The Trancas Incident: The Moreno Family and Object F

Finca Santa Teresa belonged to Antonio Moreno and stood about 3 km from Villa de Trancas, in Tucumán Province, beside the embankment of the Belgrano Railway. Monday, 21 October 1963. The ranch's generator failed at about 19:00, and the house went dark. Most of the family went to bed. Yolié Moreno de Colotti, visiting from Rosario, stayed up to feed her baby.

The maid, 15-year-old Dora Martina Guzmán, first saw lights near the railway line. She thought there had been a train accident. The lights blinked on and off, shedding beams in various directions. Over the tracks, Oscar A. Galíndez later wrote, some forty silhouettes stood out against the luminous background. They walked in different directions.

Then the nearest craft, object F, came to the gate. A body about 8 or 10 metres across, its surface metallic, like aluminium. A dome on top. About six small windows, glaring from within. It hovered 1 to 2 metres above the ground and wobbled slightly. Teresa Kairuz de Moreno shone a flashlight at it. A tube of white light about 3 metres across shot toward the house. It cast no shadow. Yolié said it seemed solid, but you could put your hand into it.

Within the craft a coil lit up and began to turn. The windows went from pink to red to orange. A fog thickened, with a strong smell like sulphur. Inside the house, the temperature reportedly climbed from 16 °C to nearly 40 °C. Then a tongue of flame. Dora was burned on the face, arms and legs, and the witnesses ran back to the house. The dogs stayed quiet, as if sedated.

After about forty minutes, object F lifted and moved east, followed by the others, toward the Sierra de Medina. An orange glow lingered over the mountains.

Police drew up an official record, filed by Comisario Marcos Fidencio Hidalgo. Under object F lay white spheres and dust in a circle 8 to 10 metres wide. Walter Gonzalo Tell of the University of Tucumán found 96.48% calcium carbonate and 3.51% potassium carbonate. Pea and lettuce plants withered. A neighbour, Francisco Tropiano, saw lit discs crossing the sky at about 22:15.

The Argentine Navy sent Capitán de Fragata Omar Roque Pagani. In 1964, at his request, Yolié filled in the Navy's UFO technical form. Pagani later passed it to Spanish researcher Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, who published it. No Navy conclusion was found. Galíndez, APRO's Argentine correspondent, investigated from 1964 and kept returning to the case.

From 1988, Roberto E. Banchs argued for an earthly answer. Troops were moving toward the area from 17 October 1963, after a Che Guevara-backed guerrilla group entered Salta. Perhaps, he suggested, soldiers with searchlights and smoke screens had been on a security operation near the house. Galíndez disagreed. Sperry searchlights were too heavy for the narrow-gauge line. No one saw vehicles come or go. Two of the daughters were married to army captains and knew military equipment. For Galíndez, the case stays unidentified.

Yolié never felt she was looking at non-human technology because of the rivet-like projections. Still, she has tied the night to Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. "I authorized it," she said in 2001. No confirmation from Spielberg's side has been found. In 2023, La Gaceta described her as the last surviving witness.