Argentina's President Urged to Release UFO Data

Taking advantage of Argentinean President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s May 13, 2010 visit to Victoria, a city in the province of Entre Ríos, prominent Argentinean ufologist Silvia Pérez Simondini handed the president’s chief of security and protocol an envelope with a ten-page report about UFOs from CEFORA (Spanish acronym for Commission for the Study of the UFO Phenomenon in the Argentinean Republic).
Pérez, who is the director of the Victoria-based Visión OVNI (UFO Vision) group and museum, had the opportunity of talking briefly with President Fernández during the ceremonies commemorating the bicentennial of Argentina’s independence.
Forty-eight hours later, Pérez received a call from the Casa Rosada (the presidential offices) acknowledging receipt of the CEFORA document and promising a quick response.
CEFORA is an umbrella organization of various Argentinean UFO groups and researchers, specifically created to lobby for the declassification of official UFO files in Argentina. CEFORA is also working on a campaign to collect one hundred thousand signatures petitioning UFO declassification to be presented to the Argentinean congress.
Andrea Pérez Simondini, Silvia’s daughter who is also a prominent ufologist and chemist who has documented dozens of cattle mutilation cases in Argentina, cautioned that the successful delivery of the CEFORA documents to President Fernández “may have extraordinary results or may end up in nothing.” CEFORA is clearly following the Brazilian model created a few years ago in a “Freedom of Information” public campaign that yielded significant results when the Brazilian Air Force instituted an official policy to declassify its voluminous UFO files, which is still ongoing.
President Fernández’s political biography has been compared to that of Hillary Clinton. Her husband, Néstor Kirchner, was the former president of Argentina, and she was a powerful senator from Buenos Aires province when she won the presidential election in a landslide in October 2007. Whether President Fernández will implement pro-UFO policies remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that Argentina’s military has in its possession UFO-related documents and probably some physical evidence. The Argentinean Navy created as far back as 1962 a “Permanent Commission for Studies of the UFO Phenomenon,” which lasted for several years. As a result of a series of spectacular sightings over Argentinean, Chilean and British meteorological bases in Deception Island, Antarctica, in 1965, the commission’s director, Captain Engineer Omar Pagani, stated, “Unidentified flying objects do exist. Their Presence and intelligent displacement in the Argentine airspace has been proven.

Their nature and origin is unknown and no judgment is made about them.”
In the late 1960s it was the Argentinean Air Force (AAF), through a small office out of their CNIE (Spanish acronym for National Commission for Space Research) that undertook the official study of UFOs. The AAF Commanderin- Chief, Brigadier Adolfo Alvarez, revealed in a radio interview (subsequently published in the newspaper La Razón) that “the Air Force has a specialized agency that has conducted investigations about this field for some time.” This agency was led for many years by AAF Captain Augusto Lima, who generally kept a tight-lip operation, although a few investigations were reported in the press. It appears that the CNIE has more than just documents in its possession since The Argentinean press reported at least two cases—one in General Ocampo, Argentina, on December 21, 1978, and the other in the Andean province of Rio Negro on October 3, 1980—in which metallic debris following a UFO sighting was retrieved by Captain Lima. Argentina’s neighboring countries of Chile and Uruguay already have official UFO agencies.And, Brazil continues to release some of its own UFO files, so Buenos Aires seems to be behind the curve. Perhaps President Fernández will do something about it.