As most seasoned investigators know for one reason or another, a good number of UFO cases often remain unsolved. In other words, they can neither be proven real or to be fake with total and complete certainty. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ongoing mystery of the so-called UMMO affair. For over two decades, a vast number of technical and sometimes philosophical communications have been mailed in manila envelopes to several (no less than 20 and probably much more) Spanish and French ufologists. There are allegedly also networks of correspondents in Canada, Austria, Yugoslavia and other countries, although there is no concrete proof of this.
The exact origin of the UMMO papers has never been solved. This means that it was never proven with the slightest degree of certainty that they were either fabricated by some “earthly” intelligence agency or by an extremely persistent and well informed hoaxer; or for that matter, what they purported to be: communiques from intelligent beings from the planet UMMO, who according to their own admission, have been visiting Earth incognito since 1950.
According to the papers, UMMO is the name of a planet orbiting IUMMA, known in our astronomical catalogs as the star Wolf 424, and located 14.6 light years from the Sun. It belongs to a rare group of small, hot stars discovered in 1867 by French astronomers Etienne Wolf and Pons Rayet; they are described as surrounded by luminous clouds of ejected material containing atoms of helium, carbon, and nitrogen.
The main source for the UMMO affair is the prolific Spanish writer and ufologist Antonio Ribera, who wrote with Rafael Farriols the classic book, “Un Caso Perfecto” (A Perfect Case), which chronicled two UFO landings in the mid-60’s near Madrid. These spearheaded the UMMO affair by showing for the first time its characteristic emblem (similar to our astronomic symbol for the planet Uranus), which first appeared on a controversial series of photographs known as the San Jose de Valderas case, and in eyewitness descriptions of the Aluche landing. Later on, Ribera wrote, “de veras los OVNIs nos vigilan?” (Are we really being surveilled by UFOs?) and in 1979, “El Mensaje de UMMO” (The UMMO Message), in which he reprinted a number of the most interesting technical and philosophical papers, as well as an appendix with an UMMO – Spanish-French Dictionary, containing 403 words of this alleged alien language.
Starting in 1965, the Spanish UFO buff Fernando Sesma began to receive by mail a number of technical papers relating to and supposedly written by the OEMII, the inhabitants of UMMO. The network of correspondents soon expanded to about 20 people residing in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and other Spanish cities. The envelopes, however, contained no valid forwarding address, and so it was only a one-way communication system. Because Sesma had a reputation for being a wild contactee, his 1967 book, “Ummo, Otro Planeta Habitado” (UMMO, Another Inhabited Planet), was largely ignored by the Spanish UFO community. Nevertheless, the affair would soon prove to be too strange to be totally disregarded.
According to the papers issued by the OEMII, their first landing on Earth occurred on March 28, 1950, when “an OAWOLEA UEWA OEM (lenticular spacecraft) established contact with the Earth’s litosphere for the first time in our history. The descent took place near the village of ‘La Javie’ in the Basses-Alps, in France.” The crew was composed of four OEMII (men) and two YIEE (women). Another message explained that two years prior to this first landing, their civilization had detected the existence of intelligence in our OYAA (planet), when they intercepted a weak signal with a frequency of 431.44 megacycles; they later discovered that it had been emitted in 1934 by a Norwegian ship conducting ionospheric research in Terranova.
The plot thickened, however, when the UMMO aliens admitted that they had set up an underground base somewhere around the mountain Pic de Cheval Blanc in France, and that they had also sacked a nearby farm house, paralyzing their inhabitants and taking papers, bank notes, equipment (including an electric meter), and biological samples from the farmer’s family.
Due to the highly interesting technical content of some of the papers, which dealt with such things as cosmology and advanced physics, a number of respected French scientists became involved in the UMMO affair. Dr. Claude Poher, who was instrumental in setting up GEPAN, the French Space Agency specialized UFO bureau, was one of them. He told Ribera that the French police had looked into the matter of the sacked farmer’s house in La Javle about 20 years after the event. To their dismay, they found that in April of 1950 (one month after the alleged UMMO landing), the local farmer had reported the robbery to the police, including the detail that his electric meter had been taken.
The UMMO affair, however, reached prominence with two landings in the outskirts of Madrid in 1966 and 1967. On February 6, 1966, at about 6 P.M., half a dozen witnesses spread about in the Madrid outskirt of Aluche, observed the flight path and landing of a perfectly round saucer with three legs and a diameter of approximately 33 feet. According to Jose Luis Jordan, who saw it closer, the saucer’s underside also exhibited the Uranus-like emblem of UMMO, which was not known by any of the witnesses at the time. The UFO landed in one of the local properties, leaving three distinct small landing marks and burnt grass around it. The marks were rectangular in shape, (5.9 by 11.8 inches), 2 inches deep, and with a carved cross or X at the bottom; the distance between each mark was 19 feet, with the three holes forming a triangle.
One of the most puzzling details of the San Jose de Valderas case, however, was the appearance of little metallic tubes of nickel found around the UFO landing marks in the property of “La Ponderosa” in the Madrid neighborhood of Santa Monica. A mysterious Frenchman named Dagousset appeared on the scene offering a reward for the recovery of the pieces. Ribera and other Spanish ufologists eventually obtained a sample, and submitted it to Spain’s National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA) for analysis. Lab results revealed that the cylindrical nickel tubes were contained inside plastic sheets of polyvinyl fluoride. These were eventually identified with a plastic product called “TEDLAR,” which was manufactured by Du Pont de Nemours. The trick, however, is that this product was then restricted to military use and was not available in the open market in Spain.
In the following years the network expanded and the papers multiplied; some of them were highly technical tracts on the nature of the universe, their planet, the biological basis for intelligent life in the cosmos (basically variations of the humanoid form), the propulsion of their spacecraft, the OAWOOLEA UEWA OEMM, etc. All communications had the characteristic seal – similar to Uranus – of UMMOAELEWE, their central government or Politburo. The envelopes were mailed from different cities in Europe, but no forwarding address was ever discovered; most were written in Spanish and a few in French.
Even a brief summary of their content would require dozens of pages. Notice, for example, the style of the following essay on the AIOOYAAIODI (dimensional entity): “Advances obtained in the field of Cosmology have thrown enough light for our ideologues to abandon the moving grounds of intuition in their speculations, so that we can support ourselves in a depurated empiricism which is all-encompassing and has allowed us to formulate much more consequent hypotheses than the previous ones.” Sounds heavy? Listen to another paragraph: “Our model of the Cosmos is capable of explaining satisfactorily all the questions posed not only by Physics, but also by the biological and psico-physical fields. It is compatible with the rich phenomenology of which we are optional observers.”
Skeptics and believers alike should be aware that the content of the UMMO material is different from that of most contactee cases, because they don’t contain messianic messages of doom and salvation. The method used is always by mail and not direct or telepathic contact. Unlike Adamski, Siragusa, Meier, Rama, and countless other cosmic souls trying to convert our confused human species, the OEMII write things like, “in no way do we wish – and we sternly warn you about this – to see you fall into the temptation of switching your religious, scientific and politico-economical ideas for ours…it would be a mistake for you to adopt our ideas, concepts and statements at face value….”
What are we to make out of all of this? Are we dealing with a clever and long-range social experiment conducted by some earthly intelligence agency or a think-tank like the RAND Corporation, as was considered by Ribera? Or are we instead being manipulated by a cryptical cabal of industrialists and scientists like James Bond’s “SPECTRA,” or the UFO-conditioning plot described in Martin Caidin’s novel, “The Mendeleyev Conspiracy”? Or should we instead take the papers as true renderings of an advanced alien civilization from UMMO, which is trying to impart some real knowledge without upsetting too much the world’s political and cultural “status quo”?
Whatever the answer, there can be little doubt that UMMO is a complex affair. A simple hoax is ruled out in view of the duration and complexity of the material involved. A secret conspiracy or experiment is perhaps more tenable, yet again we must consider the length of time, international resources, and the sophistication of the material itself. One would have to ask what are the motives of such a group (providing that it exists) to go to so much trouble? One must keep in mind that some of the papers on advanced physics, cosmology, biology, and space propulsion, actually baffled a number of respected Spanish and French scientists and engineers. As put by Dr. Jacques Vallee, a well known computer expert and UFO writer, “If these concepts were not of extraterrestrial origin, as it was pointed out, then they must have originated with people who knew perfectly the ultimate advances of modern physics, and had extrapolated beyond them.”
To my satisfaction, the mystery has never been solved as either a long-range disinformation experiment or actual ET messages. The affair may also still be going on, as shown by a one page letter written in English, postmarked October 1, 1985 from New York City, received by this writer two years ago. The letter had the characteristic UMMO symbol and was obviously a photo copy. Unlike the original technical papers, however, this could have been a put on, since it was now stressing political views of an almost subversive nature.
“The Recognition of the UFO Phenomenon refutes the authority of the State as the ultimate power on this planet,” started the message, adding later that, “the ignorant masses are being sent to fight senseless and needless wars to sacrifice their own lives in the name of Nationalism.” This, in turn, was defined as “an outmoded concept based upon arbitrary and imaginary lines which represent artificial boundaries that do not exist in Nature. Nationalism is the modern-day extension of primate mammalian territorialism…” And so, the case goes on.
Excerpt from UFO REVIEW, No. 27
For more about the UMMO Affair:
Galactic.no – links to the Ummo papers and audio book and more on UMMO
UFO Contact From Planet Ummo – pdf
UFO Contact From Planet Ummo – text link (Archive.org)
UFO Contact From Planet Ummo, Vol. 2 (Kindle)