The Night the Platos Voladores Woke San Juan

1968 was a restless year in the Argentine sky. Aerolíneas Argentinas pilots reported sightings on 4 June. In late June came the José Paulino Núñez case at the YPF distillery in Luján de Cuyo, Mendoza. On 31 August came the Peccinetti and Villegas encounter, also in Mendoza. Then came November.

Saturday, 16 November 1968. 03:05. The González Aubone brothers were heading home from a party in Trinidad when they saw it. A "flotilla" in the sky. They went inside and woke their parents.

Across the city, Jesús Vega was asleep. "I was asleep and woke to people shouting in the street. All they said was 'flying saucers, flying saucers!'" He ran out with his trousers in his hand. At that moment, those things were passing over him.

Diario de Cuyo described eight distinct points of light. They moved slowly, rising and falling. Metallic bodies. Flat, oval tanks, completely silent, giving off reddish flashes. The lead object was about 100 metres long and 15 metres wide. Seven much smaller ones followed. They floated from west to east for one or two minutes, then disappeared heading north. One witness said: "They passed slowly and did not seem to be drifting aimlessly. On the contrary, it looked as if an intelligence was guiding them and they were carrying out a mission." The phone lines were swamped. The paper counted about 1,000 witnesses in San Juan alone.

In Caucete, two parties were going on at the same time. Pharmacy and kiosk workers saw the objects. Residents were woken by the shouting and ran outside, many in their underwear. At the Club Centro Imperial, the singer on stage looked up and fell silent, pointing without a word. The audience followed the objects across the sky.

In November 2012, Michel Zeghaib told the story again in Tiempo de San Juan. His version agrees on the date, the small hours, the silence, the reddish light and the hundreds of witnesses. But the details shift. Five objects at some moments, six at others, apparently at random. The formation changed from a triangle to a quadrilateral. The objects seemed "static and moving at the same time". They left a reddish trail, and the sky turned greenish-yellow. Their silent passage traced a parabola from east to west. Finally, they were lost near Cerro Pie de Palo. Diario de Cuyo added that the objects were also reported in Chile, Mendoza, La Rioja, Tucumán and Santiago del Estero.

Diario de Cuyo reported that NASA authorities in Chile said the only satellite due over the area had already passed. Meteorites and conventional aircraft were ruled out too, though no expert was named. One modern assessment points instead to a satellite or rocket re-entry, or a fragmenting fireball. A large body leading smaller ones. A red glow. Silence. A slow pass seen over a wide area. But no matching re-entry has been found for that night. The one candidate, Cosmos 253, decayed around 18 November and was seen over England.

No photograph or film of the objects is known. What survives is the 1968 front page of Diario de Cuyo, reproduced in the paper's 2019 retrospective, alongside portraits of the people who ran into the street that night. For San Juan, it remains the night the flying saucers got the city out of bed.