Carlos Díaz and the Ships of Light at Ajusco and Tepoztlán

Carlos Díaz was a photographer from Mexico City. In January 1981 he drove to Ajusco National Forest, in the volcanic zone south of the capital, on a magazine assignment. He arrived early. He waited in his car for a journalist.

A yellow glow came up out of the valley. It was a large, orange, oval-shaped object, slowly hovering about 30 metres from his car. Díaz started shooting, camera held over the steering wheel. Then the car began to tremble and shake, jumping wildly. He got out and took two more frames. The craft sped up vertically into the sky. He was left with a set of 35 mm transparencies.

23 March 1981. Díaz returned to Ajusco in fog and rain. He saw a dome-shaped craft with a smooth ring at its centre, covered in half spheres about one metre across. At about 45 metres he felt someone grab his shoulder from behind. He passed out. When he came to, his clothes were completely dry. It was pouring. A humanoid told him to come back the next day.

What followed returned as memory. He merged with yellow light. He stood in a huge cave with a craft on a platform, Mayan sculptures, many people and seven glowing, egg-shaped orbs. Inside the orbs he experienced whole ecosystems. "I could see all the details of the forest as if I was walking through it…yet I wasn't physically there." The fair-haired beings said they had visited Earth for thousands of years. They warned of total extinction if humanity kept to its course. Díaz calls himself a messenger. One summary files the story as a close encounter of the third kind.

Díaz later lived in Tepoztlán, Morelos. Around 1985 he photographed the object that made the case famous, glowing yellow and red. In the early 1990s Jaime Maussan gave him a video camera. The first footage came three days later. Three more sequences followed within five months. In one, Díaz left the camera on a tripod and walked the hillside with a flashlight. The craft materialised directly above his head, sent beams of light down towards him and stayed motionless for 30 seconds. Then it blinked out. Colin Andrews, who visited in April 1995, described it on video as "a jelly fish with a beating heart."

No government investigation is on record. Maussan arranged private analyses. Prof. Víctor Quesada said the spectrum of light "was unlike anything we have ever seen" and put the object at 30 to 50 metres across. Jim Dilettoso of Village Labs judged the images genuine. Dr Robert Nathan of NASA JPL is said to have found no evidence of a fake.

Sceptics saw something else. Héctor Escobar, Héctor Chavarría and Luis Ruiz Noguez proposed a blown-glass lamp, an idea Ruiz called "simple, pero genial." Juan Chía had similar lamps made and showed on television how such images could be faked. Néstor Berlanda heard a click like a light switch on the unedited tape. Bill Hamilton saw jerky motion, as if on a cable. Even Maussan once said on air that some material made him think Carlos was using tricks. Supporters reply that the analysts found no tampering, and that the reflections on the car roof and guardrails fit the scene.

Michael Hesemann produced the documentary Ships of Light: The Carlos Díaz UFO Experience, which won two EBE Awards. John E. Mack wrote about Díaz in Passport to the Cosmos (1999). In 2026 Díaz reappeared after about 20 years of silence with an urgent message for humanity. He no longer calls it a ship. He calls it a body of light.