Overview
They came by ordinary post. Typed pages, single-spaced, in careful formal Spanish, each stamped with a mark that looked like a closed parenthesis, a plus sign, and an open parenthesis: )+(. Starting in 1965 and 1966, envelopes like these began landing at the homes of UFO enthusiasts around Madrid, and the authors introduced themselves without much ceremony. They were, they wrote, scientists from Ummo, a planet orbiting the star Iumma, 14.6 light-years from Earth. They had been living here quietly since 1950. They had things to explain.
The first and most devoted reader was Fernando Sesma, who presided over the Society of Friends of Space, a Madrid tertulia of saucer enthusiasts, and whose circle became the letters' first audience. From there the correspondence spread — to hundreds of recipients across Spain and eventually France, arriving steadily until about 1988. By 1983 one count already put the corpus at some 6,700 pages; estimates of the full total vary widely, but everyone agrees it was enormous. The material was dense and strangely consistent: cosmology, biology, the grammar of the Ummite language, the social organization of a distant planet, all of it cross-referenced across years of mail from authors nobody ever met.
A Landing, Announced in Advance
On February 6, 1966, witnesses in the Madrid district of Aluche reported a circular craft descending on three legs. Among those who came forward was a local psychologist named José Luis Jordán Peña, who sketched the object for the press — with the )+( symbol on its underside. The letters and the sightings now had each other.
Then the campaign got bolder. In the spring of 1967, letters told recipients that a ship would soon show itself, and on June 1, 1967, over San José de Valderas on Madrid's edge, one apparently did. Photographs circulated of a pale saucer bearing the symbol. Hollow capsules of fluoride plastic turned up nearby, containing plastic strips marked )+( — material exotic enough, it was said, to be catalogued as something out of NASA. The American photo-analysis group Ground Saucer Watch later examined the Valderas pictures and reported a small object held close to the camera, by its estimate a plate about eight inches across with the symbol painted on in ink, and researchers came to regard the images as shots of a model. The letters kept coming anyway.
The Physics in the Envelopes
What held serious readers was not the saucer. It was the prose. The documents laid out an integrated scientific and philosophical system — physics, information theory, ethics — that stayed internally coherent across decades and thousands of pages, which is a hard trick for any author, terrestrial or otherwise. The French plasma physicist Jean-Pierre Petit became the corpus's most credentialed champion, writing books on Ummite science and maintaining from 1991 onward that the texts showed signs of a superior intelligence; he has credited them with inspiring parts of his own cosmology work. In Spain, the ufologist and journalist Juan José Benítez engaged with the material in his books. Working the other side of the street, investigative journalist Manuel Carballal picked at the affair in the Spanish press, tracing who might have typed what, and for whom.
Issue 29
April 1993. In issue 29 of the Madrid skeptical magazine La Alternativa Racional, Jordán Peña — the same psychologist who had reported the Aluche craft twenty-seven years earlier — told readers that he was the one who wrote the letters from Ummo. He framed it as research. He wanted, he said, to test his thesis that paranoia was more widespread than psychiatrists believed, so he "decided to create a myth called Ummo, providing it with a false landing and falsified traces." He assembled a study group of intelligent people and watched what the letters did to them. "The hoax was almost perfect," he wrote. In later tellings he added stranger flourishes, including a claim that the CIA had supplied him with radioactive sand for the landing sites.
The confession settled less than one might expect. Many recipients rejected it outright, and their argument was practical rather than mystical: one man, thousands of technically dense pages, twenty-five years of sustained coherence, letters posted from cities around the world. Petit and others held that the corpus was simply beyond a single author's reach, whatever Jordán Peña had signed his name to. The psychologist had, after all, spent decades demonstrating a talent for saying things that were not so.
The Open File
The letters outlived their confessed author's confession. Devotional offshoots persisted into the following decades, including a Bolivian group calling itself the Daughters of Ummo, still active some twenty years after 1993. Chile's CEFAA — the government's official aerial-phenomena agency — keeps the case in its historical files under a heading that does its judging for it: the great ufological fraud forged in Spain. The pages themselves are still out there, scanned and traded and argued over, and the affair is routinely described as one of the largest coordinated document campaigns ever aimed at the UFO world. What remains, as at the start, is what arrived in the mail: type, a postmark, and a symbol.