Sighting record / 1955
Monday, 3 January 1955. A hot summer day in Santa Fe, Argentina. From the first hours of the morning, people stopped in the street and looked up. Something bright hung in the daytime sky. A single shining point, drifting slowly. By noon, circles of pedestrians on Calle San Martín were shouting. "At last we have a flying saucer!" The news ran from mouth to mouth, onto trams and buses. Thousands searched the sky. Newsroom phones rang without pause. That same afternoon, El Litoral printed an answer from a local astronomy society. The planet Venus. The next morning, El Orden ran a headline that summed up the day. Santa Fe had been thrown into turmoil.
By the mid 1950s, flying saucers had a firm grip on the public imagination. Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting had given the world the phrase. Hollywood was filling cinemas with invaders from the sky. In Argentina, the Duclout brothers had made a widely publicised UFO announcement from the Kavanagh building in Buenos Aires in September 1954. Santa Fe, the provincial capital, was ready to look up.