Aerial Mystery Off Argentine Coast
[Original headline: Disquieting trip in the South Atlantic ]
An air of confusion and suspicion surrounds an hour-long incident in the night skies over Argentine airspace, in the South Atlantic.
According to a report in the Argentinian newspaper Clarín, a Lear Jet carrying Daniel Gallo, a lieutenant governor, had been returning from a meeting with fellow governors when it encountered unidentified bright flashing lights in the sky over Patagonia.
Piloted by commander Mariano Zalotti and copilot Mario Beban, the aircraft had left Jorge Newbery Airfield at 20.50 hours on Monday, November 12, and set course for the airport at Río Grande, with an estimated landing time there of around midnight.
The newspaper says the aircraft had been travelling at a height of about 10,000 meters when its crew and lone passenger were alerted to the presence of nearby blinking lights in the darkness.
Lieutent Governor Gallo had been travelling half-asleep when he was informed by the commander of the presence of "estrobocópicas" [strobe] lights appearing on the left side of his aircraft. "Nevertheless, I never thought that it could be a foreign military airplane invading our airspace," he added.
According to the report, all three occupants of the aircraft discounted the lights as being either a UFO or an atmospheric phenomenon and theorized that they could have belonged instead to a British Phantom, or a Tornado aircraft, whose base is at Mount Pleasant, in the Falkland Islands.
"When flying over the city of Commodore Rivadavia, 75 miles out to sea [Strait of Magellan G-fs], we observed for the first time the left blinkers [flashing lights] that followed a short distance, flying the same map course to a height superior and of greater speed", commander Zalotti said later. "Then we flew at a cruising speed of 900 kilometers per hour".
A British Embassy spokesman in Buenos Aires denied emphatically that it could have been an aircraft from that country and described the claim by the two pilots as "speculation without sense".
Clarín reported the spokesman having referred to the location of Royal Air Force fighter aircraft on the "night of the 11 of November", which of course is not the night of the incident itself.
The Argentine Air Force confirmed that it had not detected "any irregularity in the Argentine airspace in the South Atlantic", during the flight of the jet.
Commodore Jorge Reta said the Lear Jet pilot had been irresponsible in suggesting that the lights were an aircraft that belonged to the Air Force of a foreign country.
"If a pilot observes an abnormal situation he has the obligation to communicate by radio with the control tower and to inform it. The commander has not done this, and in its place she has made journalistic declarations", added Reta.
There was also confirmation that no other Argentinian aircraft had been flying in the area during this time, although there seems some doubt that air-search radars exist from the area of White Bay towards the south. However, three mobile radar units are apparently located in this region.
According to Clarín, an Argentine crew member of one of the boats that regularly fish near an exclusion zone imposed by the British around the Falklands, says RAF aircraft are regularly seen in these latitudes "and they fly almost always in pairs".
• Story compiled by FarShores from a report in:
Clarín, Buenos Aires / Argentina | Wilmar Caballero - Nov 14.01
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