The Popocatépetl Cigar: A Glowing Object Falls Into the Volcano

Popocatépetl rises on the border of Puebla, México state and Morelos, about 65 km from Mexico City. Televisa kept a fixed camera trained on its summit. On 25 October 2012 the volcano was restless. That day it experienced numerous explosions that produced ash clouds.

That night, at 20:45 local time, the camera caught a brightly lit, oblong and cylindrical object. Some reports called it cigar-shaped. Others called it a giant tube. Mexico News Daily described "an object with shining edges".

It moved fast. Faster than an airliner, according to one report. It stayed on screen for about two seconds. Then it appeared to plunge right into the top of Popocatépetl. Or perhaps it passed behind the crater.

There were no human eyewitnesses. The whole case rests on a single recording. Estimates attributed to scientists put the object at 1 kilometer long by 200 meters wide.

Televisa ran the footage on the evening news of Joaquín López-Dóriga, most likely on Friday 26 October. The anchor gave it almost four minutes and was openly annoyed by the end. The newsroom had never been given the original recording. Wire services such as ANSA picked up the story, followed by HuffPost, IBTimes and Open Minds. Pocho rounded the object up to "mile-long".

Televisa consulted Margarita Rosado Solís, an astronomer at UNAM. She did not think it was volcanic material, and a meteorite seemed unlikely too. There was no sound, no explosion, no fireball, no debris. "Una cosa interesante es que va en caída," she said. She added that it would be even more spectacular if it were rising, since descending objects tend to have natural explanations.

Julieta Fierro, another UNAM astronomer, said no one could tell whether it fell into the crater or was "something incredibly distant moving behind the Earth". William Lee of the Mexican Academy of Sciences called it "a video error, given that there was no visible interaction between the object and the atmosphere and gases emanating from the volcano." Raúl Rivera of the Servicio Meteorológico Nacional stayed open. It was "an object whose composition is simply unknown to us."

In the United States, Ben Hansen, a former FBI agent and lead investigator on Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files, suspected editing. "It seems almost superimposed on the volcano video, as if it's in the foreground and not by the volcano," he said. He saw a slight shadow around it and suspected the volcano rumble had been dubbed in.

Marc Dantonio, a photo and video analyst for MUFON, disagreed. "I believe it to be far beyond the crater and, in fact, to be a meteor captured on successive frames." A columnist at SDP Noticias went political. He called the story a "cortina de humo", a smoke screen to distract from the labour reform. No formal government investigation was found.

In 2013, HuffPost UK described the clip as "dismissed by experts as a fake". Yet nothing was ever proved. The original file never surfaced. And the clip planted an idea that would not go away: a UFO base inside Popocatépetl. Jaime Maussan helped spread the images. Scott C. Waring believes there is a base "kilometers below the crater". New clips followed in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2025.