San José de Valderas landing and photographs (Ummo affair)

By 1967, a strange correspondence was circulating in Madrid. Letters signed by beings who said they came from a planet called Ummo reached Fernando Sesma, founder of the Sociedad de Amigos del Espacio, and other correspondents. On 6 February 1966, a Ummo craft had supposedly landed at Aluche.

A Ummita ship, they said, would be visible at San José de Valderas. They even gave the geographic coordinates of the landing spot. About forty people from Sesma's gathering at the Café León later signed statements that they had read the announcement before the event.

Thursday evening, 1 June 1967. Something appeared over the Castillos de San José de Valderas, an estate built by the Marquis of Vasto. Witnesses described a circular object 12 to 13 meters across, shaped like two soup plates united by their concave side. One account called it a whitish disc. On its belly was a sign, a kind of six-armed letter h, which one eyewitness compared to the gearshift of old automobiles.

It flew for around a quarter of an hour. Low. Swaying with the curious movement the Spanish press called hoja muerta, the dead leaf. According to Antonio Ribera and Rafael Farriols, it landed briefly on the nearby Santa Mónica estate.

Two of those present had cameras. One set of pictures was credited to Antonio Pardo, described as a journalist, who sent them to flying saucer author Marius Lleget. Pardo was never located. A second, anonymous photographer left strips of Valca 400 ASA negatives at a photo shop in Carabanchel for the photo editor of Informaciones. The paper ran the story under the headline "¿Platillos volantes sobre Madrid?"

At Santa Mónica, near a restaurant called La Ponderosa, metal tubes turned up. Inside were strips of plastic embossed with the Ummo emblem. Reports also spoke of landing gear marks, like those at Aluche.

In 1968, Spain's aerospace institute INTA analysed the materials. The plastic was Tedlar, a DuPont product. The tube was an unusually pure form of nickel. Neither could be found in Franco's Spain, which is why the material was called alien at the time.

Claude Poher of CNES reported a suspension thread. Ground Saucer Watch, in Phoenix, found a small object close to the camera, apparently hanging from power lines. The Center for UFO Studies also labelled the photos a hoax. On 30 December 1996, the Guardia Civil's Criminology Division examined five original negatives for J. J. Benítez. It found no manipulation, called the thread a scratch on the negative, and said the object's size and distance could not be determined.

On 2 April 1993, José Luis Jordán Peña, a telecommunications technician, wrote: "I decided to create a myth called Ummo, adorning it with a false landing and fake traces." Later he told Manuel Carballal of a 30 cm model hanging from a nylon thread in a tree, photographed with Vicente Ortuño. "It was an experiment I did to study human credulity, but it got out of hand." Not everyone accepted that he acted alone. Jacques Vallée suggested a Soviet intelligence origin for the letters, and Benítez and Ribera kept disputing the thread evidence.

The Valderas pictures are still argued over. They inspired a copycat hoax near La Coruña around 1978 and the 2022 Movistar Plus+ series Ummo. La España alienígena.