Five Horses Found Mutilated Outside Río Mayo, and Neighbors Describe 'a Light Like a Plate, With a Tail'
A rancher in Argentina's Chubut province says he found three mares and two horses dead with eyes, tongues and ears missing, no blood and no tracks, as reports of strange lights reached him. Police say the animals had been dead for some time and point to scavengers and the weather.
Location Estancia La Lucía, about 6 km outside Río Mayo, Chubut, Argentina
RÍO MAYO, Argentina (reported Sept. 1, 2026) — At first, Francisco Quilodrán thought the mare lying in his field might be about to give birth. When he got closer, he says, she was dead, and one of her eyes was gone.
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Then he found the others: three mares and two adult horses in all, on his land about six kilometers outside the small Patagonian town of Río Mayo. “It’s the first time in my life I’ve seen anything like it,” he told Radio Nacional journalist Raúl Oliva, according to the Argentine news site ADNSUR.
Within days, people were telling him about lights in the sky.
What we know
On the record: documents, statements, dates and places. Sources below.
- The animals. Quilodrán found the five dead horses near Río Mayo, in Argentina’s Chubut province, toward the turnoff for Ricardo Rojas and Alto Río Senguer, ADNSUR and Patagonia Press reported on Sept. 1. Both credit the local portal RíoMayo1935 and Oliva’s interview. Police identified the property as the La Lucía ranch, LM Neuquén reported. No exact date for the discovery has been published.
- The police visit. After the story spread, Chubut police acted on their own initiative, according to LM Neuquén. Officers from the Río Mayo station inspected the ranch. Cristian Mulero, head of the police regional unit in Comodoro Rivadavia, described their findings to the newscast Ahora en Comodoro (see below).
- No necropsy. No necropsy establishing how the animals died had been made public as of Patagonia Press’s report.
- A note on the pictures in circulation. The image of lights over farmland at the top of Patagonia Press’s article is labeled as an AI-generated illustration. It isn’t a photo of the lights the witnesses described.
What’s claimed
Accounts, testimony and theories, as told by the people who tell them.
The wounds. Quilodrán says some of the animals were missing an eye, while others were missing tongues, ears, tissue from the head and neck, and parts of the genital area. “It’s as if they’d been burned,” he said of some of the surfaces, per Patagonia Press. He told LM Neuquén the tongues were “cut at the back, like with a laser.” “They have no tongue and the eye is white,” he said. “And these aren’t animals that have been dead for a month.”
What wasn’t there. Quilodrán says he found no spilled blood, no claw marks and no tracks. He has seen pumas kill mares and guanacos, he says, and knows the wounds they leave. “You grow up in the countryside and you know how the animals kill,” he told the radio interviewer. He also says there was no smell of death, and that caracaras, armadillos and other scavengers stayed away. “No animal came near to eat them,” he told LM Neuquén.
“A light like a plate, with a tail.” After his photos spread, Quilodrán says, people began contacting him. Workers heading to the Orizon mineral-water plant told him that 10 to 15 days before he found the horses, around 8:40 a.m. as dawn was breaking, they saw “a light like a plate, with a tail.” “When they got out of the van they were riding in to film it or take photos, it disappeared,” he told LM Neuquén.
More lights. Others told him they had seen an intense light over farmland at night, and an acquaintance in Puerto Deseado passed on an account of a light descending near a group of people. Quilodrán himself recalled seeing a large light with smaller points of light crossing the sky last year. “You see lights and you don’t pay them any mind, but this thing that happened with the animals took me completely by surprise,” he said.
Sheep near Lago Blanco. Someone connected to a ranch near Lago Blanco told Quilodrán about earlier cases of sheep found missing ears, tongues and other soft parts, according to Patagonia Press.
Chupacabras or UFOs. Local theories range from the “chupacabras” to UFOs, Patagonia Press and ADNSUR reported. Both noted that no evidence has been presented linking the lights to the deaths.
The police explanation
Mulero told Ahora en Comodoro, as quoted by LM Neuquén, that the horses “had been dead for some time.” Officers found no sign of intruders, no indication of livestock rustling and “no traces of knife perforations that would suggest an external factor,” he said.
“We work on scientific evidence, not theories or rumors,” Mulero said. “This whole idea of supernatural phenomena, lights in the sky or mutilations is a rural myth.”
In his account, “the sun, the wind and dehydration make the skin dry out and contract quickly over the bones,” and the injuries to the soft, moist parts of the bodies come from “the natural action of scavenging animals, birds of prey or insects, which is the first thing they consume.” As for five deaths at once, he said that in these sparsely populated areas it happens “because of the climate, lack of water, scarcity of pasture or because the animals ate something in a certain area that disagreed with them.”
So Río Mayo has two accounts. A rancher says he has never seen anything like it, and his neighbors describe a light with a tail. A police commander says the steppe explains it. No necropsy has been published to settle it.
Sources
- ¿Un chupacabras en Chubut?: encontraron cinco caballos muertos y extrañas luces que aparecieron en el cielo (Spanish) (opens in new tab) — ADNSUR
- Cinco caballos muertos, extrañas mutilaciones y luces en el cielo: el misterio que inquieta a Río Mayo (Spanish) (opens in new tab) — Patagonia Press The image of lights over the countryside at the top of this article is labeled as an AI-generated illustration. It isn't a photo of anything the witnesses saw.
- Caballos mutilados y luces misteriosas en el cielo: se supo qué había pasado (Spanish) (opens in new tab) — LM Neuquén