The Bariloche Incident

On the evening of 31 July 1995, a commercial airliner on approach to the airport at San Carlos de Bariloche, in Argentine Patagonia, ran into trouble as the city suffered an electrical blackout that darkened the runway lights. The pilot, Jorge Polanco, reported an object with orange, green, blue and amber lights that paced his aircraft and appeared to anticipate his manoeuvres, and he aborted the landing. A military commandant and residents across the town were among those who reported seeing lights over the area during the outage, and power returned only after the object was said to have vanished.

What is on the record

The archive resolves six claimants to this event. They are the pilot Jorge Polanco, a military commandant identified as Ruben Zapusak, two residents named Cabral, and the crews of two aircraft recorded as groups rather than by name. Polanco had been counted twice under two forms of his name until this review, and that duplicate has been removed. Its documentary corroboration is a single reporting-class source that discusses the incident inside a wider survey of UFO reports and defence posture, rather than a dedicated file on the night itself. The coincidence of the object report with the blackout is a recurring detail across the tellings; whether the two were connected, or the blackout had an ordinary cause, was not established.

Why it sits where it does

Bariloche grades L3 in this archive, carried by several independent claimants reporting one connected event. It is testimony grade, with the pilot's account reinforced by ground observers, and it carries no government documentation of its own. What the record holds is that a landing was aborted during a blackout while a pilot and others reported lights over the airport. What paced the aircraft is not resolved here.