Olavarría Army Patrol Encounter: Corporal Menéndez Fires on Three Silver-Suited Beings by the Tapalqué Stream

July 1968. Argentina was in the middle of a wave of sightings. That month, a local UFO study group formed in Olavarría, in Buenos Aires Province.

The town's Army garrison stood about 2.5 km from the centre, its back to the Arroyo Tapalqué. Behind it lay a landing strip used by aircraft in emergencies.

Friday 19 July 1968. Shortly before dawn. Corporal Menéndez had just come on guard. Over the Tapalqué valley, a great gleam lit up the area. With it came a strange buzz that grew louder and louder. Others saw it too. A patrol went out by jeep, the men carrying PAM sub-machine guns.

They found an oval object, rather flat, moving a few metres above the ground and projecting multicoloured sparks. It had short legs on its edges. It landed by the strip. Its light dimmed, and it looked silver-plated.

Three beings got out. They were 2 metres tall or more, in silver suits, and they came towards the patrol with slow steps that seemed to lack stability, like the moves of big apes. Corporal Menéndez fired five bursts at them. Nothing happened. All three raised a hand, showing something like a small illuminated lantern. The soldiers felt invaded by disgust and tiredness. They could not use their weapons. The beings went back on board, and the craft took off at high speed, zigzagging. The next day, the men's eyes were badly irritated.

El Popular, the Olavarría paper, broke the story on 20 July. It wrote of "extraños seres", strange beings, never extraterrestrials. On 26 July La Razón and the EFE wire took it national and abroad. Along the way the corporal became a "police chief", and the date drifted to 22 or 25 July. On 1 August, Gente reported that Cabo Menéndez and soldiers Flores and Hernández had been moved to Campo de Mayo "for observation".

The Army moved fast. On 21 July, Maj. Julio César Cattani called the reports "totalmente falsa", totally false. A communiqué the next day said there was not the slightest indication that the versions about a UFO and extraterrestrial beings were credible. El Popular's director, Julio Mario Pagano, later wrote that the military had held a secret inquiry with witness statements. Its results were never published.

In August 1992, investigator Roberto Banchs interviewed the former regiment commander, Lt Col Luis Máximo Premoli. "Fue un episodio sin ninguna importancia," the commander said. A mix-up with the night lamps of the airstrip.

Banchs traced the leak to Miguel Ángel Di Guilmi, an El Popular photographer doing military service at the garrison. "No sé nada," Di Guilmi told Banchs. "Yo escuché en rueda del cuartel." Barracks talk. For Banchs, the case seems to dissolve into versions and conjectures, a rumour loaded with embellishments as it passed from mouth to mouth. Patrick Gross weighed extraterrestrial visitors against a hoax or a journalistic hoax, with low certainty. Luis Burgos, for his part, writes that investigator Gustavo Fernández later confirmed the episodes.

The shooting at Olavarría lives on in the literature: Flying Saucer Review, books by Jean Ferguson, Pierre Delval and Henri Durrant, and the humanoid catalogue of Albert Rosales. No photograph, radar return or physical trace survives from 1968. What remains is a corporal, a burst of gunfire, and three silver figures the bullets never seemed to touch.