Illegal aliens?

The brothers Yayo and Payo Rodríguez achieved national prominence when on the morning of August 19, 1965, at eight o’clock in the morning, they claimed having witnessed the landing of a sizeable glowing disk on an open field near the Politécnico’s campus. The otherworldly vehicle allegedly charred vegetation as it settled to the ground on its tripodal landing gear. As if the landing of this spaceship, drawn straight from My Favorite Martian, wasn’t enough, the Brothers Rodríguez also claimed that a pair of diminutive beings wearing respirators of some kind emerged from the craft and walked up to the terrified students, depositing at their feet a metallic object. The dwarfish “away team” returned silently to their conveyance, which took to the air in a matter of seconds.

The Rodríguezes delivered the putative extraterrestrial fragment to the campus laboratory, where it was apparently subjected to analysis by investigators. According to an article in Mexico’s El Gráfico newspaper (defunct) a few days later, a number of journalists and photgraphers from different media organizations visited the site, where burn marks were plainly visible and where traces of a curious liquid, characterized as “fuel” were found. Despite the good physical evidence, Yayo and Payo were not considered credible witnesses. Even Dr. Santiago García, in his landmark book OVNIS Sobre México, would headline his chapter on the Rodríguez case as “¿de cual fumarían?” (“which did they smoke?”).

Scott Corrales, “Mexico: UFOs of the 1960s ” Inexplicada, the Journal of Hispanic Ufology, 12 June 2018