The Chascomús teleportation hoax
Dr ROBERTO e banchs re-assesses one of the most influential cases of UFO-related ‘teleportation’ of a car and passengers. Translated and with background material added by RICHARD W HEIDEN.
The original incident is said to have happened in May 1968, in Chascomús, a regional hub approximately 100km (62 miles) south of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Briefly, Dr Gerardo Vidal and his wife were driving home one night from Chascomús to Maipú when, just outside Chascomús, their car was enveloped in a thick fog. The next thing they knew they were driving on a road near Mexico City in broad daylight – 7,250km (4,505 miles) to the northwest and on the other side of the South American continent. Their watches had stopped, and they found two days had passed. They went to the Argentine embassy in Mexico City, from where Dr Vidal called a relative in Maipú to report that they were well.
The ‘Vidal teleportation’ – as it came to be known – was first reported in the Argentine press on 3 June 1968, in an article in the Buenos Aires evening daily La Razón, and it quickly spread abroad via the wire services and foreign correspondents. Since then, it has been included in numerous UFO magazines and books. Some of the early accounts included details that seemed to support the case and the existence of the witnesses; for example, when Oscar A Galíndez reported it in a 1968 issue of the UK Flying Saucer Review, he referred to “personal communications”, presumably from relatives of the Vidal family. 1
The Tucson, Arizona, based APRO Bulletin stated that APRO knew the Vidals’ real names and that a field investigator was trying to learn more. 2 Peter Rogerson wrote, years later, that: “In 1969 or 1970, I was at a UFO group meeting at which a British businessman who had worked in Argentina and who claimed to know Dr Vidal’s employer said that the case had been made up to explain Mrs Vidal’s absence from home for psychiatric reasons.” 3 In 1970, Flying Saucer Review – citing a letter written to a European ufologist “by a member of the family” – reported that early the previous year, Señora Vidal had died of leukemia. 4
It took a few more years before Argentine ufologists began to acknowledge that the case was a hoax. The September 1972 issue of the Spanish UFO magazine Stendek quoted Omar Pagani as saying that “it was a mystification, a hoax.”
5 In 1973, Oscar Galíndez – again in Flying Saucer Review – admitted that it was impossible to find the alleged protagonists. 6 However, these dismissals did not appear in any English-language books until 1990, when Jacques Vallée asserted, in his book Confrontations: “There are no Vidals.” 7
Even so, the case continued to be reported as though it were true; for example, the Uruguayan UFO promoter and actor Fabio Zerpa, who lived in Argentina for many years, included it in his pro-UFO magazine Cuarta Dimensión in 1976, and again in 1985. 8 Another influential endorsement came when Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger devoted three full pages to it in their UFO Odyssey (1999). 9
ON 4 June 1968, the day after the original report in La Razón, a Reuters dispatch from Mexico City carried a denial of the Vidals’ story by the Argentine embassy in Mexico City. This crucial datum – calling the story “absurd” – was repeated in at least three Buenos Aires newspapers the
Their watches had stopped and two days had passed
following day ( Clarín, Crónica, and La Nación). However, many UFO researchers seem to be unaware of this refutation by Reuters – or at least distrustful of it – for it was never cited in any UFO books, at least not those in English. 10 As far as those ufologists were concerned, the evidence against the case had been based purely on the inability to locate the supposed witnesses or, indeed, any sort of corroboration.
The first ufologist to suspect the actual origin of the teleportation story was Alejandro Chionetti, an Argentine ufologist now living in the United States, who had connections to the film industry and who deserves credit for helping expose the case, which he investigated between 1981 and 1984.11 As a student of cinema, Chionetti realised the possible connection between the story and the Argentine movie director Aníbal Uset. In 1982, he even travelled to Maipú to locate the Vidals and their supposed relatives, but failed.
Now, after almost 50 years, I can finally report a confession, which I obtained while doing research for an Argentine biographical UFO directory. 12 Aníbal Uset had been responsible for the satirical movie Che OVNI, the first Argentine film to exploit the theme of UFOs or extraterrestrials. This bizarre, surrealistic comedy premiered in Buenos Aires on Wednesday, 7 August 1968, just three months after the alleged teleportation.
In two interviews, during October 1998, Uset clearly stated that, along with “reporters and others”, he had invented the Chascomús teleportation as a publicity stunt, but he never explained the nature of the help he received from those unnamed reporters. The idea, he said, was to spread a fantastic story based on the plot of the film, and this turned into the paradigmatic and well-known ‘Vidal case’. The movie’s poster (which was also used in newspaper ads) even shows a UFO carrying off an automobile beneath it – a Peugeot 403, just like the Vidals were said to have driven.
During my first contact with Uset, he told me plainly: “I believe in extraterrestrials, but not that they visit us. I invented the protagonists – Vidal and Señora Vidal – on the TV magazine Sábados Circulares (‘Circular Saturdays’). The following Saturday a person came forward who said what he saw, and so on. Every Saturday another ‘witness’ came on.” Then the details followed. “The flying saucer was a means for us to get to Europe,” he admitted. When I asked him how the idea arose, he said that it originated when he took a trip to Colonia, in Uruguay, during which a reporter agreed to help him. Together they invented the whole story. Uset gratefully accepted the publicity stunt, which he said had exceeded all expectations. He also explained that the name ‘Vidal’ was inspired by the Argentine town of Coronel Vidal. Vidal’s wife, Dolores, was named after another town in the area, although as far as we know her first name never actually appeared in print.
At our next meeting – also in October 1998, this time with a tape recorder present – Uset was more restrained, varying his account to protect some names, saying only that the idea had arisen with an acquaintance of his, the director of a Uruguayan radio station whose name he did not remember and who had now passed away. Nor did he identify the reporter whom, he said, had accompanied him to Uruguay.
He also doubted whether Nicolás Mancera – the director of Sábados Circulares – could remember or recognise the background of the case. Some months later, I spoke with Mancera at length by telephone and, as Uset predicted, Mancera said he could not remember the story. This is highly curious given the repercussions the episode has had within ufology and its retention in the collective memory.
One could wish for more loose ends to be tied up, or for statements from others involved with the film. Uset died on 16 August 2015, but his testimony remains significant and he struck me as completely sincere. He had nothing to gain by admitting to the Chascomús teleportation hoax, and everything to lose in confessing to having been behind it.