An observation with several dates
Some historical UFO stories become confusing because the observation, publication and later explanation are collapsed into one moment. The Bonilla case benefits from keeping all three apart. An unusual appearance recorded in the nineteenth century is not the same thing as a modern discovery of alien vehicles.
A 2011 research preprint by Héctor Javier Durand Manterola, María de la Paz Ramos Lara and Guadalupe Cordero revisits observations made by Mexican astronomer José A. y Bonilla at Zacatecas on 12 and 13 August 1883. According to the authors, Bonilla reported objects passing across the solar disc in L’Astronomie in 1886 without proposing an explanation for the phenomenon. [1]
A dramatic proposal, carefully labelled
The authors suggest a highly fragmented comet as their working hypothesis. Their estimates of the objects’ distances, dimensions and masses follow from that interpretation and their treatment of the historical observations. Those calculations are not independent measurements proving that a particular comet nearly struck Earth. The source is a research preprint, and this article does not present its proposal as a settled identification. [1]
Our assessment: the alien-fleet interpretation faces the same basic demand for evidence. A silhouette crossing the Sun does not establish a machine, its origin or its intelligence. Before choosing any explanation, a reader should ask what information the observation actually constrains and which assumptions introduce the proposed scale and distance.
Keep the photographic claim separate
This article deliberately avoids announcing the first UFO photograph or a confirmed near-catastrophe. Such superlatives would require a separate historical and technical case. The interesting story is how a limited old observation can support very different later readings, with very different levels of confidence. Bonilla’s Mexican setting also has no demonstrated link to Tartary. Its place in the series is as a later historical sky puzzle, not an extension of an established Tartarian technological network.