,
Alcorcón, Spain on 1 June 1967.
Ummo () is a hypothetical planet believed to be located in the constellation
Virgo. Ummo and its civilization are described in a decades-long series of claims that
aliens from the planet Ummo were communicating with people on the Earth. Most Ummo information was in the form of detailed documents and letters sent to various esoteric groups or
UFO enthusiasts. The Ummo affair was subject to much mainstream attention in France and Spain during the 1960s and a degree of interest remains regarding the subject.
Ummoism is the term used to define different groups interested in the study of the ideas and concepts presented in the Ummo letters). The culprit (or culprits) is unknown, but José Luis Jordán Peña has claimed responsibility for writing the letters and instigating Ummoism, leading many to think that Ummo could be an elaborate
hoax. However, twenty years ago, there were still a few small groups of devotees, such as "a strange Bolivian cult called the Daughters of Ummo".
Jacques Vallée has said that the author(s) of the Ummo documents might be a real-world analogue of the fictional creators of
Borges' "
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". Historian
Mike Dash writes that Ummoism began on 6 February 1966, in
Madrid. On that day, Jordán Peña claimed to have had a
close encounter of the first kind when he saw "an enormous circular object with three legs and, on its underside, a curious symbol: three vertical lines joined by a horizontal bar. The two exterior lines curved outward at the edges, which made the
pictogram resemble the
alchemical sign for the planet
Uranus." (Dash, 299) Peña's report generated a fair amount of excitement, but it was only the beginning. Not long afterwards, a Madrid author of a UFO book received several photographs in an anonymous mailing. The photos were of a craft similar to the one reported by Peña, and bearing the same symbol. Within a few weeks, "a leading Spanish
contactee named Fernando Sesma Manzano became involved when he began receiving lengthy, typewritten documents which purported to come from a spacefaring race called the Ummites." (Dash, 299) Since 1991, the well known French researcher
Jean-Pierre Petit has claimed to have detected signs of superior intelligence in some of the Ummite writings he says he has received. He also claims that the scientific subjects addressed in the
Ummite letters are totally innovative and have directly inspired him in his research in
cosmology and
magnetohydrodynamics. On the basis of letters, it is difficult to speak of an Ummite language. All we have, apart from a few complete sentences, is a lexicon, a set of vocables, the vast majority of which are given to us in isolation.
Antonio Ribera mentions 403 Ummite words in a 1978 compilation and Jean Pollion, in
Ummo, de vrais extraterrestres (2002), lists over a thousand words considering that every doubling of a letter in a word is significant. Two theories have been formulated by analysts of Ummite letters: • the first, defended by Jean Pollion
pseudonyme, considers that each letter (sound or phoneme) in words transcribed in typewritten form is signifying, and he has called these sounds "soncepts". He considers this to be an "ideophonemic" language: • The second considers that differences in spelling (especially the doubling of letters) are of little significance, and that they are due to differences in the understanding of foreign sounds by the typist(s), or to difficulties in alphabetic transcription. They consider that language is made up of word-objects and not of "soncepts." Currently, more than 1300 pages of those letters have been registered, but it is possible that many other letters exist. In a 1988 letter, reference is made to the existence of 3850 pages, copies of which have been sent to several individuals, representing perhaps up to 160,000 pages of total Ummo documents. The true identity of the authors of those reports remains unknown. Dash notes that "few ufologists outside Spain took Ummoism seriously—the photographic evidence was highly suspect, and, while the Ummite letters were more sophisticated than most contactee communication, there was nothing in them that could not have originated on Earth." Still, Dash allows that, whatever their origins, "considerable effort had gone into the supposed hoax." (Dash, 299) Many scientific subjects are described in detail in the letters, including
network theory (or
graph theory),
astrophysics,
cosmology, the
unified field theory,
biology, and
evolution. Some of this information is thought to be dubious
pseudoscience, but much of it is scientifically accurate. However,
Jerome Clark (Clark, 1993) notes that Jacques Vallée argued that the scientific content of the Ummo letters was knowledgeable but unremarkable, and compared the scientific references to a well-researched
science fiction novel—plausible in the 1960s, but dated by the standards of the 1990s. The controversy over an "error" in the distance from
Wolf 424 arose from the first letter, referenced D21 (May 1966), which states: "The first distance is the one used by terrestrial astronomers for their calculations (disdaining the curvatures of light as it passes through fields of high gravitational intensity), such a distance is "constant" for two bodies fixed in space. The second distance is a function of time, measured in an N-dimensional space with a certain periodicity. Its measurement is very important as it relates to our galactic travels. DISTANCE FROM IUMMA TO THE SUN. The apparent distance, i.e. that which a coherent beam of waves would follow in three-dimensional space, on 4 January 1955, was 14.437 light-years. The real distance (straight distance in decadimensional space) on the same date, according to our measurements, was 3.685 light-years". Further on, after giving some characteristics, the author adds "The result is that it is impossible, even with the most careful axis translation, to identify the same star coded by us with another catalogued by Earth astronomers. We believe, however, that our IUMMA may still be the star you've registered as WOLF 424, as its coordinates are similar to those we've given you." Thus, ill-informed or ill-intentioned critics have amputated the original writings, arguing that the author of the letters relied on an erroneous measurement, this distance coinciding with that measured by Yerkes' laboratory in 1938 (3.6 to 3.8 al) for
Wolf 424, although Yerkes corrected it in 1952. ==Planets proposed by Zecharia Sitchin==