Uruguay's CRIDOVNI and the Palmar dam chase

The archive. CRIDOVNI (Comisión Receptora e Investigadora de Denuncias de Objetos Voladores No Identificados) is the Uruguayan Air Force (FAU) commission for UFO reports. It was set up in 1979, and Uruguayan officials describe it as the first official body of its kind in South America. It is a mixed military-civilian commission: three FAU officers plus civilian investigators, building on the methods of the civilian group CIOVI. It works with universities, laboratories and planetariums, and has no budget of its own. - Caseload, 2010 (Col. Ariel Sánchez): 2,200 reports received since its creation; 1,204 investigated; about 3% ("unos cuarenta casos") unresolved. - Breakdown, given by Lt. Daniel Silvera: 70% closed as explained and 27% on "stand by". 11% of testimonies came from qualified witnesses (pilots, meteorologists, controllers), and 7% of cases had physical evidence. - Recent work: it took on the Paysandú lights in 2023. A 2026 report says it began sharing information with the US AARO. - No public archive. Unlike Chile's, Argentina's or Italy's, Uruguay has published no file archive. Sánchez said the files stay confidential under Uruguay's privacy law because they hold witnesses' names and addresses. The commission answers specific questions and releases final reports, not the folders. - The CRIDOVNI material on the UFO Transparency mirror is empty (the /international/files/uy listing has no files). The case. By CRIDOVNI's own account, its most important unresolved cases are two involving the FAU itself, in which aircraft made visual contact with "esferas lumínicas" and failed to intercept them. The one Sánchez described in detail is the Palmar dam case of 1986: - FAU IA-58 Pucará aircraft on training manoeuvres near the dam, in a restricted zone, saw a round luminous object hovering over the dam. - They checked with the control tower, which had no traffic. They closed on the object twice, and it evaded both times, the second time heading west and changing from yellowish-white to reddish-orange. - A major blackout hit Montevideo, traced to an overheated line or transformer at the dam. Sánchez said the timing coincided but "we are not able to prove that the object actually affected the transformer." Every detail comes from interviews with commission members. No document from the case file has been published, so this is graded lead.