Sighting record / 1951
July 19, 1951. Late afternoon in Puerto Maldonado, deep in the Peruvian Amazon. Customs inspector Domingo Troncoso looked up and saw a long, cigar-shaped object gliding low over the river. Behind it streamed a dense trail of smoke. He found a camera. He took one good photograph. Across Madre de Dios, others saw it too. A radio station went silent. A thick vaporous trail hung in the sky for more than fifteen minutes, then settled to the ground as thin fibrous threads. The picture ran in El Comercio and ended up in a US Air Force file. Inside that file sat a blunt opinion from the Peruvian Air Force. Trick photography.
Puerto Maldonado sits where the Madre de Dios and Tambopata rivers meet. It is the capital of Peru's Madre de Dios department, deep in the Amazon, close to the Bolivian border. In 1951 Domingo Troncoso worked there, at the Peruvian customs office.