Gendarmería jeep patrol and the low blue light at Andacollo

July 1968. Winter in the Andes. In the far north of Neuquén Province, close to the Chilean border, the Gendarmería Nacional guarded a land of steep grades and poor roads. The region had already seen a quiet run of strange lights. Visión OVNI says a "micro-wave" of sightings at Pichi Neuquén and Copahue in January 1968 was known only in some military circles.

The night of 15 to 16 July. A patrol jeep was driving back from Las Ovejas along provincial route 101, between Andacollo and Chos Malal. It was snowing and raining moderately. Visibility was poor. Aboard were Alférez Néstor Arturo Palacios, Sargento David Acosta, Sargento Heriberto Segundo Muñoz, Cabo Ignacio Castillo and Cabo Dionisio García, the motor mechanic at the wheel.

At 00:15, near a spot called Los Menucos, they saw a luminous object. It crossed the road ahead of them, about 500 metres away, some 40 to 45 degrees above the horizon. It was elongated, wider at the front, about two metres in size. Its light was a clear sky blue. No halo. No trail.

It moved very slowly. It stopped for moments at a time. Then it went into a vertical descent until it was hidden from view. The whole thing lasted about 20 to 40 seconds.

Something else happened in those seconds. The jeep visibly lost power. On a slope it normally climbed in second gear, it struggled. The driver noticed. So did the passengers.

Snow, rain and terrain made any search for traces impossible. The gendarmes wrote reports and sent them up the chain of command. The original reports reached Visión OVNI through Lic. Antonio N. Baragiola. No report numbers or dates for them have been found. No conclusion has ever surfaced.

On 20 July an AFP wire item ran in La Tribune of Sherbrooke, Canada. It spoke of the border Gendarmerie and a mysterious flying object at high altitude "which gave off a very bright light". The object seemed to land nearby, in a place hidden by the terrain. In translation the force became "national Police", probably the origin of NICAP's "National Police officers".

Then the catalogues took over. The Argentine researcher Oscar A. Uriondo described a flattened object 2 metres across, glowing sky blue, flying slowly close to the ground, with a five-minute loss of engine power. His catalogue reportedly cites La Razón of Buenos Aires, 18 July 1968. Uriondo carried the case to Flying Saucer Review in February 1974, and from there it entered Mark Rodeghier's 1981 vehicle-interference catalogue for the Center for UFO Studies, the UFOCAT database and NICAP's files, coded simply as a "jeep" case. Daniela Ciancia's 2014 Patagonian list gives about 30 minutes, and another of her entries, dated 1967, is almost certainly the same event with the wrong year.

No source proposes a conventional explanation, and questions stay open. A bright fireball does not fit the slow movement with pauses. A jeep labouring up a snowy mountain grade might have an ordinary cause. A glow linked to the storm is conceivable. None of this has been tested.

The Andacollo patrol sits in a cluster. Two nights later, residents of Chos Malal reported three objects to Gendarmería Commander Juan B. Farías. In August, Cabo Dionisio García was aboard another jeep at Chacay Melehue when a reddish ovoid ducked behind a hill. Across Argentina, the July to September 1968 wave was building. Five uniformed witnesses, one blue light, an engine that faltered.