The Route 35 truck drivers' "illuminated railway car", Bahía Blanca wave

May 1962. For about two weeks, Bahía Blanca and the country around it filled with reports of strange things in the sky. The sightings ran from 9 to 22 May and touched the naval bases at Espora and Puerto Belgrano. Later retellings would give the city a nickname. The national capital of UFOs.

Three days before this case, on 9 May, José Carlos García, an employee at Puerto Belgrano Naval Base, was on a hunting trip along the same road. He reported a large luminous object that released smaller ones. One of them followed his jeep for several kilometres before speeding away.

Saturday, 12 May 1962. 04:10.

Three truck drivers, Valentino Tomassini, Gauro Tomassini and Humberto Zenobi, were driving from Bahía Blanca toward Jacinto Arauz on National Route 35. Near km 72, something caught their eye inside a field. About 40 metres beyond the wire fence, a light was switching on and off. It looked like a flashlight.

Then a row of lights came on. Between 20 and 30 of them. The men had the impression they were facing a brightly lit passenger railway carriage. Later accounts describe an elongated object with lit windows. As the truck drew close, the object rose from the field. It crossed the road about four metres above the ground, roughly 70 metres from the truck. Its lights went out. A reddish flame came from its lower section, and the drivers reported a soft hum.

Then it divided. Two parts. They flew off in different directions.

The story did not end on the asphalt. Where the object had rested, the grass was reported burned over a circle given as 60 metres across. There were damp, lead-grey stains. According to the press of the time, samples were analysed at the Universidad Nacional del Sur in Bahía Blanca and found to be calcium and potassium carbonates. The laboratory report itself has never surfaced.

The case reached the national press. La Nación carried it on 24 May 1962, and Los Principios of Córdoba the next day. Revista 2001 returned to it in December 1968. In 1972 the researcher Oscar A. Uriondo listed it as case 8 (21) in his Catálogo Preliminar de Manifestaciones Argentinas del Tipo 1, a survey of 95 Argentine cases. Jacques Vallée included the sighting in his Magonia database of landing reports. Decades later, the local daily La Nueva still recalled the night "los camioneros Zenobi y Tomassini" saw something "parecido a un vagón del ferrocarril" crossing the road at low height.

No official body is known to have investigated the truck drivers' report. There are no photographs and no radar. The account survives mainly through catalogue summaries, and the distances shift between them: 40 metres from the fence and 70 from the truck in one version, 100 metres from the road in another. Sceptics might also note that calcium and potassium carbonates are ordinary products of burned plant matter, so the analysis alone shows little. No hoax allegation has ever been raised against the three drivers.

The wave rolled on. On 21 May, Miguel Tohmé of La Nueva Provincia photographed an object over the city, and a news dispatch about it later turned up in CIA files released in 2016. A day after that, four pilots at Espora watched objects for about 35 minutes, one describing an orange object moving on an oscillating course. Among all of it, the Route 35 carriage remains one of the strangest moments. A lit shape in a dark field. A flame. A split in two.