Chilca desert programmed sightings and the founding of Misión Rama

Lima, 22 January 1974. In the Paz family home, Sixto José Paz Wells sat with his mother, Rose Marie Wells Vienrich, and his sister. He was 18. They were trying automatic writing. That evening, the family says, the first message arrived. The sender called himself Oxalc. He said he came from Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter. His father, Carlos Paz García, an astronomer, had founded the Instituto Peruano de Relaciones Interplanetarias, or IPRI, in 1955.

The group was told where to go. The Chilca desert, about 60 km south of Lima. By Paz Wells's own account the date was 7 February 1974, at 21:00. Some English-language summaries give 10 February instead. Twenty witnesses waited among the desert hills.

Then something came out from between the hills. It was lens-shaped. It was full of lights. It had half a dozen little windows. It moved toward the group and came to position itself some eighty metres above them all. It did not land. Afterwards, the group says, a message explained why. "We are not coming down at this time because you do not know how to control your emotions. There will be a preparation, a time and a place."

August 1974. After an IPRI trip to the Marcahuasi plateau, the EFE news agency reported the group's claimed contact. In Bilbao, La Gaceta del Norte sent a 27-year-old reporter to Peru to test the story. His name was Juan José Benítez, better known as J. J. Benítez.

7 September 1974. Benítez stood in the Arenales de Chilca with Charlie Paz Wells and a group whose size varies by account, from seven others to twenty. As had been announced to him in advance, two UFOs appeared. One account quotes him describing two objects, very low, about 100 meters away, "very luminous" and appearing "in complete silence." They were the first UFOs of his life. His book OVNIS: S.O.S. a la Humanidad followed in 1975 and launched his career.

From those nights grew Misión Rama, "RA" for sun and "MA" for earth. Its aim was "to transform the human being into a star, into a Sun on Earth." It spread across Latin America and Spain. Paz Wells later claimed 250 to 300 sightings and eight physical contacts. Charlie Paz left in 1976, calling the movement "plagued of interpretation errors, struggles for leadership and unclear economic purposes." In 1990 Paz Wells dissolved Rama, citing the risk of sectarianism.

No photograph, radar return or physical trace from 1974 has surfaced. No government body investigated. Nearly every detail comes from the Paz Wells circle or from Benítez, a participant. Scholars such as Ricardo Campo Pérez describe Rama as a UFO religion rooted in Theosophy, spiritism and occultism. A Peruvian book, Yo visité Ganímedes, had already told of Ganymede contacts in 1972.

31 March 1994. On Spanish television's La máquina de la verdad, Paz Wells took a polygraph test. He failed the question about travelling to another planet. Ganymede, he replied, is a moon, not a planet. Critics note that polygraphs are not scientifically valid. Astrophysicist José Maza later observed that Ganymede's surface sits at about minus 150 °C.

Chilca is now known locally as Peru's UFO capital. Paz Wells has argued that a geological fault there produces a special energy. He kept calling the press to programmed sightings, at Chilca and as far away as Teotihuacán. In 2020 a bright light over Playa Yaya was traced to a person with a powerful flashlight on a cliff. No published explanation exists for the lights of 1974.