Antarctic UFO Sightings at Deception Island and Orcadas, 1965

The southern winter of 1965. On Deception Island, in the South Shetlands, three nations kept stations. The Argentine Navy ran Destacamento Naval Decepción. The Chilean Air Force held Base Presidente Pedro Aguirre Cerda at Pendulum Cove. The British had Base B at Whalers Bay.

Between June and August, CEFORA counts 10 Antarctic incidents. The Condon Report lists moving colored lights seen from the Argentine station on 7 June, 20 June and 3 July.

3 July 1965. 19:40 local time. At the Argentine station, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Daniel Alberto Perissé, the crew watched an object in the sky. The Navy's communiqué described "un objeto volador de forma lenticular, aspecto sólido, coloración predominante rojo y verde, por momentos tonalidades amarillas, azules, verdes, anaranjadas y blancas."

It sat about 45 degrees above the horizon, 10 to 15 km away. CEFORA gives an estimated diameter of 75 to 90 m and an altitude of 15 to 20 km. Its edge looked blurred. There was no sound. It changed speed, sometimes stood still, and moved mostly east, at times west. The official duration was 15 to 20 minutes. Other accounts give 62.

The meteorologist Jorge Hugo Stanich reported four separate objects in different positions. Stanich photographed the object, but the pictures failed. The film was too slow, the object far away and the wind strong, and there was no tripod. Perissé was plain about it: "Nosotros sólo hemos visto un objeto volador no identificado." We have only seen an unidentified flying object.

At the Chilean base, nine people saw objects for 20 minutes, according to Dr. Erich Paul Heilmaier of the Catholic University of Chile observatory. The objects crossed the southwest end of the island "at full speed". Corporal Uladislao Durán Martínez took about 10 pictures. The base had no darkroom, so the film waited until the January 1966 crew change. It was later lost. At British Base B, staff reportedly saw a stationary luminous object for about 10 minutes.

Far to the east, at Orcadas on Laurie Island, Argentine newspapers reported that staff saw "a strange luminous body simultaneously with a small deviation in the earth's magnetic field". It lasted about 40 minutes.

The Navy's communiqué of 6 July became what Patrick Gross calls the second official acknowledgment of UFOs by Argentina's armed forces. Rear Admiral Jorge A. Boffi said: "These incidents are real, although the possibility of explaining them escapes me." A one-page CIA cable, apparently a digest of press reports, spoke of red, green and yellow flying saucers over Deception Island for two hours. Then, on 8 July, a second communiqué scaled everything down: "un objeto brillante, como una estrella de primera magnitud." By then the Washington Post, the New York Post and the Boston Globe had picked up the story.

For the Condon Committee, Roy Craig examined microfilm copies of the Orcadas magnetograms. The deviation, he found, was "well within normal daily fluctuations." Argentine Navy Captain José María Cohen agreed. British base commander C. D. Walter told Craig that the British report came from the cook and "was looked upon as rather a joke".

On 4 August 1965, the La Plata Observatory attributed the Deception sighting to Echo II, a balloon satellite. In 2020, Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, Manuel Borraz Aymerich, Heriberto Janosch and Juan Carlos Victorio Uranga published FOTOCAT Report #3 after six years of work. They judged the three key sightings "most probably" a meteor, Echo II, and Mars or the stars Spica and Arcturus. They also called the original data "insufficient and even contradictory".

Perissé later became a well-known ufologist. The case lives on in the Condon Report, in a MUFON symposium paper hosted by NICAP, in APRO summaries, and in anniversary pieces in the Argentine press. No photograph of the object survives.