Du côté de Mexico ils vont certainement se souvenir du milieu de 1965 comme :
L'été 1965 va certainement être qualifié dans l'histoire mexicaine de l'"été des soucoupes volantes".
Les "observations" commençèrent fin juillet après une succession de signalements de phénomènes semblables depuis diverses parties d'Amérique du Sud.
Puis soudain tout Mexico sembla voir des disques lumineux, des lumières en vol et des boules de lumières rapides.
Rarement un jour passait sans que la presse mexicaine rapporte que des "objets volants non-identifiés" avait terrorisé quelque famille paisible de jour ou toute une ville la nuit.
Parfois une chaîne d'"ovnis" (objects voladeres no identificados) avait convergé vers un "vaisseau mère" à forme de cigare.
Enigme
Un journal de Mexico City commenta sur l'"énigme de 23 ans" car, dit-il, ces "observations" avaient commencé en 1942. Un autre se souvint que dans un rapport scientifique un astronome
mexicain, le Dr. Jose Bonilla, dit qu'il avait vu des des centaines d'objets de forme ovale
passer devant son
télescope en 1882.
La "plativolitis" — la fièvre de voir des "plativolos" de soucoupes volantes — grippa la capitale mexicaine, staid businessmen could be seen climbing to the roofs of their office blocks clutching a pint of field glasses.
Home-going office workers risked their lives crossing busy streets with their eyes in the air instead of on the
traffic. A big department store advertised OVNIs ? Voyez-les par vous-mêmes si vous n'y croyez pas — achetez votre
télescope ou vos jumelles ici
.
Les "soucoupes volantes" arrivaient rouges, blanches, bleues, jaunes et mêmes grises. Elles variaient de la taille d'une balle de baseball à des disques de 60 pieds d'envergure. Elles whizzed silencieusement à travers le ciel ou gave out a deafening roar and a shower of sparks. Apart from saucers, some looked like mushrooms. American footballs, doughnuts or eggs.
They were seen in Acapulco, on the Pacific coast and Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico, in Tijuana. In the far northwest and in Merida in the Yucatan Peninsula.
In time photographs appeared in the press and then films on television. Usually they shewed fuzzy balls of light but sometimes clearly defined discs.
Le 16 septembre le traffic fut embouteillé pendant près de 2 h dans l'un des principaux boulevard de la capital as scores of motorists leap from their cars to join hundreds of pedestrians staring up at half a dozen hovering "glowing objects".
Perhaps significantly this was Mexico's Independence Day and the night sky was ablaze with rockets and fire ballons. But even former sceptics denied that the OVNIs bore any resemblance to fireworks.
Reports became more fantastic.
Glowing
Three architecture students from the National University solemnly claimed to have made a three-hour round trip to Jupiter's third moon with tall spacemen who conversed with them by telepathy.
Three women walking in a city suburb said that they fled from two ten-feet tall beings wearing "spacesuits like men in the strip cartoons," but with glowing red eyes.
The family of Senora Elsa Martinez Rebolledo said that their car was chased 35 miles into the outskirts of Veracruz by a gleaming blue egg-shaped object which finally soared away at a dizzy speed into the night sky.
"As fast as the evidence" piled up the rationalisers knocked it down.
Dr. Ernesto Dominguez, Director of the Gulf of Mexico weather bureau in Veracruz, insisted that people were seeing artificial satellites and weather balloons.
Senor David E. Mehiblum, a nuclear physicist, in a public lecture in Mexico City, wrote off all the sightings as weather balloons or meteorological freaks. Photographs of OVNI, were, he said, photographers' tricks, and "the whole thing can be summed up as a fraudulent fantasy."
Astronomers appeared on television with telescopic photographs showing that Venus went through phases like the moon and was therefore saucer-shaped at times.
But Senor Javier Garzon, a physicist on the staff of the National Astronomical Observatory was quoted as saying that in his view "the saucers really exist and apparently come from other planets."
After weeks of denying that anything out of the ordinary had been seen two Mexico City airport officials admitted that they had watched through binoculars, two "luminous bodies" crossing the sky.
One followed a fixed course and they conjectured this was one of the many artificial satellites visible soon after sunset or before sunrise.
But the second "changed course, speeded up, disappeared and came back into view and even went back on its track" according to the airport supervisor, Senor Jose Luis Enriquez.
Swarms
Further swarms of "flying saucers" were seen over Mexico City on September 25 and 29. The evening newspaper, "Ultimas Noticias", commented "Now Ovnividencia—(evidence of OVNIs)—is getting alarming", while Diario de la Tarde said: "A greate number of persons, formerly sceptical or incredulous, had objective and undeniable proof that the flying saucers are a reality."
Hoaxers have certainly also been at work in Mexico City.
On several nights, I myself watched a searchlight, or car headlight, being played on low clouds to give a rough impression of a fast travelling blob of light. But it bore no resemblance to what was being described by hundreds, and even thousands of witnesses.
I also saw a set of unorthodox intermittent lights waxing and waning and turning red, and sometimes turning about each other. But they were several miles away and none travelled at high speed.
La point culminant de "plativolitis" fut la prédiction du Senor Clemente Gonzales Infante, un peintre de panneaux de signalisation de Mexico City, que 3000 soucoupes volantes venant Venus would stage un vol au-dessus de Mexico City à 09:00 le 1er octobre.
They did not show up. Nor did Senor Gonzalez when reporters went to look for him.
But it took police and firemen an hour to dislodge some 2,000 citizens from the base of the Independence Monument, known as "El Angel", where they had gathered since down on the safety-in-numbers principle to watch the predicted extra-terrestrial parada.