The Huella del Pajarillo Burn Mark, Capilla del Monte

Capilla del Monte lies in the hills of Córdoba, Argentina, near Uritorco. Cerro Pajarillo, Uritorco and Las Gemelas are described as sacred hills of the Comechingones. In December 1985, the IPEC group led by Dante Franch and Raúl Somma announced plans for contact at Uritorco. They called it Operación ERKS.

January 1986. A summer night. The family's account places it on 9 January, after 22:00. Other sources differ by a night. At a rural property a few metres from provincial Route 17, the Gómez family was playing cards with the doors and windows open. Gabriel Gómez was 12, or 11 in some accounts. With him were his grandmother, Doña Esperanza Gómez, and her sister Sara.

A bright red light came in through the doors and windows. They took it for the headlights of a car. Then they realised it was coming from the sky. Gabriel saw "a red light, and the one above was pale." It swayed over the hillside. "It was a round thing with those little windows," he said. He lay down and kept watching from his bedroom window. This light made no noise. "It did keep changing its lights." The family said the red light lit up the house and came down onto a willow tree.

On the hillside of Cerro Pajarillo lay an oval of burned grass. Measured from Rubén Lianza's aerial photographs, it came to 115 × 57 m. Proponents said the grass burned from above only, and the willow turned yellowish without burning. Mayor Diego Sez came with municipal secretary Jorge Suárez and photographer Raúl Ochonga. Gabriel's testimony and a drawing he made were collected. Suárez passed the story to Radio Universidad. TELAM picked it up, and it went out nationally and internationally. On 27 January 1986, Sez and Suárez drew up a municipal act certifying the mystery.

The sceptic Alejandro Agostinelli examined the site in February 1986. The grass was charred at the base with a dry crown above, the pattern of a fire starting at ground level. A cane stalk was burned on one side only. Lianza's photos showed "a mark within the mark, V-shaped", and Agostinelli read it as a possible lightning strike. Several witnesses reported rain and lightning on the night of 8 January. In 1996, fire chief Luis Bartoli said the municipality never asked his brigade to investigate.

In 1996, film director Roberto Basso said three neighbours had made the mark with an acetylene torch. Then, on 17 March 2016, Gonzalo Vaquer spoke on Fernando Diz's radio show Cielos Profundos. He was the grandson of Lilly Arijón, 75 in 1986, who had presented herself as the mark's discoverer. She had described blown fuses on the night of 8 January, and an earlier episode of missing time. "It was all my grandmother's invention... a white lie," Vaquer said. By his account, she told locals: "Say a flying saucer came, that way more tourists will come." In 2022, Diz suggested that he and Basso had invented the acetylene story. Proponents point to a 1987 forest fire that reportedly spared the Pajarillo area, leaving an inverted mark.

The mark was still visible in 1989 or 1990, when J.J. Benítez and Fernando Jiménez del Oso filmed there. Jorge Suárez later directed the Centro de Informes OVNI Colombo-Argentino. The town gained a UFO museum, the Paseo de los Marcianos and a Festival Alienígena that draws about 25,000 visitors. Gabriel is a father now. Forty years on, the red light over the hillside still defines the town.