Villegas-Peccinetti Encounter: The Mendoza Casino Workers' Case

Mendoza, Argentina. 1968. Fernando José "Nené" Villegas and Juan Carlos Peccinetti were payroll employees at the Provincial Casino. Late one night, Villegas was driving his colleague home in his 1934 Chevrolet.

Saturday, 31 August. 3:42 a.m. The car turned north onto Calle Neuquén in the Sexta Sección, then stopped abruptly. The men were about to check the battery when they saw it. A lens-shaped object about 5 metres across hung over a vacant lot some 30 metres away, 1.70 metres off the ground, "as if floating in space," with a powerful beam of light falling at about 45 degrees from an opening on its underside.

Five beings were there: two stayed by the craft like guards, and three came closer. They were human in shape and 1.40 to 1.50 metres tall. They were completely bald, with very pale skin, abnormally large heads and intensely luminous eyes. They wore one-piece grey-blue overalls.

The voices came from inside the men's skulls in faulty Spanish, with a foreign accent, as if tiny transistor speakers had been put in their ears. "No temer, no temer": don't fear. The visitors said they had just been three times around the Sun, studying the customs and languages of the system's inhabitants. "Mathematics is the universal language." One of them held a round screen about 0.70 metres across that showed a waterfall, then an atomic explosion, then the same waterfall, dried up, without life.

Each man felt three small punctures on the fingers of his left hand. Then the beings climbed the beam "as if it were an escalator," one after another. The light went out behind the last one, and there was an explosion. Villegas felt his trousers flap while Peccinetti felt a gust of air. The object sped away across the Mendoza sky.

At least nine marks covered the Chevrolet's left door and running board, in two vertical series: circles, crosses, arrows, and shapes like the Greek letters alpha and pi. Peccinetti's watch had stopped at 3:42. At Hospital Lagomaggiore, doctors found both men in acute psychomotor excitation, with no alcohol in their blood. Within days they were on Buenos Aires television. Flying Saucer Review later put experts examining the car door on its cover.

The police lab said the marks were made with a pyrography tool. Mercury on the running board matched a broken thermometer. The CNEA, the National Atomic Energy Commission, found no radioactivity above normal. Three watchmakers traced the stopped watch to a drop of paraffin wax. Judge Jorge Marzari Céspedes found an unexplained one-hour gap and co-workers left out of the story. "It's a joke in bad taste, with a motive behind it," he said. No one was charged.

Investigator Roberto Banchs was not satisfied. He quoted Commissioner Miguel Montoya: staging such a scene would have taken an investment perhaps only Hollywood could afford. And it would have been hard to recruit five bald people of identical height.

In 2008 Peccinetti told journalist Miguel Títiro that the UFO thing was a joke; in 2011, on a private recording, he told Alejandro Agostinelli, "Nené fue el genio." Nené was the genius. Yet one 2023 report says both men publicly stood by the story until they died. Peter Rogerson later counted this close encounter among the semi-abductions of Latin America's 1968 wave. Mendoza's newspapers still return to the night the visitors came to the Sexta Sección.