UmmiteThe Letter Writers
From 1966 onward, scientists, writers and enthusiasts, mostly in Spain and France, received thousands of typed letters signed by visitors from the planet Ummo, describing their physics, society and quiet presence on Earth. The 'Ummo affair' is the largest documentary hoax in ufology; the Spanish parapsychologist José Luis Jordán Peña claimed authorship in 1993.
At a glance
- Home system
- Iumma (lore; Wolf 424)
- Avg. height
- 5′9″ – 6′6″
- Appearance
- Human-like, fair, athletic, indistinguishable in a crowd
- Reported lifespan
- Described as similar to human
- Social structure
- Described as a rational, non-hierarchical society
- Technology
- Described in thousands of pages of technical letters
- Primary traits
- Discreet, scientific, observant
- Relationship to Earth
- Claimed to live among us and study Earth since 1950
Physical profile
The letters described Ummites as human in every visible respect: tall, fair, physically fit, with slightly larger and more sensitive fingers and a reduced sense of taste. They claimed to walk unnoticed in European cities and to have adopted local names and jobs. There is, by design, nothing to see; the Ummite is a being of letters.
Reported origin
The letters placed Ummo in orbit around a star they called Iumma, 14.6 light-years from Earth, which correspondents identified with the red dwarf Wolf 424 in Virgo. Wolf 424 is real, a faint binary about 14 light-years away, and entirely unsuited to the temperate world the letters described.
Culture
The Ummo letters describe a rational, non-hierarchical society with a single language, a shared philosophy and a scientific approach to every aspect of life, including a physics based on a ten-dimensional universe and a theory of 'twin universes'. The content ran to thousands of pages and impressed some scientists at the time with its coherence, which is what a good hoax by an educated author looks like.
Technology
Interstellar craft, telepathic instruments and a physics described at length and with invented terminology.
Craft
Disc-shaped craft with markings resembling the Ummo symbol, an H with a vertical bar; photographs of one such craft near Madrid in 1967 were later shown to be of a model.
Communication
Typed letters in Spanish and French, later in other languages, sent by post to selected recipients, occasionally followed by telephone calls.
Earth encounters
The first letters arrived in Spain in 1966, addressed to members of a Madrid parapsychology group. Over the following decades hundreds of recipients in Spain, France and elsewhere received documents, and a small movement grew up around them. In 1993 José Luis Jordán Peña, a founder of the original group, stated that he had created the Ummo letters as a psychological experiment. Some believers rejected the confession, and letters continued to circulate.
Lore & history
The Ummo affair is the textbook case of a documentary hoax: the medium, the letter, gave the beings authority that a face-to-face contactee could not command. XenoAtlas lists the Ummite as contactee lore with the hoax noted plainly.
Source notes
- Ummo · encyclopedic summary
XenoAtlas documents extraterrestrial concepts appearing in mythology, contactee literature, popular culture, speculative accounts, and related sources. Inclusion does not constitute scientific verification.
Related species
See every type in the Types of Aliens guide.