Platillos volantes sobre Asunción: Incident #119

Friday, 20 February 1948. About 07:00, in Barrio Obrero, Agustina Vargas viuda de Paula saw an oval-shaped object travelling through the sky from west to east. The front was bulkier than the rear, and the shape ended in a very thin tail about 3 feet long. From inside came green, yellow and orange light, and behind it ran a very colourful trail. To her, it was "extraordinario y muy hermoso", extraordinary and very beautiful.

In Areguá, on Lake Ypacaraí east of the capital, an unnamed employee of the Banco del Paraguay saw the same object at the same time. The object, they said, gave off a variety of colours. In the hills of Cordillera, people reported a star falling onto one of the hills. Travellers arriving in Asunción from the interior said they had seen the object as well. They believed it was a celestial phenomenon.

Across the river, in the Paraguayan Chaco, a rancher and his farmhands saw something too. One account places them at the estancia Santa Felicia, another at Villa Hayes. They described "un disco de un tono verde, con aureolas a su alrededor". A green disc with halos around it. It was smaller than an aeroplane, moved slower than one and flew at about 300 feet.

The story ran in La Tribuna, the Asunción newspaper, a few days later. Sources disagree on whether it was 25 or 26 February. The article caught the attention of United States investigators.

Major Samuel J. Skousen, GSC, gathered the accounts from the scattered locations into a 13-page report. It was filed as Incident #119, under the title "Platillos volantes sobre Asunción". There were no photographs, no radar and no physical traces. Only the words of the witnesses.

Paraguayan ufologist Ronald Maidana Torres found the file among declassified Project Blue Book records and brought it into his 2016 book. In May 2026, Diario Extra reported it among the 162 files published by the US Department of War at its UFO portal.

No source available today states Skousen's formal conclusion. The only interpretive note on record is that the travellers believed they had seen a celestial phenomenon. No hoax has ever been alleged.

The details invite comparison with a bright daylight fireball: a single pass from west to east, seen at the same moment from separate towns, a heavier head with a thin tail, green, yellow and orange colours, a star falling over the Cordillera hills. But no published analysis makes that case. And the Chaco witnesses put the object low and slow, at about 300 feet, slower than an aeroplane. One account gives 1,000 feet instead, and the figures have never been reconciled.

Maidana's book, Ovnis en el Paraguay: Radiografía de un fenómeno desconocido, gathers about 50 Paraguayan cases reaching back to 1651. Incident #119 is one of three Paraguayan cases in the American files, beside an object said to have landed on school grounds and a case titled "Ovnis en el Chaco".

It remains a quiet case. One morning. A handful of people across a country, looking up at the same moment. And one of them, at least, calling what she saw extraordinary and very beautiful.