UFOs in the High Andes

by Scott Corrales

FATE :: September 2007

On October 18, 2005, local newspaper La Patria reported that journalists from a Bolivian television station had captured two UFOs on film as the strange objects flew over the city of Oruro. Julio Espinoza, José Romero, and Paola Medina stepped out of the ATB television station at 8:30 p.m. in response to local UFO reports. As fate would have it, their impromptu skywatch paid off. By 9:00 p.m., they had observed a strange, rhomboidal object in the heavens, with lights that changed colors.

Paola Medina said that the object “transformed from a rhomboidal shape into a perfect square and into a classic flying saucer.” ATB-TV’s switchboard was soon flooded with phone calls from members of the public who corroborated the news team’s sighting with observations of their own, affirming that the object was circular-shaped, traveled with an oscillating motion, and disappeared half an hour later. Several days later, skywatchers saw strange objects over the city once again: one of the UFOs reportedly hovered above the cluster of radio and television antennas that occupied one of the city’s hills.

But these incidents, spectacular though they might have been, could not compare to the encounters between the Bolivian Air Force (Fuerza Aérea Boliviana, or FAB) and unidentified flying objects.

In March 2001, the sighting of an unidentified spherical object over the city of Cochabamba and Tunari National Park prompted the military to dispatch a T-33 fighter to intercept the object. The interceptor’s pilot, Maj. Luis Arzabe, told his superiors that the sphere was “brilliant and metallic,” yet he was unable to determine the exact nature of the unknown device. Arzabe reached an altitude of 42,000 feet before breaking off his pursuit; by the time he returned to the base at El Alto, the strange sphere had disappeared altogether. “Its shape [could not be] clearly made out. It was a brilliant sphere with a metallic sheen we believe comes from solar reflections. The object type has not been determined.”

The UFO was observed from the ground by residents of El Alto, and further corroborated by passenger airliner crews flying the Lima to La Paz routes, who reported visual contact with a sizeable object to the air traffic controllers at El Alto. A number of aviation experts suggested at the time that the object could have been a weather balloon, part of a worldwide French project launched from Brazil, although the object’s speed and altitude did not correspond to that of a balloon......

Read the rest of this article in the September 2007 issue of FATE

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