Ummo

Ummo is the name of a fictional exoplanet inhabited by a technologically advanced civilization, called Ummites, who supposedly contacted it by sending letters, photographs, phone calls or sightings. to groups of people who believe in the UFO phenomenon. The "Ummo case" It is the name that encompasses everything related to this false extraterrestrial contact.

Considered one of the most important and emblematic cases linked to ufology in Spain, it was a phenomenon of great popularity in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s both among the public and in the press and television of the time. It also had ramifications in Latin American countries or France.

In the mid-1990s José Luis Jordán Peña, a technical engineer specialized in parapsychology, confessed to being the creator and instigator of this fraud. Despite his statements Ummo and the "Ummo case" It has generated an extensive bibliography, conferences, documentaries and periodically appears in informative or mystery programs such as Espacio en blanco or Milenio 3. In 2022 it was proven that, despite evidence to the contrary, believers in the phenomenon persist (such as José Luis Jordán Moreno, son of its creator) and groups, such as Ummo sciences or Hijas from Ummo, who consider it true facts.

The «Ummo Case»

Origin

According to historian Mike Dash the "Ummo case" It began on February 6, 1966, in Madrid. The weekly El Caso published the next day that journalists and onlookers approached the Aluche neighborhood of Madrid due to the alleged landing of an unidentified flying object.. This sighting was later found to have been witnessed by two people. The publication also reported that neither the Madrid observatory nor the control tower at the Madrid-Barajas airport had recorded any unidentified flying object that day and at that time. hour.

"The witnesses, undoubtedly burned by so many and so many stories as they have been told about the flying saucers, have not wanted to say that it is one of these devices. But they strongly claim and agree to say that it was neither a plane nor a helicopter. For our part we neither affirm nor deny this account that, once again, it can lead to the fields of science fiction stories. The concrete and undeniable fact is that there are two witnesses and a portion of shady terrain that speak of the appearance of a strange flying object yesterday Sunday in Madrid.”

Diario El Caso (7 February 1966) [1]

The members of the Society of Friends of Space, an entity founded years before by Fernando Sesma, welcomed the news without surprise since, for some time, they had held weekly talks on unidentified flying objects and alien life: the ufological gatherings La Ballena Alegre at the Café Lion, near the Plaza de Cibeles, whose motto was “Believe it all until proven otherwise.” One of its participants, the engineer José Luis Jordán Peña, a frequent collaborator in magazines and television programs of the time, was the creator of Ummo when later, in the mid-1990s, he publicly revealed its fictitious nature, indicating that, in addition, he had told with the support of other people.

"It was pressed to tell who was behind Ummo and I have evidence to prove it."

José Luis Jordan MorenoThe newspaper of Spain, 15-10-2022) [2]

Typewritten letters, personalized and of limited distribution, had begun to arrive at this gathering, since sometimes they were sent to a single person, signed by extraterrestrial beings from a planet they called UMMO. In these communications the Ummites revealed their scientific knowledge, they spoke to the gatherings about their planet, they stated that some of them lived on Earth infiltrating alongside humans and that an ummite ship would be visible for a few more months. afternoon in San José de Valderas (Madrid).

The ufological myth allows us to divert attention to other more important things such as the repression of the regime or the cases of corruption of the Francoist dome. The most representative case was UMMO. Its origins are in the tertulia The joyful whale of Café Lion in Madrid, where the letters of supposed aliens begin to arrive."

Eduardo Bravo (RTVE Play, 14-10-2021) [3]

This sighting was reported by two witnesses, then anonymous, who contacted the journalist from the newspaper Informaciones Antonio San Antonio to provide him with some photographs, depositing them in a store in Carabanchel and which, according to them, confirmed the veracity of the event that occurred on July 1, 1967. In the images you can see, above the town's castles, a circular ship that showed on its belly the same sign with which the Ummites signed their communications. Although some ufologists, such as the military man and scientist Óscar Rey Brea, questioned its veracity due to the manipulation of the negatives or the lack of correlation, most experts accepted them as good, which was contributed by the popularity of the news. reached in the press.

"With a little bit of luck, I trust in a little bit to enter into personal contact with Ummo beings, a planet that gravitates around the Iumma star, located 14.6 light-years from Earth, codified by us as the Wolf 424 star."

Fernando Jiménez del Oso (review Garbo, 1979) [4]

Nor was the fact taken into consideration that the Ummite communications did not contain relevant scientific data but rather information that had sometimes already been published in foreign scientific journals that were difficult to obtain in the Spain of the Franco dictatorship. According to the letters received, these beings claimed to come from the planet UMMO, a planet in orbit around the red dwarf star Wolf 424 (located in the constellation Virgo) and called themselves OEMII (men of Ummo) in their own language. They themselves clarified in their letters the phonetic equivalents in their language of every word they deemed necessary. Thus, they recounted in their reports how they had arrived on Earth on March 28, 1950, landing very close to La Javie in the French Low Alps. There they contacted the first humans, disguised so that they would not be recognized, and began to investigate the planet: customs, culture, language, etc.

"My father chose a group of culte people who were open to understanding or believing in extraterrestrial life. When he wrote the letters, from 1966 until at least 2006, he did not want them to be exploited commercially."

José Luis Jordan MorenoThe newspaper of Spain, 15-10-2022) [5]

Development 1970-1980

Since the second half of the 1960s, different people around the world would begin to receive new letters in which the Ummites told different scientific aspects of their planet, its technology and its society. Some examples of the many existing documents over time they are:

• About your planet

"We proceed from a solidified astro whose external geological characteristics differ somewhat from those of EARTH. The topical fonema we designate our "OYAA" can be transcribed with the Spanish language spelling: UMMO.

His morphology can be assimilated to an ellipsoid of revolution whose radios are: Maximum R = 7251,608×103 m. Minimum r = 7016,091 × 103 m. The global mass is: M(ummo) = 9,36 × 1024 kg. Inclination regarding the normal to the plane of the ecliptic: 18° 39' 56.3" (there is a regular variation of 19'8 seconds sexagesimales of arc). Gravity acceleration: g = 11.9 m/s².

Rotation on its axis: 30.92 h (we measured in UIW. 30.92 h = 600 UIW) (equivalent to 1 XII.)".

• About your spacecraft:

"The profile of our UEWA does not need to adopt the forms that in terrestrial aeronautical technology show a high ballistic coefficient (equal shapes etc.) whose slenderness is necessary to achieve high speeds within a viscous fluid. This is because our displacement technique is radically different from the embryonic usual methods on Planet Earth. The Displacement in its wider trajectory is verified in a three-dimensional framework other than that which is familiar to us in WAAM (COSMOS). Our propulsive base, in addition to differing from those known to you, enjoys a higher energy capacity than those envisaged in your future space programs."

• About your message:

"To the present, the numbered cases in which his Earth brothers published some fragments of our reports, the echo has been scarce and therefore not dangerous to us. There is no reason to think that those sent to you will constitute an exception if you fulfill the spirit more than the letter of our supplications. But if in spite of all you decided to publish them one day and observe a reaction of excessive curiosity, I beg you to behave with your attitude of apparent skepticism or unbelief that position. Since we have never asked for anything to provide them with these reports, we trust their honorability and moral values."

• About the origin of species:

"We have indicated to you that a factor called by us BAAYIODUU (actually a chain of atoms of Kriptón) presents a double mission: it stores from the generation of WAAM (cosmos) within the living beings a codified information of all possible organic beings integrated in it, and captures information in the surrounding ecological environment: it compares such information with the above mentioned, and in your case a new mutation will give a new place

• About God:

"WOA (God) exists: (with the meaning you attribute to the verb to exist). The essence of WOA does not suffer any evolution. It is this same essence that understands the possibility of the idea dimension, more this dimensionality cannot affect its being as an intimate attribute because dimensionality has appeared mutability and WOA could not impose itself changes, and therefore limitations. More WOA's ideas must possess reality, it must be generated whenever it is not incompatible with WOA's intimate essence. How many realities exist? The answer is simple: as many as not incompatible ideas coexist in the mind of WOA. "

The Ummo affair also had a certain impact in France, where the skeptical opinion of Dominique Caudron would stand out. Curiously, much of the very advanced technology described by them, especially the 'oawooleaidaa' or change of dimensional coordinates (the "ibozoo uu" or dimensional axes), appears word for word (although with another name) in the works of J. J. Benítez from the saga Trojan Horse: in the latter case it is used to travel through time. According to Jacques Vallée, the Ummo documents raise similarities with the fictional world created by Borges in the story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

During the 1960s in Spain, some UFO sightings were reported in the towns of Cubellas (Barcelona) and Cunit (Tarragona) where the saucers with the ummite symbol on their belly were recorded photographically. >. These had been seen, according to locals, by many people. However, the only declared witnesses were Josep Marcillas and Víctor Lora. Later there was also an alleged landing in Sitges that would have left a series of footprints at the landing site.

After these sightings, this symbol began to become popular, becoming a sign of authenticity for any UFO sighting over the years. Throughout the 1970s, Ummo and the Ummo case were repeatedly announced as a theme in television programs, such as Más Allá directed by Fernando Jiménez del Oso, and radio programs such as Madrugada en la SER, by Antonio José Alés, or in magazines such as Paraciencia, Beyond Midnight, Karma 7, Stendek, Unknown World and Horizonte.

In the mid-1980s, sectarian groups began to emerge that used the story of aliens to break the will of followers and obtain money or sexual favors from them. The best-known case, due to the social alarm it caused and its coverage in media such as ABC, La Vanguardia or El País, was that of the Edelweiss mountain group, a sect created by Eduardo González Arenas. Coupled with a granddaughter of the Dominican dictator Leónidas Trujillo, González Arenas recruited minors from wealthy neighborhoods in Madrid with the claim that he was "an extraterrestrial prince. Cataloged as a destructive sect The trial for the Edelweiss case was the largest trial held in Spain for corruption of minors.

1990s

In 1996, as a result of long investigations by a new generation of Spanish ufologists such as Manuel Carballal who managed to reproduce the original photos of the 1967 sighting with a model and a fishing rod, the key to all of them was found. these sightings: José Luis Jordán Peña, who became vice president of the Spanish Society of Parapsychology, was the common denominator, directly or indirectly, for all these events. According to the documents, photographs and other evidence related to the genesis of UMMO to which they had had access, this man was the only person responsible for the fraud, although he had several sporadic collaborators who also provided financial help and infrastructure. However, he never provided very specific data about them and, when he did, they were vague and contradictory. Therefore, due to his erratic explanations, many UFO fans refused to believe Jordán Peña.

"I've been the author of Ummo. It's an experiment that I did to study man's credulity, but he left my hands. It was my fault. I'm sorry. My intention was to believe that there was a group of aliens who had arrived to France and from there they spread to Spain, South America, etc. But it must be said that he did not allude to any sect. Believers were free to believe or not. What happens is that, over time, some people have fanatized with Ummo and turned it into a sect. One thing that wasn't dangerous made her dangerous."

José Luis Jordan Peña (diario) El País, 29-08-2019) [6]

Some time later Jordán Peña confessed to the Police the details of the fraud that he carried out for almost thirty years: He wanted to inspire with this phonosymbolism the falsity of its content.

UMMO evokes Humo. I chose the star Wolf 424 at random as my real goal was not to develop a credible extraplanetary world. [...] I wrote the reports on Saturdays and Sundays in the afternoon, and took advantage of my travel abroad to send the letters from there. [...] We use the model hanging from a very thin nylon yarn. We use a very fast 1/1000 speed so that the saucer and the bottom of the photo will go out just as focused, and the dish would look bigger. I came to interview people who said they saw the dish, but they didn't get my pay. [...] I began to be indignant at seeing the Edelweiss sect marking on fire with my symbol to children. And then I received an anonymous invitation from Cuba, to attend I don't know which ummite meeting at Joaquín Farriols' house, so I decided to cut off the experiment I've been doing for 25 years. [...] I'm sorry to have created an immoral experiment that has turned against me.

José Luis Jordan Peña