La Joya / Arequipa UFO Incident

Peru. April 11, 1980. About 7:15 in the morning. La Joya Air Base, also known as Mariano Melgar, sits in the Arequipa region, about 1,000 km south of Lima. Its airspace was restricted. About 1,800 personnel were on parade in formation. Near the runway, something hung motionless in the air. It looked like a balloon, perhaps 500 to 600 meters up.

The base commander, named in one account as Col. FAP Oswaldo Sarabia Peña, feared espionage. His order: intercept it and shoot it down.

The pilot was Lt. Óscar Santa María Huertas, 23, of the Peruvian Air Force. His Sukhoi Su-22 carried 140 rounds of 30 mm ammunition. He closed in and fired 64 of them, a cone-shaped "wall of fire," as he later put it. Then the surprise. "It looked like the huge bullets were absorbed by the balloon and it wasn't damaged."

The object climbed away fast. He followed on afterburner, about 84 km toward the coastal town of Kamaná. It stopped abruptly and his jet overshot. Twice more he set up an attack. "I caught the target and was ready to fire. But at that very moment, the object made another rapid ascent, avoiding the attack." When he tried to come at it from above, it ended up at 19,200 meters, above the Su-22's rated ceiling, and "settled at the same altitude and right beside my plane."

From about 100 meters he finally saw it clearly. An object about 10 meters across. A frosted, cream-coloured dome on a wider circular base of silver-grey metal. It "lacked all the typical components of aircraft. It had no wings, propulsion jets, exhausts, windows, antennae, and so forth." Low on fuel, he turned for home. The chase had lasted 22 minutes.

A US Defense Intelligence Agency cable, "UFO Sighted in Peru," came from the Defense Attaché office in Lima and was received on June 3, 1980. It described a round object hovering near the airfield on the morning of May 9. An Su-22 "fir[ed] on it at very close range without any apparent damage." On a second pass the jet was "outrun," and the object "vanished at high speed." It was seen again on May 10. The dates clash with the pilot's April 11, but the two accounts are treated as one event. The object is recorded as unidentified.

Peru kept its own file. The Air Force set up a UFO investigation office in the early 2000s, and in February 2002 El Comercio carried Santa María's first press statement. On October 18, 2013, the office was reopened as DIFAA. La Joya is its Case 0007. Neither file offers a conclusion.

The first word anyone used was balloon. When the tower asked him about it by radio, he answered that it was not a balloon. Mario Zegarra's 2005 version of the document describes it as "resembling a weather balloon used for maritime navigation." A skeptic could note that research balloons can float at around 19 km, and that shells can pass through a thin envelope without bursting it. Santa María rejects the idea. He points to the dome and base, the sudden stops, and climbs that came just as he moved to attack. No dedicated skeptical study has surfaced, and no hoax claim either.

Santa María retired as a commander in 1997. On November 12, 2007, he spoke at the National Press Club in Washington, on a panel hosted by James Fox and moderated by Fife Symington. He wrote his own chapter in Leslie Kean's 2010 book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. History's UFO Hunters paired his story with Tehran 1976 in "UFO Dogfights." The case remains unexplained.