The Iztapalapa Masons

The figures had webbed feet like a duck's and four pointed fingers on each hand. Their eyes were greenish bumps. Raimundo Alvarez and Pancho Torres were working on the drain of a house under construction in Iztapalapa at about two in the afternoon on 18 August 1972. A humming sound came first. Then two figures seven or eight feet tall, clad in something silvery like fish scales, floated towards them. In the published record the beings then flew at a woman carrying a milk can and vanished into a cloud of dust.

What is on the record

Alvarez and Torres are the two claimants. Both come from a single video, which describes a mason and his assistant and names the APRO Bulletin as its source. The archive's sources place the encounter in the summer of 1972 without a day or a district. The published record gives 18 August 1972 at Iztapalapa in Mexico City, and this page follows it.

The case reached print through two specialist journals within about fifteen months. The APRO Bulletin carried it in its November and December 1973 issue, and Flying Saucer Review ran it in November 1973. It sits in the Webb and Bloecher humanoid catalogue as case 1972-19. Later chronologies repeat it from those sources. That is a solid paper trail for a sighting report, though every entry descends from the same original account of the two men.

No official investigation is recorded, and nobody has put forward an explanation. The woman with the milk can appears in the published record without a name, and nothing she said reaches the archive. The archive holds no photographs and no physical traces.

Why it sits where it does

Two men working side by side saw the same thing at the same moment, which places the case at L3, the tier for independent claimants to one connected event. Their account was published early and catalogued, but it remains their account alone. What came across the building site in Iztapalapa is not resolved here.