The Las Lomas Daylight Disc Video, Mexico City (1997)

Mexico City, 1997. Six years earlier, during the solar eclipse of 11 July 1991, Jaime Maussan had broadcast a viewer's tape of a metallic object in the sky. It started a wave. More viewer tapes followed through the decade.

On 26 September 1997, a letter and a five minute VHS cassette arrived at Televisa, booth 3, San Ángel. The letter was typed and signed "José Valles P." The cameraman, it said, wanted to stay anonymous. Two days later, on 28 September, the tape aired on Maussan's program Tercer Milenio.

The date given was 6 August 1997. Daylight. Bosques de las Lomas, in the west of the city. The camera is handheld. It shakes, zooms and tilts. Among the buildings hangs a large metallic disc. It hovers. It wobbles. It rotates. At one point it disappears behind a high-rise building. Then it reappears.

On the soundtrack, two men talk as they film. The cameraman is worried about losing his job, because he is filming during working hours from the office building where he works. A note with the tape reportedly read: "We know what happens to witnesses, if they go public with something like this."

Maussan said he had interviewed twelve witnesses. Another account counts nine, plus the cameraman and his friend. A woman named Cassandra said the object was spinning, and that it had windows. Annie Lask said it hovered over her house in Bosque de las Lomas. She climbed up on her roof to watch it. She later reported burning eyes and memory loss, and her one attempt to photograph it failed. Another witness said the craft left a purple mist when it vanished.

The tape travelled. It was sold to UPN in the United States and Fuji Television in Japan. On the UPN special, propulsion engineer David Froning said: "I think it's an intelligently controlled craft." Two special effects supervisors at Digital Domain disagreed. Fred Raimondi called it "the most compelling footage I've seen." Ray Giarratana called it "a really good hoax… suspended from something above."

The frame by frame work told another story. Bruce Maccabee found that the buildings blurred with the camera's shake, but the object did not blur to the same degree. He called these "the fingerprints of a hoax." In October 1998, Jeff Sainio, MUFON's staff video analyst, reported in the MUFON UFO Journal. He had first thought it might be genuine. Then he found the disc jumping from stationary to steady speed almost instantly, with no period of steady acceleration. His conclusion was hoax. Philip J. Klass covered the case in his Skeptics UFO Newsletter. Years later, Mick West stabilised the clip on Metabunk and showed the same jerks.

Luis Miguel Barrera began investigating on 14 July 2009. On 5 November 2015 he published his answer. He named Ignacio Ocampo Valles, a creative animator at Publicidad Virtual. The company held the Latin American licence for LVIS, the Live Video Insertion System, which could "automatically compensate all camera movements… such as zoom in, zoom out, tilt up, and tilt down." According to Barrera, Ocampo filmed from the terrace of a 4th floor penthouse at Paseo de los Laureles 458, then under construction, and inserted the animated disc. The pseudonym matched a maternal surname. Valles.

Ocampo never openly confessed. Pedro Ramírez, a former Tercer Milenio collaborator, said the video "is totally false and that it was made with animation techniques." Maussan held his ground. "For me the case is authentic," he said in 2009.

The UFO Database rates the case "82% likely a hoax," while still calling it insufficient information. Its defenders pointed to how smoothly the disc moved with the camera. The insertion theory rests on that same smoothness. Today the clip stands as a standard early example in the argument over faked digital UFO evidence.