Miguel Tohmé's Photographs of a Luminous Object over Bahía Blanca

May 1962. Bahía Blanca was living through a month of strange skies. On 11 May, Rear Admiral Eladio Vázquez and Captain Aldo Molinari reported an object near the Comandante Espora naval air base. Before dawn on 12 May, truckers on Route 35 described a lit object like a railway car on the ground near the road. It rose and crossed the road at a height of four metres.

On Sunday 20 May, La Nueva Provincia was flooded with phone calls. Its Monday page read "Un domingo con platos voladores." Then came Monday evening.

Miguel Tohmé was 23, a staff photographer at La Nueva Provincia. He was on foot on Calle Chiclana, in the centre of town, when he saw it. He described a luminous body with an aura of light "más grande que la luna llena", larger than the full moon. Other accounts compared it to a soccer ball. The press called it a luminous oval.

It was not leaving the city. Tohmé went for the paper's Jeep. "Subí al Jeep del diario con el objeto de buscar un lugar de buena visibilidad," he said. At Calle Don Bosco he parked facing the way he had come, engine running, lights on. It was instinct because he could see the object coming toward that spot.

According to the press account later clipped into CIA files, he drove to the Maldonado Canal and took several photographs, "one the very instant the mysterious body stopped and changed its course." Across the city, people watched "a strange luminous body suspended for several minutes over the city." Then it disappeared. Quickly, at great speed.

Tuesday 22 May 1962. La Nueva Provincia ran one of Tohmé's frames on its front page, under the headline "Logróse fotografiar un objeto luminoso que cruzó ayer sobre el cielo de Bahía Blanca." Some accounts say he took two photos, the wire report says several. Only one is known to have been published.

An AFP Spanish-language wire report, filed from Lima, carried the story abroad. A copy ended up in CIA files titled "ARGENTINA UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS." It was released under FOIA in 1978 and drew new attention online in 2016. The transcription published by Patrick Gross carries a 1952 header, apparently a typing error, and some later write-ups repeated the wrong year. The CIA reached no conclusion, and the document is a news clipping, not an investigation.

At the time, the Observatorio Astronómico de Córdoba asked for photos and sketches of the luminous phenomenon seen since 13 May, to determine whether it was a meteor shower, the break-up of an artificial satellite, or something else. No published conclusion has been found. No source accuses Tohmé of faking his picture, and a long hover followed by a stop and a change of course sits uneasily with a meteor. Small details still disagree: seven or half past seven, two photos or several, many witnesses or a small group.

In 1963 the writer and UFO researcher Carlos Ferguson counted "8 important cases out of almost 80 in the entire country" in Bahía Blanca. Sightings came from Puerto Belgrano Naval Base in the same days. The city became the capital nacional de los ovnis, and retrospectives, including a 2021 piece by DIB journalist Marcelo Metayer, keep returning to that May. Tohmé's single frame is its emblem.