Ummo, The Greatest Celtiberian UFO Story Ever Told

Movistar Plus+ premieres this Monday ‘Ummo. La España alienígena’, a miniseries about the legendary ufological phenomenon born in Madrid in the 1960s and which was revealed to be a delusional invention by its creator, José Luis Jordán Peña

Spain has always been hot territory in ufological questions. Since the first ‘UFO case’ documented in the Spanish press – the sighting of a glowing and steaming flying jar in the skies of Campo de Criptana (La Mancha) in March 1826-, thousands of incidents with strange objects and presumed creatures from another world have been recorded. Nothing, however, is comparable to the formidable ‘Ummo case’, a ufological event that began in 1966 with the alleged landing of a flying saucer in the Madrid neighborhood of Aluche and that, for decades, became an intricate and wacky alien cult phenomenon that crossed borders and whose plot weaved the fascinating and oblique figure of Jose Luis Jordan Penathe genius who pulled the strings of the shed.

This Monday, Movistar+ Plus premieres ‘Ummo. Alien Spain’a three-episode documentary miniseries directed by Laura Pousa and Javier Olivera that sheds light on a case that, 56 years later, is still strangely alive among the legion of fans around the world who are still convinced that the remote planet Ummo exists and its advanced inhabitants live infiltrated among us. The series not only explores the infinite ramifications of the case, but also offers a exciting social fresco of that late-Francoist Spain as eager for freedom as for something to believe in. And what better than an extraterrestrial civilization with a gleaming Nordic appearance willing to share with the Celtiberian earthlings its amazing levels of scientific, technological and social development.

That said, it is absolutely essential to explain, at least try, what the ‘UMMO case’ is all about.

Everything has its origin in the sighting and landing of a flying saucer in Aluche, the February 6, 1966, in full patriotic fury over the UFO phenomenon. “The concrete and undeniable fact is that there are two witnesses and a portion of charred land that speak of the appearance of a strange flying object yesterday Sunday in Madrid & rdquor ;, recounted the chronicle sent by the Cifra agency and collected by the tabloid newspaper ‘El Caso’. Over time it was learned that one of those witnesses was Jose Luis Jordan Penaan intriguing engineer of Alicante origin who plotted the false sighting while participating in the lively talks about the occult that the pioneer of ufology in Spain, Fernando Sesmaorganized in La Ballena Alegre, a space located in a basement of the old Café Lion in Madrid, on Calle de Alcalá, opposite the Post Office (now an Irish pub).

Star Wolf 424

Some participants in the ufological gathering began to receive strange typed letters and phone calls of supposed inhabitants of the planet Ummo, located in the orbit of the star Wolf 424, 14.6 light years from Earth. In these elaborate letters, endowed with a rich and bombastic language, the Ummites revealed their amazing scientific and technological knowledge, in a huge epistolary volume that, over three decades, would end up exceeding 1,500 pages. One of these letters announced that some Ummites were already living on Earth and that a spaceship would be visible, on July 1, 1967, in San José de Valderas (Madrid). Said and done: two alleged witnesses would claim to see a UFO that day and would document it with photographs in which a circular craft appeared with the same sign on its lower part with which the Ummites signed their communications.

Nobody could imagine it then, but the (fake) photos were one more machination of Jordán Peña, the same as typewritten letters. Ummo’s crazy ball was starting to roll and to this day it still hasn’t stopped, despite the fact that its own creator admitted in the early 90s that everything was smoke. “I have been the author of Ummo. It’s an experiment I did to study the credulity of man, it got out of hand. It was my mistake, I am sorry & rdquor ;, he told the journalist Manuel Carballal in his day. Certainly, the issue got complicated, and a lot, when the excesses of the Edelweiss pedophile sect became known, which in the 80s had used the Ummo symbol as an aesthetic alibi: “That scared me. One thing was Ummo and another a sect that believed in Ummo. It was a mistake to launch an innocent idea with a scientific charge & rdquor ;. In any case, the iinfinite legion of Ummo’s followers, including writer JJ Benítez, never believed that Jordán Peña was the only architect of the case and preferred to think of conspiracy; hence his stubborn persistence in thinking, as a battle cry, that “Ummo it exists!”.

“Jordán Peña was a genius, a brilliant, lucid guy, full of chiaroscuro, but fascinating & rdquor ;, they affirm Laura Pousa and Javier Olivera in conversation with this newspaper. “He dedicated his whole life to creating Ummo, all his talent, which was boundless. He could have shaped it into a literary work and gained fame and money. But Ummo didn’t give him anything. So why did he do it? & rdquor ;, wonders the couple of creators, for whom the inventor of the case is less a fraud than a artist of an indecipherable discipline. “Everything he plotted and wrote is the work & mldr; that we don’t really know where to put it, but there is an artistic proposal there, something close to the concept of the ‘performer’”, Olivera points out.

‘Beyond’ and Jiménez del Oso

The two directors have worked for three long years to shape the series. “It has been very hard, because it has been a huge amount of research work, but we have had a great time & rdquor ;, says Pousa, doctor in Film History from the Autonomous University of Madrid. Indeed, there was hundreds of hours of steamy Spanish Television programs that debated the subject with avidity and (much) rigor, such as the legendary ‘Más tú’, by Jiménez del Oso, where Jordán Peña himself frequently went as an authorized voice, by way of wicked devil’s advocate that questioned the existence of Ummo or ufology itself. “They were amazing shows, with people really thinking straight, talking with solemn seriousness about things like Ummo. Hence its influence and its echo: at that time, people thought that if it was on TV it must be true”, comment the directors.

Another story of Spain

“We learned about the case and we found it fascinating how a UFO story in Madrid in the 1960s allowed us to tell the story of Spain in a different way,” Pousa points out. “Indeed, it is almost an excuse to talk about the society and culture of the timeof that Spain kidnapped by a dictatorship and a time when religion no longer supplied the need to believe & rdquor ;, adds the filmmaker and visual artist, son of the great Argentine director Héctor Olivera, about his series, irresistible pop mix of family images of Jordán Peña in super 8, magnetic tapes from the infinite archive of Televisión Española, historical recreations and interviews with experts on the matter such as the journalist Eduardo Bravo (author of the wonderful essay ‘Ummo The incredible is true’)the director Nacho Vigalondo or the (incredulous) daughter of José Luis Jordán Peña, Maite Jordan.

“There are times when everything reported seems untrue. But how can this be? Can not be! The border between the real and the lie is very diffuse, and that game is also exciting for us, to the extent that we believe that it can generate a reflection in the viewer about what is happening today with the ‘fake’ & rdquor ;, explains Olivera. “I would give for many series. Everything has so many layers, it’s so complex, there are so many things in there: the creation of mythsthe joke turned phenomenon, the role of the media…”, Pousa sentences with an unequivocal gesture of fascination about a phenomenon as unique and unfathomable as Jordán Peña himself.