“Follow me, Chango!”

Argentine news reporter José de Zer didn’t just chase stories. He chased gnomes, UFOs, chupacabras, and whatever paranormal or unexplained activity he could find in his reports for Nuevediario, one of the most popular news shows in 1980s Argentina. 

With his faithful cameraman sidekick, Carlos “Chango” Torres, following him around like a Sancho Panza to a Quixote of the Bizarre, José de Zer was lucky enough to find these mysteries every time. How? Easy: he faked them.

Now, The Man Who Loved UFOs, the latest film by Argentine director Diego Lerman, will bring the local icon of bizarro journalism to the big screen, played by Leonardo Sbaraglia (Puán, Wandering Heart). Produced by Netflix, the film will premiere at the San Sebastián Film Festival, where it will run for the Golden Shell in the official competition. Lerman’s last film to play at San Sebastián, Una especie de familia, won the Jury Prize for Best Script in 2017. Lerman’s own daughter Renata also won the Silver Shell for best supporting actress in her father’s El suplente (2022).

Lerman’s film taps into one of the most memorable episodes of de Zer’s extensive career. It happened in 1986, when he set up a flamboyant report about an supposed UFO landing site near Uritorco Mountain in Córdoba. It was based on no real facts other than some burnt pasture in the middle of nowhere. De Zer was working in Villa Carlos Paz, just outside the city of Córdoba, when he came across tabloid reports about a mysterious dark spot on the ground. That was enough to get him started. The report became a week of rolling footage, featuring strange burnt insects, hieroglyphics in caves, and live footage of strange lights in the night sky. 

It was all fake. He planted the insects himself. He painted rocks in his hotel room. The shiny aircraft? A couple of guys with flashlights in the middle of the night and the right camera angle. Nuevediario’s viewing numbers spiked. 

“Every time we went back to Buenos Aires our news editor would send us right back, because we were getting great numbers,” Torres recalled in an interview for Radar 20 years ago. 

Gnomes, UFOs, magnetic pits

Born José Keizer in 1941, José de Zer had a long career in journalism. He was already an established TV reporter covering all sorts of stories when he started reporting on paranormal — or just plain weird — events for Nuevediario. A relentless, chain-smoking journalist whose life could be as frenzied as his reporting. The son of a theater lighting designer, he had survived both the Six Days War in Israel as a young reserve lieutenant, and a serious car crash in Patagonia.

He used to cover major crime stories and show business, and befriended popular celebrities like Alberto Olmedo and Buenos Aires governor (and later president) Eduardo Duhalde. His daughter Paula once described him as a serial womanizer, who had secret affairs with TV celebrities and several illegitimate children. It was actually during a break in his summer coverage of the Villa Carlos Paz theater season that he came across the famous burnt pasture that would lead him to Uritorco, a few kilometers away.   

José de Zer’s stories were always a bit too crazy to be taken seriously: gnomes wandering around La Plata, a strange pit with magnetic powers that pulled people in, dangerous narco gangs hiding in Argentina’s forests and jungles. They were as clearly staged as they were exciting, and drew huge numbers in the pre-cable TV era, back when fake news was just a way to describe harmless entertainment, rather than a political weapon to undermine democracies.

De Zer also delivered solid reporting, like his on-site coverage of the assault on military compound La Tablada in 1989, when a guerrilla group attempted to take over an army base in Buenos Aires Province. He also got to interview boxing champion Carlos Monzón shortly after he was jailed for murdering his wife Alicia Muñiz in 1988. 

José de Zer died at the age of 56, after battling with Parkinson’s and esophagus cancer. An old-school reporter, it was his knack for incredible stories — in the way of Ripley’s Believe It or Not, which became popular in Argentina in 1987 — that made him a pop culture icon. And his Blair Witch Project style of reporting and his instinct for the appeal of the bizarre set a precedent for the late-1990s TV aesthetics of chaotic talk-shows and gonzo reporting.