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CASE FILE / 044 — 1965

The Light over Deception Island

In the dark of the Antarctic winter, sailors, airmen and weathermen at three rival bases in a drowned volcano watched a colored light hover, dart and reverse above Deception Island. Argentina’s Navy announced a solid, lens-shaped flying object; Chile’s Air Force spoke of ten color slides. The slides never surfaced, and the argument over what they saw never ended.

Photograph of a narrow sea passage between two banded rust-red volcanic cliffs, opening onto a calm blue bay with a large white iceberg on the right and snowy ridges on the far shore under a pale sky.
1965
Neptune’s Bellows, the narrow gap in the crater wall that leads into Port Foster, Deception Island’s flooded caldera, in January 2016. The three stations of 1965 stood on the shores of the bay beyond. Photo: Godot13, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Three flags in a drowned volcano

Deception Island is a volcano whose crater the sea has flooded. A ring of ash and ice about fifteen kilometers across encloses a bay, Port Foster, reached through a single gap in the wall called Neptune’s Bellows. In 1965 three countries that all claimed this corner of Antarctica kept stations around its shore. The Argentine Navy’s Destacamento Naval Decepción, the Chilean Air Force’s Base Presidente Pedro Aguirre Cerda on Pendulum Cove and the British Antarctic Survey’s Base B, set in the old whaling station at Whalers Bay, stood around the shore in a rough triangle about seven kilometers on a side. Twelve years earlier, Royal Marines had landed and burned the new Argentine and Chilean huts built beside the British base. Now the three garrisons were radio neighbors and occasional guests at one another’s stations. In the southern winter the bay froze solid. Daylight, the Argentine commander reported, ran from about 10:20 in the morning to 3:30 in the afternoon, “followed by 16 hours of darkness.”

Satellite image of a horseshoe-shaped island in a dark blue sea: a ring of brown volcanic ash streaked with white glaciers, open to the sea through a narrow gap on the lower right, enclosing a large round bay.
Deception Island from Landsat 8, March 2018: the ring of the caldera, the flooded bay of Port Foster and, at lower right, the narrow entrance of Neptune’s Bellows. NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Public domain. Image source · Public domain · NASA Earth Observatory

Sources: Deception Island UFO SightingsAvistamientos OVNI en la Antártida en 1965Deception Island incidentOvnis en la Antártida: hace 60 años los gobiernos de Argentina y Chile afirmaron haber avistado platos voladoresThe Island Shaped Like a Horseshoe

A yellow light in June

The first sign came in early winter. At 7:50 on the evening of June 7, Jorge Stanich, the Argentine detachment’s civilian meteorologist, saw a pale yellow light, ringed by a fuzzy halo, hang motionless to the southwest for five seconds. In the small hours of June 8 he saw it again, below a low overcast, for four seconds; the detachment commander, Daniel Perissé, later wrote that Stanich heard “a grave sound of hardly any intensity” two minutes after it went. On the afternoon of June 18, according to the Chilean Air Force radiogram printed in Santiago the next day, the whole Chilean garrison watched “a celestial body with the luminous intensity of a first-magnitude star” appear over the east of the island sixty degrees above the horizon, make a 180-degree turn to the left, turn again through ninety degrees and head off south, gone at 4:40. The Argentine cables later dated this Chilean sighting to June 20; the Chilean base commander himself was quoted giving June 13.

Sources: Unidentified Flying Objects Sighted in AntarcticaTranslation of official UFO reports from the Naval Ministry of ArgentinaDeception Island UFO SightingsAvistamientos OVNI en la Antártida en 1965

The Chilean watch

On the evening of Saturday, July 3, the sky over Deception did something rare for the season: it cleared. At 7:20, a sergeant on the weather round at Pedro Aguirre Cerda, Luis Moya, spotted a light, and nine men of the twelve-man garrison came out to watch. It was yellowish-red, then green, yellow and orange, crossing the southwest of the island on a swaying course at high speed, and behind it, Perissé later wrote, trailed “a wake, apparently steam.” For about twenty minutes it hung, moved and hung again, until cloud swallowed it. Corporal Uladislao Durán Martínez did not wait. “I ran for my camera, praying on the way that I would have time to prove we weren’t the victims of an optical illusion,” he told Clarín. “I took ten shots in all… The film is color, and I’m sure they came out well.” Some frames, he said, he took directly and some through a theodolite, the swiveling sighting scope weathermen used to follow their balloons, and some through a pair of binoculars someone handed him. There was no darkroom on the base; the film would have to wait for the relief ship.

Color photograph of a red barrack building with white-framed dormer windows behind snowbanks, with a white slatted weather-instrument box on a tall stand in the foreground on dark volcanic ground and a snowfield behind.
The Chilean base Pedro Aguirre Cerda on Pendulum Cove in January 1958, with its weather screen in front. On July 3, 1965, a sergeant on the evening weather round here was the first to spot the light. Photo: Jorge Valdés R., public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Image source · Public domain · released by the photographer

Sources: Avistamientos OVNI en la Antártida en 1965Deception Island UFO SightingsUAOs Over AntarcticaRadio interview with the commander of the Pedro Aguirre Cerda base

Sixty-two minutes at the Argentine station

Two minutes after the Chilean sighting ended, it was the Argentines’ turn. At 7:42, Aldo Irusta, a petty officer taking the evening weather observation, saw a light to the north-northwest about thirty degrees up. On the Naval Intelligence questionnaire he later filled in, he compared it to “a Bunsen-burner flame, shaped like a rugby ball.” The detachment commander, Lieutenant Daniel Perissé of the naval infantry, turned out his men and the three Chilean airmen who happened to be staying at the station, one of them there to have a fracture treated by the Argentine doctor. They watched with the naked eye, with binoculars and through the theodolite. The radiogram sent to Buenos Aires the next day described a red center with borders “changing from yellow to green to orange to blue to white,” the size of the head of a half-inch nail, round to oval. It hovered, accelerated, reversed. The questionnaire noted that it slipped behind the low stratus but showed against the high cirrus. For one hour and two minutes it held the sky, and at 8:44 it drew away to the northwest, shrinking and climbing. Stanich tried to photograph it with slow film and no tripod.

Black-and-white photograph of a man in a dark coat speaking into a microphone in front of a wooden building, flanked by a priest in vestments and naval officers in peaked caps, while sailors watch from an open window above.
President Arturo Frondizi speaks at the Argentine station on Deception Island on March 8, 1961, four years before the sighting. Photo: Archivo General de la Nación, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Image source · Public domain in Argentina (PD-AR-Photo) and the United States

Sources: Unidentified Flying Objects Sighted in AntarcticaAvistamientos OVNI en la Antártida en 1965Deception Island UFO SightingsTranslation of official UFO reports from the Naval Ministry of Argentina

The cook at Base B

The British were the odd ones out. When the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), the leading American civilian UFO group of the day, asked the British government about the sightings, the British Antarctic Survey’s director, Sir Vivian Fuchs, forwarded the only message Base B had sent: “Flickering red-green-yellow light observed from British base 2300Z 2nd July due north, it had moved in two waves quickly from the west then reversed along this course for a short distance before returning again to the north where it remained stationary for about 20 minutes.” The time, 2300 GMT on July 2, was early evening at Deception, a day before the Chilean and Argentine sightings. The Argentine and Chilean cables credited the British with five witnesses. Decades later Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos and his Spanish and Argentine colleagues of FOTOCAT, a catalogue of UFO photograph cases, traced the man behind that line: Bernard Chappel, the base cook, who also stood shifts as a weather observer. “I observed a bright bottle green coloured orb high in the night sky whilst I was assessing cloud cover,” he wrote to them. At first he took it for a planet; then “the light disappeared towards the horizon at a phenomenal speed, before returning minutes later hovering for a short while before disappearing once more in the opposite direction.” He had kept quiet, he said, because he was by far the youngest man on the base. His colleague Peter Bird remembered Bernie as someone who liked a tall story. Another, the pilot Jules Brett, did not believe he had made it up.

Black-and-white photograph looking down along a dark curving shoreline at a cluster of snow-covered buildings, storage tanks and a tall chimney beneath a broad snow slope.
Whalers Bay from the anemometer mast in April 1945, when the British wartime Operation Tabarin set up Base B among the buildings of the old whaling station. Photo: Alan William Reece, British Antarctic Survey Archives, public domain (UK Crown copyright expired), via Wikimedia Commons. Image source · Public domain · UK Government work

Sources: Avistamientos OVNI en la Antártida en 1965Unidentified Flying Objects Sighted in AntarcticaIndirect Physical Evidence

Needles at Orcadas

Hours before the Chilean watch, eight hundred and forty kilometers to the east-northeast, two meteorologists at Orcadas, the old Argentine station on Laurie Island in the South Orkneys, had already seen something. José Mazzucchelli and Eduardo Jarriek spotted it at 5:03 that afternoon. Their commander’s first radiogram, the next morning, described a round, white, not very bright light with a clean outline, crossing “west to east” on a parabolic path about thirty degrees up for fifteen seconds before cloud hid it. Two days later a second cable added the detail that made the story famous. The station’s variometers, instruments that record small changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, had reacted: “Two variometers working affected by magnetic field disturbance at the time object sighted.” The base chief, Lieutenant Miguel Sosa, told La Prensa it had been “a slight disturbance of the variometers,” but one that “would indicate the object was made of highly magnetic material.”

Sources: Unidentified Flying Objects Sighted in AntarcticaAvistamientos OVNI en la Antártida en 1965Deception Island UFO Sightings

The Navy speaks

Chile went first. On the morning of July 6, El Mercurio printed the base commander’s radiogram: nine men had seen “the curious celestial body,” the British had seen something the day before, Corporal Durán had taken ten color slides, and “there were no prior communications between the bases that could induce a psychosis of this kind.” The commander, Squadron Leader Mario Jahn Barrera, spoke to the Santiago press by radio: “Our observation was not a hallucination or a collective psychosis… I can say it was not a star, because it had very rapid and continuous movement… my knowledge of man-made craft reaches nothing like it, in its shape, its speed and its maneuverability in the air.” That evening the Argentine Navy issued a communiqué headed “Sighting of unidentified flying objects in the Argentine Antarctic.” It described “a flying object of lenticular shape, solid appearance, predominantly red and green, at moments with yellow, blue, green, white and orange hues,” seen in exceptionally clear weather under a waning moon, silent, changing speed, at times stationary, watched by eleven men for fifteen to twenty minutes, “photographs being taken.” A second bulletin a day later raised the witnesses to seventeen and ruled out “a sounding balloon, a star or an airplane.” The Buenos Aires evening paper La Razón wondered aloud whether the two militaries meant to confront “three billion earthlings” with the evidence of visitors from other worlds.

Sources: Avistamientos OVNI en la Antártida en 1965Radio interview with the commander of the Pedro Aguirre Cerda baseA flying object over Antarctica wasn’t identifiedOvnis en la Antártida: a 50 años del avistamiento en la isla DecepciónOvnis en la Antártida: hace 60 años los gobiernos de Argentina y Chile afirmaron haber avistado platos voladores

A winter of saucers

The Antarctic object led the front page of every Argentine paper, and Argentina had what Clarín called, fifty years later, a collective psychosis that lasted all winter. Seven young hikers saw a UFO near Pilar; lights were photographed over Bahía Blanca; on August 1 the binoculars at the Palermo racecourse swung from the track to a strange globe in the sky until the loudspeakers announced five minutes to post. The Navy’s own UFO officer, Commander Omar Pagani, wrote to NICAP with two more reports: on July 7 a coast guard post on Gable Island in the Beagle Channel had watched a silver disk hover for two or three minutes and leave a bright ray that lit the water, its men, Pagani said, knowing nothing of the Antarctic news; and on July 8 the Army’s Esperanza base reported an object like Deception’s. Wire services carried the story abroad, growing as it went; one French paper had “a whole flotilla” of red and green saucers circling for more than two hours. The American naval attaché in Buenos Aires sent translations of the four base radiograms to Washington, and in August the State Department asked its embassy for more.

Sources: El ovni que se paseó por la Antártida y disparó la psicosis argentinaTranslation of official UFO reports from the Naval Ministry of ArgentinaUnidentified Flying Objects Sighted in AntarcticaCelestial Body Observed over AntarcticaLe Méridional, July 8, 1965Avistamientos OVNI en la Antártida en 1965

Ten slides in the dark

The Argentine pictures came to nothing. Stanich’s slow film showed, as he put it in 2006, “nothing, absolutely nothing, at most an insignificant dot that could have been anything”; Perissé later said they had shot from indoors, through double-glazed windows. Everyone waited for Durán’s ten color slides, which could not be developed until the Chilean relief crew came south. When the relief crew came home in January 1966, its members told the Chilean researcher Pablo Petrowitsch the photos had come out badly because the photographer was inexperienced; a later account says the Air Force declared them fogged. Jahn Barrera, years afterward, said people had imagined special cameras, “and we only had our own, which were for taking pictures of the ice and the seals.” In 1969 Commander Sergio Bravo, head of Chile’s weather service, told the Madrid paper ABC that he had interviewed the man who saw it, “a student of mine. But there were no photos.” Project Blue Book, the U.S. Air Force’s UFO investigation, logged the Chilean pictures among images that appeared in the press but were never submitted. Clarín’s anniversary piece summed up the choice: “Either a conspiracy or blank frames: choose your own adventure.”

Sources: Avistamientos OVNI en la Antártida en 1965El ovni que se paseó por la Antártida y disparó la psicosis argentinaDeception Island UFO Sightings

The commander who wanted to see

At the center of the story stood Daniel Perissé, not yet thirty in 1965 and, by several accounts, a man already fascinated by the unexplained. Before the July sightings he had been planning telepathy experiments between Deception and volunteers abroad with the Instituto Argentino de Parapsicología. Peter Bird, writing to his mother that November, called him the instigator of July’s “flying saucer scare” and claimed that someone had told Perissé about a colored light as a joke. The Condon Report, the University of Colorado UFO study funded by the U.S. Air Force, quoted the British base leader, David Walter, recalling that the one British observation, the cook’s, “was looked upon as rather a joke,” and that the Chileans’ phenomena were reported above the Argentine base while the Argentines’ were placed above the Chilean one. Pablo Justo, a civilian engineer at the Argentine station, told the FOTOCAT team he saw nothing at all and that those who did were all Perissé’s subordinates. Perissé never stopped investigating. He sat on the Navy’s UFO commission from 1966 to 1974, told the Deception story at the MUFON symposium in Washington in 1987, and yet told the researcher Luis Burgos in 1991 that in the light of modern technology he could no longer say it had been a UFO.

Sources: Avistamientos OVNI en la Antártida en 1965Indirect Physical EvidenceDeception Island UFO SightingsDaniel Perissé1965: cuando los ovnis invadieron la Antártida

The volcano’s verdict

Deception kept its own counsel. On December 4, 1967, the volcano erupted inside the bay; the Chilean base was evacuated and abandoned that day, and the British withdrew. A second eruption in February 1969 sent mudflows through Biscoe House at Whalers Bay, and Base B was never reoccupied. The Argentine station became a summer-only camp. The ruined huts joined the island’s older ghosts: Fuchs’s history of the survey tells of the “Deception ghost” of the early 1960s, a completely bandaged figure that appeared only in the whalers’ cemetery, and of footsteps in an empty loft one night as ghost stories were being told, with the Argentine commander among the listeners. Later tellers went further, speaking of alien bases under the ice and of a photograph of an oval object over the 1967 eruption, which the Corrientes paper El Litoral calls unpublished and does not show. The Chilean commander’s later life took a darker turn: Mario Jahn Barrera became deputy director of Pinochet’s secret police, the DINA, ran Chile’s aeronautical museum for eighteen years, and in 2012, a year before his death, was sentenced for a 1975 DINA killing.

Photograph of twisted, rusted steel frames and a broken concrete pillar standing on black volcanic ash beside a grey bay, with cloud-capped hills across the water.
What the 1967 eruption left of the Chilean base Pedro Aguirre Cerda, December 2016. Photo: Rob Oo, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Image source · CC BY 2.0 · Rob Oo

Sources: Deception IslandAvistamientos OVNI en la Antártida en 1965Un ovni visto sobre la AntártidaThe 1965 Deception Island sightingsMario Jahn Barrera

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Sources & interviews

Avistamientos OVNI en la Antártida en 1965Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, Manuel Borraz Aymerich, Heriberto Janosch González and Juan Carlos Victorio Uranga · Informe FOTOCAT no. 3 · completed December 2012 · 183 pp. with English conclusions · draws on the Argentine Navy questionnaires, UK National Archives file AIR 2/17982, British Antarctic Survey letters and interviews with surviving witnessesDeception Island UFO SightingsDaniel A. Perissé, translated by Willy Smith · MUFON 1987 International UFO Symposium Proceedings, pp. 142–154 · the Argentine detachment commander’s own accountUnidentified Flying Objects Sighted in AntarcticaU.S. Naval Attaché, Buenos Aires · Department of Defense Intelligence Information Report 5 804 0048 65 · July 16, 1965 · verbatim translation of four Argentine base radiograms supplied by the Navy Hydrographic Service · scan via NICAPCelestial Body Observed over AntarcticaAmerican Embassy Buenos Aires · Department of State Airgram A-208, confidential · September 4, 1965 · reply to Circular Airgram CA-1887 · copy via NICAPTranslation of official UFO reports from the Naval Ministry of ArgentinaCmdr. Omar R. Pagani, Argentine Navy, letter to NICAP of July 9, 1965 · NICAP New York translation, July 27, 1965A flying object over Antarctica wasn’t identifiedClarín (Buenos Aires) · July 7, 1965 · NICAP New York translation, July 16, 1965Radio interview with the commander of the Pedro Aguirre Cerda baseEl Mercurio (Santiago) · July 7, 1965 · NICAP New York translation, July 26, 1965UAOs Over AntarcticaThe A.P.R.O. Bulletin · July–August 1965 · transcription via NICAPLe Méridional, July 8, 1965Patrick Gross · UFOs at close sight · French press clipping with the “flotilla of saucers” wire storyIndirect Physical EvidenceRoy Craig · Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (the Condon Report), Section III, Chapter 4 · 1969 · on the Orcadas magnetograms and Base BAntarctica, July 3, 1965Francis L. Ridge · NICAP case directory · with the Richard Hall summary and scans of the 1965 documentsEl ovni que se paseó por la Antártida y disparó la psicosis argentinaClarín · July 2015 · fiftieth-anniversary feature, reposted on Historia de la Flota de MarOvnis en la Antártida: a 50 años del avistamiento en la isla DecepciónLuis Emilio Annino · CEFORA · 2015Ovnis en la Antártida: hace 60 años los gobiernos de Argentina y Chile afirmaron haber avistado platos voladoresRubén Morales · Los Andes (Mendoza) · June 20, 20251965: cuando los ovnis invadieron la AntártidaAlejandro Agostinelli · Factor 302.4 · December 9, 2012The 1965 Deception Island sightingsPatrick Gross · UFOs at close sight · case page with press referencesArgentine officials on UFOsPatrick Gross · UFOs at close sight · quotations collected by Luis Burgos of the Fundación Argentina de UfologíaUn ovni visto sobre la AntártidaEl Litoral (Corrientes) · June 23, 2024Daniel PerisséWikipedia (Spanish)Mario Jahn BarreraWikipedia (Spanish)Deception Island incidentWikipedia · the 1953 British removal of the Argentine and Chilean hutsDeception IslandWikipedia · geography, stations and the 1967–1970 eruptionsThe Island Shaped Like a HorseshoeNASA Earth Observatory · Landsat 8 image of March 23, 2018OVNIS en la ANTARTIDA | El evento de la Isla Decepción 1965Testigos de lo Oculto · YouTube · Spanish-language retelling

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The Lights that Hunted ColaresSouth America’s other military UFO file: a Brazilian Air Force operation whose photographs and reports were held back for decades.The Tehran InterceptAnother government-reported light that changed colors and moved like no aircraft, with claimed instrument effects that became the heart of the case.The Night the Sky Waved BackA remote mission, a crowd of witnesses led by the man in charge, and a string of lights over several nights.The Lights beside the Newspaper PlaneSouthern Hemisphere lights at the edge of the world again, where film was taken and the arguments over planets and refraction never quite ended.Inside Project Blue BookThe U.S. Air Force project that logged the Antarctic reports as information only and listed the Chilean slides as never submitted.
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