Bariloche UFO incident

Case dossier

The primary event involved two arriving aircraft and several people on the ground. ARG674 was a Boeing 727 from Buenos Aires. Its signed post-flight statement names commander Jorge Néstor Polanco, co-pilot Carlos Atilio Dortona and flight engineer Jorge Allende; the later CEFAE report also places visiting Boeing 747 captain Roberto Benavente in the cockpit, though he is not a signatory to that immediate statement. GN-705 was a Gendarmería Nacional Piper PA-31T Cheyenne whose crew included Juan Domingo Gaitán and Rubén Adolfo Cipuzak. Airport and ground records name Daniel Alberto García, Ramón Alfredo Blanco and meteorological observer Nicolás Enoe Araya. These are reports from trained aviation personnel and named ground witnesses, but they are still visual testimony rather than a common instrument track.

The first reported light must be separated from the later multicoloured display. While ARG674 was descending on a heading of about 120 degrees, its crew reported a white light at roughly eleven o'clock. The tower initially treated it as converging traffic and told ARG674 that GN-705 should be about forty nautical miles away. GN-705's radio position reports and Cipuzak's 1996 hand drawing do not align perfectly. CEFAE's later geographic reconstruction placed GN-705 much closer than the radio estimate and concluded that it was the likely white source. That is a plausible traffic identification, not a radar confirmation: Bariloche had no air-traffic-control radar in 1995, and positions were plotted manually from pilot reports.

During the later approach, ARG674 reported a bright source to its right and another aircraft above it. The radio transcript records the crew describing two strong flashing lights and saying they thought it was a flying saucer. The signed statement describes green lights at the ends and an orange centre that appeared to depart rapidly toward the southeast. Ground witnesses described white, yellow or amber light and no consistently resolved silhouette. Dortona and Allende later emphasized lights or reflections; Gaitán reported a light without a structure; Polanco's more solid craft description is clearest in later interviews. The variation does not erase the observation, but it prevents the witnesses from being treated as independent measurements of one agreed shape, distance or path.

The electrical chronology is narrower than the popular 'UFO blacked out Bariloche' claim. Tower chief García placed a total utility cut at about 20:15 local time and restoration by the airport's auxiliary generator around 20:20. The preserved VHF recording begins at that second time. At 20:47, during ARG674's final approach to Runway 28, the auxiliary generator suffered a mechanical failure and the runway lighting went out, prompting the go-around. García's statement says the anemometer stopped but the VOR and ILS remained normal and some lights stayed on. A near-contemporary El Cordillerano clipping separately attributed the city outage to human error involving a transformer. No reviewed record demonstrates that the reported light caused either fault.

Utility power returned, ARG674 landed at 21: 09 and GN-705 at 21:18. The outcome was a safe go-around and delayed landing, with no collision, damage or physical residue reported. The public record nevertheless has important holes. Bariloche lacked radar, so there is no radar track of the lights or both aircraft. No authenticated event photograph or video is known. The VHF tape contains an approximately four-minute non-recording interval after the most relevant exchange, and the public version is a transcription rather than a released forensic audio master. Witness bearings were descriptive, while GN-705's reported positions conflict. These limits matter more than later claims that every airport instrument failed.

The 1995 official response was real but limited. A 5 September Air Regions Command reply, preserved as a researcher-hosted transcription, says airport authorities took statements and analyzed the event. It provisionally excluded confusion with known conventional aerial objects, yet did not exclude natural objects, light reflected from cloud bases or another optical phenomenon. The inquiry stopped after officials found no intrusion of jurisdictional airspace by a known conventional aerial object. It was not an aviation-accident finding or an official confirmation of an anomalous craft. A National Meteorological Service report and NOAA station data support cold weather, westerly winds and cloud or ceiling observations, while the 4 September El Cordillerano article recorded competing optical and electrical explanations close to the event.

Researcher Heriberto Janosch later traced a powerful sky-tracer to the Rocket nightclub. Operator Juan Carlos Rivero wrote in 2004 that he had used it that night, and employee Sergio Segade said he recognized the beam. CEFAE revisited the case in 2018 and published its report in early 2019. It interviewed Rivero, Dortona and Segade, overlaid Cipuzak's 1996 drawing on Google Earth, and used scale aircraft, an acrylic cloud layer and a flashlight to reproduce sight lines. CEFAE judged the match decisive: GN-705 explained the first white light and the projector explained the moving coloured display. The experiment is informative, but it depends on a hand drawing, 2004 emails and memories collected more than two decades later; no contemporaneous projector log, measured beam direction, radar data, photogrammetry or original audio master was produced. The best current conclusion is therefore a well-supported conventional reconstruction, not a fully repeatable identification.