Uruguayan Air Force

This all happened in June.

And in Uruguay, in Uruguay, the Uruguayan Air Force investigated it, their UFO division.

That should tell you something right there.

And they, according to chat GPT, I looked all this stuff up on AI to get the scale of it because I wasn't aware of the scale.

And it said that those files have been locked up by the Uruguayan Air Force UFO division.

Apparently they discovered it was too frightening to the people to let them know what had happened and how many cows were mutilated.

So they locked up those files and those are not available according to chat GPT.

But the clincher is that the...

While their cows are being exsanguinated, 1,500 in Argentina, hundreds in Chile, and in Uruguay, the Uruguayan Air Force UFO Division was investigating it.

Think about that for a minute.

Right.

It included three countries, 1,500 cows in Argentina, hundreds in Chile that haven't even been counted yet because a lot of them are the gauchos that roam with their herds in the upper Camino Austral in the middle of where really remote areas.

And then an unknown amount in Uruguay because it was investigated by the Uruguayan Air Force UFO division.

Cattle mutilation.

investigated by the Uruguayan Air Force UFO Division.

Great.

So how many in total, approximately?

A flight into the mountains.

The journey began on October 12, 1972, when members of the Old Christians Rugby Club departed Montevideo, Uruguay, aboard a chartered Uruguayan Air Force Fairchild FH227D aircraft.

The team was traveling to Santiago, Chile, for a rugby match.

Many of the players were young men in their late teens and early twenties, and several had invited friends and relatives to accompany them.

And they knew what it meant to survive when survival itself seemed impossible.

The mountain that refused to let them die.

The disaster of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 remains one of the most disturbing and extraordinary survival stories in modern history.

Its horror does not come from a supernatural presence, a murderer or an unexplained disappearance.

A story you've probably heard of before but never really looked into.

The 1972 Andy's plane crash, the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, the Andy's plane disaster, whatever you want to call it.

This is a story of survival where humans were forced to do things that no human wants to do to survive for 72 days until they're eventually rescued.

This is a story that's been made into films and TV shows.

So if anybody wanted to bring any family or friends for free, they were able to do so.

So some team members phoned around offering the free seats to their loved ones.

The president of the team had chartered the plane from the Uruguayan Air Force.

It was a twin turboprop Fairchild FH227D.

It's named after the computer? [laughs]

In 1972, Uruguayan Air Force flight 571 crashes in the Andes Mountains near the Argentine-Chile border.

Only 16 survivors out of the 45 players are rescued.

Alive.

This is The Hangar on Radio Hangar, and today is October 13th, fifty-four years ago today.

Forty-five people boarded Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571.

Thirty-three of them were alive when the aircraft came to rest in the mountains.

Sixteen of them made it home.

Two Rolls-Royce Dart turboprops, good for about two hundred fifty knots in cruise, a stretched Americanized variant of a solid, reliable Dutch airliner.

Several South American air forces operated them as passenger transports by 1972.

The Uruguayan Air Force had acquired theirs just a few years prior.

The aircraft was sound.