Isla de Lobos lighthouse landing

Isla de Lobos lies about 8 km southeast of Punta del Este, in Uruguay's Maldonado Department, where the Río de la Plata meets the Atlantic. Its lighthouse, built in 1906, is run by the National Navy of Uruguay. In 1972 a small crew lived there under Sub-Officer Francisco Cascudo.

Saturday, October 28, 1972. About 22:10. Clear skies, no Moon. Corporal Juan Fuentes Figueroa left the crew house to check the generators.

On the terrace roof at the base of the lighthouse, he saw lights that "shouldn't be there." His first thought was a car. On the island, that was impossible. He fetched his pistol and walked closer, cocking it.

The object was an inverted bowl, 4 to 5 m across, with a dome and a rotating, corkscrew-shaped antenna. It stood on legs. Its metal was reddish, "something like... burnt," he said, "a sort of... mahogany colour." Lights like "little squares" in white, yellowish and violet flashed like "an advertising sign."

Three figures came out through a rectangular door. Two were about 1.50 m tall, the third about 1.75 to 1.80 m. He saw only dark silhouettes, "as if they were wearing heavy black rubber suits," with an elongated shape to the back of their heads.

Fuentes, about 27 m away at his closest, raised the pistol. He felt "paralyzed and confused and was unable to shoot." His hair stood on end. An inner message came: "Don't shoot because it is useless."

The figures climbed back in. The legs "retracted telescopically." The craft rose with a hum to about 45 meters, tilted, "belched a blinding fireball from the bottom, and disappeared in silence." It was gone toward the southeast. The whole event took about a minute.

He returned to the house pale. Only Cascudo seems to have believed him. Navy Captain Rubén R. Varela reported the sighting on 17 November 1972, and the case passed to the Uruguayan Air Force. Fuentes said he was later shown drawings by two US Embassy staff. In 2012 his eldest son wrote that red marks like burns had appeared along his father's right side days afterward.

In August 1973 the case reached CIOVI, the group Milton Hourcade founded in 1958. Two recorded interviews, an on-site reconstruction and about 9 hours of psychological testing followed. In March 1975 CIOVI found "a high degree of possibility that it really happened," though a single witness limited the case to "about 50% value." Willy Smith called it a "TRUFO," a term coined by Bruce Maccabee.

Fuentes died around 2002. In 2005 Hourcade and Germán Vázquez reviewed the file and proposed a Hughes 500 helicopter, citing height, cabin size, colour, door, rotor sound and exhaust. Carlos Ferguson called the idea absurd. Argentine helicopters were painted green, there was no noise before take-off, the range was too great, no flight record exists and the burns go unexplained. No one has ever alleged a hoax.