The Las Lomas Daylight Disc Video, Mexico City (1997)

Mexico City, 1997. Six years earlier, during the solar eclipse of 11 July 1991, Jaime Maussan had broadcast a viewer's tape of a metallic object in the sky. It started a wave. More viewer tapes followed through the decade.

On 26 September 1997, a letter and a five minute VHS cassette arrived at Televisa, booth 3, San Ángel. The letter was typed and signed "José Valles P." The cameraman, it said, wanted to stay anonymous. Two days later, on 28 September, the tape aired on Maussan's program Tercer Milenio.

The date given was 6 August 1997. Daylight over Bosques de las Lomas, in the west of the city. The handheld camera shakes, zooms and tilts as a large metallic disc hangs among the buildings, hovering, wobbling and rotating. At one point it disappears behind a high-rise building, then reappears.

Two men talk on the soundtrack. The cameraman says he is filming at work and fears losing his job. A note reportedly read: "We know what happens to witnesses, if they go public with something like this."

Maussan said he had interviewed twelve witnesses. Another account counts nine, plus the cameraman and his friend. A woman named Cassandra said the object was spinning, and that it had windows. Annie Lask said it hovered over her house in Bosque de las Lomas. She climbed up on her roof to watch it. She later reported burning eyes and memory loss, and her one attempt to photograph it failed. Another witness said the craft left a purple mist when it vanished.

The tape travelled. It was sold to UPN in the United States and Fuji Television in Japan. On the UPN special, propulsion engineer David Froning said: "I think it's an intelligently controlled craft." Two special effects supervisors at Digital Domain disagreed. Fred Raimondi called it "the most compelling footage I've seen." Ray Giarratana called it "a really good hoax… suspended from something above."

Bruce Maccabee found that camera shake blurred the buildings more than the object, calling the difference "the fingerprints of a hoax." In October 1998, MUFON staff video analyst Jeff Sainio reported his analysis. He had first thought the clip might be genuine, but found that the disc jumped almost instantly from stationary to steady speed, with no steady acceleration, and concluded it was a hoax. Philip J. Klass covered the case in his Skeptics UFO Newsletter. Years later, Mick West stabilised the clip on Metabunk and showed the same jerks.

Luis Miguel Barrera began investigating on 14 July 2009 and published his answer on 5 November 2015. He named Ignacio Ocampo Valles, a creative animator at Publicidad Virtual, which held the Latin American licence for the Live Video Insertion System, or LVIS. Barrera said LVIS could automatically compensate for zooms, tilts and other camera movements. He placed the filming site on a fourth-floor terrace at Paseo de los Laureles 458, then under construction, and argued that Ocampo inserted the animated disc. The pseudonym used Valles, Ocampo's maternal surname.

Ocampo never openly confessed. Pedro Ramírez, a former Tercer Milenio collaborator, said the video "is totally false and that it was made with animation techniques." Maussan held his ground. "For me the case is authentic," he said in 2009.

The UFO Database rates the case "82% likely a hoax," while still calling it insufficient information. Its defenders pointed to how smoothly the disc moved with the camera. The insertion theory rests on that same smoothness. Today the clip stands as a standard early example in the argument over faked digital UFO evidence.