. No hour was given.

Ricardo Mieres was 17, a student at the Colegio Nacional de Paraná. He was driving his car toward Bajada Grande, about 5 kilometers from Paraná, near the cement plant. Open country. Sandy soil.

Then he saw it. In the paper's words, as translated by Patrick Gross, it was "a very tall being with a watermelon-large head, long almost white hair, with three unblinking eyes with fixed stare."

Mieres tried to get away in a hurry. His engine stalled. The being came up and violently wrenched away his scarf. Then, "turning in a circle like a 'robot'," it left on foot. Behind it lay footprints in the sand.

Once it had gone, the car started. Mieres drove to the centre of Paraná. In Plaza de Mayo he gathered friends on motorcycles and led them back. The scarf was lying on the road. The footprints were there. Other people had seen something too: "a strange glow from a space vehicle flying at low altitude which vanished at very high speed." Mieres himself never reported a craft.

Gordon Creighton brought the case to English readers in the Flying Saucer Review special issue The Humanoids in 1966, and in the 1967 book edited by Charles Bowen. In his telling Mieres rode a motorcycle, and the creature "did an about-turn, like a robot." In the original, the motorcycles belonged to the friends.

Jacques Vallée listed it in Passport to Magonia, citing the Argentine group CODOVNI. His entry gave "Bajeola Grande", 30 July and a witness named "Roberto Mievres", and had the search party see an unknown craft flying away. Ted Phillips copied those errors into his Trace Catalogue as case 155. The 30 July date cannot be right. The first report is dated 29 July.

There appears to have been no investigation beyond the newspaper report. Patrick Gross, who catalogued the case as URECAT-000155, flags that and the single witness to the being as serious open issues. The CODOVNI file has never been located. No photographs or drawings exist, and no source says the footprints were measured or cast. No hoax finding or confession is on record either. Gross leaves the verdict at extraterrestrial beings or hoax, with no certainty. In 1978 Jean-Jacques Jaillat wrote in Lumières Dans La Nuit that the case had "high symbolic value", part of his view that UFOs are "psychic materializations".

The Paraná giant stands apart from the Bahía Blanca sightings of May 1962, more than 600 km away. Albert Rosales's catalogue of humanoid encounters for those years may hold it too. What remains is a sandy road, a scarf on the ground and three eyes that never blinked. The Spanish text of La Razón and the CODOVNI file are still waiting to be found.