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Mexico's UFO Golden Age
By Scott Corrales
FATE :: January 2004

The UFO cognoscenti will roll their eyes at yet another mention of the historic sighting of over a hundred unidentified flying objects made by a Mexican astronomer in the late 19th century.  The story of Professor José A.Y. Bonilla’s startling find and subsequent photographs has become the stuff of myth, and many have jokingly suggested that he should be made the “patron saint” of Latin American ufology (a thought that would have disgusted the good prof to no end).

Between August 12 and 13, 1883, Professor Bonilla, who was the director of the Zacatecas Astronomical Observatory, situated at a dizzying 7,000-foot height, was engaged with pure fin-de-siécle concentration on studying solar flares, when in the early morning hours of August 12 he noticed a small celestial body crossing the solar disk. As if one anomaly wasn’t bad enough, the perplexed Bonilla would find himself counting 283 similar objects engaged in their procession across the face of the sun before the mighty star became hidden by the mist rising from the surrounding countryside.

Bonilla’s report indicated that the objects moved in an east to west direction, while tilting slightly toward the north and south of the solar disk. The enigmatic bodies were dark in color; some of them were perfectly circular while others had a slightly more elongated shape, moving singly or in pairs. The dark objects would turn luminous after their transit across the sun. At one given moment, Bonilla reported, 15 or 20 such objects crossed the face of the sun in a single wave.

“I was able to photograph,” Bonilla wrote, “nearly all those strange bodies in projection and in profile. Some of them seem round or spherical, but the photograph shows them to be irregular rather than spherical. Before crossing the solar disk, these bodies shed bright flashes, but when crossing the sun they appeared to become opaque and dark against such a bright background. The negatives of the photographs in question show a body surrounded by a nebulous halo and black lines.”

Between 8 and 9:45 a.m. on August 13, the astronomer would count 116 more of these objects engaged in the same activity. He telegraphed his colleagues at the observatories of Puebla and Tacubaya (Mexico City), but their response across the wire was that no such objects could be seen from their location. Without independent confirmation, the Zacatecas sighting would remain little more than an odd anomaly that would soon be forgotten by astronomy, which at the time was more interested in naming the lunar craters or confirming Schiaparelli and Lowell’s speculations on the Martian canals.

The usual suspects—bugs, birds, meteorites—were rounded up and blamed for the curious objects photographed by Bonilla. But the astronomer himself believed that the objects were physical bodies hurriedly crossing the space between the Earth and the Moon ...

Read the rest of this article in the January 2004 issue of FATE

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