Argentina's 'Firewheel' UFOs and the Resistencia Fireball: Two Cables

What this record is

Two telegrams from the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, four years apart, show the embassy dealing with Argentine UFO stories that had a space-programme angle. The first, BUENOS AIRES 5003 of 19 June 1980, is unclassified and was sent with immediate precedence to the U.S. International Communication Agency (the government’s overseas information service) and to NASA, with the State Department copied. The second, BUENOS AIRES 9606 of 4 December 1984, was classified confidential and went to the Secretary of State with a copy to the embassy in Moscow. Both were released in full after review in December 2025 and appear in the National Archives catalog by February 2026.

What it says

The June 1980 cable reported that Argentine media were carrying stories that a NASA engineer of Argentine origin had sent his mother a tape saying a NASA experiment would create flying-saucer shapes in the Argentine sky. There had recently been many UFO reports in Argentina. The embassy asked NASA to respond to the story through the Washington media so that news agencies would carry the answer to the Southern Cone, “where the story cited below will generate much interest.”

The cable quotes the story as the Buenos Aires Herald printed it that day from the agency Noticias Argentinas. Datelined Córdoba, it said the UFOs seen over the country “last Saturday” (14 June) might have come from a NASA experiment called “Firewheel.” Local television channel 12 had revealed that Mario Héctor Acuña, an Argentine engineer working for NASA, had told his mother on tape that a satellite would be launched on 23 May and that she should look up at the sky between 8 and 15 June around midnight. She would probably see only a flying saucer, he said, but it would have been created by them. The project involved injecting an artificial cloud that would make something like a comet.

The November 1984 cable reports press accounts of a “ball of fire” seen over Resistencia, in Chaco province, at about 20:40 on 28 November, travelling west to east. Observers also reported a strong jolt, apparently the object’s impact. On 30 November Brigadier Jorge P. García, president of Argentina’s space commission (CNIE), told the embassy’s science counsellor that the government had found no remains. He thought it was probably another Soviet satellite re-entering over Argentina, and the cable refers back to two earlier 1984 telegrams on the same subject, which are not in this collection.

Context

The Firewheel story was built on something real, but the facts undo it. Firewheel was a West German magnetospheric research satellite planned by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics at Garching, a German project rather than a NASA one. It was designed to release clouds of barium and lithium ions high in the night-side magnetosphere over North and South America, so that scientists could trace them from the ground. A released cloud of that kind can look like a glowing comet or disc, which is presumably what the tape described. But Firewheel never reached orbit. It was launched on 23 May 1980, as the tape said, on the second Ariane test flight from Kourou, French Guiana, and the rocket failed shortly after lift-off because of a first-stage engine fault. Firewheel was lost with it. Whatever Argentines saw on 14 June 1980, it was not a Firewheel release. The embassy cable does not say whether NASA ever answered, and neither the cause of the June sightings nor the engineer’s role is settled by the record.

The 1984 cable is simpler. A fireball crossing the sky followed by a felt jolt is a common report during meteor and re-entry events, and the head of the national space commission gave a satellite re-entry as the probable cause. The embassy offered no view of its own. The same pattern turns up in the State Department’s 1987 Barbados cables, where U.S. Space Command matched a mass sighting to the decay of a Soviet rocket body.

Status

Neither cable describes an anomaly the embassy took seriously. The first is about managing a press story, and the specific explanation it reported, the Firewheel experiment, can be ruled out because the satellite was lost at launch. The second records an official Argentine attribution to a Soviet re-entry, which is plausible but was not confirmed by any recovered debris. The June 1980 sightings themselves remain unexplained in this record.

Sources

• National Archives catalog, BUENOS AIRES 5003, “Argentina Media Carrying Stories” (19 June 1980): https://catalog.archives.gov/id/608863152
• File: https://catalog.archives.gov/medialz/electronic-records/rg-615/608806625/059UAP00002_80_BUENOS_AIRES_5003.eml.pdf
• National Archives catalog, BUENOS AIRES 9606, “Unidentified Flying Objects Seen Over Resistencia” (4 December 1984): https://catalog.archives.gov/id/608863154
• File: https://catalog.archives.gov/medialz/electronic-records/rg-615/608806625/059UAP00003_84_BUENOS_AIRES_9606.eml.pdf
• Series: Records from the Department of State Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/608806625
• NASA NSSDCA spacecraft record, Firewheel: https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=FIRE-A
• Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Firewheel (Feuerrad): https://www.mpe.mpg.de/35025/Feuerrad
• Ariane L02 launch record: https://nextspaceflight.com/launches/details/740