UAPgradeUAPgrade Italiano

Case · C-048

La Joya 1980: a Peruvian Su-22 fires at an object over the air base

La Joya (Mariano Melgar) Air Base, Arequipa · Peru · 1980

In flight Military witnesses

Unexplained

What happened
According to a message from the U.S. defense attaché in Lima transmitted to the DIA in June 1980 and later declassified, on the morning of May 9, 1980, Peruvian Air Force officers saw a round object hover near the Mariano Melgar base (La Joya); a Su-22 took off, fired on it at close range with no apparent effect and was then outdistanced, and the following evening a luminous object outdistanced a second Su-22. The pilot Óscar Santa María Huertas, who has publicly recounted the episode, places it instead on April 11, 1980 and says he opened fire repeatedly without damaging it. The message concludes that a vehicle of unknown origin was sighted; no Peruvian investigation appears to have been published.
Proposed explanation
No official explanation: the U.S. message leaves the origin open. The pilot has said that he took off to shoot down what looked like a balloon, and Julio César Chamorro, later head of the Peruvian Air Force office for anomalous aerial phenomena (OIFAA), who witnessed it as a boy, described it as an aerostatic balloon; the hypothesis has not been verified.
Official investigation
Fuerza Aérea del Perú; office of the U.S. Defense Attaché in Lima (message to the Defense Intelligence Agency)
Words of the document
APPARENTLY SOME VEHICLE WAS SPOTTED, BUT ITS ORIGIN REMAINS UNKNOWN

Official documents

  1. UFO Sighted in Peru (U) – IR 6 876 0146 80 (trascrizione del messaggio declassificato) · U.S. Defense Attaché Office in Lima, for the Defense Intelligence Agency · Jun 1980

Sources

  1. La República (Peru), October 14, 2008: the pilot who “confronted” a UFO in Arequipa (press)
  2. Andina (Peruvian state news agency), November 13, 2013: interview with the head of OIFAA Julio César Chamorro (press)
  3. Enigma Labs: La Joya Air Force Base, Arequipa, Peru, 1980 (with the comparison of the dates) (analysis, pro-disclosure)

Open in the interactive archive The whole section: Map of UAP and USO cases

UAPgrade's entries are compiled with artificial intelligence (three verifiers with opposing roles) and checked against the sources listed above: how we work. Have a document that changes this entry? Bring it to the Investigations Unit.