The entire town – or at least those who were awake at 0200 yesterday – agree that it was hot, an unbearable heat that kept people from getting a good night’s sleep, their eyes wide open under treacherous, menacing and stormy skies. Outside, people drank cool drinks or ate ice cream hurriedly, before these were reduced to sticky confections.

This was the fate of many residents of Joaquin V. Gonzalez, engulfed by nearly 300,000 hectares of soybeans, when at 2:00 a.m., with heat still burning under their skins, they saw a strange, gigantic luminous creature, elongated and weightless, heading southeast to El Tunal, some 35 kilometers from the town. It plowed the dark skies, lighting everything around it, visible to everyone.

The “cigar-shaped UFO” (as it is known to specialists) crossed the Saltan night suspended under a spongy ceiling of clouds, and according to some of the numerous witnesses, “with intermittent, flashing lights and a fixed red beacon”. As the object disappeared from view, those who watched the sky as though expecting something more, saw it disappear into the darkness toward El Tunal. Minutes later (some say 5, others 15), all of Joaquin V. Gonzalez experienced an electrical blackout that submerged a 200-kilometer area in the deepest darkness possible.

“It was terribly hot. Some people were eating ice cream while others sat around the outdoor tables of local restaurants,” said one witness to Salta’s El Tribuno. “Suddenly everyone saw a strange vehicle plow across the sky, completely illuminated, and a little bit later, there was a power failure. The phone lines were also rendered inoperative,” said the excited witness. “Things went back to normal at 11:30 a.m., nine hours later.”

The power failure was confirmed by the EDESA Company, which confirmed the lack of electricity only minutes after the blackout, adding that it was impossible to find the failure, which had occurred at the main power station located at El Tunal. The problem? “A burned-out generator!”

UFO expert Luis Burgos told DIARIO POPULAR that “the blackout occurred some fifteen or twenty minutes after the object was sighted over Joaquin V. Gonzalez, and right when it hovered over the generating plant at El Tunal.” To Burgos, the protagonist of yesterday’s episode was “what we call a mothership, a sort of space aircraft carrier measuring no less than 200-300 meters long, and which usually issues smaller UFOs measuring between 8 and 10 meters in size, which later return to the mothership.”