The El Ramblón Railway Station Encounter (Felipe Onofre Orozco)

El Ramblón was a small station on the old Mendoza to San Juan branch of the Ferrocarril General San Martín, in rural Sarmiento department near the Mendoza border. In 1978 its station chief was Felipe Onofre Orozco. He was 33, married, a father of three.

The region was already on edge. That year brought sightings in the Uco Valley, near San Luis, over Mendoza, and in May "three flotillas" over Villa Mercedes, Mendoza and San Juan.

July 12, 1978. About 8:30 in the evening. Orozco left his post to refuel one of the railway signal lamps. In the French wire version, he was up the signal tower awaiting a freight train when an intense light came from the south. He took it for the train.

It was not the train. He saw a very powerful light. He heard a strange buzzing. He was completely dazzled. A strong smell of sulphur overcame him, his legs were immobilised, and he could not speak. In the railway's own report, the night had turned to "broad daylight". He lost consciousness for about three hours. When he came round, his nose was bleeding, and a large fireball was rising into the sky and disappearing behind the hills.

"Even though I was never afraid," he said, "believe me, what I went through was terrible."

At the nearby Estancia Santa Ana, manager José Lorenzo Correa was at home with his wife, six children, his mother-in-law and a friend, Leonardo Bazán. The television cut out. On the screen, an image like the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion. Then a red light rose between the hills.

Sergeant Andrés Néstor Oro, at the San Carlos police post, watched a red light from about 10 pm to 3 am. Félix Alfredo Balmaceda, from Media Agua, saw it too. A red luminous object, giving off a very strong white light across the countryside to the west. It stopped for moments, then moved off again in different directions, for about 15 minutes. A motorist heading to Mendoza was dazzled before it vanished. Domestic animals took refuge in Orozco's office. Radio and TV were interrupted across several kilometres.

Orozco was hospitalised the next morning with psychological shock. He asked to be transferred and never went back. Police forensics found no sign of ground contact. The provincial police chief, named as Juan Voget, or Guillermo Vogel in one account, told a press conference: "We are dealing with a strange object, not common or usual for the people of the area." UFO specialist Víctor Corradi called it one of the most important cases in 15 years.

In 2023 CEFORA, through Andrea Pérez Simondini, obtained the release of a confidential two page report from the railway zone chief to Ferrocarriles Argentinos in Buenos Aires. It confirms the reddish light with bright flashes, the radio and TV interference, the animals and the sulphur smell.

The story grew in the retelling. Jorge "Toto" Pérez of Guardianes del Cielo Cuyano describes a flying saucer settling over Orozco and knocking him from a ladder, and calls it Argentina's first documented close encounter of the third kind. A 2024 KGRA piece adds radiation burns and fighter jets. None of this appears in the 1978 coverage. No hoax has been alleged, and no conventional explanation has been published. In 2022 Pérez and colleagues released the documentary El caso Ramblón, nominated at the Roswell Daily Record Film Festival in 2023.