OVNI, born Gilberto Miguel Martínez Henríquez, is a Dominican rapper and actor. His stage names are a career in a list: Ovni LC, Ovni Lo Correcto, Ovni Experiencia, Ovni Exp. Each one says which room he was in at the time.

Lo Correcto

Lo Correcto is a name a Dominican rap history cannot skip. It was founded by Tony Hasbún and Núcleo Salomón and it held OVNI, Básico, SinFin, Faqundo González, Crooklyn and Beethoven Villaman among others.

What made it different from a crew is that it was organised as a business cooperative. In a country where rappers of that era had no label, no radio and no contracts, a group of them pooling the work into a shared structure was not a stylistic choice; it was the only way the records got made and paid for. Ito Ogamy had been doing something adjacent a decade earlier with Alcapón Rap.

Experiencia, the duo he made with Básico, gave him another of his names.

When the next thing arrived

Charles Family and Complot Records came up around 2003 and 2004 and changed who the audience was listening to. Lo Correcto ignored them for years, and interviewers still ask OVNI whether the group felt its position slipping. By several accounts it was DJ Scuff who finally pushed Beethoven Villaman into answering.

That is a small story and a useful one. Dominican rap has no institutions, so its history is transmitted as argument — who ignored whom, who answered, who was first — and the people who were there are the only archive.

The judge’s chair

He has sat five consecutive years as a judge of the Red Bull Batalla, the largest Spanish-language freestyle competition there is. Judging it means being trusted by rappers across two continents to say who won, which is a different authority from having hits.

He also teaches. In 2022 he ran a rap lyric-writing workshop with the digital creator Jhonwayne, and on World Hip Hop Day a national newspaper asked him, rather than a younger artist, to lay out the chronology of the genre in the country.

Despertar, in July 2026, is his most recent single, and it goes where his generation tends to go: a message rather than a hook. Lápiz Conciente and the rappers who came after him are the ones with the numbers, but OVNI is on the short list of people they all have to acknowledge.