The Mexico City Eclipse UFO Wave

Thursday, 11 July 1991. The Mexican press called it the eclipse of the century. The path of totality crossed the country from Sinaloa to Chiapas and ran straight over the capital. In Mexico City, maximum eclipse came at 13:24:17. Totality lasted 6 minutes 38 seconds. Millions watched.

Guillermo Arreguín González worked for Televisa. He stood on his rooftop at Glorieta de las Flores, south of the Periférico, with a Signature-2000 VHS camcorder that had been a raffle prize at the office. Seconds after 13:24, he aimed it upward. "I raised my camera to the sky, maybe looking for a bright star or something strange," he said. He saw a bright object. "Suddenly I saw that the light wasn't going away." The clip runs 8 seconds.

He was not alone. Erick Aguilar, a 19-year-old university student, filmed from a rooftop after his girlfriend spotted the object. "At first, all we saw was a white dot in the sky, that's all," he said. "It was a larger object. And it was giving off light." About 60 miles away, businessman Luis Lara saw something in the clouds. "It's not a star. It's a UFO because it had a shadow underneath." More tapes came from Colonia Condesa, Iztapalapa, the Cerro de la Estrella and Puebla.

That night, Jacobo Zabludovsky's 24 Horas reported a strange phenomenon, recorded by an amateur cameraman in the south of the city. About a week later, Jaime Maussan showed the footage on 60 Minutos. "When I saw it, I said oh my god. This is a UFO, a real UFO," he recalled. "The telephone lines blew up. I mean 40,000 calls at the same time."

Viewers sent in their own tapes. To Maussan, the Puebla video was "absolutely identical" to Arreguín's. Slowed, zoomed and solarised, the footage showed what he called a metallic object with a double dome on top. On Siempre en Domingo, on 28 September, he was firm. "It is an object suspended in the air. It is not a helicopter, not a plane, not a weather balloon; we have checked."

No government, military or academic investigation was ever reported. In December 1991, Sky & Telescope noted "dozens of reports of people finding brilliant Venus a half hour and more before totality." In 1993, Ron Johnson of MUFON Texas called the object "nothing more than our old friend, the planet Venus!!" Camcorder circuitry, he showed, places a thin black line beneath a bright object. That was the shadow underneath.

Tim Printy found tapes with Venus, Regulus and Mars in the correct configuration. Venus was about 40% illuminated, enough to look like a domed disc on video. The famous hyperjump, he argued, was saturated pixels and a moving camera. "The object was stationary and it was the operator of the camera." In Mexico, Oscar García of Marcianitos Verdes reached the same conclusion.

The eclipse opened a door. Silvery discs were filmed at military air shows in 1991, 1992 and 1993. Maussan later said he had collected over 5,000 videos and photos. Messengers of Destiny, Sightings and a 1994 episode of Unsolved Mysteries carried the story abroad. The original tape is still contested. Arreguín has accused Maussan of plagiarising his video, and as of July 2025 both sides had proceedings before IMPI and INDAUTOR. Eight seconds of tape. Still unresolved.