The Argentinian village that has been united by a strange alien obsession since 1986
The year was 1986. The location was Sierra del Pajarillo near Capilla del Monte, Córdoba, Argentina. The witnesses were Esperanza Pelliza, her grandson Gabriel Gómez and her sister Sara Gómez. The sight? Something in the sky above their house that could only be piloted by aliens.
Reading their reports sounds genuinely terrifying. On the night of January 9th, their home was suddenly flooded with an intense red light coming from the sky outside – along with it was a deafening, motor-like noise that seemed to rattle them from the inside out, and when they looked outside, they saw a disk in the sky – red in the centre, but surrounded on all sides by tubes of brilliant, blinding white light… It hung there for a moment as the family watched on, dumbfounded, before, as quickly as it arrived, it left.
All three of them would have thought it was a dream, or a shared hallucination. That was until they woke up the following morning (though God only knows how any of them slept that night), and found real-life evidence that something unexplainable had happened that night. Their home was on a hillside, and a few hundred metres away from their house was an enormous, perfectly circular burn mark in the grass. Right underneath where the craft was floating the previous night.
Now, on the surface, we all know what likely happened here. A family who wanted a bit of attention burned a patch of grass near their house and called it aliens – nothing to see here, let’s move along, except that the more people investigated the burn, the more the facts didn’t add up. For one thing, analysis of the burnt grass showed that it had burnt from the top down; grass in normal forest fires burns bottom up, due to the fire naturally rising.
This means that whatever caused this patch of burnt grass had to be sending burning hot air downwards rapidly. Y’know, like an engine does.
That wasn’t all. Stones found in the area were burnt at the top, but not underneath. Local wildlife had gotten caught up in the fire, where normally they would have vacated the area long before a normal fire would have gotten out of control. Then, a year and a half later, the deal was sealed by something truly bizarre: an actual forest fire broke out in the same area and spread across the hillside – the only part of the hill that didn’t catch on fire was the part that had burnt the previous year.
José de Ze, one of the most famous names in Argentinian media at the time, caught wind of the story, and as an obsessive UFOlogist, he made sure to spread it far and wide. His passion for the hobby came through on screen so vehemently that it rubbed off on seemingly the entire population. Suddenly, Capilla del Monte became one of the most in-demand tourist destinations in Argentina, with thousands flocking to see the site of this UFO visit with the hope of seeing a visit of their own.
To this day, seemingly every celebrity of note in Argentina has a story of visiting Capilla del Monte and having a close encounter with an alien. In 2012, the town capitalised on this by starting the Alien Festival, a yearly tradition that draws thousands to the village to this day. Every town’s got to have a gimmick, I suppose, and there are many, many worse gimmicks to have than aliens.
So here’s to Capilla del Monte, a place that never stops watching the stars.