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This article was published in the daily newspaper The Yorkshire Post, U-K., on October 4, 1965.
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Public debate in Mexico on flying saucers has received a new lease of life as thousands of reports pour in to the authorities.
REPORTS of sightings of "Flying saucers" continue to pour in to Mexican newspapers, radio and TV offices, sometimes accompanied by hair-raising stories of "mysterious visitors from outers space."
A group of "beings" ten feet tall, with brilliant red eyes but neither mouths nor noses, were described by three women who claimed to have seen them during a stroll through a southern suburb of Mexico City.
The creatures were said to be wearing shiny grey shirts and "boots like spacemen wear in the comic strips". Interviewed by reporters, the women said that they ran away in panic, and when they eventually packed up courage to return to the scene, the "beings" had vanished.
Reports of glowing objects in the sky coincided with this "visitation". Sightings of "unidentified flying objects," mostly reported at dusk or before dawn, varied from luminous "saucers" with a red glow to shapes like spinning tops with winking lights.
Some hovered, others darted across the sky "faster than any aircraft," and some performed complicated gyrations.
About a dozen people claimed to have seen two objects zigzagging round the dome and turrets of the capital's Fine Arts Palace at about half past seven one evening. Described as "huge luminous things with intermittent flashing lights," they eventually soared vertically up into the sky until they became "merely tiny dots of light."
Two of five people who lent their names to this report insisted: "We could not have invented this, and we were not drunk. But we just do not know how to explain it. A foreign diplomat was reported to have witnessed this display but to have declined to give his name.
From Jalapa and Villahermosa, near the Gulf of Mexico, and from Tepotzlan, 30 miles from Mexico city, came further reports, including a basketball-sized object emitting blue sparks which appeared to land and take off again, a hovering object which discharged yellow, blue and orange lights from slits in its circumference, and a "black-clad being with eyes gleaming like a cat's, holding a gleaming metal rod."
The last-named visitor vanished suddenly after being spotted in a Jalapa street by a local reporter, two taxi drivers and a bull fighter.
Not to be outdone, Mexico City taxi drivers next claimed a sighting just before dawn - a "saucer" which changed colour as it rotated and flew slowly from west to east across the city. Officials at the city's airport control tower said they had seen only "a very pretty bright star" that morning.
Next came the dramatic display of "flying saucers" which caused an hour-long traffic jam in one of the capital's main boulevards in the midst of Mexico City's Independence Day festivities.
Passing motorists, seeing crows of pedestrians staring upwards, screeched to a halt and climbed out, ignoring the hooting of drivers behind them. While lines of cars lengthened, excited citizens craned their necks to look at half a dozen luminous orbs, or saucer shapes, hovering silently in the clear evening sky, sliding towards each other, and finally soaring upwards at what people described as "dizzy speeds."
At the same time, over a western suburb, a luminous object with a pulsating internal light hung motionless for half an hour before mysteriously disappearing. One reliable witness described it as "four or five times the size of Venus" (Which was in the sky at the same time) and said that there would could be no confusion with the "conventional" fireworks bursting in the city skies from Independence parties.
For the first time since "saucer sightings" became a commonplace here, officials at Mexico City airport conceded that "something" had been seen.
Senor José Luis Enrique, airport supervisor, said that he had studied two glowing objects through binoculars. One maintained a fixed course, and he told reporters that he thought it could have been one of the many satellites frequently seen in orbit round the world after sunset or before sunrise.
But, he added, the second object "appeared to change its course, accelerated in flight, disappeared and reappeared in another direction." He declined to suggest any explanation.
Dr. Ignacio Elias, director of Tacubaya Observatory in the west of the city, dismissed the sightings as "mere fantasies." People, he said, had been seeing the weather surveys balloons sent up regularly from his station.
He did not explain why the balloons, released every day two hours before sunset, have not given rise to "saucer" reports in the past, not how the unlit gas-filled balloons trailing two small instrument boxes, rising steadily and drifting with the wind, could be mistaken for rapidly darting lights.
The observatory, newspapers, radio and TV stations were swamped with anxious telephone calls from the public on this occasion. One newspaper alone reported over a hundred calls.
John Bland
