Close encounters
The truth is out there and Hugh Chow is determined to find it among the good people of Capilla del Monte, the UFO capital of Latin America
"There were two white lights, as bright as that street lamp," says Jorge Pablo Lopez, pointing across the road. "They were high up, about 1,000 metres. The lights moved west, stopped, turned and moved north. There was no sound."
Spend even a little time in Capilla del Monte and you become aware that just about everyone in this laid-back little Argentinian town has a story like this. For we are in Latin America's UFO capital, where strange lights in the sky, crop circle-like phenomena and mysterious energy fields are what locals gossip about.
Lopez, the friendly owner of our hostel, says his Close Encounters experience took place in October 2010, about two years after he'd moved northwest from Buenos Aires, the nation's capital, to this Cordoba province town of some 10,000 people.
"It's very common to see lights moving in the sky," says Diego Malleo, another porteno, or native of Buenos Aires, who runs guided tours into the surrounding hills. He advises us to scan the night sky above 1,949-metre-high Cerro Uritorco, the summit of which is a four-hour hike from town. Between 8pm and 9pm is the best time, he reckons. Friends, his brother and his girlfriend have all seen the lights, he says.
Capilla del Monte (pronounced capi-sha del mon-tay), "chapel of the mount" in Spanish, is 110 kilometres north of the university city of Cordoba, at the base of the Sierra Chica mountain range and in an area prone to droughts and wildfires. In some ways, it's like many rural Argentinian towns; there are few cars, the streets feel safe and almost everything shuts down for the afternoon siesta. It also has a Malvinas Street, named after the disputed islands in the South Atlantic the British call the Falklands.
