Argentina.Campo de Mayo · Gendarmería pilots see a colored sphere

On the evening of November 2, 1972, an Argentine Gendarmería Nacional Cessna 182 was flying a night training sortie over Campo de Mayo aerodrome, north-west of Buenos Aires. At about 20:30 its crew, led by the then officer and later commander Héctor Ramón Flores, saw a large luminous object to the north-west, on a bearing of 320° and some 25° above the horizon.

The crew described it as a huge sphere, almost a balloon or a cloud of incandescent gas, with bands of color: red at the top, a violet stripe in the middle and blue below. During the observation the sphere changed shape; in the final phase, over the town of Campana, it seemed to them to make a sharp turn of almost 90° and to take on the shape of a solid object. Reading it as a collision threat, the pilots spiraled down in an evasive maneuver and, by their own account, made an emergency landing. The object gradually faded until it disappeared.

The crew took no photographs, but they left written statements and a series of color drawings made on the ground that record the sequence. All of this went into a Gendarmería file that stayed in its archives for more than forty years, until in 2015 a civilian enthusiasts' group, CEFORA, published it on its website. The Air Force's 2017 report also notes that two other aircraft reported the same sighting: an Aerolíneas Argentinas flight bound for Córdoba and another leaving Morón air base.

In February 2017 the group's secretary, Luis Brussa, consulted the Argentine Air Force's aerospace phenomena commission (CEFAE, now called CIAE) and pointed out that a balloon and an experimental rocket had been launched that day from Chamical air base in La Rioja. The commission, headed by retired Commodore Rubén Lianza, published its analysis in its 2017 annual report under the heading "Enigmatic cases never resolved before".

It found that a Rigel sounding rocket had lifted off from Chamical on November 2, 1972 at 23:28 GMT (20:28 local time), with the mission of releasing a barium cloud before reaching its apogee, the highest point of its flight, at about 240 km. The historical launch record lists that flight as an aeronomy and ionosphere mission. Seen from Campo de Mayo, the patch of sky where the cloud was matched the bearing and elevation the crew reported.

In 2018 the commission extended the work with the original launch document, Report EANI 1/72 on Rigel 05. According to that document, the rocket reached the barium injection altitude, 170 km, two minutes after lift-off; the planned time was 20:25, and Commodore Luis Cueto, who signed that report, confirmed to the commission that a last-minute adjustment could have delayed it to 20:28. The color arrangement the pilots drew matches that of ionized barium clouds recorded on video.

For the final turn, which Flores confirmed to it by telephone during the 2018 review ("a steep turn of almost 90°"), the commission proposed that the cloud, pushed east by ionospheric winds, was deformed on meeting the edge of the South Atlantic Anomaly (a region where Earth's magnetic field is weaker), right over Campana. The CIAE's 2025 report reaffirmed the conclusion and added a late witness who, as a child, saw the cloud from Santa Fe to the west-north-west, toward Chamical: a distant observation consistent with a phenomenon hundreds of kilometers up, not with an object beside the aircraft.

The case had professional witnesses in flight, an official file from a security force, detailed drawings, a real evasive maneuver and four decades of mystery. And yet the explanation lay in another archive of the same state: that very day, from Chamical, Argentina's space program launched a rocket that released barium clouds to study the ionosphere. The match is precise: the launch time, two minutes before the sighting; the patch of sky, which fits the reported bearing and elevation; and the sequence of colors, which reproduces that of ionized clouds.

A cloud released 170 km up, lit by the Sun when it is already night on the ground, can look huge, close and threatening to a crew with no frame of reference, who read it as a self-propelled object. And the scientific and military experiments of the era (barium, sodium or strontium clouds, sounding rockets, stratospheric balloons) only show up as the cause of a sighting when case files are cross-checked against launch records; here that cross-check rests on the launch's original technical report.

The only thing the explanation does not fully close is the final turn Flores recalled decades later, for which the South Atlantic Anomaly hypothesis is plausible but unproven; the commission itself writes that it could be confirmed by future ionospheric soundings.