La Plata's Zone 72: Seven Decades of UFO Stories on One Avenue
In the Argentine city of La Plata, a stretch of 72nd Avenue, the so-called Zone 72, has been collecting UFO reports for decades. According to the latest article by Punto Capital Noticias, the story goes back to 1954 and keeps gaining new elements to this day.
Along 72nd Avenue, which runs between 10th and 20th Streets near La Plata's Meridiano V neighborhood, people have been reporting strange lights, small objects and mysterious marks found in the grass since the mid-1950s. According to researchers at the Argentine UFO Foundation (FAO), the first such case occurred in 1954, when a group of young people saw a small, white object hover briefly near the area and then speed away toward the west. Three years later, in the winter of 1957, a local resident named Juan Maldonado spotted, by a cane field at the corner of 9th and 74th Streets, an object of about 40 centimeters that, according to the account, resembled a frost-covered item, and which rose and vanished as he approached.
In the following decades the list of stories kept growing: in 1985 there were reports of the slow, vertical movement of a metallic, luminous object, and in 1988 of the passage of a silent, gray, pyramid-shaped object, which was followed a few days later by the appearance of a greenish circle four meters in diameter in the grass. In 1999, according to FAO researchers, around twenty similar circular marks were found near 72nd Avenue; Luis Burgos, one of the foundation's leading researchers, said years later that the marks appeared in the busy central median of the avenue. On July 9, 2007, during the snowfall that blanketed much of La Plata, some residents claimed to have seen green flashes in the same place, and in 2019 a student shared on social media an experience tied to a stormy night and a cat, which was linked to Zone 72 and sparked new amateur investigations.
As one explanation for the phenomenon, Burgos mentioned the hypothesis that the old railway lines running through the area might act as a kind of "energy corridor," and that this could be behind the concentration of reports. However, as the article also stresses, this is a ufological hypothesis, not a scientifically proven explanation, and the existence of the railway route in itself proves nothing about the nature of the phenomena. Neither for the circles found in the grass nor for any of the other cases is there independent evidence of what caused them.
The sober take
The source article itself emphasizes the skeptical viewpoint: the reports can be explained by atmospheric phenomena, by errors in perception caused by weather conditions (for example, the unusual light conditions during the snowfall), by hard-to-identify everyday objects, and by the fact that similar stories gradually came together over decades into a coherent urban legend. There is no independent, scientific explanation for either the lights or the circles found in the grass that would confirm an extraterrestrial origin.