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Yesenia Cruz García took a break from cooking and stepped out onto her patio for a breath of fresh air. The date was Sunday, May 22, 2022. The place was Zapopan, Jalisco, a suburb of Guadalajara, and part of Mexico’s 3rd largest metropolitan area. Yesenia looked up into the sky and saw a very strange object that was not a regular aircraft. It wasn’t saucer-shaped, it wasn’t round, and it wasn’t triangular. It had an irregular, almost jagged shape, and when it hovered in the sky, slightly shifting its position, it maintained its strange form. The young woman ran into the house to get her phone and told her relatives who also came out to the patio to witness this strange aerial event. The curious onlookers saw a bright red light form in the upper right-hand side of the object. That light faded and then appeared at the bottom of it. Yesenia and one of her cousins filmed the whole thing with their phones, and their astonished nana, still in her apron from the kitchen, provided commentary that would later make it to social media. The diminutive Mexican grandma would proclaim that the object was the work of the Devil and that is why it was pulsing a strange red light. It was a warning to Mexicans, she claimed, to turn their country around and do penance for their many sins. As if on cue, the object began moving and flew in the direction of the basilica devoted to Our Lady of Zapopan, one of the major religious pilgrimage sites in Mexico. This was proof, according to the elderly lady, that we are living in the end times and Mexico should turn to God. Yesenia immediately posted the footage she was filming to social media, along with her cousin and many others that day, throughout Zapopan and Guadalajara proper. Many of the images and videos of this strange flying object have mysteriously vanished off the internet, including Yesenia’s, which not only made social media posters angry, but fueled stories of American plots to suppress the sharing of UFO information, with NASA and the CIA as the prime culprits. Yesenia’s nana stands behind her original claims that the mysterious object in the sky was a warning from evil forces that are not of this world.
The Guadalajara metropolitan area is estimated to be home to some 5 and a half million people. With over 10,600 people per square kilometer, it has the second-highest population density in Mexico. With such a large and concentrated population, Guadalajara has many eyes directed to the sky at any given time. Because of this, UFO sightings are plentiful here, especially since the early 2010s when most everyone had a cell phone and could take photos and videos and share them instantaneously on social media platforms. However, even before the rise of the accessibility of this sort of technology for Mexicans, the Guadalajara metro area was considered a hot spot for UFO activity. The city, appropriately, has also hosted several UFO conferences over the years drawing the curious from around the world.
Witnesses have been reporting UFOs – or OVNIs in Spanish – in the skies over Guadalajara since the early 1950s. The typical “flying saucer” metallic craft so familiar in science fiction at the time and seen in other parts of the world had been spotted over Guadalajara, too. However, going back to the 1950s and 1960s there is very little detailed information in the UFO literature involving this region for several reasons. One reason is that back then very few people had access to cameras that were ready to shoot pictures when UFOs appeared. Also, there was a great stigma at the time surrounding anything to do with possible extraterrestrial craft or strange objects in the sky. People felt embarrassed to come forward with their stories. UFO accounts from the 50s and 60s are usually mere points of reference on a list or map with very few particulars of the cases fleshed out. The 1970s saw more occurrences of unidentified aerial phenomena, but people were still reluctant to talk. For an overview of Mexican UFO sightings during this decade, please see Mexico Unexplained episode number 184 titled, “Forgotten UFO Stories of the 1970s” https://mexicounexplained.com/forgotten-ufo-stories-of-the-1970s/
As mentioned previously, well-documented UFO sightings with multiple witnesses and photographic proof only became prevalent in the 21st Century for most of Mexico due to the wider use of certain technologies, such as cell phones and digital cameras. In the year 2004 the skies over Guadalajara hosted what UFO researchers claim to have been the largest fleet of UFOs ever recorded. This “Flotilla” of unidentified flying objects even made it to Wikileaks. At 12:50 in the afternoon on June 10, 2004, hundreds of sphere-shaped objects appeared over the city and moved in unison. In the center of these hundreds of strange aerial craft was a larger saucer-shaped object that investigators believe was controlling this massive squadron of metallic orbs. Astonished and frightened onlookers filmed this extraterrestrial spectacle or took photos on their phones or with digital cameras. Guadalajara UFO researcher Miguel Dominguez had a video recorder handy and filmed several minutes of the event. Skies were clear that day and the metallic objects reflected the sunlight of the warm late spring day. The objects passed in front of the few clouds present, in a uniform, synchronized way. Dominguez was not the only person to record this unusual event. Video eventually made it into the hands of Daniel Monraz, one of Mexico’s most respected journalists and researchers. Monraz gave the video clips to Guadalajara’s Institute of Meteorology and Astronomy for analysis. The institute ruled out weather balloons, satellites, or drones. The Monraz footage eventually reached the desk of Jaime Maussan, the grandfather of Mexico’s UFO and paranormal research communities. Maussan featured the footage of the Guadalajara UFO flotilla on his nationwide television show. Millions of Mexicans were glued to their television sets and this program became one of Maussan’s most top-watched shows in his multi-decade history of TV and radio. One of the witnesses to the event shown on Maussan’s show was Miguel Águila Chávez. This amateur “cazaovni” or, “UFO hunter” in English, would feature prominently in another mass UFO sighting that would occur over Guadalajara twelve years later.
Miguel Águila Chávez appeared on Mexico’s number one internet-based show for the paranormal called “Insólita Experiencia,” or, “Unusual Experience,” in English, to talk about a strange sighting that occurred in September of 2016. In one of his famous livestream broadcasts with thousands of viewers, host Yohanan Díaz Vargas asked Águila to tell his story and followed up with a series of thorough questions. Yohanan introduced this cazaovni as someone with decades of experience as a UFO witness and researcher. In all his years doing this, it was the first time Águila saw what he called “OVNIs Flasheantes” which could be translated to be “blinking” or “flashing” UFOs. These objects in the sky were not circular or saucer-shaped and they were not jagged like what Yesenia Cruz saw over the Guadalajara suburb of Zapopan. These objects were flat, like white pieces of copy paper that seemed to hover in the sky and blink on and off as if reflecting sunlight for brief periods of time. The date this happened was September 15, 2016, and it was in the mid-afternoon, around 2:15 to 2:30. These rectangular shapes were hovering below airplanes and in front of the few clouds present. They numbered about two dozen. They seemed to the witness to be like pieces of foil suspended in the air and moving in an intelligent way. A few times during the interview Águila stated that these objects were like pieces of paper in the air that never came down to earth. When the witness finished his story, host Yohanan Díaz Vargas asked him a series of questions. Yohanan reasoned that September 15th was part of the 2-day-plus holiday during which Mexicans celebrated their independence. Could those objects have been balloons or other lightweight party decorations that were somehow sucked up into the upper atmosphere? Águila stated that he and other researchers did not believe that to be the case. Were they drones? No, the witness said, because these objects were flat and flimsy and their entire forms flashed. He was unaware of any drones that could make those flashes. Yohanan then asked an interesting question: How did your dogs and dogs in the neighborhood react to all this? Águila responded that his dogs and the neighborhood dogs were barking at the sky. Surprisingly, though, most of his neighbors did not come out to see what was happening above and consequently, this UFO incident had very few witnesses or video recordings. Águila said that the objects seemed to fade away, as if slipping into another dimension. There has not been a similar sighting before or since, anywhere in Mexico, or in the entire world for that matter. To this day, the incident remains unexplained.
A seeming overabundance of orb sightings have taken place in the skies above Guadalajara in recent years. Of all the shapes and types, the glowing orb UFO is the most common unidentified aerial phenomenon posted to social media from Guadalajara eyewitnesses. The later months of 2017 into 2018 saw a rash of orb sightings in Guadalajara and surrounding areas to such an extent that Yohanan Díaz Vargas devoted a whole show to this phenomenon in February of 2018. Researchers believe that the ramp-up of orb sightings began in late 2014, but this may be just that more videos were being posted to social media and there was no increase in the actual sightings. A mass sighting occurred on December 6, 2014, and was recorded by dozens of onlookers. In this case, three metallic orbs, one bigger and brighter than the other two, hovered over the Metropolitan Cathedral of Guadalajara for almost 15 minutes before vanishing. A caller to a local radio station explained that these supposed extraterrestrial objects were merely silver balloons that local children had attached letters to that were intended for Santa Claus. Skeptics were quick to debunk the December sightings, but no one has yet explained the various other orb sightings throughout recent years that resemble pulsing lights and come in various colors and intensities. It turns out, especially in recent years, there are more unknowns than knowns in the skies above the beautiful Mexican city of Guadalajara.
REFERENCES
“Insólita Experiencia” hosted by Yohanan Díaz Vargas (in Spanish): https://www.youtube.com/c/YohananD%C3%ADazVargasYohananDiazOficial
YouTube – Various uploaded video clips from Guadalajara residents
“Update – Amazing UFO Fleets Over Mexico” https://rense.com/general66/uupd.htm