What happened
On 6 February 1966 a Madrid man named José Luis Jordán Peña reported seeing a huge circular craft on three legs, its underside marked with a strange emblem: three vertical bars crossed by a horizontal one. Soon a Madrid UFO author received anonymous photos of a similar craft bearing the same symbol, and the contactee Fernando Sesma Manzano began receiving long typewritten letters from beings who called themselves Ummites, natives of a planet orbiting a star they suggested might be Wolf 424. More photos appeared, notably of a craft over San José de Valderas near Madrid on 1 June 1967, along with reported landing traces. Over the following decades well over a thousand pages of Ummo documents circulated to groups in Spain and France, filled with cosmology, biology, social theory and a fragmentary invented vocabulary. The affair drew mainstream coverage in both countries and inspired devoted followers, including French physicist Jean-Pierre Petit.
The official explanation
In a 1993 article in the Spanish rationalist magazine Alternativa Racional, Jordán Peña, a psychologist and former vice-president of the Spanish Society of Parapsychology, wrote that Ummo was a myth he manufactured himself, complete with a false landing and planted traces, as an experiment in how readily people adopt delusional belief. He said Spanish ufologists had already uncovered him and that journalist Javier Sierra prompted his public admission. Historian Mike Dash notes the photographs were highly suspect and nothing in the letters needed an extraterrestrial source; Jacques Vallée compared their science to a well-researched 1960s science-fiction novel.
The anomalous case
Some researchers do not accept that one man could have produced the whole corpus. Wikipedia notes that the culprit or culprits remain formally unknown, and a 1988 letter referred to 3,850 pages sent to various recipients, a volume that continued arriving long after the early years. French researcher Jean-Pierre Petit has said since 1991 that some Ummite writings show signs of superior intelligence and directly inspired his work in cosmology and magnetohydrodynamics. Defenders also argue that a much-cited 'error' in the letters, a distance matching an outdated measurement of Wolf 424, comes from quoting the first letter selectively. Peña himself described the material as becoming contaminated with writings of unknown origin. The strongest honest version of the anomalous case is not that Ummo is real, but that the full authorship of the letters has never been established in detail.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- UMMO Special: the other myth that crashed, by José Luis Jordán Peña (Alternativa Racional no. 29, 1993; English translation) transcript, ufologie.patrickgross.org
Sources
- Planetary objects proposed in religion, astrology, ufology and pseudoscience: Ummo Wikipedia
- Ummo, an article by Jordán Peña (1993, translated) Patrick Gross, UFOs at close sight
Witness reports elsewhere
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