The Vidal Teleportation Hoax: Chascomús to Mexico (1968)

Argentina, 1968. The country lived under Juan Carlos Onganía's dictatorship, and that year it also lived through a wave of UFO reports. In early June, a strange story reached the papers. One headline asked simply: "¿Qué es esto?" ("What is this?").

Early May. Two couples left a family gathering in Chascomús shortly before midnight, in separate cars, bound for Maipú. The Rapallini family arrived. Dr. Geraldo Vidal, a Buenos Aires lawyer, and his wife, Mrs. Raffo de Vidal, did not.

On Route 2, on the outskirts of town, a dense white fog wrapped around their Peugeot 403. As Flying Saucer Review later told it, a "dense fog" "materialized suddenly before them." Vidal slowed down to avoid an accident. After that, he remembered nothing.

They woke in daylight, still in the car, on an unknown road. Both complained of pain in the nape of the neck. The paint looked as if it had suffered the effects of a blowtorch, yet the engine worked perfectly. Their watches had stopped. A calendar told them the rest: 48 hours of missing time. The original story has no craft, no lights and no sound. Only the fog.

Locals told them where they were: about 10 km from Mexico City, some 6,400 km from Route 2. At the Argentine Consulate, Vidal phoned Martín Rapallini, a notary in Maipú. The consul, Rafael López Pellegrini, is said to have asked them to keep quiet and taken the car away. It was reportedly sent to a laboratory in the United States and never returned.

Officials denied everything. The consul, the ambassador, the Foreign Ministry and the Buenos Aires Police all dismissed the story. On 10 June 1968, Foreign Minister Nicanor Costa Méndez waved it away on Canal 13.

The Vidals were never found. Alejandro Chionetti looked for the family in the 1980s and found nothing. In 1994, Peter Rogerson suggested in Magonia that the story had been invented to cover Mrs. Vidal's psychiatric hospitalisation.

Then came a confession. Alejandro Agostinelli interviewed film director Aníbal Uset at least seven times between 1996 and 2007. Uset said he made up the story with journalist Tito Jacobson and other friends, on a boat trip between Montevideo and Buenos Aires. The goal was to promote his film Ché OVNI, which opened on 7 August 1968. He said he sent his assistant, the young actor Juan Alberto "Muñeco" Mateyko, onto Pipo Mancera's show Sábados Circulares, posing as a relative of the Vidals. "La película lo creó," Uset said. The film created it. It had been shot in 1967.

The confession has loose ends. Jacobson and Mateyko both denied taking part, and Mancera said he had no memory of it. Uset had his own doubts: "So many people approached me to say that they had known the Vidals that I began to have doubts." Some writers suggest the hoax story covers a CIA or NASA experiment. They offer no evidence. Agostinelli's verdict is blunt: "El caso Vidal fue un engaño" ("the Vidal case was a deception").

Ché OVNI was a notorious box-office failure. Its UFO was two bowls glued together. The story outlived the film. Roberto E. Banchs revisited it in Fortean Times in 2017, and podcasts still retell it. Agostinelli put it best: "La primera vez desaparecieron de Chascomús; la segunda, de la realidad." The first time they disappeared from Chascomús. The second time, from reality.