A mystery for forty-eight years: what is known about the 1978 Trevelin UFO case?
In late September 1978, an Argentine farmer claimed to have seen a glowing disc on the road to the Futaleufú Dam, near Trevelin, and a few days later Diario Esquel ran the story on its front page. The case has now, in October 2026, been revived from the paper's archive. There is still no proven explanation for it, but the night sky that evening may offer a possible clue.
Trevelin is a small town in southern Argentina, in Patagonia, at the foot of the Andes. It was founded by Welsh settlers at the end of the 19th century; its name means “mill town” in Welsh, and many families of Welsh origin still live in the area today. From here the road leads west into the mountains, to the dam of the hydroelectric plant built on the Futaleufú River.
The central figure of the story is Eilir Hughes, who on Saturday evening, September 30, 1978, at around 11 p.m., was heading toward his own farm on the road to the Futaleufú Dam. According to his account, a luminous object passed over the cab of his pickup truck, after which he stopped at the usual turnoff. From there he watched the object settle about fifty meters away from him, hovering roughly one meter above the ground. Hughes estimated the disc at 20–25 meters in diameter and said it glowed in colors that changed like a rainbow.
Hughes claimed he was not alone: a farmhand working for him named Roberto Ferreyra also saw the phenomenon and, according to the account, became extremely agitated and frightened. After the incident, Hughes drove to Trevelin to file a report with the police. According to his account, the disc then rose and followed their vehicle for two kilometers.
According to the story, the visit to the police brought additional witnesses. Based on Hughes's account, on returning to the site Corporal Austin and other police personnel also saw the receding, color-changing object. The Wednesday, October 4, 1978, issue of Diario Esquel mentioned Corporal Austin, Ferreyra and the driver by name, so the case appeared in the paper of the time along with the testimony of several witnesses.
Hughes also reported a second sighting: he claimed that on Sunday evening, October 1, while heading home with his wife, he saw the object again, and this time it did not stop but turned and moved away. The farmer also told the paper that he wanted to return to the site to photograph the phenomenon. The article provides no further information on whether this happened and, if so, with what result.
Not an isolated case: the 1978 Argentine wave of reports
The Trevelin account did not emerge in a vacuum. Between August and October 1978, an unusually high number of UFO reports came in across Argentina. In the October 1978 issue of the journal UFO Press, Argentine researcher Guillermo Roncoroni wrote of unusual activity extending across the entire country: the reports clustered first in the western provinces, then in the southern part of Buenos Aires Province, and later in Tucumán and Santa Fe.
The catalog of close encounters compiled by French researcher Patrick Gross also includes several Argentine cases from this period. A week before the Trevelin case, on September 23, also in Patagonia, near Viedma in Río Negro Province, two Chilean rally drivers claimed that a yellow light enveloped their car and that they lost their sense of time. In October, reports also came in from the provinces of Jujuy, Tucumán and Mendoza. The Trevelin case itself does not appear in Gross's catalog, and we found no trace of it in other international case collections either: it seems that so far only the local press has preserved it.
Waves of reports like this are well known in UFO research. When the press writes a lot about the subject, more people watch the sky, and more people report things they might not otherwise even notice. This does not mean that every report is mistaken, but it does mean that the mood of the time must also be taken into account when assessing an individual case. The Diario Esquel article itself reflects this: the author referred to the films Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
What do we know, and what don't we?
We know for certain that the story appeared in Diario Esquel on October 4, 1978, that Mariano Romero Cuestas revisited the article in the paper's October 6, 2026, issue based on the newspaper archive of the Esquel Municipal Public Library, and that Inexplicata published it in English translation on October 8. We also know that the original article did not stop at the account: the author added a lengthy reflection on the UFO phenomenon, in which he referred to the films already mentioned and, citing the number of stars and planets in the Milky Way, argued that the question is best treated with neither dismissal nor uncritical belief.
What we don't know: no source other than the press of the time corroborates the event, there is no photograph, and it is not clear whether the police or any authority launched an investigation. Nor is it known whether Hughes ultimately returned to the site with the planned photograph, or what became of the phenomenon that Ferreyra and Corporal Austin allegedly also saw.
More than four decades later, the Trevelin case is today more a curious chapter in local press history than a case that can be investigated: the names and dates are there, the evidence is not.
The sober take
The source mentions no official investigation or mundane explanation; the author of the original article added not a rebuttal but a general reflection to the account. The claim is supported by the testimony of four eyewitnesses mentioned by name, without independent corroboration or a photograph.