Bolivia.Ayoayo · three people see a fiery silver object fall

On Friday, June 29, 1962, between noon and 1 p.m., three people on the La Paz Altiplano saw an object they described as silver and fiery fall from the sky. The place is on the plateau that stretches south of the capital, near Ayoayo, a town the cable places at 17° 05' south and 68° 00' west. The event did not reach the Americans at once: according to the cable, the civilian authorities of Ayoayo reported it on July 6, a week later (the date is mistyped and reads "6V JULY").

The Air and Army attachés of the US embassy in La Paz went to the area. They carried out a ground search and talked to the three people who claimed to have seen the object fall. They found nothing. On July 7 at 2135 GMT they sent a joint message, CX-20, with "Operational Immediate" precedence, to the Department of the Army and the Air Force Chief of Staff in Washington, marked "DEPTAR FOR ACSI" (the Army's intelligence chief), and to the Air Force's 1127th Field Activities Group at Fort Belvoir (Virginia), copied to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Caribbean commands and the State Department. The Secretary of State also received it as a NIACT, the flag that requires action at once even at night: "ACTION SECSTATE NIACT 20, JULY 7, 6 PM". The subject was the "sighting of missile or rocket approximately 35 nautical miles south of La Paz and eight nautical miles west of Ayoayo", some 65 kilometers south of La Paz and 15 west of the town. The message ends by announcing that the search would continue "with larger ground party and available conventional aircraft". It is signed "FOX", who was then the air attaché in Bolivia, Lieutenant Colonel Edward J. Fox, according to another Blue Book file from that summer.

The cable reached the Pentagon as message AF IN 37168 and ended up at Blue Book, which opened a record card. The card summarizes: "Fiery silver obj falling between noon & 1PM on 29 Jun. Search party unable to locate obj, will try second time. Three witnesses questioned". It sets the time at 1700 GMT, which in Bolivian time, four hours behind, is 1 p.m.; it records one object, course "falling", length "not given", no photos and a civilian source. The conclusion ticked is "Was Astronomical: Meteor", with this comment: "No reentries this date. Obj considered meteor". There are no further sheets: the file contains neither the result of the second search, nor the witnesses' names, nor the direction in which they saw the object fall.

Jonathan McDowell's catalog of space objects (GCAT) makes it possible to check the card's statement. By our own search of the catalog, no cataloged object re-entered on June 29, 1962. The nearest re-entry was that of the FTV 1127 reconnaissance satellite (Corona program), launched on June 2 from the California coast into an orbit inclined at 74°: the catalog, and CelesTrak's too, give it on June 28, with no time, one day before the sighting. The others in that fortnight were a camera door from another satellite, to which the catalog assigns 1 kg with a query, on July 3, and two Corona capsules deliberately brought down off Hawaii on June 26 and July 2.

The few lines in the file fit a daytime fireball: a fiery object falling, seen in broad daylight by three people, and a search that finds nothing. By our own calculation, the Sun was some 49° high over Ayoayo at that hour, so what they saw must have been very bright. But the card offers no analysis: its only argument is that there were no re-entries that day, and the file gives no duration, direction or trajectory against which to test a meteor. Blue Book's conclusion is a fact about the case, not its resolution.

The re-entry of FTV 1127 settles nothing either way. An orbit inclined at 74° crosses the latitude of the Altiplano on every revolution, but the catalog puts its fall one day before the sighting and without a time, and without orbital elements for those days we cannot know where it came down; for it to be the Ayoayo object, the catalog date would have to be wrong by at least sixteen hours. It is a coincidence worth recording, not an identification.

The case also shows how the procedure worked. The attachés' first impulse was a "missile or rocket", that is, launch debris, and the cable went to Washington with "Operational Immediate" precedence and to an Air Force field unit; the attachés searched in person and promised to return with aircraft. Two months later the same attaché forwarded another fiery object falling west of Santa Cruz, and Blue Book closed it the same way, as a fireball. Sixteen years later, the fall announced on El Taire hill, near Bermejo, followed the same course: a report to the embassy, fruitless searches by the Bolivian Army and Air Force and no space object that matched (↗).