Mexico City student contact claims — August 1965

In August 1965, newspapers in several countries circulated an extraordinary story from Mexico City. The reports said that two groups of students—three from La Salle University and a separate party of secondary-school boys—had experienced nearly identical encounters without initially knowing of one another's claims. Later catalogues assigned August 21 or August 23 as the event date, but the cited newspapers appeared on August 22 and 23. The event therefore must have been reported before publication, while its exact day remains uncertain. According to the story, each group encountered an enormous metallic disc somewhere outside the city at night. The object was said to be about fifty meters, or 150 feet, in diameter. Its surface resembled polished stainless steel and gave off an intense white light. The crew looked entirely human but stood approximately 2.1 meters—nearly seven feet—tall. They had fair hair and blue eyes and wore seamless, one-piece garments of metallic-looking material. The visitors invited the students inside. Both groups reportedly accepted and were taken on a journey lasting about three hours. The interior was described as profoundly quiet. Although instruments were visible, the visitors said they did not operate them by hand; communication and control were supposedly accomplished by thought. The students said the disc carried them to a vast station as large as their university grounds. There they reportedly saw many kinds of beings differing in size and appearance. One circulated version also claimed that a Brazilian family, said to have become lost in the jungle, was present aboard the station. The tall hosts identified themselves as coming from Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter. They were said to know hundreds of Earth languages, including Spanish, and to be far in advance of humanity. Their message predicted mass landings in October 1965 for a peaceful conquest intended to teach people to use thought constructively rather than destructively. The surviving retellings do not provide a detailed account of the students' return or establish what happened when the promised date passed. The source trail leads through Gordon Creighton's article and Charles Bowen's The Humanoids, which cite newspaper stories in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, France and Germany. Later reviewers also questioned whether the allegedly independent groups were actually one story duplicated as it moved through the press.