The Espora and Puerto Belgrano naval air base sightings, Bahía Blanca wave (1962)

May 1962. Bahía Blanca, a port city on Argentina's Atlantic coast, was living through a strange month. Truck drivers reported an object on Route 35. On 21 May, Miguel Tohmé photographed a luminous oval over the city. At the edge of it all sat two navy installations, Base Aeronaval Comandante Espora, north east of the city, and Puerto Belgrano Naval Base, beside Punta Alta.

11 May. 19:40. Rear Admiral Eladio Vázquez and Captain Aldo Molinari, second commander of the naval area, were waiting at Espora for a North American military mission. They saw a UFO. No description of its shape survives.

22 May, early evening, sometime between 19:00 and 20:00. A naval training formation was in the air near Espora, led by instructor Teniente Rodolfo César Galdós. Student pilot Eduardo Figueroa saw "un objeto anaranjado que se mueve según un rumbo oscilante, por debajo del horizonte visible". An orange object on an oscillating course, below the horizon. Figueroa gave chase, but it escaped at high speed.

Roberto Wilkinson was flying at 4,000 feet. Suddenly the cockpit filled with "una potente luz proveniente detrás del avión", a powerful light from behind. Then a luminous object passed beneath the aircraft and disappeared over the lights of the city. During the contact, Wilkinson's radio stopped working.

The tower asked Galdós whether anything was visible, and it was. A luminous circular disc, orange, of great diameter, about the apparent size of the Moon. It hung roughly 30 degrees above the horizon over Bahía Blanca, then moved south and was lost in the distance. Tower staff described one object as orange and the size of the full Moon. The low passes went on for about 35 minutes.

A stranger story surfaced 57 years later. On a radio programme in March 2019, Horacio Edgardo González recalled serving as a petty officer at Puerto Belgrano. Between 21 and 23 April 1962, González and others saw three flying saucers about 70 metres off the shore, some 100 metres up. A hatch opened and a ladder came down, "como de vidrio, hasta el agua", like glass, down to the water. A being 60 to 70 cm tall, in a shiny suit, filled a transparent bucket with seawater eight to ten times, while two more beings stayed inside.

Luis Burgos of the Fundación Argentina de Ufología lists the Espora flight as Report No. 02779 and calls it the first official acknowledgment by an Argentinean government. In October 1962 the Air Attaché at the Argentine Embassy in Washington reported on the sightings near Espora. One quoted line reads: "testimonies of Naval Air Officer pilots and personnel of the Flying Course indicate the existence of something unexplained". That year the Navy set up COPEFO, a permanent commission to study the phenomenon, with Captains Constantino Núñez and Omar Roque Pagani among its members.

The Córdoba Astronomical Observatory gathered reports from the wave to decide whether the cause was a meteor cluster, part of an artificial satellite, or something else. No result was published. No specific explanation has been offered for the Espora flight. No hoax claim has been made against the naval witnesses.

In February 2021, Andrea Pérez Simondini of CEFORA made public a story from an anonymous former Navy man. According to the informant, a UFO crashed near Puerto Belgrano on 22 May 1962, and two small corpses with large heads were seen at the Military Hospital. The Navy said the nearby runway dates from 1962 and 1963, and that many archives from the period were lost in a fire. The legend rests on unnamed documents. The pilots' account needs none of it, and remains on the record, unexplained.