Pelluco landing lights and ground depression, Puerto Montt, 1965

Pelluco sits on the shore of the Reloncaví Sound, about 4 km east of Puerto Montt. In the winter of 1965 Chile was in the middle of a wave of sightings. Most of what is known about that night comes from Raúl Gajardo Leopold, then a Carabineros lieutenant in Puerto Montt. Decades later, retired as a major, he signed a statement on 20 May 1998.

It began with a phone call. A family reported "three immense lights" over their house, like car headlights, no more than 100 metres up. Gajardo went out with eight Carabineros. The lights grew larger and smaller, approaching the house and flying away. Then they moved slowly north along the coast toward Piedra Azul and were lost on the horizon. Some accounts place this episode two weeks earlier.

About 70 people had gathered at the Proschle family home for the wake of Carolina Proschle, 16, killed in a road accident. At about 04:20, by Gajardo's account, a loud noise rolled in, "like a nearby explosion." Arnaldo Flores, who ran the youth home in Pelluco, said it kept growing. "We thought it was an earthquake." Light flickered in the windows, and the mourners went outside.

Behind the trees, an oval, throbbing mass of light was coming down slowly. Flores saw many flashing violet and yellowish lights, about 80 metres above them. The glare hid any shape. Alejandro Proschle, the girl's brother, said it first hung in the air, then settled in a ravine near Pelluco. Nobody wanted to follow it, because they were afraid.

Then, in Gajardo's words: "The oval-shaped mass of light began rising very slowly, tipping forward first, then backward." And "it took off in a straight line to infinity at an indescribable, unimaginable speed." About six minutes after the first noise came a second one, not quite as powerful.

The next day Gajardo went to the spot, about 300 metres east of the house. He found a depression about 60 metres across and 1 metre deep, with tree roots and ragged edges exposed. Nothing was burned, he said. The soil had been removed "in a very even manner". He asked where the tons of soil had gone.

Carabineros cordoned off the site, and El Llanquihue photographed it. One image survives, showing children in white aprons from the nearby home standing in the hollow. No photograph of the light is known.

The Intendencia de Llanquihue commissioned a public agency to investigate. Its verdict was "hundimiento por exceso de humedad", subsidence from excess moisture. Ufological writers objected that 1965 had been a very dry year, though none has published rainfall data. A story also spread of an American scientific commission that arrived about a week later, examined the soil and roots and took photographs away. The fine roots were said to be intact, as if the earth had been lifted, but no document, agency or name has ever surfaced.

Eduardo Gutiérrez, a veterinarian woken by the noise, doubted anything could land on a 45 degree slope and suggested a sinkhole. Others later called it a landslide. The Pelluco hillsides are still prone to them. Retellings have drifted on the date, the crowd size and the burned ground. The only contemporaneous text, an AFP wire story printed in Le Méridional on 2 August 1965, says the object rose without noise and was gone after five minutes.

The core never changed: a dazzling purple light, a crowd of mourners, a landing. A sighting chronology citing APRO lists the case, it appears in a Spanish edition of Aimé Michel's work, and Gajardo told it again on TVN's OVNI in 1999. Local papers still mark the anniversary.