UMMO — the San José de Valderas photographs
In June 1967 photographs of a round craft marked underneath with the sign )+( reached the Madrid newspaper Informaciones and Spanish UFO researchers, left anonymously at a photo shop in Carabanchel and sent by a man signing himself “Antonio Pardo”. They were said to have been taken on June 1 at San José de Valderas, outside Madrid. The sign was that of UMMO, a planet whose inhabitants had been writing long typed letters to Spanish enthusiasts since the mid-1960s, and the pictures made UMMO famous. No reliable witness of the flight was ever found; the negatives that were later analysed had gaps in their sequence, and a police laboratory study in the 1990s, while finding no thread, noted lighting that suggested artificial light and could not rule out fraud. In the 1990s José Luis Jordán Peña, a Madrid engineer with an interest in parapsychology, admitted that he had created UMMO, that he had written the letters with the help of a few friends, and that the photographs showed a model hung from a thread. Believers still defend the case.
Explanation
A hoax. José Luis Jordán Peña, the main witness of the 1966 Aluche “landing”, admitted in the 1990s that he had invented UMMO as an experiment in credulity and that the photographs showed a small model hung from nylon thread; a stylistic study of the letters signed “Antonio Pardo” pointed to him, and in 1996 Manuel Carballal reproduced the pictures with a model on a fishing line.
What was seen
Shape: A circular craft with the UMMO sign, )+(, on its underside
Witnesses: Anonymous photographers (“Antonio Pardo”); no credible eyewitnesses were found
Duration: A few minutes, according to the photographers
Sources
- Wikipedia (Spanish) — Ummo
- Patrick Gross — The UMMO affair: the San José de Valderas photographs and their analysis