UFO sightings — Mexico
UFO sightings — Mexico. 3 places in the catalogue, each with coordinates, the story behind it and a danger level from white to black.
Popocatépetl and the Objects in the Crater
An active volcano seventy kilometres from Mexico City whose crater is watched around the clock by the cameras of the national disaster prevention centre. The recordings are published openly, and since 2012 elongated glowing objects have regularly been found in them, entering or leaving the crater. The best-known clip, showing a cigar shape about a kilometre long, went round the world in October 2012. Volcanologists attribute such footage to a combination of video compression artefacts, birds and insects passing close to the lens, and glowing fragments thrown out in minor explosions. The cameras keep recording, and the material accumulates faster than anyone works through it.
Coyame and the Crash That May Not Have Happened
On 25 August 1974 US radar over the Chihuahua desert picked up an unidentified return heading north and, almost at the same time, a light aircraft. The returns merged and vanished. In the version set out in a document that reached an American researcher in 1978, a Mexican military party found the wreckage of a disc in the desert, and then contact with the party was lost. The document is a typed report with no signature and no classification, of unknown provenance. No agency in either country has ever confirmed it. The case survives in the literature as an example of a story grown entirely out of one piece of paper, and is useful for exactly that: there is nothing in it to check.
Mapimí Silent Zone
A patch of northern Mexican desert where, by local account, radios fall silent and compasses misbehave. The reputation dates from a US missile crashing here in 1970; tests have not confirmed any radio anomaly.