The 1992 Mexican Wave

One telling has a saucer stalking a squadron of military helicopters during a national holiday, videotaped by dozens and seen by millions. Mexico City in the early 1990s had cameras in it and people willing to point them upward. Across 1992 and 1993 a number of camcorder operators recorded objects over the city in daylight and after dark. The claims made for the footage are of anomalous flight, of objects fading out rather than departing, and of what the account calls armada formations. Crowds gathered where filming happened and the press covered it. Another telling describes objects over the city from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. while traffic backed up on Avenida Reforma and police watched with the crowds.

What is on the record

Four tellings across three videos, all from one channel, give ten claimants. Four are named people, all from one account: Demetrio Feria, Mr Del Calejo, Arturo Dias Solano and Mr Ikar. The rest are collective descriptions such as police, families and "hundreds of thousands of residents". That is a thin base for something described as a wave.

The dating is loose as well. One telling places the wave in 1992 and 1993. Another says residents have filmed objects nearly daily since 1991. The file therefore covers a period. It is a run of sightings grouped together, with no single date to hang them on. None of the footage is held or authenticated by the archive and no documents accompany the case. The descriptions of dematerialisation and formation flight are interpretations of video. That is where this class of material is weakest, particularly with consumer camcorders of the era pointed at bright objects against open sky.

The filming itself is on record. Separate operators in one city came away with recordings they believed showed something unusual, and that is a matter of record even where the content of the tapes is not.

Why it sits where it does

The case grades L3 on claimant count. Those claimants reach the archive through one channel, many of them as crowds and not as individuals, and they describe years of sightings instead of a single night. There is no documentation and no authenticated footage. What was filmed over Mexico City is not resolved here.