UMMO and the EXTRATERRESTRIAL PAPERS

Are there extra-terrestrial beings living among us on Earth? Events surrounding two spectacular Spanish UFO sightings suggest that this case is a fact. The UMMO-case is a mystery with plenty of clues along the trail. Whatever the truth, this is in every way a refreshing change from the more usual alleged encounters with people from other worlds; as the Ummites themselves explained:

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Excerpt:

We have not come to bring you a new doctrine, as prophets descending from the skies to teach a new physics or mathematics or preach a new religion, or offering you panaceas for your social or patho-psychological ills.

Apparently, in 1950, inhabitants of the planet Ummo (14 light years away) landed on Earth. They lived among us for 55 years undetected, establishing their bases and acclimating themselves to our way of life. Then, in 1965, they started to make contact. Initially they compiled a list of 20 carefully selected individuals, most of them were Spanish. They included a playwright, a police officer, an employee in the American embassy in Madrid, an engineer, an official of the Telegraph Office, a lawyer and two of Spain's best-known UFOLOGISTS, Antonio Ribera and Rafael Farriols. Many of those on the list were also members of a small Spanish group, the Society of Friends of Space, including their founder-president, Fernando Seams. According to the Ummites, those on this particular list constitute the Madrid group; there are other groups all over the world.

Early in 1965 the Ummites began to contact the names on their Madrid list, by letter or telephone, to explain the purpose of their mission to Earth. One of the few who has openly described what happened is the engineer Enrique Villagrassa Novoa, who received the telephone call late at night on 28 November 1966. The speaker identified himself as an extra-terrestrial being and spoke fluently and intelligently, though in a voice that was both faintly foreign and mechanical, for about two hours. He discussed engineering and obviously had an impressively detailed know-ledge of the subject; he followed this up by posting on some documents a few days later.

Unfortunately, few of those on the Ummites' list have revealed the details of how they were contacted. It seems the letters were usually typewritten on paper that bore a distinctive mark. Nor do they know how many others the Ummites telephoned, nor whether they contacted anyone more than once. All we know is that some of those who had a specialist interest received follow-up documents.

One of the problems that besets this story is that there has been very little investigation into vital points. For example, no one seems to have made any detailed, systematic attempt to look into the ways in which the Ummites contacted the people on their list, nor why these people should be on the list.

In 1969 the Ummites contacted a prominent UFO researcher, Antonio Ribera, who had in fact heard about them two years earlier when he had been introduced to Villagrassa. Rather curiously, he kept the matter quiet and - as only in 1975, eight years after first hearing about it and six years after being contacted by the Ummites, that he spoke out.

The Ummites suggested to Ribera that their planet may orbit the star we know as Wolf 424 - Apparently, it is difficult for them to be more precise than this because our astronomical references are incompatible with theirs.

They claimed that in 1948 they had accidentally picked up a strange radio signal with a frequency of 413.44 megacycles, which they were unable to decipher. Eventually, they traced it to a planet known to them as 'Ooyagaa', or 'cold star of quadrate' (they refer to our Sun as 'quadrate'). The signal was later identified as having been transmitted by a Norwegian scientific research vessel. The transmission took place between 5 and 7 February 1934, and took 14 years to travel to Ummo. Subsequent investigation confirmed the presence of such a ship, transmitting on this frequency, between these dates.

The Ummites were surprised at this evidence of intelligent life on our planet and decided to investigate. Two years later, in March 1950, a lenticular-shaped spaceship landed secretly near the small town of La Javie in Les masses Alpes, France, in a wild and sparsely populated region, well-suited to their purposes. The landing went unobserved, and a party of six - four males and two females - was left on Earth. They took over a nearby country house, paying its owners to leave, and excavated an underground hiding place as their base.

When the story eventually became public knowledge, it is said that the French authorities carried out an official investigation of the alleged landing area. Some reports claim that they found evidence of unusual activity.