'Celestial Body Observed Over Antarctica': Embassy Buenos Aires, 1965

What this record is

This is a one-page Department of State airgram, A-208, classified Confidential, sent from the American Embassy in Buenos Aires to the Department of State on 4 September 1965. Its subject line reads “Celestial Body Observed over Antarctica.” It answers a Department request, CA-1287 of 16 August 1965, and is signed for the Ambassador by Albert Mayio, Counselor of Embassy for Commercial and Economic Affairs. The routing box shows it was routed to the Department’s science office. It survives in the National Security Agency’s files, which is how it came to the National Archives. The page is a poor photocopy, but the typed text is mostly legible.

What it says

The airgram has three short paragraphs. The first directs the Department to an earlier military report on the same subject. That was a Department of Defense Intelligence Information Report from Buenos Aires dated 16 July 1965, which provided a translation of four messages about unidentified flying objects that the Argentine Navy’s Hydrographic Service had received.

The second paragraph reports on efforts to find out more. The Office of the Naval Attaché had asked the Argentine naval authorities for the information the Department wanted. The Embassy judged it “unlikely, however, that additional information will be available until there is the summer exchange of personnel at the Argentine Antarctic stations.” At that time the stations’ records and detailed data would be transferred to headquarters in Buenos Aires, and the Embassy promised to follow up then.

The third paragraph is offered “as an additional item of interest.” After a Reuters dispatch of 7 July caused public interest, La Plata Observatory issued a statement to the press. The Observatory said it had no theory on the unidentified flying objects sighted in Antarctica, “although it would point out that the sightings occurred at the time that Echo II was orbiting over the Antarctic zone.”

Context

The airgram does not describe the sightings themselves, which were in the four messages attached to the July intelligence report and are not in this file. The Reuters dispatch it mentions fits the widely reported events of early July 1965. At that time personnel at Antarctic bases, including those on Deception Island, reported a bright moving object, and Argentine naval sources released their accounts to the press. The Embassy’s letter shows how such stories reached Washington. A military attaché passed on what the host navy chose to share, and the Department’s science office asked for more.

The observatory’s comment deserves weight. Echo II was a large, highly reflective NASA balloon satellite launched in January 1964 into a near-polar orbit. It was among the brightest objects in the night sky, and a slowly moving bright light seen from Antarctica in midwinter is exactly what it could produce. The airgram does not say whether anyone compared the reported times and directions with Echo II’s passes, and this file contains no evidence of a follow-up report after the summer relief.

Status

Unresolved in the file. A satellite explanation was proposed publicly at the time by La Plata Observatory, and nothing in the airgram argues against it. The document was classified Confidential when written and had been released by NSA before its 2025 transfer to the National Archives.

Sources

• National Archives catalog entry: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/596347911
• PDF of the record: https://catalog.archives.gov/medialz/electronic-records/rg-615/580103959/457UAP00013_released.pdf
• Series: Records from the National Security Agency Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/580103959
• National Archives, Record Group 615 UAP records: https://www.archives.gov/research/topics/uaps/rg-615