Couple Captures Photo of “UFO” Above Erupting Mexican Volcano
News | January 14, 2023
Cameras and UFOs have always gone hand in hand along the fringes of the photographic world, and this latest example is yet another case.
A photographer couple in Mexico has recently sparked lots of interest on social media after capturing a photo of what definitely looks like a UFO-type object flying above a giant and very active volcano.
The photo taken by the couple captures a disk-shaped object hovering over the Popocatépetl volcano in the Mexican state of Mexico (a specific state in the country that shares the same name).
The couple caught their shot from the nearby town of Atlixco, where volcano watching of the nearby rumbling giant is a hobby among many locals and visitors.
Popocatépetl itself is Mexico’s second-highest mountain at 5,426 meters or 17,802 feet. In recent years it has become exceptionally active with frequent eruption warnings for the surrounding countryside.
The rather crisp image was taken by the photographers Luis Guerra and Karla Gracia, who managed to capture it at 7:52 am this past Monday.
It later went extremely viral online, both in Mexico and internationally – unsurprising considering what it shows, with many people online rapidly starting to claim it might include an unidentified flying object.
The couple who took the photo picked up their hobby of capturing the very photogenic volcano since moving to the city of Atlixco, but this was their first photographic brush with the unexplained.
While the two of them were getting ready for breakfast on Monday morning, Popocatépetl suddenly emitted one of its periodic blasts, which echoed throughout the region.
Guerra then rapidly started taking photos of the volcano with his cell phone and its internal camera zoom. He hoped to capture “El Popo’s” (as the volcano is often called in Mexico) cone with the moon peeking out from behind it in the morning light.
The photographer claimed in comments to the UK newspaper The Daily Mail that he liked how that morning’s particular shot showed the moon as it appeared from behind the smoking cone.
Later that day, when he sent the photo to his girlfriend Karla Garcia, she shared the shot on a Whatsapp feed with friends of hers. Even by that point, neither had yet noticed the strange object in the shot.
It was only a bit later, once the photo had been shared with others that some of the couple’s friends sent back messages mentioning the supposed UFO.
As Garcia mentioned to the Daily Mail, “Since my boyfriend is not a fan of social networks, I asked him if I could upload his photo to Twitter and he said yes.”
She did that and tagged a local reporter too. Once the reporter shared it, the viral spread really took off.
She later also shared the same image on her Facebook page with the caption, “Today’s photo at 7:52 am. Popocatépetl, the moon, and possibly a UFO.”
The photo has spread like wildfire in Mexico since then and is now internationally famous. The authenticity of the object shown remains uncertain and will likely stay that way in today’s world of easy, on-the-fly digital image manipulation.
It is worth noting that while the mountain looks remarkably sharp in the shot, the mysterious object is oddly blurry, suggesting that it was much closer to the lens than the mountain it’s supposedly hovering above.
This, as any landscape photographer knows, could easily mean that some much closer, much smaller very ordinary object like a fast-moving bird or insect happened to zip by at just the right moment and angle
Either way, decide for yourself with a closer look.
Curiously, this isn’t anywhere near the first time that people have claimed to spot UFOs appearing near or over the erupting Popocatépetl volcano. Many previous cases have been reported over the years.
There is even at least one previous case of a video appearing to show some sort of object rapidly entering the volcano itself at night.
The quantity of reported and supposedly recorded sightings has even been large enough to make one major Mexican newspaper, “El Universal” jokingly ask whether the volcano might be the home of an extraterrestrial base. Strange indeed.
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