ArgentinaArgentina.Bariloche · Vuelo AR 674Bariloche · Flight AR 674

On July 31, 1995, at dusk, Aerolíneas Argentinas flight AR 674 was on approach to San Carlos de Bariloche's Teniente Luis Candelaria International Airport when Captain Jorge Polanco and his crew reported by radio a luminous object accompanying the aircraft off to the side, at apparently constant speed and altitude. The episode became known as the 'Polanco Case', after the pilot's surname; he has described over the years a sighting lasting about seventeen minutes with the object 'right at the wingtip'.

That same night, the city of Bariloche suffered a power outage. Polanco chose to break off the approach and execute a go-around; by his account, during the maneuver the object made a rapid climb and vanished. The temporal coincidence between the sighting and the blackout is what made the case famous. Here editorial honesty is mandatory: the documented explanation of the blackout is mundane. According to the local utility's records, the outage occurred between 20:17 and 20:31 when the protections of the transformer substation fed from the Alícura hydroelectric plant tripped, and the recorded cause was human operating error, not an inexplicable anomaly. In other words, there is an ordinary, logged cause for the electrical failure; what the case raises is its temporal coincidence with the sighting, not a proven causation of the blackout by the object.

The meteorological context is worth situating, since it too has been debated. A strong snowstorm hit the city that day, with reported accumulations of several tens of centimeters. Some researchers have noted that the snowfall by itself produced no additional outages that night, contrasting that with the singularity of the substation's discrete trip; others invoke it, together with visibility conditions, as a factor to weigh when assessing what the crew could observe on approach. Neither reading alters the central recorded fact: the outage had an identified operational cause.

The case was documented by civilian researchers — notably Roberto Banchs — in the press and in work published in 1996, and was later taken up in the context of the Argentine Air Force's aerospace-phenomena study office, which channels the formal study of such reports. The reconstruction rests on the testimony of the crew and ground witnesses and on the operational records of the airport and the utility. No radar or photographic record of the object has been published: as in other Latin American corpus cases, the evidence is essentially testimonial, reinforced by the professional qualification of those providing it.

Es uno de los pocos casos sudamericanos con seguimiento institucional por la fuerza aérea de su país, expediente que llegó a hacerse público y testimonio profesional consistente de una tripulación comercial. El comandante Polanco sostuvo su relato durante décadas, y el caso reapareció en 2020-2025 al ser referenciado en material desclasificado y en el informe COMETA francés, lo que le dio una segunda vida mediática.

La calibración, no obstante, debe descontar el elemento que la cultura popular trata como decisivo: el apagón. Ese corte tiene una causa ordinaria documentada —error humano en la subestación alimentada desde Alícura, entre las 20:17 y las 20:31—, de modo que no puede contabilizarse como 'falla eléctrica inexplicable causada por el objeto'. Lo que queda, descontado el apagón, es un avistamiento aéreo sostenido por una tripulación profesional fiable, sin registro radar ni fotográfico publicado que lo corrobore de forma independiente. Es, por tanto, un caso testimonial sólido en cuanto a la cualificación del testigo y débil en cuanto a instrumentación y a corroboración física de los efectos atribuidos. Presentar la causa real del apagón —en lugar de insinuar que el objeto desconectó la ciudad— es exactamente lo que distingue un corpus calibrado de uno sensacionalista; el peso analítico del caso debe descansar en el avistamiento en sí, no en una correlación cuya pata eléctrica ya tiene explicación mundana.

It is one of the few South American cases with institutional follow-up by its country's air force, a file that came to be made public, and consistent professional testimony from a commercial crew. Captain Polanco sustained his account for decades, and the case re-surfaced in 2020-2025 when referenced in declassified material and in the French COMETA report, giving it a second media life.

Calibration, however, must discount the element popular culture treats as decisive: the blackout. That outage has a documented ordinary cause — human error at the substation fed from Alícura, between 20:17 and 20:31 — so it cannot be counted as an 'inexplicable electrical failure caused by the object'. What remains, once the blackout is discounted, is a sustained aerial sighting by a reliable professional crew, with no published radar or photographic record corroborating it independently. It is therefore a testimonially solid case as to witness qualification and a weak one as to instrumentation and physical corroboration of the attributed effects. Presenting the real cause of the blackout — rather than insinuating the object cut power to the city — is exactly what distinguishes a calibrated corpus from a sensationalist one; the analytical weight of the case must rest on the sighting itself, not on a correlation whose electrical leg already has a mundane explanation.