My dad was born in the prov­ince of Cha­co, and mi­grat­ed (very slow­ly) some 1500km to the south. The mi­gra­tion was slow enough that he man­aged to have two dif­fer­ent lo­cal foot­ball teams to like.

The one he liked when I met him was Unión de San­ta Fe, but the team of his child­hood and youth was the re­mark­ably ob­scure Cha­co For­ev­er. And of course, be­cause it's what peo­ple do when their teams have no chance of ev­er win­ning any­thing, he liked one "big" team just to have some chance to cel­e­brate (Bo­ca Ju­niors, in his case).

On­ce, at the end of the 60s, he was driv­ing north, to­wards Re­sisten­ci­a, the home of Cha­co Forever, with my mom and my big broth­er, maybe a year old sit­ting in my mom's lap, no seat­belt­s. Those were the 60s and chil­dren sur­vived be­cause lead poi­son­ing seems to be an an­ti­dote for sec­ond hand smoke and car crash­es.

Then, his car stall­s. That was hard­ly un­usu­al. Our usu­al av­er­age speed on long trips was about 20k­m/h once you ac­count­ed for the stops to add wa­ter to the ra­di­a­tor, change flat tires, get a me­chan­ic to see why the lights did­n't work, and ar­riv­ing at the wrong town. My dad liked cars, but cars hat­ed him.

But be­fore the car stalled, they had seen a light by the side of the road, up high. A light that seemed to fol­low them. And the car did­n't start. That road in those times was lone­ly, and dark, and in bad main­te­nance. So stop­ping in the mid­dle of it was a recipe for be­ing killed by a truck.

A lit­tle lat­er, the car start­s, and the light ap­pears again, and again it stop­s. Here, ac­cord­ing to my moth­er, my dad got out of the car, and start­ed shout­ing at the aliens to stop be­ing id­iot­s, that they were go­ing to get him killed. Af­ter that, the light dis­ap­peared, and they con­tin­ued trav­el­ing with­out fur­ther me­chan­i­cal is­sues.

And a few days ago, this hap­pened: A UFO ap­peared over a foot­ball prac­tice. The foot­ball team? Cha­co For­ev­er.