Aerolíneas Argentinas Flight AR674 / Bariloche Incident

Theoretical Alignment

This case earns a meaningfully higher Extraterrestrial Hypothesis alignment than most files in this catalogue, not on the strength of any single witness's account but because of the range of observers: an airline cockpit crew, a separate Gendarmería Nacional aircrew flying nearby, and a control tower whose own instruments deviated during the sighting, all reporting elements of the same event on the same night. Interdimensional Hypothesis alignment remains minimal, as nothing reported here departs from ordinary three-dimensional flight behavior, however anomalous its reported speed and maneuvers might be. The Psycho-Social/Mundane reading nonetheless carries the most weight in this file's own assessment, both because Argentina's own Air Force concluded in 2018 that a terrestrial light source explains the sighting, and because the first independent skeptical investigation, published in December 1995, reached a different but equally terrestrial conclusion; that the two official and unofficial mundane explanations do not agree with each other, and that Polanco himself has publicly rejected the official one, is treated here as a sign of a case still genuinely unresolved rather than as license to lean further toward the anomalous reading.

Background

San Carlos de Bariloche sits on the southern shore of Lago Nahuel Huapi in the Argentine Patagonian Andes, in Río Negro Province, roughly 1,600 kilometers southwest of Buenos Aires. Founded in 1902 and built up through the twentieth century as Argentina's premier Andean ski and lake-tourism destination, the city depended by 1995 on daily Aerolíneas Argentinas jet service connecting it to the capital, landing at the Argentine Air Force-administered Teniente Luis Candelaria Airport, a facility whose control tower and ground infrastructure at the time were staffed jointly by Air Force personnel and Aerolíneas Argentinas' own ground operations. The airport lies at the base of Cerro Otto and within sight of the Cerro Catedral ski resort, both of which feature prominently in this case's later conventional-explanation debate.

Aerolíneas Argentinas, the national flag carrier, operated Boeing 727 trijets on the Buenos Aires–Bariloche route through the 1990s. In command of Flight 674 on the night of July 31, 1995, was Capt. Jorge Polanco, an eighteen-year veteran of the airline (Infobae, 2020). Clarín's 1995 report names flight engineer Jorge Allende and air hostess Ana María Cancela; Heriberto Janosch's 1995 analysis also names Dortona and Benavente among the pilots aboard (other accounts give first officer Carlos Atilio Dortona and an off-duty captain, Roberto Benavente, in the jump seat). Passenger counts vary across secondary accounts, from about 100 to 150, and this file found no primary figure. Among the passengers were a La Nación journalist, Mariano de Vedia, and a 15-year-old, Melina Mazzoleni, who later recalled "una luz blanca bastante grande redonda" (C5N).

By 1995, Argentine ufology already had a substantial public history: sightings reports had circulated in the national press since at least 1947, and the Argentine Air Force had, on and off since the 1970s, maintained some internal apparatus for logging and evaluating reported aerial phenomena, though nothing as formalized as the United States' Project Blue Book had existed on a continuous basis. In 2011 the Fuerza Aérea Argentina created the Comisión de Estudio de Fenómenos Aeroespaciales (CEFAE), restructured on April 4, 2019 (Resolución 364/2019) into the Centro de Identificación Aeroespacial (CIAE), led by Comodoro Rubén Lianza — the country's first standing, publicly acknowledged body for investigating reported aerospace phenomena. The Bariloche case's persistence in Argentine public memory, its 2020 declassification (described in the press as the first time the state had released such a file), and its 2026 reappearance in news coverage of the Pentagon's UAP file release make it one of the best-known civil-aviation UAP cases in Latin America.

Complete Timeline

Date	Event
1902	San Carlos de Bariloche is founded on the shore of Lago Nahuel Huapi; the city later develops into Argentina's leading Andean ski and lake-tourism destination.
July 31, 1995, shortly after 20:00 local	Aerolíneas Argentinas Flight 674, a Boeing 727 commanded by Capt. Jorge Polanco, approaches Teniente Luis Candelaria Airport; the tower reports that the airport has lost power, and the aircraft holds for about ten minutes while a generator is started (Clarín).
~20:15 local	About twelve miles out, Polanco sights a light at his 11 o'clock; the tower reports no other traffic except a Gendarmería Nacional aircraft on a medical flight behind them (Infobae, 2020).
During the approach (no timestamp recorded)	Per the later-declassified control-tower exchange, Polanco radios: “Tenemos un objeto a la derecha formándonos… El objeto tiene luces intermitentes brillantes… creemos que es un plato volador” (“We have an object forming on our right… The object has bright intermittent lights… we think it's a flying saucer”).
Minutes later	As Flight 674 nears the runway, all power fails again; by Polanco's account the airport's generator revs up on its own, smokes and stops; the radio exchange is interrupted for about four minutes (Infobae).
Minutes later	Polanco executes a go-around (“escape maneuver”), climbing the 727 to about 10,000 feet and turning right toward Lago Nahuel Huapi, leveling off to keep clear of the Gendarmería aircraft above him.
During the go-around	Per Polanco, the object follows the aircraft; Clarín reported in 1995 that it stopped about 100 m away and then held a parallel course. The crew of the Gendarmería Nacional Cheyenne GN705, Cdrs. Rubén Cipuzak and Juan Domingo Gaitán, see an intense light following the airliner; Gaitán describes an amber light that grew and faded in intensity and moved at high speed toward the mountains.
Later that evening	The tower radios “Acabamos de ver la luz otra vez” (“We've just seen the light again”); the object departs at high speed (toward the southeast per Clarín; toward Cerro Otto in Polanco's 2020 account) and Polanco completes a second, uneventful approach and landing.
August 2, 1995	Clarín, one of Argentina's leading national newspapers, publishes the first detailed press account of the sighting, drawing national attention.
August 9, 1995	An official file (Expediente No. 5374181) is opened on the incident.
1999	France's COMETA (Comité d'Études Approfondies) study group publishes its independent report on UFOs and national defense in the magazine VSD; it mentions the Bariloche case, describing the blackout and an object resembling a large aircraft appearing on the plane's right.
2011	The Fuerza Aérea Argentina establishes the Comisión de Estudio de Fenómenos Aeroespaciales (CEFAE), Argentina's first standing body for investigating reported aerospace phenomena.
December 1995; republished 2015	Psychologist Heriberto Janosch and engineer Virgilio Di Pelino of the Fundación CAIRP publish a skeptical analysis in El Ojo Escéptico No. 14 proposing ground-based reflectors, most likely on snow-grooming machines working on the slopes of Cerro Catedral; Janosch republishes it with a new preface in July 2015.
2018	The Argentine government's final report concludes the sighting was not an extraterrestrial craft but a confusion caused by a person on the ground, identified as Juan Carlos Rivero, testing “un potente proyector hacia la base de las nubes” during the blackout.
April 4, 2019	CEFAE is restructured into the Centro de Identificación Aeroespacial (CIAE) by Resolución 364/2019; the CIAE identifies the light as a spotlight from Bariloche's Rocket discotheque.
September 18, 2020	Argentina's Ministry of Defense declassifies the Bariloche case file for the first time in the country's history, following a Freedom-of-Information request by the civilian research group CEFORA (Comisión de Estudios del Fenómeno OVNI en la República Argentina); the release includes the control-tower radio exchange.
September 9, 2022	Aerolíneas Argentinas crews on three flights report pairs of luminous objects near Choele Choel, Río Negro, and one pilot refers on the radio to "the Polanco UFO"; these later reports are not part of the 1995 case itself.
2023	After a review of the Air Force report by the “Fénix 4” team, the CIAE lists the case as “en revisión” (under review), per C5N.
May 8, 2026	The Pentagon releases more than 160 files on unidentified anomalous phenomena; a section on investigations outside the United States includes the 1999 COMETA report, which mentions the Bariloche case, returning it to headlines in Argentina.

The Approach and the First Power Failure

Flight 674 departed Buenos Aires' Aeroparque Jorge Newbery on the evening of July 31, 1995, bound for San Carlos de Bariloche on a routine, frequently flown domestic route. As the Boeing 727 began its descent toward Teniente Luis Candelaria Airport, the control tower reported that the electrical supply serving the airport, and a substantial part of the city of Bariloche itself, had failed — Janosch's 1995 analysis attributes the city blackout to a transformer switching error, and the airport generator's failure probably to an overload (a presumption he says needs confirmation). Clarín reported in 1995 that instruments in the tower briefly deviated without apparent cause while the aircraft's instruments worked normally, a detail this file's Sensor & Instrumentation Detection Profile section below treats as a genuinely disclosed, if inconclusive, anomaly rather than either a confirmed technical malfunction or confirmed evidence of an external field effect.

It was against this backdrop — a city already dark, an airport running on emergency power, and a control tower whose own instruments were behaving strangely — that Polanco first noticed an intense light at his 11 o'clock, roughly twelve miles out from the field by his own later account. He radioed the tower; controllers reported no other traffic in the sector apart from a Gendarmería Nacional aircraft behind him on a medical flight, a Piper Cheyenne, registration GN705, carrying a patient to Buenos Aires.

Seventeen Minutes: The Sighting and the Radio Transcript

What happened over the next roughly seventeen minutes is preserved in part, unusually for a case this old, in the control-tower radio exchange that Argentina's Ministry of Defense declassified a quarter-century later, in September 2020 (no timestamps were recorded, per Infobae). In it, Polanco radioed the tower: “Tenemos un objeto a la derecha formándonos y arriba estamos viendo a la otra aeronave… El objeto tiene luces intermitentes brillantes. Este… es… no sé… creemos que es un plato volador” — “We have an object forming on our right, and above we're seeing the other aircraft… The object has bright intermittent lights. This… is… I don't know… we think it's a flying saucer.” Infobae's presentation of the exchange attributes to the tower the line “Acabamos de ver la luz otra vez” — “We've just seen the light again.”

Polanco's fullest public description of the object, given in numerous interviews over the following three decades, describes something considerably more structured than a distant point of light: “un plato sopero invertido” — an inverted soup plate — roughly 30 meters in diameter, ringed with rotating green lights and topped with a single orange light that “parecía que respiraba” (“seemed to breathe,” i.e., pulsed rhythmically in brightness). Other contemporaneous and later accounts describe the object differently — as three lights with a red light at the center, or, in Clarín's 1995 report, as an intense white-to-amber light like a star but much larger and brighter — and this file discloses that variance rather than silently harmonizing the sources into a single tidy description; what is consistent across the accounts is a bright light that appeared to move with the aircraft for a sustained period, not a fleeting glimpse. Clarín reported that the flight engineer estimated its speed at about 2,000 km/h.

The Escape Maneuver

As Polanco brought Flight 674 down toward the runway, all the lights failed a second time, and, per Polanco's own repeated account, the airport's backup generator “se aceleró al máximo, largó humo y se paró” — revved to maximum, released smoke, and died. The radio exchange was interrupted for about four minutes (Infobae). With the runway now completely dark and no working backup power, Polanco made the decision to abandon the approach: a standard aviation go-around, but one executed, by his own account, under genuinely degraded conditions rather than as routine caution. He climbed the 727 to about 10,000 feet, turning right toward Lago Nahuel Huapi and leveling off to keep clear of the Gendarmería aircraft, which he puts about 300 meters above him (Clarín said about 600 meters), before attempting a second approach.

It was during this phase, per Polanco, that the object's behavior became most dramatic. Clarín's 1995 report says the light approached the plane as if heading toward it, stopped about 100 meters away, turned to match the plane's movements and held a parallel course, and finally left at high speed toward the southeast; in Polanco's 2020 account it disappeared toward Cerro Otto when the aircraft turned back to land. Polanco completed a second, uneventful approach shortly afterward, landing Flight 674 without further incident and with no injuries reported among the crew or the passengers.

Independent Corroboration From the Air: The Gendarmería Nacional Crew

The single feature that most distinguishes this case from the great majority of single-aircraft airline UFO sightings in this catalogue is the presence of a second, wholly independent aircrew in the same general airspace, flying a different aircraft type, on a different mission, for a different operator — and reporting a light near the airliner. Note, though, that both aircraft were on the same tower frequency and heard each other's reports. That aircraft was a Gendarmería Nacional (Argentina's federal border-police force) Piper Cheyenne, registration GN705, carrying a patient to Buenos Aires and positioned, by Clarín's 1995 account, about 600 meters above the airliner (Polanco later said about 300 meters).

The aircraft was commanded by Commandant Rubén Cipuzak (spelled "Zipuzak" in Clarín), with Commandant Juan Domingo Gaitán. Clarín reported in 1995 that the Gendarmería crew saw an intense light following the airliner and thought it might collide with them. Gaitán described “una luz tipo ámbar que aumentaba y disminuía de intensidad” — an amber light that grew and faded in intensity — moving “a gran velocidad hacia la cordillera” (at high speed toward the mountains) (C5N), and Janosch's analysis reports that Gaitán put its speed at about Mach 3. Infobae reported in 2020 that both gendarmes had since died.

This file treats the Gendarmería account as the strongest corroborating evidence in the case, because it comes from a differently positioned, professionally trained second flight crew. Its limits should be stated plainly: the published Gendarmería descriptions are of a light, not a structured object; the crews shared a radio frequency; and an earlier version of this page quoted Cipuzak describing an abrupt, inertia-free stop, a quotation that could not be found in any source.

Ground Witnesses on the Far Side of the City

Beyond the two aircrews, some Bariloche residents reported lights that night; Janosch's 1995 analysis names a couple, Berta and Silverio Cabral, and C5N refers to unnamed neighbor witnesses. An earlier version of this page named further ground witnesses (a meteorologist, Nicolás Aray, and the brothers Abel and Pedro Drelevich) and placed them on the far side of the city; neither the names nor the bearings could be found in the sources checked. Clarín's 1995 report names the tower chief, Suboficial (Warrant Officer) Daniel García, and the airport's senior officer, Major Jorge Oviedo, among those at the airport, along with the head of the Gendarmería unit in Bariloche, Jesús Ángel Fino, and weather-service staff; the tower recorded the event, and its instruments briefly deviated. At the time, Carlos Angueira, president of the Asociación Amigos de la Astronomía, ruled out a meteor and reflections from ice-crystal clouds, and Raúl Barrachina Tejada, a physicist at the Centro Atómico Bariloche, said that a reflection of signals that could have confused the pilot should not be ruled out (C5N).

Declassification, the COMETA Report, and the 2026 Pentagon Files

For a quarter-century after the sighting, the Bariloche case existed publicly only through press coverage, Polanco's own repeated interviews, and informal treatment by Argentine ufology researchers. That changed on September 18, 2020, when Argentina's Ministry of Defense declassified the case's original administrative file — Expediente No. 5374181, opened August 9, 1995 — described by Argentine news outlets as the first time the state had released official files of this kind. The release followed a request by CEFORA (Comisión de Estudios del Fenómeno OVNI en la República Argentina), an independent civilian research group, under Argentina's 2016 Access to Public Information Law (Ley 27.275), and an earlier request by a civilian, Pablo Álvarez, who obtained the transcript of the radio exchange with CEFORA's help; the Air Force response was authorized by Brigadier Inspector General Roberto Alfredo Orlando (ANBariloche). The released materials included the control-tower radio exchange quoted above.

Separately, and considerably earlier, the case had already drawn international attention through its inclusion in COMETA's 1999 report, “Les OVNI et la défense: à quoi doit-on se préparer?” (“UFOs and Defense: What Should We Prepare For?”), an independent study authored by a group of retired French general officers, engineers, and scientists convened under the auspices of the Institut des Hautes Études de Défense Nationale. According to La Nación's 2026 summary, the COMETA text says that a power cut plunged the town into darkness, that an object resembling a large aircraft appeared on the airliner's right, and that electromagnetic phenomena were observed as the city and airport lights went out. The report was first published in the French magazine VSD in July 1999.

The case resurfaced on Friday, May 8, 2026, when the Pentagon released more than 160 files on unidentified anomalous phenomena. A section on investigations conducted outside the United States includes the COMETA report, and with it the Bariloche passage (Buenos Aires Times; La Nación). The case appears there only through the French report, not as a case U.S. investigators examined; this file treats its inclusion as a measure of the case's documentary reach rather than as confirmation of any particular explanation.

Key Witnesses

The Five Observables Assessment

The Five Observables framework, drawn from the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, is applied here to the performance characteristics reported by Flight 674's crew and independently echoed by the Gendarmería aircrew:

Assessment: Anti-Gravity Lift and Instant Acceleration are rated Speculative: the 1995 Clarín report describes the light stopping about 100 meters from the airliner, holding a parallel course and then leaving at high speed, and the Gendarmería pilot Gaitán describes it moving at high speed toward the mountains, but these are visual impressions of a light at night with no instrumented confirmation. (An earlier version of this page rated both Present on the basis of a quotation attributed to Cdr. Cipuzak about an inertia-free stop, which could not be sourced.) Hypersonic performance is rated Speculative rather than Present: the flight engineer's estimate of about 2,000 km/h (Clarín) and Gaitán's estimate of about Mach 3 (Janosch) are visual estimates, but eyewitness velocity estimation is notoriously unreliable, and the skeptical researchers Janosch and Di Pelino specifically noted that witnesses reported silence despite the claimed supersonic speed — a real, disclosed objection to taking the raw speed estimate at face value. Low Observability is rated N/A rather than Present or Absent because, unlike several other cases in this catalogue (the BOAC Stratocruiser sighting among them), no radar system of any kind was brought to bear on this sighting at the time — there is neither a positive nor a negative radar result to evaluate. Trans-Medium performance is rated Absent, as no water or ground transition was reported or applicable to a purely aerial sighting.

Evidence Assessment

Why "Disputed"

This case earns a DISPUTED classification with a credibility score of 64/100. That places it modestly above this catalogue's other South American aviation cases — the Ceará Boeing 727 Sighting (Disputed, 41), where CINDACTA's own radar contact was later retracted as an equipment defect, and Araçariguama (Disputed, 34) — and above the single-aircraft BOAC Stratocruiser Centaurus Sighting (Disputed, 61), while remaining well below cases combining credentialed military witnesses with genuine positive instrumented corroboration, such as Coyne Helicopter (Credible, 81).

What lifts this case above BOAC and the other South American aviation files in this catalogue is the combination of a second aircrew that saw the light, a contemporaneous radio exchange rather than a reconstructed one, and a coincident power failure. What holds it well short of “Credible” is the total absence of any instrumented evidence — no radar was ever brought to bear, unlike BOAC's negative three-system search or Coyne's positive altimeter anomaly — combined with two separate conventional explanations (a ground projector or discotheque spotlight per the official finding, and ski-slope machinery reflectors per the 1995 skeptical study) that agree the light was ground-based but disagree about its source, and a case status the CIAE listed as “en revisión” in 2023. A case corroborated from more than one vantage point, yet this evidentially thin on the one form of proof (radar, photograph, physical trace) that could most directly discriminate between explanations, and whose own official investigators have not converged on a single accepted cause, is precisely the profile this catalogue's scoring reserves for the middle of the Disputed range.

Sensor & Instrumentation Detection Profile

No radar system, military or civilian, is documented anywhere in the source record as having searched for or detected the object during this sighting — a significant limitation distinguishing this case from others in this catalogue such as the BOAC Stratocruiser sighting, where an intercepting fighter and two ground radar stations all actively searched and returned a negative result. The one instrumentation anomaly documented in this case is indirect: Clarín reported in 1995 that instruments in the Bariloche control tower briefly deviated without apparent cause during the event, while Flight 674's instruments worked normally. This file's own assessment treats that combination honestly as a genuine, disclosed anomaly rather than either a confirmed electromagnetic-interference effect from an external source or a simple consequence of the same electrical fault that caused the blackout; no engineering investigation of the tower's specific instrument malfunction, distinct from the general power failure, appears in any source consulted for this case file. No photograph, video, or audio recording of the object itself is known to exist; the main surviving primary record is the control-tower radio exchange.

Environmental & Geospatial Context

The sighting occurred on a cold winter evening in the Argentine Patagonian Andes; the weather record was not available for this review, although both conventional explanations involve lights projected onto cloud. The approach corridor to Teniente Luis Candelaria Airport runs directly over Lago Nahuel Huapi, a large glacial lake, with Cerro Otto rising immediately to the airport's north and the Cerro Catedral ski resort situated several kilometers further along the same mountain range — a detail directly relevant to this case's competing conventional explanations, both of which locate their proposed light source somewhere within this same compact geography. No engineering report on the cause of the citywide blackout was located; Janosch's 1995 analysis attributes it to a transformer switching error and the airport generator's failure probably to an overload. Geospatially, Bariloche in 1995 sat well outside any major military installation, nuclear facility, or dense radar-coverage zone, a contrast with several of this catalogue's Northern Hemisphere Cold War-era cases where nearby defense infrastructure sometimes provides an independent evidentiary channel this case simply does not have available.

Observer Credibility & Occupational Profile

Capt. Jorge Polanco's eighteen years of experience with Aerolíneas Argentinas at the time of the sighting places him within the same broad category of credentialed, professionally trained commercial-aviation witnesses this catalogue treats as carrying real evidentiary weight, comparable to Capt. James Howard in the BOAC Stratocruiser sighting or Capt. Gerson Maciel de Britto in the Ceará Boeing 727 Sighting. What distinguishes this case from either of those is the additional professional witness crew: Gendarmería Nacional commandants Rubén Cipuzak and Juan Domingo Gaitán, flying a separate aircraft on a medical flight, who saw an intense light following the airliner. Two professionally trained crews from two organizations seeing the light is a stronger configuration than this catalogue's more typical single-cockpit sightings, although the published Gendarmería descriptions are of a light rather than a structured object.

Set against this strength is a limitation this file discloses rather than minimizes: the passage of three decades between the event and most of the detailed public interviews this file draws on means that much of Polanco's most vivid, specific description (the exact shape, the “breathing” light, the precise sequence of the hover) comes from repeated retrospective retellings rather than a single, fully contemporaneous statement, and this file found variance across sources on details such as the passenger count, the duration and the object's departure direction. The contemporaneous record — the control-tower exchange and Clarín's 1995 report — is considerably more limited, describing an object with bright intermittent lights, or an intense white-to-amber light, rather than the rotating-green-lights, breathing-orange-light description that appears in Polanco's later interviews. This file's own assessment treats the contemporaneous transcript as the more evidentially reliable anchor and the fuller retrospective accounts as valuable but potentially elaborated over three decades of retelling, a distinction worth keeping in mind when weighing the object's precise described morphology against its independently corroborated behavior.

Physical & Material Assays

No physical trace evidence of any kind exists for this case. The object was never reported landing, and no debris, residue, or material sample connected to it is claimed to exist in any source consulted for this case file. See Material Analysis below for a full discussion of the case's surviving documentary record in place of physical evidence.

Historical Precedents & Archive Matches

Within this catalogue's own collection of South American commercial-aviation UFO cases, the Bariloche incident sits alongside the Ceará Boeing 727 Sighting (February 1982, a VASP Boeing 727 paced for roughly ninety minutes over five Brazilian states) and, at a considerable remove in both era and character, the fatal Araçariguama Sighting (March 1946, São Paulo state). The Bariloche case stands apart from the Ceará sighting specifically on the question of independent aircraft corroboration: where VASP Flight 169's own CINDACTA radar contact was later retracted by CINDACTA itself as an equipment defect, leaving that case's strongest instrumented evidence undermined by the very agency that first reported it, Bariloche has no radar evidence at all to retract, but does have a second aircrew (Cipuzak and Gaitán's Gendarmería Cheyenne) that neither Ceará nor Araçariguama offers.

This case's pattern of a maneuvering light coinciding with electrical disruption also invites comparison with this catalogue's broader cluster of cases reporting apparent electromagnetic effects, a pattern researcher Jacques Vallée has documented extensively across Latin American UFO reports specifically. Unlike several of those cases, however, Bariloche's power failure has not been disputed as a real event by investigators on either side of the debate; what remains contested is only whether the failure and the sighting share a common cause, are coincidental, or whether the failure itself (via the emergency generator's own malfunction and the tower's disrupted instruments) contributed to misperceptions that then compounded into the fuller sighting account. Within Argentina's own investigative record, the case remains the best-known file reviewed by the Air Force's CEFAE and its successor, the CIAE.

Material Analysis

There is no physical object, debris, or trace sample connected to this case; “material” here refers instead to the case's actual surviving evidentiary substrate — the 1995 control-tower radio exchange, Clarín's 1995 report, the 2018 official finding, Janosch and Di Pelino's 1995 skeptical analysis, and the COMETA report's 1999 mention (re-released among the Pentagon's 2026 files) — since that documentary record is the only tangible evidence this case file's research was able to assess.

The Surviving Documentary Record

This case is unusually well-documented for a Latin American sighting of its era: Argentina's Ministry of Defense declassified material from the case's administrative file (Expediente No. 5374181, opened August 9, 1995) in September 2020, including the control-tower radio exchange, following CEFORA's request; the government published a final report in 2018 attributing the light to a ground projector; Janosch and Di Pelino published a skeptical analysis in December 1995; and the case is mentioned in COMETA's 1999 report, which reappeared among the Pentagon's 2026 releases. A contemporaneous radio exchange, a same-week national newspaper report, an official conclusion and an independent skeptical analysis that agree on the basic sequence of events, while disagreeing about the cause, are a stronger documentary foundation than most cases of this vintage can claim.

What Does Not Survive

No photograph, film, radar record, or physical trace of the object is known to exist in any archive consulted for this case file. This case file's research did not examine the full text of the declassified Expediente No. 5374181 itself, relying instead on Argentine press quotations and summaries of its contents, principally Infobae's 2020 reporting on the radio exchange. The CIAE names the Rocket discotheque as the source of the spotlight; Mariano de Vedia's account mentions beams from both the Cerebro and Rocket discotheques. Passenger counts (variously 100, 102, 140, or 150 across different sources) could not be checked against a primary record.

The Conventional Explanation Candidate (CEC): Discotheque Spotlight, Ski-Slope Reflectors, or Genuine Unknown

Unusually for a case in this catalogue, two separate investigative efforts — one official, one independent — each proposed a different specific ground-light source for this sighting, and neither has persuaded Polanco or displaced the other. Each candidate is evaluated on its own merits below.

Discotheque Spotlight (Official Finding)

The government's final report, published in 2018, concluded that the lights were a confusion caused by a person on the ground, Juan Carlos Rivero, testing “un potente proyector hacia la base de las nubes” (a powerful projector aimed at the base of the clouds) while the city was dark from the blackout; the CIAE identifies the light as a spotlight from Bariloche's Rocket discotheque, and passenger-journalist Mariano de Vedia cited beams from the Cerebro and Rocket discotheques. This is the only explanation to have received a formal, named, institutionally-backed investigative conclusion, and it does account for the timing coincidence with the power failure and for the general character of a bright, apparently mobile light against a dark sky. It struggles, in this file's own assessment, against several specific objections Polanco and others have raised: a 1995-era discotheque spotlight would need to project an extraordinary distance to be mistaken, by two separately positioned professional aircrews at different altitudes, for an object holding station beside and then behind a moving airliner; and a fixed, club-mounted spotlight cannot itself reposition from behind an aircraft to ahead of it, as Polanco describes, although a moving beam on a cloud base can appear to move and stop.

A caveat on the only "official" finding on record: that CEFAE/CIAE's spotlight conclusion is the sole institutionally-backed explanation should not be read as making it the most likely one by default. A 23-year gap between the incident and the 2018 final report is itself notable (Janosch reports that the Air Force had found no other aircraft in the area and closed the case earlier), and a military investigative body has an ordinary interest in resolving a decades-old open file involving its own airspace and personnel with a mundane, low-controversy answer. This file weighs the finding on the strength of its own specific fit to the evidence — which, as detailed above, is genuinely incomplete — rather than crediting it simply because no rival explanation carries an equivalent institutional stamp; the CIAE's 2023 “en revisión” listing suggests the 2018 finding was not the last word.

Ski-Slope Snow-Grooming Machinery Reflectors (CAIRP Foundation, 1995)

Working independently of the Air Force, psychologist Heriberto Janosch and engineer Virgilio Di Pelino of the Fundación CAIRP (Centro Argentino para la Investigación y Refutación de la Pseudociencia) published an analysis in El Ojo Escéptico No. 14 in December 1995, republished by Janosch with a new preface in July 2015. They proposed, as a “probable” but unproven explanation, that ground-based lights were projected onto clouds, the lake or the aircraft windows, most likely from reflectors on snow-grooming machines working that night on the 18-to-45-degree slopes of the Cerro Catedral ski resort: two machines of Robles Catedral with roughly 75-watt halogen reflectors and two of Lado Bueno Sky y Sol with rotating reflectors more powerful than a car's. Janosch and Di Pelino noted that witnesses reported silence despite the claimed speeds, and argued that stress, expectation and Polanco's prior beliefs shaped what he perceived. Like the discotheque theory, this explanation does not clearly account for the light's reported repositioning relative to two separately moving aircraft.

Genuine Unconventional Aerial Object

This reading remains open on the strength of the case's multi-vantage sightings — particularly the Gendarmería crew's sighting of a light following the airliner — the contemporaneous 1995 radio exchange, and the CIAE's 2023 “en revisión” listing. It is tempered by the complete absence of radar or physical evidence, and by the existence of two separate, physically grounded terrestrial candidates — either of which could plausibly explain at least part of what was seen, even if neither individually accounts for the full reported sequence. An earlier hypothesis considered by Janosch — the thin crescent Moon near Mars — was discarded because the aircraft's heading did not match the sighting, a negative result this file treats as a data point against the astronomical-misidentification theory specifically, distinct from the still-unresolved question between the two terrestrial-light candidates above.

Related Cases

Further Reading — Recommended Literature

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Essential Viewing

Sources

• Infobae. “La noche que un piloto avistó un ovni en Bariloche y los enigmas que aún persisten: ‘La explicación de la Fuerza Aérea fue absurda’” (Aug. 13, 2025). infobae.com
• Infobae. “Me siguió durante 17 minutos”: el piloto argentino que vio un OVNI contó detalles del hecho” (Sep. 18, 2020). infobae.com
• Infobae. “Acabamos de ver la luz otra vez”: la conversación completa entre el piloto que observó el objeto volador y la torre de control” (Sep. 18, 2020). infobae.com
• Infobae. “‘Nos persiguió durante 17 minutos’: el relato del piloto argentino que vio un OVNI y cuyo caso fue desclasificado por EEUU” (May 11, 2026). infobae.com
• Buenos Aires Times. “Bariloche sighting cited in newly released Pentagon files on UFOs” (May 2026). batimes.com.ar
• La Nación. “El intrigante vuelo de Aerolíneas Argentinas que aparece en los archivos sobre ovnis desclasificados en EE.UU.” (May 2026). lanacion.com.ar
• El Cordillerano. “A 31 años del Caso Polanco: el misterio que puso a Bariloche en el mapa mundial de los Ovnis” (Aug. 1, 2026). elcordillerano.com.ar
• El Cordillerano. “A 30 años del caso Polanco: el OVNI que sorprendió a Bariloche” (Jul. 31, 2025). elcordillerano.com.ar
• El Cordillerano. “Se cumplen 25 años del avistamiento de un OVNI desde la cabina de un avión que aterrizaba en Bariloche” (Jul. 30, 2020). elcordillerano.com.ar
• La Capital. “Desclasificaron documentos sobre el avistamiento de un ovni en Bariloche en 1995.” lacapital.com.ar
• Página 12. “El Ministerio de Defensa desclasificó por primera vez documentos sobre OVNIs en Argentina” (Sep. 2020). pagina12.com.ar
• MDZ Online. “El Caso Polanco: la noche en que un ovni sorprendió a un avión en Bariloche” (Feb. 21, 2025). mdzol.com
• Los Andes. “‘Era un plato volador con luces verdes’: cómo vivió el piloto argentino su contacto con un OVNI en Bariloche.” losandes.com.ar
• La Brújula 24. “El ‘Caso Bariloche’: la historia argentina que aparece entre los documentos sobre ovnis” (May 8, 2026). labrujula24.com
• Janosch, Heriberto, and Virgilio Di Pelino. Analysis of the Bariloche case, El Ojo Escéptico No. 14, December 1995; republished with a preface (Madrid, July 2015) on Visión OVNI as “El ‘OVNI’ de Bariloche, 20 años después.” visionovni.com.ar
• Agostinelli, Alejandro. Factor el Blog. “El ‘ovni’ de Bariloche, 20 años después” (Jul. 31, 2015). [Link removed 2026-08-25: factorelblog.com currently flagged by antivirus software for an untrusted/revoked SSL certificate — citation kept, link withheld pending verification the domain is safe.]
• ANBariloche. “El Gobierno desclasificó documentos sobre el avistamiento de ovnis en Bariloche: qué revelan los archivos” (Sep. 18, 2020) (expediente numbers, CEFORA request, 2018 report and Rivero). anbariloche.com.ar
• ANBariloche. “Pilotos aéreos avistaron objetos no identificados en el cielo rionegrino” (Sep. 13, 2022). anbariloche.com.ar
• Argentina.gob.ar / Fuerza Aérea Argentina. “Centro de Identificación Aeroespacial.” argentina.gob.ar
• U.S. Department of War (Defense). UFO news release index. war.gov
• Perfil. “OVNIS en Argentina: así trabaja el organismo especializado en analizar los casos nacionales.” perfil.com
• Patrick Gross (ufologie.patrickgross.org). “UFOs at Close Sight: Airmiss in Bariloche, Argentina 1995.” ufologie.patrickgross.org
• Patrick Gross (ufologie.patrickgross.org). “UFOs at Close Sight: The Newspapers, the Bariloche Incident, Argentina, 1995” (reproducing Clarín, Aug. 2, 1995). ufologie.patrickgross.org
• C5N. “A 29 años del OVNI de Bariloche, el avistamiento más famoso de la historia argentina.” c5n.com
• El Extremo Sur. “Caso Bariloche: el primer avistamiento de ovnis desclasificado en Argentina.” elextremosur.com
• Wikipedia. “COMETA report,” for background on the 1999 French study group and its authorship, used only for orientation and cross-checked against primary Argentine press coverage of its specific Bariloche citation. en.wikipedia.org
• Wikimedia Commons. “File:Aeropuerto Internacional Teniente Luis Candelaria (Bariloche).JPG” (CC BY-SA 3.0, SoleFabrizio, 2014), source of this case file's hero image. commons.wikimedia.org
• This site's own case file, “Ceará Boeing 727 Sighting” (February 1982), a comparable South American commercial-aviation UAP case. OverClassified
• This site's own case file, “BOAC Stratocruiser ‘Centaurus’ Sighting” (June 1954), for comparison with a single-aircraft airliner sighting that did include a radar search. OverClassified

Corrections (October 2026)

A fact-check against Clarín's report of August 2, 1995 (reproduced by Patrick Gross), Infobae's 2020 reporting on the declassified radio exchange, ANBariloche and Río Negro on the 2020 declassification, C5N, La Nación and the Buenos Aires Times on the 2026 Pentagon release, and Janosch and Di Pelino's skeptical analysis found that the earlier version of this page contained material no source supports. The quotation attributed to Gendarmería commander Rubén Cipuzak that the object “se detenía de forma abrupta en el aire, sin señales de inercia ni pérdida de control” could not be found, and the page's central argument — that two aircrews independently reported an inertia-free stop — has been removed with it; the quoted amber-light description belongs to his fellow commandant, Juan Domingo Gaitán. The named ground witnesses Nicolás Aray and Abel and Pedro Drelevich, and the claim that ground witnesses saw the light from the opposite side of the city, could not be found. The “declassified Air Force meteorological log” (overcast, 0°C, westerly winds of 30 km/h), the 20:17 and 20:31 timestamps attached to the transcript and to a “substation circuit protector,” the Air Force “scale-model reconstruction,” the claim that the case catalyzed the creation of CEFAE in 2011, and the details of the 2026 U.S. release (a “war.gov/UFO” portal with “162” files assembled by AARO with the ODNI, NASA and the FBI) are not supported by the sources found and have been removed or replaced. The quotation “uno de los casos más importantes del mundo” could not be found.

Following this review, the rating was changed from Disputed 64 to Disputed 52 (October 27, 2026), because the higher rating had rested partly on claims corrected or removed above.

Other corrections: the ski-slope reflector analysis by Janosch and Di Pelino was first published in December 1995 in El Ojo Escéptico, not on the 20th anniversary in 2015 (it was republished then); the 2018 finding came from the government's final report and names Juan Carlos Rivero testing a projector aimed at the cloud base, while the discotheque attribution (Rocket) is the CIAE's; the early astronomical hypothesis Janosch discarded was the crescent Moon near Mars, not “Venus or Mars”; the 2,000 km/h estimate was the flight engineer's (Clarín); and the Gendarmería aircraft was about 600 m above the airliner per Clarín (300 m per Polanco).