Alejandro Agostinelli

Childhood and early youth

Son of Mirtha Esther Zamudio —a social psychologist and co-founder of the Escuela de Psicología de Buenos Aires, directed by Alfred Moffat— and of Jorge Agostinelli, Alejandro Agostinelli attended elementary school at the Escuela Normal Nº 10 Luis M. Cullen and highschool at the Colegio Industrial Ingeniero Luis A. Huergo ENET Nº 9.

Journalism

Agostinelli entered the world of journalism because of an early vocation for scientific heterodoxy, beginning with his interest in UFOs. In 1977, together with a group of fellow students at the Colegio Luis A. Huergo, formed the Grupo Aficionado a la Investigación de Fenómenos Espaciales (Amateur Research Group for Space Phenomena, GAIFE), dedicated to studies of astronomy, astronautics and ufology. In 1979 he wrote and distributed its first publication, the Boletín GAIFE, along with Adrián Legaspi.

In 1980, with Juan Carlos Zabalgoitia, Agostinelli published the newsletter of the Centro de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos No Convencionales (Center for the Study of Unconventional Aerial Phenomena, CEFANC), which for its third and final issue was renamed Fenómenos Aéreos (Aerial Phenomena).

In 1982 he began collaborating with William Carlos Roncoroni and Alejandro Enrique Chionetti in writing the Ufo Press magazine, edited by the Comisión de Investigaciones Ufológicas (Commission of UFO Research, CIU), representative in Argentina of the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) founded by Dr. Joseph Allen Hynek, until his death in 1986. UFO Press was published until 1987. In December 1982, Agostinelli collaborated with Roncoroni in organizing a massive presentation of Dr. Hynek in the General San Martín Cultural Center of Buenos Aires. That same year, Agostinelli joined the newsroom of the nationwide newspaper La Voz. Starting at the general News Bureau, he was later promoted to the International section of that paper.

A year later he edited together with Aram Aharonian, El País, a version of La Voz made for Córdoba Province, under Dr. Gustavo Roca. He was also a writer for Pueblo de la Nación until that newspaper was terminated, in 1985.

In 1991 he entered the newsroom of the Conocer y Saber magazine (later named Conozca Más). He has also collaborated with the magazines Misterios, Enciclopedia Popular Magazine and Gente, and with the newspapers La Prensa and Página/12. That year he was one of the founders and joined the Directive Committee of the CAIRP Foundation (Argentine Center for the Research and Refutation of Pseudoscience) and was a writer and an advisor for the journal El Ojo Escéptico ("The Skeptical Eye"). He then served as a producer for Channel 9 and América TV of Argentina.

Between 1994 and 1995 he was a writer in the Politics and International sections of the newspaper La Prensa, being a correspondent in the Triple Frontier after the terrorist attack on the AMIA Jewish center. He also covered the Operation Río I against drug trafficking and the Cenepa War between Peru and Ecuador. In the same journal he created and edited the section En Trance.

In 1998 he joined Editorial Perfil as the editorial secretary for the popular science magazine Descubrir. He then was a staff member in the Collectibles and Multimedia areas of Perfil and edited a dozen infomagazines for magazines such as Noticias, Semanario and Caras. He was editorial secretary from the beginning in the magazines El cacerolazo (directed by Andrés Cascioli), Hombre and NEO. At the same time, he wrote for the magazines Rolling Stone and Web! (Argentina), Cuadernos de Ufología, La alternativa racional, Bitniks, Más allá de la Ciencia, Enigmas and Año/Cero (Spain), and Gatopardo (Colombia). Agostinelli also published his work in the American magazines The APRO Bulletin and The Anomalist, the British Flying Saucer Review, the French Lumières Dans la Nuit, Phénomena and VSD, the Italian Giornale dei Misteri and the Brazilian UFO.

After he left Editorial Perfil (2007), Agostinelli wrote for the magazines Pensar, published by the Center for Inquiry (CFI), El Escéptico, Veintitrés, Newsweek Argentina and Bacanal, among others.

He was the creator and editor of the website Dios! (2002–2004), editor of Magia Crítica (2008–2010), a blog that was part of the online edition of the journal Crítica de la Argentina, and wrote for the blog Ciencia Bruja (2011–2013), published by Yahoo! Argentina and replicated in other sites of the company in the Americas. He currently edits the blog factor 302.4 / Factorelblog.com

Research and controversies

The enigma of the Uritorco. In January 1986 there was an alleged "UFO landing" on a slope of the Sierras del Pajarillo, near Capilla del Monte, Córdoba Province, Argentina. Agostinelli traveled there, took measures and samples, and found that the alleged evidence of landing, called a "stain", had not been caused "from above" by "an object emitting heat", as stated in an official press release, but that the heat could have ascended from the base of the hill. Agostinelli proposed that the mysterious "stain" could have been caused by a mere fire.

The accusations against Valentina de Andrade. In August 1991 Agostinelli published in Página/12 a story under the title "The Invaders", his first article on the Lineamiento Universal Superior (L.U.S.), an Argentine-Brazilian group led by a couple who claimed to be in contact with extraterrestrials. Two years later, Agostinelli did some self-criticism for having used words such as "brainwashing" and "destructive cult" to refer to the action of new religious movements. "The cults are more religious than they are dangerous", he wrote in the journal La Maga.

Science vs. New Age. In 1992–1993, Futuro, a section in Página/12, reproduced a controversy where representatives of science spoke against and in favor of the New Age movement. The polemic began when, in an October 1992 edition, Futuro published a chapter of the book Strange Weather, by Andrew Ross, a sociologist at Princeton University. Among other things, Ross wrote that skeptic groups were "a symptom of the crisis in scientific rationality and materialism". In 1996, Ross, being an editor for the journal Social Text, approved an article by physicist Alan Sokal that was actually a parody intended to reveal the lack of rigor of postmodernist philosophy. Agostinelli contested that Ross "chooses to embrace the new faces of trickery to express his disbelief in 'rationalist science'". The controversy took eight editions of Futuro, with many academics participating in the debate, including Alejandro Piscitelli, Marina Umaschi, Leonardo Moledo, Denise Najmanovich and Alejandro J. Borgo. The discussion continued in El Ojo Escéptico articles, with opinion pieces by Celso Aldao and Manuel Comesaña, titular professors in the National University of Mar del Plata; Fernando Saraví, associate professor of Biological Physics at the Faculty of Medical Sciences of the National University of Cuyo; and CAIRP methodology consultant, Lic. Daniel De Cinti.

The Roswell "autopsy". In 1995 Agostinelli denounced as a possible fraud Ray Santilli's video of an alleged autopsy of an alien from the Roswell UFO incident. Agostinelli enlisted, on behalf of La Prensa, the help of Diego Licenblat, an expert in special effects, to explain how they could have made the dummy seen in the film, and provided the idea for the program Memoria, which mounted a recreation of the fake autopsy to expose how easy, fast and cheap it was to create that footage.

Sai Baba, a sinner God?. In 2001–2002, Agostinelli produced for Zona de Investigación (a program in Azul TV of Argentina) several controversial reports, being prominent among them the one that addressed the sexual abuse allegations against Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba. The program, divided into two reports issued on August 5 and 12, 2001 under the title "A sinner God?", was an international production that collected testimonies hitherto ignored in Argentina of former followers of Sai Baba. The series presented stories of the experiences of former devotees and counterarguments from devotees. It also included original discoveries.