In 1907, Argentine aeronaut Aarón Félix Martín de Anchorena (1877-1965) brought from France a balloon which he named “Pampero”, after the cool Pampero wind which blows on the flat plains of Patagonia and the Pampas. Its first ascension was made on Christmas Day 1907, when Anchorena and well-known sportsman Jorge Newbery inflated the “Pampero” using the Belgrano gasworks at the Sociedad Sportiva Argentina in Buenas Aires (located in Palermo what is now the Campo de Polo), rose to 2000 feet altitude and drifted for two hours across the Río de la Plata to land at a ranch about 30 miles away in Conchillas, Uruguay. The journey had been the first aerial crossing of the Río de la Plata, and numerous flights followed successfully. On October 17, 1908, Eduardo Newbery, brother of Jorge, invited his friend Thomas Owen, a prominent yachtsman, to accompany him on a night flight. When Owen became absent, Newbery decided to make the flight anyway, onto which he invited Sergento Eduardo Romero. After leaving as usual from the Sociedad Sportiva Argentina to the southeast, the balloon disappeared without a trace.