Foreword
There appears to be no room in the contemporary paradigm of ufology for the traditional close encounters of the third kind. The field has become mired in efforts aimed at strong-arming the U.S. Federal government out of information it supposedly has on the “extraterrestrial truth” of the UFO phenomenon. Many advocates of such a course of action may be stunned if the government – succumbing to so much rhetoric and verbal judo – releases information hinting at a truly terrifying possibility: that for all its warships and tanks and aircraft, officialdom is no closer to knowing what UFOs really are, much less protecting the taxpayer against them.
As to “the truth behind UFOs” – who can say?
Encounters with non-human entities, however, have been reported for decades, since the early days of the “flying saucer” phenomenon by people who did not seek to profit from disclosing their encounters and ultimately died no better informed than those around them. The year 2013 marks forty years since the “Year of the Humanoids – 1973” and the prodigious number of reports that emerged worldwide at the time. Skeptical ufologists and outright naysayers may argue, perhaps with reason, that a fair share of these cases could have been journalistic confections, spin-offs of the actual cases that captured the headlines of the time. They could have been misidentifications of commonplace phenomena, but the accumulated writings of that distant time suggest something else was going on, eluding the best efforts of law enforcement, civilian researchers and the media to get to the bottom of things.
Not all cases involving non-human presences took place in 1973 or in the U.S., either. As we endeavor to show here, Latin America and Spain contributed significantly to the case histories, the language barrier serving as an obstacle to any “cross-pollination” of eyewitness accounts, as many of these spoke and read no English at all, and in some cases could not even read in their mother tongue.
But where did they go? What became of the wild and wonderful array of creatures that both startled and terrified so many ordinary citizens from all walks of life in at least a dozen countries? Were scores of planets from an intergalactic federation sending all their vehicles and member races to Earth in 1970s for no apparent reason, or is the answer more subtle? Perhaps a cosmic mind – or even a genius terrae – taken these entities out of some toolbox of the impossible and set them in our midst, gauging our reactions to the unfamiliar and downright skin-crawling, as Jacques Bergier suggested. Maybe western societies were seeing the “phantoms of the Id” that caused the destruction of the fictional society of the Kralls in Forbidden Planet. Or John Keel’s ultraterrestrials were playing the “games non-people play” over and over again in a variety of cultural settings and environments.
Some of the cases in this monograph never became widely known, and indeed, some of them occurred in subsequent decades. Argentina has been a source of CE-3s even into the 21stcentury, a place where motorists and farm laborers in the world’s fifth largest country can still have experiences that would have attracted the attention of media forty years ago during the heroic age of such cases.
Acknowledgements
The Institute of Hispanic Ufology (IHU) has been fortunate to rely on the active support and contributions of its contributing editors and writers since 1998.
Our heartfelt thanks go out to: Ana Luisa Cid
Andrea and Silvia Pérez Simondini of Visión OVNI Angel Carretero Olmedo of Andalucía Misteriosa Angel Rodríguez Alvarez of GEIFO
Carlos Alberto Guzmán Rojas
Carlos Iurchuk of the now-defunct El Dragón Invisible Daniel J. López
Diego Sánchez Dr. Oscar A. Galíndez Ernesto Escobar Grupo FENIX
Guillermo Giménez and Christian Quintero of Planeta OVNI J.J. Benítez
José Manuel García Bautista Liliana Flotta and Eduardo Grosso
Liliana Núñez Orellana of Archivos Forteanos Latinoamericanos Lucy Guzmán de Pla, OVNI.net
Luis Alberto Reinoso
Luis Burgos of Fundación Ovnilógica Argentina Luis Ramírez Reyes
Manuel Carballal Manuel Ramírez Néstor Berlanda
Oscar A. (“Quique”) Mario of CEUFO Oscar Raul Mendoza
Pablo Omastott Pablo Villarubia Mauso Pedro M. Fernández Raúl Garrido Lepold
Raul Núñez of the Instituto de Investigaciones Exobiológicas Salvador Freixedo and Magdalena del Amo-Freixedo
Sebastián Aranguren Sebastián Robiou,
The Humanoid Conspiracy
By Scott Corrales
Even if J. Allen Hynek hadn't come up with the classification, and Steven Spielberg hadn't made the movie, another name would have surely come about to describe "close encounters of the third kind" --the most compelling, exhilarating and downright terrifying of all --the scenarios involving --the possibility of contact with intelligent, non-human life and the repercussions it entails. Given the enormity of the possibility, early researchers into the UFO phenomenon were understandably hesitant to acknowledge its existence. Looking into reports of strange aerial objects that defied our military's best aircraft was controversial enough.
In the 1950's, the public at large found some humorous relief in telling jokes about little green men asking parked cars "take us to your leader." Contactees amused some and enraged others with colorful accounts of roadside encounters with Venusians, Neptunians and denizens of other planets. However, a decade later--and certainly two decades later--stories of encounters with unknown quantities were becoming commonplace.
Hynek left his classification system for posterity to employ and develop, and it is nowadays possible to hear about close encounters of the fourth and fifth kind as some experts tried to cover abduction experiences and other UFO-related phenomena. Nevertheless, it is the third leg of the tripod that interests us here: the moment in time when certain individuals among the many billions on earth have looked upon what we term "aliens"--regardless of their provenance.
Skeptics have always complained about the reliability of CE-III's, regardless of the country in which they occur. The opinion of a trained witness--usually a police officer or other uniformed personnel--is believed to carry greater weight than that of the casual observer faced with the unknown, as in the cases we have discussed so far.
But the situation acquires a wholly different complexion when members of the military are involved. Soldiers, sailors and airmen, given the nature of their training, are therefore believed to have greater accuracy in their statements. The following accounts involve recent CE-III's with military personnel. On November 25, 1998, a sentry patrolling the perimeter of the Morón de la Frontera Air Base near the city of Seville (Spain) at five o' clock in the morning was startled to hear a sound he likened to "steel plate being cut".
The sentry shouted a challenge; when no one responded, he loaded his rifle and fired two shots in the air, while letting loose the German Shepherd watchdog that accompanied him on his rounds. Almost immediately following the two loud reports, an entity described as a two meter tall "sort of person" emerged from the surrounding thicket.
According to Spanish researcher José Manuel García Bautista, the sentry was astonished by the being's height and its fluorescent green eyes, adding that the darkness kept him from making out its physical details. With his heart pounding, the sentry fired another shot straight into the creature, to no avail. He then ordered the German Shepherd to attack; the animal charged the dark figure, but stopped short of it with a loud whimper. The highly trained guard dog cowered back to the sentry, who was at a loss as to what to do next. The entity spared him further confusion by vanishing into the thicket once more.
After contacting his superiors over a handheld radio, the sentry was taken to see the base commander, who advised him to keep the whole affair confidential and awarded him a week's leave. But before going off on his furlough, the sentry noticed that his guard dog now sported a long scar running along its left shoulder blade: physical proof of the encounter with the unknown creature.
From the late 1980s and well through the 1990's, the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico held pride of place as the no-holds-barred strangest place on the planet: sightings of UFOs in the air, land and sea, strange creatures like the Bigfoot-like Comecogollos and the ubiquitous Chupacabras, and the possibility of collusion among the military and island authorities to keep these matters a secret, filled the pages of many a book and magazine around the planet.
Long Tall Alien
In spite of these and other paranormal goings-on, it is still possible to come across traditional CE-3 cases. One of the most compelling ones occured on July 31, 2000 in the densely populated Bairoa sector of Aguas Buenas, a bedroom community of metropolitan San Juan.
According to researchers Lucy Guzmán and Edwin Plaza, the Aguas Buenas incident began in the early morning hours of the 31st, when Marie Molina, the witness to the events, was awakened by an unusual sound on her corrugated zinc roof at exactly five o'clock in the morning, followed by the sudden and frantic barking of her neighbor's watchdogs. Parting the items of clothing she'd hung across the window in order to peer out into the darkness, she was startled beyond words.
Standing with its back to her, at an estimated distance of 15 feet, was a tall creature with pallid,
wrinkled skin, long ears, arms and legs, and an egg-shaped head. Ms. Molina was apparently able to see the corners of its elongated white eyes with black centers, but unable to make out the details of its mouth and nose, nor the number of fingers on its hands.
But the most curious detail of this backyard encounter was the fact that the strange entity shook its body incessantly, with its hands clenched in what Molina took to be a prayeful attitude. The witness would later tell Guzmán and Plaza that the creature's shudders reminded her of "a person afflicted with a muscular cramp and who is trying to relive it [by shaking]."
Ms. Molina watched the creature for approximately fifteen minutes until she developed a sudden, perhaps irrational, fear that the shaking creature would somehow try and get into her house. This prompted her to reach for the phone and call another person (described as "a sister, friend or neighbor" by the researchers) who urged her not to call the police for help, since "she would not be believed", and asked her to hold on while a relative was sent out to rescue her.
Five minutes after having made the phone call, Ms. Molina decided to check on her unwanted visitor again, but this time accidentally bumping her leg against an object near the wall. The sound caused the creature to stop its activity (but apparently not its shaking) and turn to look at her. Clearly able to see its face now, the witness remarked that it appeared to be giving her a telepathic command to shut her eyes. This prompted her to step back from the window and rub her eyes repeatedly in an effort to focus and somehow break the suggestion placed by the entity. The fact that it had been able to "command" her to take action only served to ratchet Ms. Molina's fear even higher--if the shaking creature could control her mind so readily, what might be in store for her?
Another five minutes of barely restrained panic elapsed until Molina heard her name being called from the street--it was the person that her telephone contact had sent to rescue her. Perhaps feeling
heartened by this, she ran back to the window to see if the creature was still in the backyard, but it had vanished. In an article for Inexplicata (Fall 2000), Lucy Guzman notes that Marie Molina had experienced some mild changes in the wake of the event: a chain smoker all of her life, Molina no longer felt the urge to smoke, "nor was she in bad mood over not smoking."
The 2000 Aguas Buenas case brings to mind another Puerto Rican case which occurred in mid-'70s during the UFO wave which included the mutilations caused by the Moca Vampire. On April 17, 1975 Orlando Franceschi, an ambulance driver for a hospital in the city of Ponce, on the island's Caribbean shore, returned to his house after 8:00 p.m. that evening only to become aware of the fact that
something unsual was going on in his backyard. Franceschi's could see his watchdog jumping into the air in a frantic effort to clear the fence get away from whatever it was. The homeowner, tired after a long day's work, angrily set off for the backyard, taking the precaution to arm himself with a shovel which he kept against one of the house's exterior walls.
Nothing could have prepared the ambulance driver for what he found in his backyard: a bizarre entity with long, pointed ears, a long nose, lipless mouth and greyish, ashen skin. Franceschi would later describe it eyes as being "black spots", and having a jawline reminiscent of an ape's. The creature walked toward the homeowner with a jerky, stiff gait.
In a mixture of fear and anger, Franceschi struck the five foot tall intruder with the shovel, but was surprised to see that it was unharmed by the terrific blow. Oddly enough, the entity backed off, perhaps deliberately allowing Franceschi to deliver a second shovel-blow without any effect. But when the human was winding up to deliver a third strike, he began to feel his body becoming numb and paralyzed, leaving him at the mercy of whatever it was that could withstand such physical punishment without flinching. Helpless, expecting the worse from the non-human figure, the ambulance driver was shocked to see the entity (which he described as a "zombie") fade into thin air.
Although some rough similarities exist between the creatures--the black-centered white eyes, pointed ears, pallid skin and apparent ability to employ mental powers against humans--there are no
unexplained craft present in these CE-III's, and therefore the beings cannot be properly be considered "ufonauts" (although this should not really pose a problem, since many accepted CE-III's like the Kelly-Hopkinsville event in 1955 did not feature UFOs. Perhaps both of these Puerto Rican cases, separated from each other by a gulf of 25 years, would benefit from the revisions to the classification system set forth by Jacques Vallée in his book Confrontations (Ballantine,1988). Vallée proposes a complementary classification of "AN" for anomalous events, paralleling the CE 1, 2 and 3 classfications. His AN-3's would apply to "anomalies with associated entities. This class could include ghosts, yetis and other instances of cryptozoology as well as elves and spirits" (p.217).
We do not know if Mr. Franceschi benefitted from his encounter (in fact, we can only infer from the text that the ambulance driver shared a characteristic exhibited by "Lucky" Sutton during the
Kelly-Hopkinsville case--the unnerving astonishment that the intruder was immune to harm), but we can see that Ms. Molina's ability to quit smoking indicates that an unexpected benefit was derived from her sighting, much in the same way that Mrs. Sepúlveda in the Chilean case was inexplicably healed of her condition after the event. The Spanish sentry does not appear to have benefitted in any way aside from a very welcome furlough.
Another Argentinean Mystery
Liliana Flotta and Eduardo Grosso, researchers from the Argentinean city of Rosario, believe that healings in the wake of CE-3's or AN-3's are commonplace, particularly in their country. They cite the
case of a young married couple, Sergio and Sandra A. (ages 26 and 27, respectively) who were startled to behold an unexplained phenomenon taking place in the inner courtyard of their building, which was on the same level as their ground floor apartment. The husband saw only a luminous floating sphere, while the wife was cleary able to see a diminutive floating being. "According to Sandra," write Flotta and Grosso, "their upstairs neighbor was terrified that night by a ball of light that appeared inside her apartment." The researchers were able to confirm this event after interviewing the party in question. Prior to the experience, Sandra A. had experienced health concerns involving a fibroma, but shortly after that fateful evening in July 1992, she started having dreams about a diminutive entity coming into her room and inserting a needle into one of her ovaries. Such was the intensity of the pain that she would wake up screaming.
Soon after these "dreams" and the experience shared with her husband, Sandra A. discovered that she was pregnant and that a sonogram showed no trace of the fibroma. "Sandra and Sergio have since relocated to Greater Buenos Aires, where she gave birth to a boy," conclude the authors.
In our age of abductions and post-abduction trauma, looking at cases that involve UFO occupants or unusual humanoids as they go about their enigmatic business in our countrysides may seem hopelessy antiquated. However, unlike most abduction experiences and bedroom visitations, traditional CE-III's have the benefit of taking place away from the home and under circumstances involving more than a single witness to the event. To a certain extent, it helps that witnesses to traditional CE-III's are usually fully awake and engaged in other tasks (talking to friends and sightseeing, standing guard at an army base or having just returned from work, as in the cases we've seen here). Although the media has celebrated a number of breakthroughs in securing evidence of alien abduction, the ability to collect samples, such as the soil and anomalous water in the Chilean case, serves to bolster a case's credibility. Unfortunately, none of these things brings us closer to solving the riddle posed by these experiences. News of an alleged three-meter-tall non-human entity shambling toward a roadside in Chile (March 2010) brought back memories of the truly giant UFO occupants that were commonly reported in the 1950s and ‘60s, usually in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, although cases in Spain and even the USA were reported. As with everything involving UFOs, we must first assume good faith on the part of people who are beyond our reach: the witness, the magazine or newspaper in which the story first appeared, and so forth. These cases were made known to U.S. audiences by Jim and Coral Lorenzen’s books on UFOs in the Sixties and Seventies, contributed by a formidable network of correspondents and advisors in other countries. Some reports suggested that their tall stature proved beyond question their non-terrestrial origin, as even humans who will someday be born in a low-gravity environment may attain considerable height. Their purposes seemed centered on “gathering samples”, much like their other occupants reported at the time, or sometimes chasing terrified witnesses (potential “samples”? Who knows) who made narrow escapes.
An argument can be made in the recent Chilean sighting that energy released in tremendous
earthquakes may cause unusual effects in the human mind, perhaps leading individuals to see what isn’t there, or misinterpret what they’re seeing. But it is nonetheless worth looking back at some of the cases that we have accumulated over the decades before relegating giant UFO-related beings to the company of the Jolly Green Giant.
In January 2002, Argentinean researcher Pablo Omastott brought the following case to the attention of Quique Mario, director of that country's Proyecto Condor UFO research group. The event, a CE-III
involving a motorcyclist and a giant entity, had appeared in the January 15 issue of the Córdoba newspaper.
Enrique Moreno, 19, a clerical employee with the Ika-Renault corporation whose nocturnal job involves acting as a courier for business documents from one company office to another. Arriving at one of Ika-Renault's offices in the dark of the night to lay some paperwork in the middle of a table, he realized that the facility's lights flickered on and off inexplicably. Moreno paid no mind to the power fluctuation and hopped on his motorcycle, heading for his next destination.
Upon reaching a site where vehicles were parked before being sent out across the Andes to Chile, Moreno was amazed to see a giant green figure some 150 meters away. Thinking at first that it might be a welder carrying out his duties at that time of the night, the courier got on his motorcycle and drove toward the figure. When he came within thirty meters, his otherwise dependable bike backfired and hesitated, shuddering and becoming almost unmanageable. Moreno had to perform extraordinary efforts to remain in control of his two-wheeler, but he was much more distressed by the glowing figure than by his vehicle's unaccustomed reaction.
"I froze after seeing it," said Moreno. "It was like a robot standing more than two meters tall. Its angled head was hairless, it had shining, luminous eyes, and was dressed like a frogman, wearing a belt with a wide oval buckle around its waist."
The ungovernable motorcycle shot like an arrow out of control crossing an open gate and going straight across the road without its driver being able do a single thing about it.
"My arms still ache; it robbed me of my strength," he told the interviewer from Córdoba. "I felt as though I was in the middle of a magnetic field. It was cold that night, but the area surrounding me was very hot."
After the experience, Moreno stumbled through the factory's gates feeling a terrible buzzing in his head, as though it were about to explode. Factory personnel immediately drove him to a clinic where he was given sedatives. Although the newspaper considers that the young courier may have hallucinated the experience, it adds that there were other witnesses to the entity that very same evening: a nurse at the same medical facility Moreno had been driven to had administered a sedative to a woman who claimed having seen the same colossal figure levitate through the air and enter an unidentified flying object--an event which was confirmed, in turn, by residents of Villa de El Libertador, who had seen the alleged spacecraft that same evening.
As if these corroborating accounts were not enough, there is also the case involving trucker Luftolde Rodríguez, 52, who was slowly turning his tractor-trailer around and was terrified to find the green giant standing in front of his rig. The giant's presence appeared to drain not only the vehicle's power source, but the trucker's wristwatch and portable radio as well.
Given his proximity to the unknown figure, Rodríguez was better able to describe it. The giant, he said, was looking at him inquisitively; it had a flattened head, was completely bald and lacked eyebrows and eyelashes. Its ears were long, and it wore a glowing light blue outfit with a broad black belt and white boots. An interesting detail is that Rodríguez reports that the giant had a ball "similar to a billiard ball" in its left hand.
The article in Córdoba offers the following conclusion: "The giant's attitude was entirely harmless and could be said to be one of observation. The entity was completely made of energy, perhaps belonging to a form of life in which protoplasm no longer plays any part."
Little Deuce Coupe
Much has been written about people's love for their automobiles. Given the number of cars on our roads, the fact is unquestionable. However, not much has been put down on paper regarding the UFO phenomenon's similar affection for the humble car. Prior to the age of abductions, a fair share of UFO cases involved unsuspecting motorists.
"RV" never suspected he would be one of them.
As he drove at three o'clock in the morning along Spain's A-68 highway from the city of Logroño back to his home in the Basque country, the anonymous protagonist of our story was more interested in pulling into the nearest rest area rather than having a close encounter with the unknown. As luck would have it, he found one such rest stop further along the road, deserted but for the presence of large French tractor-trailer whose driver had obviously had the same idea.
"RV" parked his Citroen BX, turned off the ignition, and promptly shut his eyes, drifting off to sleep before he even knew it. Despite being a sound sleeper, "RV" was wakened by a slight buzzing sound and a bright light which he at first thought to come from another vehicle--perhaps another articulated trailer--pulling into the rest stop. The bright light gradually dimmed to extinction, and early morning darkness reigned over the area once more.
Even as he reflected on the sudden burst of light's origin, "RV" saw the driver of the French tractor-trailer exit the cab of his vehicle and approach the car with great urgency, pointing at the empty field adjacent to the rest area. "Did you see that?" asked the trucker in French.
"RV" cautiously got out of his car and was stunned. The source of the unexpected brightness turned out to be a vast dark structure, blacker than the surrounding night. The French trucker brimmed over with fear and nervous excitement, but willingly followed "RV"'s lead toward the dark structure.
When interviewed by Spanish ufologist Juan José Benítez in 1988, the year the event had occurred, "RV" could not explain what had possessed him to take the lead in a potentially foolhardy excursion, and he admitted to "not being a very curious person." Both men walked an estimated ten meters toward the ominous object before running into what can best be described as an "invisible wall". RV's eyeglasses pressed against his face as he hit the strange barrier, which he would describe to Benítez as having a gelatinous or plastic consistency. Even scarier was the green luminescence which emerged from nowhere to outline the looming dark structure.
The French trucker vented a few choice expletives in his language, which caused RV to take a second look at the structure with the greenish cast: twin colossi had seemingly emerged from the vehicle, advancing slowly toward the humans. Knees trembling with fear, RV guessed their height at three meters (9.8 feet), and their width seemed to match.
During the interview, RV was careful to state that he did not believe the colossi were robots--at least not mechanicals as we've come to understand them. They moved in unison, "as though they were
reflections of one another." Their faces were featureless, their arms hung by their sides, and their massive legs appeared to be slightly articulated. Silent in the darkness, the pair of giants stared
impassively at the two humans at a distance of five meters. Whatever courage or curiosity the truck driver and RV may have felt evaporated: both men broke into a frantic run, eventually hiding behind RV's car.
The entire event, which lasted about an hour, ended with a very slight buzzing sound coming from the dark structure, which began moving away at low altitude before disappearing. RV guessed that the structure could have conceivably been a hundred meters in diameter (roughly three hundred feet) and never once thought that the object and its silent "crew" could have been the product of any Earth technology. "Any country that has access to such artifacts will dominate the planet at its leisure," he told Benítez.
But the details surrounding the brush with the unknown were event stranger: during the entire hour, not a single car or truck had driven past the rest area in spite of the fact that the A-68 highway is a major artery; the French trucker jumped aboard his rig and "put the hammer down", zooming away from the rest area at top speed, not even bothering to exchange notes with RV regarding the bizarre occurrence both had shared. The battery of RV's Citroen BX became unable to hold a charge, despite the fact that the car was only a year old. Strange blister-like deformities appeared on the rear windshield and the front bumper, the parts of the Citroen which were made of plastic. Mechanics attributed them to proximity to a heat source. Nor did magnetic media fare much better: RV's credit cards refused to work at automatic teller machines.
Researcher Benítez was not disappointed when he visited the rest area in search of physical evidence. Only a short distance away from the blacktopped parking lot he found a large swath of grassy terrain that looked bleached and broken in comparison with the surroundings--desiccated without showing signs of having been singed or burned.
In the fateful early morning hours of a November day twenty six years ago, around 2:45 a.m., José María Trejo and Juan Carriozosa were standing guard outside the air base's fuel depot, each in their own guard shack, separated by a distance of two hundred feet. The night, which had otherwise been uneventful, was shattered by a loud, piercing, whistling sound that caused the soldiers to cover their ears for about five minutes. The high-pitched noise ended abruptly, causing the soldiers to emerge from their shacks. Given that they were insuring the safety of tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel, the possibility of a terrorist attack crossed their minds.
Armed with submachine guns, the soldiers decided to comb the area beyond Trejo's guard shack, which seemed to be closer to the source of the sound. They had only advanced a few feet when the high-pitched whistling sound was heard again, loud enough "to drive us crazy," in Carrizosa's words. Things were only getting started.
The very moment the second whistle-blast ended, the sky became filled with an intense light, "brighter than a flare", which lasted some twenty seconds. Both soldiers were amazed at the unsuspected display, and were still exchanging questions about it when a third soldier joined them, asking if they'd seen the light. Deciding that these events were a bit too unsettling not to be reported, they summoned the duty corporal, who ordered the three soldiers and a guard dog--a wolf hybrid--to patrol the area and check for anything unusual.
A crackling sound arose unexpectedly from a eucalyptus tree. The soldiers unleashed their growling dog, which ran at top speed toward the darkened area. The three men held their submachine guns tightly, expecting to hear the guard dog barking at an intruder. "The wolf-dog came back to us," Trejo told
researcher García, "but it seemed dazed, dizzy, as though someone or something had given it a beating or frightened it out of its wits."
The three soldiers began shouting challenges into the darkness, fingers on their triggers, expecting at any moment to find themselves in a heated gun-battle with intruders bent on detonating the fuel depot. "I felt a strange sensation," reported Trejo. "Something was standing behind me. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a green light. Spinning around on a heel, I found myself faced with the most fantastic and inexplicable sight I could've envisioned: a nine-foot tall human figure made of green light."
Even stranger, remarked another of the witnesses, was that the figure appeared to be composed of small points of green light, giving it a small head, thick torso and extremely long arms. The luminous giant appeared to have neither legs nor feet.
Trejo tried to fire a hail of bullets at the figure, but found it impossible to pull his Z-62 submachine gun’s trigger. Indeed, a gradual stiffening was taking over his body, inducing a sensation of lassitude. He could see and hear perfectly, however, managing to shout: "Get down, they're killing us!" before hitting the ground face first.
Trejo's terrified brothers-in-arms were not stricken by the enigmatic paralysis and opened fire against the towering green figure, estimating a total of forty or fifty shots between them. The green giant became brighter, "like the flash of a picture camera" before fading like an image on a television screen. Talavera de la Real was in turmoil. Alarms were sounded as some soldiers took up defensive positions and others headed for the fuel depot. The three sentries were hard pressed to explain what had occurred to an irate superior officer. But what saved them from an uncomfortable stay in the base's stockade was a cold physical fact: despite having ordered fifty men to comb the area in broad daylight, not a single cartridge case was found. A masonry wall behind the place where the green giant
materialized should have been pockmarked with bullet impacts, but was otherwise intact.
But it was Trejo--the first one to see the green intruder--who would pay the price physically: only a few days after the incident, he was afflicted by sudden bouts of blindness to which neither the base's medics nor physicians at an Army hospital were ever able to explain beyond a vague description of "nervous shock".
Giant UFO occupants have not formed part of recent case histories, and especially not during the abduction-haunted 1990's. They appear to be confined to certain parts of the world, as though assigned to them. Very few of them have taken place in the United States, and the only one worthy of mention is the August 1973 incident which occurred in Buffalo Mills, Pennsylvania, were residents saw a 9 foot tall giant with "a baleful expression" as it walked down the main street.
During the early days of ufology, speculation had it that the giant ufonauts were bred to perform a specific task, just as the small, large-headed ones seemed to be good at certain others. In the Botafuego case, the giants appeared insubstantial--projections designed to frighten away notoriously curious humans, perhaps? Had the entities been bent on enforcing a "no witnesses" policy, they could have surely caught up with the escaping vehicle in a few bounds. In the Talavera del Real case, we again find another insubstantial giant seemingly "probing the defenses" of a military facility.
The concept of these giants as security measures is highlighted in the case involving "RV" and the French trucker at the rest area. Were the monoliths involved in guarding a massive craft--probably a
mothership--that made a provisional landing for unknown reasons?
Deeper Questions Arise
“Is humanity alone in the universe?”
This question has bedeviled us for generations, although it might seem to be a recent query, a result of our interest in space exploration and the furious technological development that came about after World War 2. Others may lay the blame squarely on the shoulders of science-fiction, blaming our obsession the pulps of the 1920s and 30s, the “boys’ papers” of the 1900s, and the romantic
descriptions of worldly life on our neighboring worlds in the late 19thcentury. Readers with a taste for trivia might go back to the “Moon Hoax” of the 1830s, when newspapers claimed that a fanciful civilization of bat-people lived our planet’s satellite. We can jump headfirst into the vast pool of history and find evidence that the question was raised by civilizations of the past.
This issue was hardly disquieting to the average person in the “ancient world” as we call it. Humanity was by no means alone. There were other creatures – the ones we now call mythological – sharing the world with us. Granted, some of these were creations of the ancient storytellers, used to get a copper coin or two out of frightened listeners. Strange lands beyond the reach of ancient galleys were filled with what we would call “humanoids” – infamous regions whose inhabitants used their enormous feet as parasols, or whose heads grew out of unusual parts of the body.
Closer to the marble-pillared cities of the ancient world, there were forests, lakes and rivers with beings that, while having a generally human appearance, belonged to other orders of existence: the nymphs, undines, nixies, pixies and others too numerous to mention. Interaction with these aliens was to be avoided whenever possible, as the outcome of such close encounters was usually detrimental to mortals. On rare occasions friendship of sorts might be struck with them – sometimes by farmers and fishermen, on others by practitioners of theurgy. Of course, rumor had it that a nymph or sylph could bestow sexual favors upon a human, resulting in progeny of uncanny powers. Much of the contactee lore – and even alien encounter reports – of the 20thcentury mirrors these ancient beliefs almost perfectly.
The Church, however, was less sanguine about this business. Neither scripture nor the lengthy
arguments of priests and prelates included non-humans in the divine plan for salvation. These entities were ranked among demons, and were to be avoided at all costs, and the darkness of the Medieval period was compounded by fear. It was rumored, of course, that magicians and alchemists flouted this prohibition and had means of contacting these non-humans, and profited by their dealings with them. And here we are at the start of 21stcentury, with thousands of years of ancient lore behind us and stacks of reports from every continent on Earth regarding “visitors from outer space” who act much like the creatures that troubled our forebears, emerging out of lakes and rivers, taking us by surprise in forests, and sometimes appearing out of thin air within our homes. Their aspect is as varied as the colorful devices that transport them, so we are faced with the question raised by the late Otto Binder – is every single society in the universe sending its citizens to our world, or is something very strange going on here?
Cyberpals and Aliens
On February 16, 2001, forestry technician Ingrid Sperberg, 26, a resident of the city of Angol in northern Chile, managed to meet her cyberpal Patricio Vallejos, 25, a systems analyst from neighboring La Serena. The two had agreed to meet in person after a long friendship over the Internet, and Sperberg offered to show the out-of-towner the sights of her home town.
Vallejo arrived at Angol's bus terminal at eight thirty in the evening, as sunset crowned the city. At the station were Sperberg and her friend María Cristina Sepúlveda, 42, who had agreed to provide the transportation for the city tour and act as an unofficial chaperone on their meeting.
Maria Cristina drove the cyberpals around Angol and at one point, the three of them agreed to visit a scenic lookout from where it was possible to see the entire city of Angol brightly lit and standing out against the surrounding darkness.
Arriving at the lookout at 10:15 p.m., they were surprised to find they were the only car at the location, which is variously known as "El Mirador" or "Las Piñas" by the locals. They parked their car some four meters away from an iron gate adorned
with cartwheels, which guards the entrance to a field planted with pine and eucalyptus trees. Sperberg and Vallejo got out of the car to enjoy the view while María Cristina remained beside her vehicle. When the forestry technician and her friend looked back toward the field, they witnessed a white light ascending vertically from a distance estimated at some four hundred feet away. Rejoining María Cristina by the car, the trio witnessed a beam of light spreading open, fan-like, orange colored its base and soft violet at its top. According to their account, which appeared in a local newspaper, the beam of light "lit up everything some 40 meters around. Dry grass, depressions, the green of the trees and shrubs could be clearly seen."
The phenomenon lasted for some three to four minutes, during which a very frightened Ingrid Sperberg excused herself from her companions to get back into the car. A self-confessed skeptic about the UFO phenomenon, Sperberg stated, "I don't like seeing strange things."
A few more minutes elapsed before a solicitous María Cristina Sepúlveda went to check on her friend, discovering that the car's dome light, which had been hitherto working perfectly, did not activate upon opening the door. Puzzled, Maria Cristina repeated the maneuver a few times to no avail. It was necessary for her turn on the light source manually.
Meanwhile, Patricio Vallejo remained outside the car, taking in the veritable light show. Vallejo, who suffers hearing problems, did not notice the sound of "ringing bells" that the women had been clearly able to distinguish during the event.
The lights and sounds came to an end when the UFO abruptly vanished. Vallejo coaxed his cyberpal out of the car by assuring her that the coast was clear and that all had returned to normal.
He couldn't have been more wrong.
Sperberger became aware of a sound in the now-still night: a noise similar to that piece of metal being dragged over the loose paving stones of the country road they were on. "That's when I looked up, and
behind the iron gate I could see two figures standing 1.20 meters, tall, dark, nearing the gate. They weren't walking--they were dragging themselves along."
According to the event's protagonists, the beings' faces, hands and legs were invisible, and the entities gave the impression of being shadows. The nature of the sound was also elaborated upon later: Sepúlveda characterized it as sounding as though the beings "wore metal booties".
"When I saw them," Sperberger told journalists, "I looked at Patricio, who was alert to what was happening. At first I thought it could be people, as I struggled to find a rational explanation to what was going on. I heard the sound of metal. I’m sure that the figure on the left carried something strange, like two metal rods, but I'm not sure what they were."
The entities halted their progress only a few feet away from the decorated iron gate. The one on the left crossed the iron obstacle as though it were non-existent, and following a small walk-around, made an about face and returned to the field, rejoining its companion. The shadowy pair moved away from the stunned onlookers; Maria Cristina shone her car's high-beams on them as they departed, but there was nothing to be seen.
Ingrid Sperberger's plea to her companions about leaving the place as soon as possible was well received: the three boarded the car and left the scenic lookout behind. By their calculations, they returned to Angol at 10:40 p.m., so the entire event lasted 25 minutes. María Cristina would later add that as the car departed, she was able to see one of the dark entities through the rear view mirror, apparently pacing the car, before dissolving into an amorphous black mass.
In retrospect, Sperberger and her companions agreed that the ghostly entities made no attempt to communicate with them, but that the beings made a noise similar to speech, a "mumbling" sound; during the event, all three agreed that the immediate temperature appeared to be much greater than it should have been for that time of night. The heat appeared to be concentrated in the area occupied by the witnesses (microwaves?). The unusual heat was accompanied by an odd smell reminiscent of "burning wiring" or "burning rubber".
Although Ingrid Sperberger was the one most ill at ease with the paranormal events, it would be her friend María Cristina who would experience the unusual aftereffects of the ordeal. Ever since the close encounter on February 16, Sepúlveda claims to have been roused from sleep by the sound of metal being dragged on loose stone--the clangor made by the shadowy figures. Given her religious beliefs (an Adventist) she has refused to consider hypnotic regression and has attached religious significance to her experience, particularly after a healing experience which may be related to the encounter.
Sepúlveda told the press that she had had a dream in which an entity completely different from the shadow beings--an angelic, luminous entity she describes as "a beautiful person"--healed her of a fleshy mass that was growing in the back of her throat, and for which she had sought medical attention. She awoke from the nitric experience to discover that the lump was inexplicably gone: a fact confirmed by her physician.
UFO researcher Ernesto Escobar states that the four friends were not alone in their experience, since his UFO study group was investigating a case which occurred on March 16 involving a group of five friends who had come to Angol to visit with friends and decided to stop at the scenic lookout, where they were startled by three beings standing in excess of six feet tall and with long arms and legs, who emerged
from behind some shrubs. After talking among themselves -- at least that was the eyewitnesses' impression -- the entities turned around and vanished.
Escobar's team has focused its attention on collecting soil samples from the ground allegedly trodden by the tall entities, and upon an anomalous spring not far from the metal fence where the sighting took place. The liquid coming from this spring has been described as having a "gelatinous" quality and "an unknown type of chloration was discovered upon analysis", stated the researcher to reporters from the Diario Austral de Temuco, adding that "the importance of these apparitions resides in that they are events which repeat themselves at the same place, the number of people who have witnessed them is significant, the object are highly mobile and close to the ground, and feature the apparition of humanoid figures."
Odd Creatures in Mexico
The Mexican town of Tepoztlán, roughly an hour's drive from the urban sprawl of Mexico City, is probably better known than any other place in that country for its UFO visitations, which have been captured on video and still photographs by hundreds of witnesses and conveyed around the world through documentaries and live broadcasts. The town, which has become a "new age" mecca over the course of the last century due to its ancient ruins and reputation as a focal point for benign earth energies, also boasts stories of alien contact which are somewhat less known.
One of these is chronicled in Luis Ramírez Reyes's Contacto: México (Diana, 1995) concerning the experiences of Concepción Navarrete, a poor woman who operated a food stand at the base of the majestic rock formation known as El Tepozteco, a favorite UFO haunt. One day, according to Mrs. Navarrete, she was startled by the presence of a very odd creature standing near a cross-like structure marking the site where the coronations of ancient Chichimec monarchs took place. "I was deeply shocked," said the witness, "because he was facing away from me and he looked like a giant lizard, upright, standing some two meters tall. His skin was green and covered in scales." She added that the lizard being's back had a leaden grey cast to it, and the whole creature seemed to have emerged from the mud.
What occurred next was probably even more incredible. The reptilian entity made a sudden about-face, as if realizing that it was being spied upon. But at that very moment, its reptilian image was replaced by that of a "blond, cordial American tourist" who inquired-- telepathically and in a somewhat mocking tone--if she had been startled by his presence. Feeling her senses overwhelmed by the entity, Navarrete cried out for help as another tourist approached. The lizard man subsequently vanished as if he had never been there. The approaching tourist calmly told Navarrete, to her astonishment, that he was aware of the lizard beings and their penchant for adopting human guise to wander among us...much in the same manner as the “gods” of yore.
On June 19, 1968, Mexico’s “La Prensa” carrier the story of Mrs. Cristina Leguizamo, who reminisced back to an event that befell her on Easter Week 1963 while she prayed the Rosary with her daughter and a friend. A sudden tremor occurred, causing cracks to appear on the walls. Earthquakes being common in Mexico, she wasn’t flustered by the event, but looking outside the window, she noticed that people were going about their everyday business – not the attitude of a neighborhood that had just experienced an earth movement. The strange event appeared localized to her dwelling, and when she turned to comment to the other women, she realized that these had fallen into a dead faint. Years later (the date is given as 1 December 1966) Mrs. Leguizamo’s home became awash in bluish light,
above the floor – a humanoid entity with fine features and an athletic build, clad in a green outfit woven out of scaly material. Leguizamo subsequently said the scales were actually the creature’s skin. The outcome of this experience found the human woman accepting an invitation to board an
“extraterrestrial spaceship” which gave off a sulfurous odor.
Attractive female humanoids in the mold of contactee-story captain Aura Rhanes can also be found in the Mexican chronicles. In October 1972, Enrique Mercado was staring at the night skies over Mexico City when he suddenly found himself standing back to back with a “creature” that invited him to come aboard his vehicle. Mercado was able to get a good look at his unexpected visitor: it wore a tight-fitting outfit, strapless boots “similar to the ones worn by boxers” and an emblem over the left side of the chest. Mercado added a further detail – the alien commander aboard the craft, seemingly older than the rest of the crew, was clad head to toe in “pearly white.” Mercado paid greater attention to the
crewwomen, who were dressed exactly like their male counterparts, but had coppery skins, light and dark eyes, short hair and very pleasant smiles”. The experience wrote a book bearing the title “28 horas a bordo de un OVNI” in which he describes his experiences to the fullest.
The Michelin Man Comes Alive
On Sunday, March 14, 1976, the last thing on the minds of Vicente Corell and his wife Carmen was an encounter with beings from another world. Their son had just been drafted in Spain's compulsory military service and tearful goodbyes had been exchanged at the Draftee Induction Center (CIR-7)
located in the town of Marines. After spending the day in the local, the Corells began the long trip home to the town of Almenara, driving along small roads of Spain's Castellon region. At around 10:00 p.m., the couple found itself facing a strange phenomenon in the night skies --a brilli--ant white ov--al th--at flo--ated lazily to the left of their own car. Believing at first that it might be the headlights of a car on a nearby hill, the Corells steered their Renault 4L toward their ultimate destination. No sooner had the vehicle gone a few hundred feet did they become aware of the fact that all was not well.
The alarmed couple thought that they were driving into a
very curious object appeared to rise out of the ground. Bathing the object with his car's high beams, Mr. Corell was startled to see that it was a person.
"I suppose that it had two legs," he would tell distinguished Spanish investigator Juan José Benítez, who investigated the case. "because it reminded me of a human profile. However, since they [the legs] were so close together, it looked more like a column than a human being. The thing was tall, good-looking [sic] and wore a close fitting, one-piece outfit..."
The outlandish entity stood on the ground in what Vicente Corell described as a military "ten-hut" position --arms stiffly at its side and ramrod straight, looking at the oncoming vehicle.
The couple's initial fascination changed to fear as the Renault's lights suddenly went out, leaving them in pitch blackness. The smell of burning wires soon filled the passenger compartment and Corell was forced to pull over. While all this happened, the entity vanished into the darkness. Vicente and Carmen Corell, their car's electrical system ruined, were left to wonder what had happened.
According to researcher Benítez, Mrs. Corell proved to have a much better recall of the situation than her husband, adding the interesting detail that the entity's outfit was made of "narrow, slightly inflated bands" from its neck down to its waist. She went as far as to describe the entity as similar to Bibendum, the world-famous Michelin Man, "only less so."
While such a simile may inspire some to smile and others to shake their heads, it was not the first time that such a creature would had been seen on the Spanish peninsula.
In the summer of 1960, Miguel Timermans, a schoolteacher from Prado del Rey (Cadiz) in southern Spain, decided to go on a weekend run on his Lambretta motorcycle to the city of Jerez. It was a clear, beautiful morning and visibility was unlimited. As he drove uphill at some point between Prado del Rey and the town of Arcos, a colossal figure appeared out of nowhere along the roadside. Timermans described it as well over two meters (6.5 ft.) and encased in a "swollen" red one-piece suit. Shocked, the teacher brought his motorcycle to a halt right in the middle of the highway as an overpowering sense of fear washed over him: the giant entity was slowly walking toward him along the edge of the highway. Recalling the event, Timermans remarked that the creature's pressure suit or outfit was composed of "concentric rings" which also reminded him of the Michelin Man. The improbable figure lurched forward robotically and measuring its steps. With the high-strangeness quotient overflowing at this point, Timermans was doubly startled to see another creature walking behind the giant! The second entity was barely over a meter tall and had what appeared to be a glossy black "boot" covering one of the legs of its red outfit. It, too, walked awkwardly as it brought up the rear.
The enigmatic figures crossed Timerman's path diagonally and vanished from sight after an encounter that lasted no more than 30 seconds. Kick-starting the Lambretta, the teacher headed for the place where the creatures had last been seen and was unable to find a trace of their presence. The astonishing case was reported in Stendek magazine.
The November 1974 issue of the French UFO publication Lumiéres dans la Nuit featured a fascinating Belgian case whose detail closely resemble those of the Spanish and Argentinean events.
On January 7, 1974, a 31 year old Belgian man known only as "Monsieur X" (an anonymous designation used to excess in European cases!) was driving his car between the towns of Comines and Warneton on the border between France and Belgium. The time was shortly before 9 p.m. on a clear, damp winter
night when "Monsieur X" 's vehicle, which had been functioning flawlessly, suddenly sputtered to a halt as the headlights went out. As the vehicle coasted to a halt on the otherwise empty roadway, the driver became aware of an object some 300 feet away in a field bordering the road. At first he took it to be a stack of hay, but almost immediately noticed that the "haystack" was propped up on three struts. The witness would later go on to say that the object had the basin-shape of a W.W.I soldier's helmet. Fascinated by the yellowish-white light issuing from the distant vehicle, "Monsieur X" was unaware of two figures walking toward his vehicle in the moonlit darkness. At first he took them to be a farmer and his son, attracted, perhaps by the singular object in the field. Casting a second look, he realized his mistake.
The two beings could not have been less farmer-like: striding toward the car with stiff, deliberate paces, the shorter of the two resembled the Michelin Man, only with rings not as clearly delineated as those on the famous corporate image. The being's circular helmet concealed a featureless pear-shaped face with dark sockets; its taller companion had a similarly grotesque visage but did not resemble its counterpart. Given their deliberate movements and the brightness of the moonlight, "Monsieur X" was able to make out a number of interesting details, such as the fact that the short "Michelin Man"-like figure appeared armed with a triangular weapon in its hand and that both figures had heavy, pointed boots.
The two entities came to within thirteen feet of the car before stopping. "Monsieur X" claimed to have felt a "shock" to the base of his skull followed by a low-pitched sound that became increasingly louder. But there would be no thrilling contact scenario here -- for no reason, the tall and short being made a sudden about face in near-military fashion and headed back to the landed vehicle at a much faster pace than before. The similarity to the Spanish Corell case, still two years into the future, is remarkable.
Fashion Nightmares
An afternoon playing with cousins and the family dog developed into a full-blown encounter with the unknown for a ten year-old boy from the village of El Fundo. He had been playing outdoors around five o’clock on the family property when the dog – a Collie – began barking frantically at one of the sheds located on the premises. From behind the wood and zinc structure emerged “a man like a robot” that ignored the canine vocalizations and began walking in a straight line, seemingly oblivious to the frightened children, who ran away and hit in the shrubbery. It was then that the ten year-old heard an unusual sound which he described as “a cavalry charge”. Turning to see what the source of the noise was, he was startled to see an orb measuring approximately three feet in diameter, painted black and surmounted by an unidentified structure, rolling along the ground. The sphere rolled away and vanished into the woods. The “robot man” meanwhile continued his slow, inexorable forward motion away from the scene, harried by the barking dog.
According to researcher Manuel Fiallo, who interviewed the protagonists, the strange entity was wearing a form-fitting outfit of black slacks and a short-sleeved red pullover that revealed “scaly lemon-green arms”. Its face appeared to lack eyes and nose, although the mouth was described as “normal-looking.”
In March 1977, Dominican GOFOS group (Grupo Observador de Fenómenos y Objetos Siderales)
researched a case which had taken place in San Francisco Macorís, a farming community in the southern part of the country. In one particular instance, a couple was awakened at 3:30 a.m. by their baby's crying. When the mother went to check on her, she noticed that the entire house was bathed in a hot, greenish-blue light. The mother described it as "a buzzing lightning bolt that won't go away."
The woman's husband went outside to see the source of the mysterious light, perhaps fearing an electrical fire of some sort. He was stunned by what he saw: hovering above the palm trees at a height of some fifty feet was a disk with a large number of "grates" which emitted an array of colors, mainly red, white, blue and green. He ran back into his house as the buzzing sound increased. The heat became unbearable as the vehicle zoomed out of sight, and the couple was left with irritated eyes and a dryness of the throat that persisted for a week. Not much was known about UFOs in the Dominican Republic at the time, and certainly not in the agricultural region of San Francisco Macorís. But that was about to change.
On the night of June 24, 1977 an anonymous witness reported seeing an enigmatic light descending slowly from the night sky to remain motionless over the sea. A tube like structure emerged from the vehicle's "hull" and absorbed seawater for a protracted period of time. The unidentified object then rose again to hover above the witness, who noticed two beings staring at him through a porthole. According to the witness, a larger vehicle absorbed this smaller craft and became lost among the stars.
The stage for the sightings moved from the Dominican Republic's eastern tip to its western border with Haiti, near the sugar-producing region on the Bay of Ocoa, in late 1977 and early 1978, with events taking a grislier turn: mutilations, accompanied by strange lights and bizarre creatures, tormented the cane-cutters of the town of Barahona, who reported that a "gigantic dog" was slaying and eating domestic animals in the dead of the night. This monstrous canine possessed above average intelligence, as it was able to open pens and cages, extracting the last drop of blood from its hapless victims, which consisted largely of cats, hens and rabbits. Local authorities dismissed any supernatural suggestions, stating that it was merely "a joke in the poorest of taste" executed by the inhabitants of this agricultural area. The fact that the locals could ill afford sacrificing their animals for the sake of a prank was deemed irrelevant.
The mutilations were closely followed by a number of "occupant" sightings as the flap reached its peak: Cone-shaped beings were seen in November 1978 by five women in Santo Domingo. Three creatures, twice the height of the tallest human, carrying lanterns on their abdomens, descended a steep hillside to surround an automobile that braked to a screeching halt. The automobile's headlights died as the witnesses heard sounds which they assumed were blows being inflicted upon the vehicle by the conical trio. Their terrified screams attracted the attention of neighbors, who came to their aid. No traces were found of the beings or of the car which they had surrounded.
An Alien Jack and Jill
Argentina has been one of the world’s most prominent sources of UFO occupant and “high-strangeness” events since the 1950s. Some of these cases range from encounters with giant humanoids, as in the Eugenio Douglass case, to abductions by “Nordic” type entities (the Dionisio Llanca case of the mid-70s). Although the 80s represented a significant lull in UFO activity, Argentina was still able to offer a few astonishing cases, such as the one involving Alberto Meyer, an unsuspecting farmer from the city of Viale. In 1986, when the incident occurred, Mr. Meyer was in his thirties and more concerned about raising a family than dealing with the unknown.
On a given day in the summer of that year, Meyer had gone out to chop firewood for the ovens of a local bakery store. As he engaged in the task, he had the distinct impression that something was watching him. Given the country’s considerable wildlife, Meyer probably suspected that a wild pig was about to charge out of the bushes. We can imagine his surprise when two creatures emerged from the dense vegetation instead.
He waved at them, thinking they might be hunters. He couldn’t see them clearly, as the pair of new arrivals was still at a distance from him. They stared intently at him, and Meyer suddenly noticed the strange way in which they were dressed – they appeared to be wearing coveralls of some sort. Perhaps they were escapees from a local jail, or worse yet, terrorists (we forget the considerable amount of terrorist activity that engulfed South America in the late 20thcentury). Undeterred, and with the chainsaw as his only protection, the young man walked toward them. When he was some twenty feet distant, Meyer was suddenly seized by an unexpected paralysis – not just of the body, but of his very will. He was motionless but curiously unafraid.
Humanoid Entities, Meyer CE-3
The woodcutter was now able to get a better view of the intruders, realizing that their coveralls were not the product of any penitentiary: they seemed to be made of a skin-colored plastic material. Nor were the new arrivals in any way human: they had large, bald heads with pointed ears and generally human features. They appeared to be male and female, almost identical in height.
The trace of a smile appeared on the female being’s lips, and both she and her companion pulled away at terrific speed, “gliding” over the uneven terrain as though on skates. Meyer’s paralysis ended as soon as the entities had withdrawn, and now fully mobile again, he beat a terrified retreat to his vehicle, fleeing the area. We cannot say for sure if the bakery ever received the much-needed wood for its bread ovens.
The quicksilver speed with which the non-human couple moved is reminiscent of other encounters cases, particularly the 1972 incident involving a group of nine people who decided to spend a night on Puerto Rico’s El Yunque, the mountain rainforest. The details of the incident have been described elsewhere, but the point that concerns us here is that the campers were surrounded by “beings” that moved with uncanny agility through the densely forested area, leaving deep impressions on the ground. The figures “glided” through the rainforest, zigzagging as they did so. Witnesses Efrain Arroyo and Heriberto Ramos – the leaders of the overnight visit – described the creatures as standing between five and six feet tall with elongated arms, large eyes and pointed ears. At one point during their encounter, the witnesses came within 20 feet of the entities, feeling themselves engulfed by a sense of tranquility
and well-being they had never felt before – the same “sensation” brought to bear by the creatures encountered by Alberto Meyer?
It is difficult to bring a subject of such vast a scope to a neat conclusion. We speak patronizingly of the ancients, but perhaps they were on to something. The other beings that came into contact with humans were not from stars pegged in the firmament but from our own world, in ways that we still cannot explain with all the verbiage of science and technology. An uncomfortable kinship existed between human and parahuman – created by the same deity(ies) but each assigned to a different niche in creation. Ancient humans saw in these fellow denizens more perfected versions of themselves to be revered, or less perfected ones to be avoided. They gave them unusual names and assigned them to various regions of our world; we include them in “classifications” and imagine them to be from exotic planets.
Perhaps for all of our technical prowess, we have fallen short of our forebears in matters of intuition – the old storyteller still spins his yarns, and walks away with a pocketful of coins.
Up the airy mountain Down the rushy glen, We dare n't go a-hunting,
For fear of little men;
Humanoids and Sex
It is an unquestionable fact that sex has played a pivotal role in a number of UFO cases and has become the mainstay of the abduction phenomenon, whose literature centers around the non-consensual aspect of these goings-on. But these are merely the latest facet of a phenomenon that goes back to the very start of human history and myth. Who can forget the Greek gods and the numerous guises they assumed to seduce humans? But the Mediterranean cultures were hardly alone in their beliefs. Hindu deities were equally proficient at seduction: the Bhaghavata Purana tells us of the exploits of the divine Krishna with mortal milkmaids. Hardly a culture in the Americas lacks a story concerning a sky maiden who fell to earth, married a mortal, and then returned to her people after having had offspring. The notion of sexual congress has also played heavily in science fiction and other speculative writing as far back as Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter of Mars stories, where the human hero fights all manner of alien beings on the Red Planet and wins the affections of the alien princess Deja Thoris (Burroughs's Martians were oviparous, so in the course of time, we can imagine that Carter's alien lover laid an egg). Many researchers and writers have agreed that were it necessary to sum up ufology in a single case, the one involving the strange experience of Brazilian farmer Antonio Villas Boas would more than likely be the one to choose.
Veteran Brazilian ufologist Fernando Cleto reminisces about the surreal days of this most unusual case: "...being a friend of Joao Martins, I already knew enough about the event in his own words. One one occasion, I read letters written by Villas Boas and even managed to see a small model of the "flying saucer" and of one of its occupants--small rustic statuettes whittled out of wood by Villas Boas himself. I also recall that Joao Martins was completely opposed to making this case known to the public, for which reason it was disclosed much later[...]after Dna. Irene Granchi disclosed the case overseas, I published my own opinion in this regard in a Belgian or British magazine--I can't remember which. I made an observation which greatly favored the Villas Boas case."
As if the incredible AVB required any further bolstering, Fernando Cleto managed to show that there had indeed been sightings of the same elongated oval vehicle elsewhere in Brazil prior to the date of the events in the AVB case.
"I remember," says Cleto, "that a few days prior to October 15, 1957, there was a case in the interior of the State of Goiás. A car was forced off the roadway by a force issuing from a "flying saucer". The driver described something which bore a strong connection to what Villas Boas had seen. He compared the UFO to a helicopter, at first, with the power to exert traction...and to have seen occupants similar to those seen by Villas Boas. There is no doubt that on November 6, 1957, Colonel Ivo Gastaldoni, who was on the way to the hospital to see his newly born daughter, was summoned by his command to see a UFO hovering directly over the Cumbica Air Base. The colonel remarked that the object was high up in the air and well out of the reach of the base's fighters. His overall impression was that it resembled some sort of egg-shaped craft with a helicopter blade spinning over the ovoid fuselage.
"The event with the driver before October 15, 1957, when added to the November 6 case," writes Cleto. "coincided with the description given by ViIllas Boas for his own object and impressed me greatly. It was as if a certain model of UFO carrying a very special crew complement had been operating a given region of Brazil for a given period of time while on a special mission."
Ufologist Cleto notes in his memorandum regarding the AVB case that Joao Martins' reluctance to disclose the particulars of the astonishing event was to keep mentally unbalanced individuals from conjuring up similar scenarios.
But what exactly happened to Antonio Villas Boas?
The deposition taken by investigator Dr. Olavo T. Fontes and subsequently delivered to Brazil's Ministry of the Navy remains the cornerstone of research into the case. It was taken in Fontes' office on February 22, 1958 and witnessed by journalist Martins himself.
Villas Boas began by stating that he was 23 years old at the time and was a farmer by profession. He lived on a fazenda on the outskirts of Sao Francisco de Sales, Minas Gerais, not far from Sao Paul and came from a large family composed of two brothers and three sisters who all lived in the immediate area. The young farmer explained that it was their custom to work two shifts during the planting season: one at night, which he was responsible for, and another by day which was handled by farmhands. On October 5, 1957, Villas Boas went to bed at 11:00 p.m. following a party at the farmhouse. He shared the room with his younger brother Joao, and they were both witnesses to a strange nocturnal light which lit up the entire room and had its source in one of the animal pens on the farm.
It was ten days later--on October 15--that Antonio Villas Boas would have his historic experience. While driving his tractor, he noticed a shining star that increased in brightness as if descending to earth. "In a matter of seconds," he told his interviewers. "it turned into a very shiny oval object headed straight for me. He tried to escape from it by speeding up the tractor, but the object had already landed some 10 to 15 meters ahead of the tractor. "It got closer and I was able to see, for the very first time, that it was a strange device with a slightly rounded shape, encircled by small lights and with a large, enormous red light in front, from which came all the light I could see when it was higher...the machine's shape was now clearly visible. It resembled a large, elongated egg with three spurs in front." AVB added the curious detail that "something appeared to be spinning at high speed on top of the vehicle and gave off a reddish fluorescent light."
Seized by terror, Antonio jumped off the tractor in hopes of eluding his pursuers on foot, but the furrowed terrain made a speedy getaway impossible. The next thing he knew, someone had seized him by the arm. It was a figure much shorter than he, wearing a "strange outfit" and a helmet. The farmer pushed the figure away and managed to knock it to the ground, but three more similarly-dressed figures turned up, seizing him by his arms and legs, and bore him off to the waiting craft.
Villas Boas indicated that he did not go off meekly to whatever fate awaited him: he kicked, screamed and hurled insults at his helmeted captors. Given the narrowness of the vehicle's access stairway, the farmer managed to break away from his captors, but he was overpowered once more by their uncanny strength and superior numbers.
The humanoids dragged him into the craft, where he was stripped naked and subjected to several indignities. His captors drew a blood sample from his chin using a chalice-like device, and after slathering him with a strange liquid that covered his entire body, he was taken to a room--unfurnished but for a couch--were he was left alone for some twenty minutes, by his count. At this point, a mixture of fear, nausea and coldness, coupled to the stench of a strange gas that was pumped into the room, led him to vomit in one of the corners.
