1978 police report surfaces in Argentine UFO case
Forty-eight years after an alleged UFO sighting, the police report filed in Argentina by two Chilean race car drivers has been made public. The document was presented on September 26 in Pedro Luro, supplemented with new timeline data and witness testimony.
The incident took place on September 23, 1978, during the Vuelta a la América del Sud, a ten-country car marathon race. Carlos Acevedo and Miguel Moya were driving their Citroën on the stretch between Viedma and Bahía Blanca when, by their account, an extremely powerful light appeared behind them, and then the car rose a few meters off the road. When they came to, they had lost their sense of time and place, and the car was facing the opposite direction from the one they had been traveling. At a nearby gas station it turned out that the fuel tank was almost empty, even though they had filled up in Viedma, and another competitor arrived one hour and 45 minutes later and claimed that he had lost sight of the Citroën in the meantime. The two men then filed a report at the Pedro Luro police station and requested an escort to Bahía Blanca: this report is what has now been recovered.
The document was announced by Andrea Pérez Simondini, a founding member of CEFORA (Commission for the Study of the UFO Phenomenon), on the program Nunca es Tarde, as the result of work done jointly with researcher Daniel Lecomte. The researchers did not stop at the report: they collected the race's departure times, refueling data and progress records, and looked for material in the central archive of the Argentine Automobile Club, in the participant rankings and in the organizers' recollections. Based on this, Pérez Simondini maintains that a 70–80-kilometer stretch of road cannot be accounted for by the drivers' accounts.
For now, the story is available only through the English translation of a single Spanish-language article, which itself refers back to an earlier, 2014 write-up of the same case. The source does not detail exactly what the newly presented report says word for word, or what conclusion the police reached at the time: for now, all that is known is that the document exists and that, according to the researchers, it supports the two drivers' account, which has been known for decades.
The sober take
The source does not offer any official or scientific explanation for the case: the claim about the allegedly unexplained 70–80-kilometer stretch is based on the timeline analysis of a single UFO researcher, Andrea Pérez Simondini, not on an independent investigation.