Argentina: The Estancia La Dulce CE-3 (1978)

The Estancia La Dulce Case(Argentina)
A UFO Encounter with the Presence of
Amorphous Entities
By Guillermo Daniel Giménez

The year 1978 marked some significant chapters in the UFO chronicles of the Republic of Argentina. The entire region of Necochea, in the southeastern end of the Province of Buenos Aires also echoed these manifestations of UFOs, landings and even
encounters with the occupants of these objects.

But there was an incident of significant characteristics that took place in late August of that year some 56 kilometers from the city of Necochea, more specifically in the locality of La Dulce, a rural community located northwest of the city in question.



The incident was important not only because of the events that transpired, not only due to the presence of a large object over the ranch, but also the presence of amorphous entities that surveyed the location. But let us see what the TELAM news agency had to tell us around that time:
.
Necochea, Sep. 7 (Télam) – Two small lights descended from the strange object and reached a shed. They later moved swiftly and something like two silhouettes or hard-to-define figures emerged. That is how the story begins, as experienced by the Arias family, today the publishers of the local newspaper Ecos Diarios. The family, made up by Manuel Arias and his wife Leonor Turiella, said that on the night of August 31, 1978 shortly before 10 pm, there was a blackout. Suddenly “we felt drawn by an extraordinary source of light originating from a sector of the ranch” – which they
occupy in the town of La Dulce.

[The couple ] was able to see “a very large object, similar to a grain storage silo, either stationary or suspended in the air some 800 meters from the house." Two lights broke away, according to the Ariases, which “also appeared to float in the air, "The newspaper adds that another neighbor, Lorenzo Parrachini, as “a singularly bright object suspended over some trees when the city was plunged into darkness due to an blackout. I went to find other witnesses, but since I couldn’t find any, I returned to the site just in time to see how the light went away, giving off some greenish
flashes. The time was 23:15. Drivers on Provincial Route No. 88, according to the appear, also saw the strange object.”

This is the information provided to us by TELAM. An incident that captured public attention and also that of the UFO community due to the presence of strange amorphous creatures – seldom seen in the Argentinean Republic.

La Dulce, Ground Zero

As stated earlier, La Dulce is 56 km northwest of the city of Necochea, 48 km along Provincial Route No. 56, with geographic coordinates of 38º 20´ Latitude South and 59º 12´ Longitude West, at an elevation of 88 meters above sea level. Its name commemorates Nicanor Olivera, owner of the La Dulce Ranch, which took its name from a lagoon located in the vicinity. His children founded the train station and in 1908, Nicanor Olivera yielded property for families to occupy and for the town to be laid
out. It is surrounded by fertile soil that enables it to have a large agricultural yield (wheat, corn, sunflower) and good cattle pastures.

The UFO and the Amorphous Entities

At 21:55 hours on August 31, 1978, a storm lashed the area. At that time, Mrs. Leonor Beatriz Arias (neé Turiella) was taking a shower and was startled by a sudden blackout. She was forced to leave the bathroom and head to the kitchen to find a dressing gown. It was there she noticed that a strong light was pouring through the
window to her house. Her husband, Manuel Arias, 55, had gone to bed to due to the
blackout and did not see the light coming in through the window in question.

Leonor remarked: "The glow was hard to describe, but its intensity gave me the sensation of having gone right through my body.”

The phenomenon was like a compact beam of light, iridescent white in color that poured through the window blinding her. “When I tried to see myself, I couldn’t,” Mrs. Arias would later remark. The light appeared to be coming through the walls of the house. Its point of origin was from the exterior, piercing the farmhouse’s right corner. Outside the farm, there was a large dark object suspended, oscillating, over a group of 6 silos located some 30 meters away from the house.

Mrs. Arias decided to wake up her husband, who moved quickly toward the window. Both were now witnesses to the [object’s] maneuvers. The object was moving away from the house, flying over some cultivated land 80 meters away from the witnesses. It continued its horizontal trajectory slowly, perhaps at 15 meters over the surface, until it paused over a eucalyptus grove some 800 meters away.

This object had an estimated diameter of 8 meters. It was dark, had an oscillating motion, and seemed to be solid, according to Manuel Arias, Leonor’s husband.

There was a row of 10 luminous windows that surrounded the object’s central section. The windows were rectangular, vertically elongated, separated by fine dark artitions. They issued an intense light that varied between bright white and orange. The UFO’s upper section was dark and oval shaped, while the lower section was less visible, as it merged with the surrounding darkness. The Ariases believe that it was also oval in shape. The UFO was to the right of the wilderness. From their vantage point, the Ariases were privileged witnesses due to the excellent visuals they had from their
kitchen. The object emitted a buzzing sound that could be heard despite the intervening distance, and which was similar to a turbine, according to Arias, increasing and decreasing in cycles, while the same occurred with the lights. At that time of night, the winds were strong and the darkness did not allow them to see the
reactions of the animals to the proximity of the phenomenon.

A few minutes went by and two objects resembling flashlight bulbs came out of the object, descending softly and moving one behind the other toward the witnesses. These bulbs [appeared to correspond to] dark silhouettes moving at an approximate speed of
20 kmh.




Their estimated heights were between 0.70 and 1 meter, and their aspect was impossible to ascertain due to the prevailing darkness the light sources appeared to constitute the faces of these amorphous entities. These beings did not touch the ground; rather, they floated only centimeters from the surface. Their movements were continuous but rigid. When they reached the barbed wire fence, the beings avoided it by rising in the air and descending on the other side, continuing their march. The entities came close to a shed that contained machinery and vehicles. They made a 90-degree turn and entered a space between the shed and wire fencing. They disappeared for a few moments and then reappeared, dodging other obstacles such as the eucalyptus tree stand and a timber chute with a brick floor, measuring 2 meters
wide and 13 meters long.

At this point, the beings were close to another shed, reducing their speed to a more normal stride, a slow one. These beings or enigmatic figures made a second circuit of the area, and perhaps many others, always around the shed, while the UFO continued
hovering in the sky and making the buzzing sound. It was then that the Ariases decided to go to their bedroom and give up on the observation. Moments later, they came back to the window and ascertained that the large object and the beings had vanished. The entire phenomenon had an estimated duration of almost an hour.

At the time, the Arias family was made up of Manuel, 55, his wife Leonor, who was younger than her husband, and their 3-year-old son. No footprints were found after the event. Mrs. Arias experienced a nervous breakdown as a result of the sighting. The area where the family’s house is located is rich in agricultural and cattle activity, being producing fields. At the time that the incidents took place, the property belonged to the four Arias brothers, but have now been subdivided. There is a large saltwater lagoon located 3 km southwest of the place where the events occurred.

Related Phenomena

During the events experienced by the Arias family on the night of August 31, 1978 at Estancia La Dulce, Necochea, Argentina, there was a blackout in the area. Manuel Arias believes that the blackout affected not only his ranch, but the entire area as well, due to the passing of the UFO.

The local newspaper, Ecos Diarios of the city of Necochea, reported that: "Strong winds caused a power outage in several sectors of the region.”



After these events, the news spread by word of mouth throughout the town of La Dulce and neighboring communities until journalists from Ecos Diarios covered the story. The entire country soon learned of the incident.The Arias family found having to deal with all of the print and/or TV media journalists onerous. It was around this time that the local police “invited” the Arias family to file a formal report on the facts.

It is because of all this that Manuel Arias no longer wants to know anything about the case. Moreover, he says that if he should ever see another UFO and beings descended, he would tell no one. His wife remarked: “Now I feel more tranquil. I have no doubts about what we saw and ever since that night I look outside, knowing that
they are there, that they’re near us and want to communicate. They have no intentions of attacking us. If they came back today, I think I would go outside without any fear whatsoever. I’m not a fan of the subject, although I do read something, but I never watch science fiction movies that could have influenced my thinking.”

Days after the event, Leonor Arias herself was a witness to other UFO manifestations in the area. Manuel Arias says: “It was a craft, a module, let us say, suspended in the air giving off light. I think they always do the same...they flood everything with their lights and then take off. They do whatever they want and then leave...”

It should be noted that a mini-flap of 21 UFO cases occurred in the vicinity of Necochea in the months of August and September 1978.

• Case 1: 22 August 1978, Necochea, 20:20 hrs. A circular object, very luminous, flew from East to West on Tuesday 22 August, having its origin in the southeastern section of Buenos Aires Province, extending to La Pampa, Rio Negro, Neuquen and then Chile. Simultaneous observation in over 30 cities.
• Case 2: 22 August, vicinity of Coronel Dorrego, 20:30. Three hunters thought they heard strange footsteps similar to those of a man or a very heavy animal, coming from a small forest. After a fruitless investigation, they ascertained that the meat they were roasting on a spit tasted of sulfur, making them ill later. When they boarded their pickup truck, they saw an object measuring 30 meters in diameter and 1 meter
tall, surrounded by a potent white light and with a black turret. The UFO approached and the electrical system of the vehicle shorted out as the UFO flew over them at an altitude of 50 meters. After it was gone, the vehicle started up and the hunters that they were traveling in the opposite direction to which they were heading before seeing the UFO.
• Case 3: 22 August. Ramón Santamarina, Necochea, night, 21:45 hs. Saw a strange "gaseous cloud” with a transparent aura, emitting a powerful light.
• Case 4: 22 August. Ramón Santamarina, Necochea, night. An object, larger and brighter than the Moon, flew at low altitude and approximately the witnesses’ car swiftly, accompanying them for a brief stretch before pulling away,
issuing flashes.
• Case 5: 22 August, Coronel Dorrego, night. A UFO maneuvered slowly over the town.
• Case 6: 25 August, Ramón Santamarina, Necochea, 20:30 hs. An object issuing a strong intermittent light was seen over a tree stand, issuing strong red and orange flashes, vanishing later.
• Case 7: 31 August, Estancia La Dulce, near Necochea, 21:55 hs.
• Case 8: 31 August, vicinity of La Dulce, Necochea, night. Another local resident reports: "A singularly bright flying object suspended over the trees" while the city was dark due to a power outage. " I went to find other witnesses, but since I couldn’t find any, I returned to the place just in time to see how the light departed, giving off greenish flashes."
• Case 9: 31 August, night. At approximately the same time,drivers traveling along Route No. 88 also saw the strange object.
• Case 10: 4 September, San Cayetano, night. A young man sees a powerful light, 30 meters long, behind a stand of trees.
• Case 11: 4 September, San Cayetano, night. A farmer heading toward this town sees a UFO traveling toward the west.
• Case 12: Early September, Paraje San Jose, Necochea, night. Two witnesses see a luminous UFO.
• Case 13: 5 September, Route 86. Mrs. Arias (protagonist of the 31 August event at La Dulce) sees a medium-white, glowing cloud transform into a reddish half-moon. It increased in size before vanishing.
• Case 14: 8 September, La Dulce, Necochea, 20 hrs. A false sun lit the entire field, bathing it in throbbing red light for 5 minutes.
• Case 15: 8 September, Route 86, Km. 20 (a few kilometers from Necochea). At 20:15 hours, a beam of blinding red light lit a ranch from a stand of trees. Horses were spooked and two recently butchered lambs began to roast due to the heat issued by the UFO.
• Case 16: 9 September, Necochea, noon. Three luminous objects flew over this city’s downtown area.
• Case 17: 10 September, Route 86, Km,.85, night. A potent light appeared to be “resting” on a high-voltage line. It departed swiftly after 15 minutes.
• Case 18: 12 September, La Dulce, Necochea. A “star” breaks off from a powerful light, descending in 8 successive stages.
• Case 19: 14 September, Necochea, night. An object issuing alternating red and green lights flew overhead at high speed from West to East.
• Case 20: 14 September, Juan N. Fernández, Necochea, 22:30 hs. Took place 500 meters from a house at an altitude of 30 meters. A silver object producing a powerful light
hovered over a stand of trees.
• Case 21: Mid-September, Necochea, night. A large, oval, red-colored light passed over the city toward the north.


A Similar Case

We can provide, as an example of a similar occurrence, an incident that took place 120 km from Necochea, where the Estancia La Dulce events befell the Arias family in August 1978.

It occurred in the early days of January 1988, when Leonardo Fuster and his friend Gabriel (surname unknown), both 18, residents of the La Serena district of Mar del Plata, Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, were leaving a get-together at a friend’s
house and were walking around a corner in the cited district, when they became witnesses to an anomalous event. The time was nearly 1:00 a.m. when Gabriel saw a white light coming from the Peralta Ramos forest. It was about 100 meters away, the light was larger in size than a star and looked much like a streetlight, according to the witnesses.

The object was making circular and zigzagging movements at high speed, not making any sound whatsoever. They were staring at for a minute until Leonardo told his friend: “Quit staring at it.”

They continued to walk and talk until a powerful beam of white light approached them and engulfed them, leaving them completely blinded. Moments later, the beam turned off and a kind of multicolored fog or smoke began to emerge; after it dispersed, a
small creature appeared. Gabriel used his jacket to cover his face and not see any more, since he was frightened, while Leonardo continued to look. The being, or “the thing” as they called it, was between 50 and 60 cm tall, brown-colored and had two square red eyes. It had no arms, legs, hands, nose, mouth ... no other feature aside from the eyes.

What was the reason for the number of so many UFO manifestations and the presence of strange beings in the region, in so short a time? A new UFO incident is therefore added to the global case history, with the presence of entities or beings of enigmatic appearance, highly reliable witnesses, in the southeastern end of the coast of Buenos Aires, in the Necochea region.

(Translation (c) S. Corrales, Institute of Hispanic Ufology (IHU)

We've All Gone Saucer-Happy!

We've All Gone Saucer-Happy!
by Manuel Carballal

There can be no doubt that the UFO phenomenon is a fascinating subject. Some of us are so enthusiastic about it that it drives us crazy. Intoxicated by the stimulation, passion and richness of this discipline, the joys of ufology sometimes drives us nuts. That's when we become "saucer happy".

Doña María is a resident of Vigo (Galicia) in her fifties. A fan of space, UFOs and the Beyond, she has spent many years reading all kinds of magazines and books on esoteric lore--an interest she combines with her great passion for the pink press. I wasn't surprised to find that on that summer morning in 1992, my companions from the Vigo Center for Psychobiophysical Research should be so interested in my meeting her. Doña María presented herself as a consummate psychographic contactee, placing at our disposal dozens of notebooks filled with psychographic messages and mediumistic drawings. Doña María, like many other contactees, claimed that alien beings had infiltrated all walks of human society. Some of them even posed as very popular personalities--a fact stressed by numerous contactees and even certain researchers...

Doña María, as with many other contactees, entered into trance states through telepathic communication with her "extraterrestrial guides", whom despite being infiltrated in terrestrial society, could still transmit their messages to the Galician contactee through psychography or telepathy. And we were on the verge of witnessing a demonstration. Spellbound, we waited for the guide to tune into the contactee to transmit his message. Finally, after intense concentration, Doña María began to receive the message: "Hey! No vayas presumiendo por ahi.." Dumbfounded, we discovered that her alien source wasn't Oxalc, nor Ashtar Sheran, nor Adoniesis or any of the "known" ET guides--it turned out to be Julio Iglesias. Because according to Doña Maria, Julio Iglesias was one of those infiltrated aliens. Swamped with intense emotion, we heard the communication: the Spanish crooner's lyrics reached us brimming over with messages, according to Doña María's interpretation. It was then that I understood, after many years of intense pondering, what it was that Isabel Preisler had seen in Julio: it wasn't that he'd seduced her--rather, like any good alien, he had abducted her in order to artificially inseminate her! Julio Iglesias fans now know the secret to his success...he was conceived by alien sperm. I'm convinced that Budd Hopkins would treat this information with the weight it so rightly deserved...

This was neither the first nor the last time I would witness "alien contacts" of this sort. Because the number of infiltrated aliens in our society is something to see. Valencia-based contactee Vera Kallas provided me a no-less extraordinary revelation, which took place during the filming of a TV series and right in front of the cameras! I still have this tape as a most valuable piece of evidence regarding the presence of aliens in our world. While I interviewed Vera about her paranormal experiences, she suddenly fell into a trance. An anonymous communicator began transmitting information through the contactee: the face of researcher Vicente Moros, who was present at the session, mirrored my own perplexity. Finally, the startling "guide" presented himself: "Hello! I'm Carl Sagan..."


Well, I thought, it sure is easy that way. I'm not surprised that Sagan received so many awards for his COSMOS show--if he's an alien, he's got it licked. Who'd dare teach him anything about the universe?...

It's Tough Being A Contactee

Who says there's no evidence that we're being visited by aliens? Carlos Jesús leads a group of UFO believers in the town of Dos Hermanas (Seville). His communications and messages became widely known throughout Spain through the popular science show "Al Ataque", hosted by Alfonso Arús. Thanks to the cameras of Antena-3, all of Spain was able to watch alien beings--such as "Christopher from Zeta Raticulin" -- possess Carlos Jesús and transmit their messages station-to-station. Moreover, even "Mikael", the alien from Ganymede itself, or even Jesus Christ, spoke to the world through the contactee from Seville---of course, preserving the Sevillian accent corresponding to the body of the person they'd possessed.

Carlos Jesús bears on his body, like many other contactees and abductees, the proof of his contact. And if other UFO abductees have received an alien implant in the nape of their necks or in their nasal passages, Carlos Jesús carries in the big toe of his right foot a "micro-transmitter" able to fire a billion megawatt energy beam (a textual quote). So, skeptics beware! Don't mess around with Carlos Jesús-Mikael-Christopher, since aliens have placed the power of Divine Justice in his hands...I mean, his feet.

Abraham, Elijah, Jesus, Moses, the Eternal Father, Antar Zeran, the Virgin Mary, etc. are some of the extraterrestrials (?) able to possess Carlos Jesús and speak through him: "I will now exhale three times," says Carlos Jesús three times before going into trance, "and my voice will change completely...puff, puff, puff...Hello, my voice is no longer the same, I have descended from a spacecraft and straight into this body. Now I am Antar Zeran..." Millions of viewers shared with me the excitement of that moment, following the contactee's touching possession by higher powers.

Being a contactee is hard work. Never mind carrying a micro-transmitter in his big toe -- which causes poor Carlos Jesús to spend a fortune in sneakers, since every time the beam fires there isn't any manmade footwear that can withstand it: there are awful arguments between contactee and contactor which sometimes jeopardize the former's physical integrity.

A few years ago, over fifty million viewers were able to witness how an alien took over the body of a contactee--live and in color--on the stage of "Esta Noche Cruzamos el Mississippi". The stage of Tele-5 turned into a makeshift parapsychological laboratory and a landing platform for Astenon, a resident of Ganymede (a world having an excess population of super-evolved beings, it would seem), who would transmit his important messages through Miguel Algarra, his channeler. Before dumbfounded spectators, Miguel Algarra engaged in a terrible struggle with Astenon, who possessed him without asking for permission, and would also slap him around...or rather, Miguel would slap himself around. It was merely a matter of sharing the limelight, since according to Astenon, the folks on Ganymede watched Pepe Navarro's show all the time, and understandably, the alien guide wanted to say hi to everyone back home, if only the jerk of a contactee would quit hogging the camera. All of Spain and part of Freakistan thrilled to the experience, and Lucas Grijalder himself, faced by such an eloquent incident of alien contact, summed up in a nutshell the essence of many similar messages: "You sound about as clear as Chewbacca..."

Making Love To No One At All

If Carlos Jesús became famous thanks to his appearances on "Al Ataque", the cameras of the equally stern "La Noche Prohibida" program granted stardom to 49-year old contactee José Verdún, better known as Penumbra.

Penumbra had already appeared on the small screen on other "scientific" programs such as "Música Golfa" (TVE) and "Los Límites de la Realidad" (Antena-3). However, it was thanks to José Coronado and Ivonne Reyes that Penumbra astonished Spain with his account of having made love to a female alien.

Penumbra, to whom the aliens gave a pyramid stone of magnificent powers, perhaps as payment for his carnal services, is the only contactee who recites his messages with bulerías (Andalusian songs accompanied with clapping and dancing--Ed.). No more monotonous Oui-Ja sessions, boring psychographies or redundant telepathic messages--Penumbra gives his messages a brighter tone by reciting them in prose or in rhyme, or ripping into a fandango using texts revealed by the "space guides". Like a true pioneer of the cosmic cante hondo, he recites as he claps his hands: "I'm a dying madman/with a world on my mind/of talking butterflies/and trees that sigh..." Precisely. A dying madman with talking butterflies in his head...he says.

Penumbra isn't the only human who's had the good fortune of enjoying close contact--I mean very close contact--with extraterrestrials. Copulation between humans and aliens is hardly circumscribed to the males. Karol, a well-known Catalan parapsychologist, was the victim of sexual harassment by a beautiful but libidinous extraterrestrial. Karol, who was up in years, could not longer endure the alien's unbridled passion as he got between the exhausted contactee's sheets night after night. Anguished over the spaceman's nightly visits, Karol appealed to a distinguished Barcelona hypnotist for help, and after a few sessions of hypnosis, the alien rapist vanished for good. Weeks later, Karol returned to hypnotist to ask him for a solution to her new quandary. Now she missed the nightly visits of her cosmic friend. "Couldn't something be done to make him come once a week?"

The Osteratrix Report

In the town of Antequera, contactee Rafael Sánchez is at the center of a significant case of E.T. contact which recently achieved significant political implications. Rafael has discovered the secret behind alien technology, since the aliens are coming to Earth from the planet "Arcolobus" on what appear to be large flying carpets some five meters long and which operate on advanced technology. Aladdin knew what he was doing.

Through his messages, Rafael Sánchez has learned that thousands of asteroids will collide against the Earth in July 1998, devastating the planet (this prophecy, not a very precise one, was made in mid-Nineties). For this reason, he devoted himself to building a spaceship that would allow him to escape the Apocalypse.

After making several designs, mock-ups and tests, Rafael Sanchez has managed to build a prototype of his spaceship using...a motor from a blender. He immediately wrote Spanish prime minister Jose María Aznar to warn him of the danger facing Spain and the planet as a whole, offering his technical services to prepare the evacuation of the planet aboard his blender-ships. Amazingly, prime minister Aznar has not replied to his mail. Could the P.P. be engaged in some sort of pact with the Osterizer company to develop the life-saving craft? Could the infamous CESID papers contain the key to transforming our appliances into Flying Saucers? Are the aliens right-wingers? We are assailed by terrible doubts.

In the light of the bizarre revelations made by contactees like Penumbra, Doña María, Carlos Jesús or Rafael Sánchez, we would finally be in a position to unveil the secrets of the UFO. In 1999, after more than fifty years of dealing with the UFO phenomenon, researchers all over the world are finally in a position to understand the mystery: Julio Iglesias and Carl Sagan came in from Zeta Raticulin aboard blender-ships to paint the town and sign a secret pact with José María Aznar while they were at it. And if it was the "Matrix Report" that blew the whistle in the United States, the "Osteratrix Report" will do much the same in Spain.

The truth is out there. It's just a little mixed up.

[Note: This is one of Spanish UFO writer Manuel Carballal's contribution to the Inexplicata Journal in the year 2000. Eleven years later, it's every bit as good -- Ed.]

Argentina: La Araña - When Time Stood Still...

La Araña – When Time Stood Still...
By Luis Burgos, Fundación Argentina de Ovnilogía

Introduction

While the return of a considerable portion of unidentified craft to the “scene of the crime” (based on my Decimal Hypothesis) is a constant that is disputed by very few, field researchers have narrowly defined the “window areas” (relatively short time intervals in non-recurring sites) and the “hot zones” (fixed recurrent periods). Intensive regional surveys may perhaps enable us to weave a hypothesis as to “why”. Such is the case with “La Araña” and other locations in the province of La Pampa, one of the most visited by unidentified flying objects.

Geographic Location




La Araña is an area located some 50 kilometers west of Santa Rosa, provincial capital of La Pampa. It can be reached along Route 14, passing first through the town of Toay. The town’s ghostly aspect is like the ancient memory of a legendary past. A little abandoned schoolhouse, the odd lonely house in the vicinity and the dilapidated structure of an old “rural bowling alley”, best remembered for its dances back in the 50’s and 60’s, are silent witnesses to unusual episodes of a UFO nature that commenced in the early 60’s and continue – incredibly – to our contemporary days and nights. It’s as though “something magical” enveloped the enigmatic wilderness, cited in books on the subject, newspapers of the time, and voiced by local residents knowledgeable about the “evil lights” that prowled the area. Nowadays, Quique Mario’s CEUFO has turned it into a favorite site for conducting UFO skywatches (“Alerta OVNI”). Likewise, Raúl Chaves and Ester Urban’s CIUFOS organization keep the area under surveillance.

Astounding Case Histories

As expected, “the first great Argentinean wave” on 13 May 1962 impacted the area in question, as well as other Pampean locations and six other provinces. It was captured thus by Hector P. Anganuzzi in his book Historia de los Platos Voladores en Argentina (A Flying Saucer History of Argentina) when describing the experiences of people attending the dances at La Araña, and who noticed a considerable source of light in the vicinity after 4 in the morning, not too far from where they stood. Some of the locals approached the source of light and saw an object begin to rise at that very same moment, followed by several similar ones that had not been seen initially. As they departed, each appeared to spin on its respective axis. The “La Prensa” newspaper also reported the sighting in its 16 May ’62 edition.

In the mid-1970s, other dance hall attendees were treated to the sight of a flying object that was about to descend several meters from the place. When it was about to touch the ground, however, it tore through a barbed wire fence. The object immediately shook itself off (like a chicken shaking its feathers) and rose into the air once more, before the disconcerted eyes of these privileged witnesses. This incident forms part of the 50 most unusual events in the national UFO case histories.

One evening in 1979, a hunter was startled by a flying object that “fell upon him”, leaving him no alternative but to open fire against it. He scored a hit, and managed to hear the bullet’s impact against the unusual prey. The UFOs lights went out at that very moment and he didn’t see it again. Nor did he find the bullet.

In late 1980, a driver traveling along Route 5 at night saw a large, luminous UFO shaped like a fish when he reached the location.

Around 15:00 hours one hot afternoon in January 1990, Jose Luis Lopez and his assistant were doing farmwork when they were warned by a laborer of a “giant oval object”, dark brown in color, that flew over their heads slowly and at a very low altitude, heading south. The artifact, which made a slight whistling sound, went unnoticed by the farm animals. The observation lasted some 10 minutes and according to one of the witnesses, it felt as if “time had stood still.”

On the night of 15 December 1994, Mr. Nestor Fernández and a companion were traveling from Carro Quemado to Santa Rosa. After reaching La Araña, they saw a glowing flying saucer that startled them, to the degree that they reported it to journalists of the “La Arena” newspaper.

Field research by CEUFO investigators aimed at implementing the First UFO Skywatch mandated by Proyecto Condor could not have had a better award. From the afternoon of 8 May to the morning hours of 9 May, 1999, they set themselves up in the wilderness, taking numerous photos of the local geography: roads, fields, skies, etc. In one of the shots taken at random, a very luminous body, white in color and surrounded by a red halo, became visible. It is one of the few nocturnal “phantom UFO” photos.

Epilogue

In the year 2002, the year in which cattle mutilations were in full swing, La Araña was not free from such incidents, as might be expected. Such episodes continue in this forbidding region to this very day.

To continue listing cases would be repetitive. The UFO phenomenon has chosen that site as one of its targets and has shown preference for it. To be there is to breathe in a bit of Pampean saucer history, and by extension, that of Argentina. There is no question that “something” moves, glides, makes incursions, appears and vanishes, acts, flows and becomes invisible in that desolate wilderness of the Pampas. The obvious question remains: what was there, what is there or what will be there? The question remains unanswered.


(Translation (c) 2011, S. Corrales, IHU. Special thanks to Luis Burgos, FAO)

Argentina: The First Multiple Daytime CE-3

Argentina: The First Multiple Daytime CE-3
By Diego Sánchez, Luis Burgos and FAO Team


Introduction

Back in 1999, as humanoid activity dwindled in Argentina over the course of the years, a notable encounter took place in the territory of Buenos Aires, with two significant distinctions: the first being that it occurred in *broad daylight* and the second being the *number of humanoid entities* involved.

Both of these facts are outstanding in the domestic case histories, or at least that is what emerges from the 4000 cases in our database (from 1900 to 2008) and we are therefore able to state that it is the *first daytime humanoid case*, as earlier cases of this sort showed one, two or three visitors during daylight hours, no more.

Geographic Location

The exact site of the episode is National Route 5, Kilometer 465, beyond the rail crossing that joins the Pehuelches and La Zanja stations, both of which are communities of the Trenque Lauquen borough, located in Western Buenos Aires Province, near the border of the province of La Pampa, 23 kilometers from the county seat.

The Events



At 16:30 hours on August 25, 1999, Mr. Carlos Colón, an automobile mechanic, was driving his 1998 Chevrolet pickup along the aforementioned route, after having been in a field of the region. After crossing the train tracks, he began to feel a buzzing sound on his radio, which was set to an FM station. He first blamed it on the cellphone he’d connected to the outlet, but the buzzing became more intense, almost unbearable, and comparable to “a bunch of mosquitoes in one’s ear”. He also thought it could be the vehicle’s alternator.

In this state of affairs, and after turning a curve, he remembers pulling onto the road’s shoulder without stopping the engine. He tried changing frequencies unsuccessfully. He was intrigued by a movement to his right, and when he raised his eyes, he saw something between the windshield and the door window – “something” that was heading toward him at high speed. Instinctively, Colón tried to get out of the pickup truck. At this point he was looking between the spare tire and the passenger compartment (sic) when he became aware of five figures in white...

The Entities

These silhouettes looked like people, but with a very strange appearance, mainly from the shoulders up. They stood approximately 2.50 meters tall and their anthropomorphic shape, similar to that of humans, was not identical. These beings were contained within a screen (from which they never emerged) similar to a movie screen or a parabolic screen, perhaps a meter taller than the figures themselves. Fifty meters away from the witness, this “screen” slowed down, stopping no more than 15 meters distant from Colon, who was able to make out the height of the silhouettes, as he had to raise his eyes to see them more clearly.

The intruders were all together, standing side by side in line, with drooping arms and open legs, always sliding within that “screen”. According to the eyewitness, the entities exchanged glances, making small movements with their heads, and looking at the protagonist for an instant. He was unable to make out any noses, mouths or eyes – only a black spot where their heads would have been. Their bodies were white.

The humanoids stood thus for a while, eventually clasping each others’ arms to form a circle, bowing their heads inward, as if joining them. The “screen” immediately started to shrink, turning into a dark grey cone. According to Colón, what kept him from having a perfect view of the situation was a sort of fog in a whirlwind, as if they were behind some sort of translucent glass. Everything vanished suddenly after this...it vanished as though a TV set had been turned off. The witness was left looking upward, looking to where the visitors had vanished, but was unable to see anything at all. Only the fields and he remained.

Later

Colón was more than startled when he heard the pickup truck’s radio operating. The truck was on the shoulder and several meters away. Having no idea of how he got there, Colón found himself beside the barbed wire fence where the beings had been stationed. Fear overcame him at that moment. He ran to his Chevrolet, sat down and made a hasty return to the city of Trenque Lauquen, looking to one side and another. After having passed La Zanja, he started to react. He didn’t know why he was driving so fast, as no one pursued him, and he started to feel an unpleasant sensation of weariness, similar to the ache felt after the flu. He ascribed it to a spike in blood pressure, but a doctor would subsequently tell him that it was a result of stress.

According to Colón, the encounter lasted “between two and seven minutes” judging by the time it takes to cover the distance he periodically travels to Trenque Lauquen. He reached the clinic feeling somewhat dizzy and with blurry vision. His blood pressure was 14.7, when the customary reading is between 16.1 to 18.1. Upon leaving, he headed for his workshop, where employees noted that he was acting strange, which he explained as malaise. He immediately crossed the street and went home, telling his wife about the event and feeling very anxious. He was unable to dismiss the memory of his experience from his mind.

Two days after the event, he visited his doctor. An EKG was performed and his blood pressure was checked. Everything in his body was normal. Therefore, there was only on thing left to do: return to the encounter site. And so he did. To his surprise, he found the paperwork of the Chevalier parcel receipt; with the change he carried within it (sic). Things began to become clearer for Colón, and he started looking for prints, but found his own footprints more than anything else.

Correlative Ufology

Three events are essential when evaluating this incident:

a. Days later, in a conversation with Mr. Avila, the owner of the field Colón had departed from prior to the encounter, the former told him that right after he left, he tried to contact tractor operators in his area and was unable to do so, as there was a persistent buzzing on the radio that made communications impossible;
b. Peasants from an adjacent field stated that while performing their duties, the saw a large light stationed in the vicinity, which later headed south;
c. That same afternoon, at 15:45 hours, that is to say 45 minutes before Colón’s encounter with the beings, a trucker and his companion, headed for Santa Rosa (La Pampa) were able to make out some glowing objects to the right of the road, facing the La Zanja station. The trucker ascribed the vision to cereal railcars lit by the sun. These alleged railcars appeared to be crossing the road, since they had not yet entered the curve. After turning the curve, they asked each other: “what happened to the railcars?” They stopped and looked around. They were all alone in the field.

Comparative Ufology



The entities described by Colón are reminiscent of the May 29, 1986 case involving Oscar Flores, 28, at the entrance to the Don Tomás Lagoon in La Pampa. In this case, the witness, who I had the chance to interview thanks to an excellent interview by Quique Mario of the CEUFO group, found two visitors within his house at 00:30 hours. These intruders were also tall, more than 2 meters, and only parts of their faces were visible in their form-fitting suits. The beings appeared to sport medallions and belts, elements that Colón did not see. Also in La Pampa, Flores was able to see the UFO (over the top of some eucalyptus trees) and a persistent buzzing sound in the air. We managed to cross paths with Flores in one of the recent UFO conventions organized by CEUFO. He is in excellent health.

Background on Multiple Encounters

With regard to close encounters involving large numbers of occupants, the Colón incident can be placed within the top ten Argentinean events, outdone only by four contact experiences, and all of these of a nocturnal nature (hence the importance of this daytime event):

· Azul, Buenos Aires: Ufologists in the nation’s capital report an incident in which several residents of this locality witness the movement of seven (7) beings corresponding to Type III (Tall) on the evening of 13 August 1994, near Route 51.
· Laboulaye (Cordoba): Shortly before midnight on 2 December 1991, three youths from that region of Córdoba saw a luminous object landing a few meters from their home, disgorging 15 small entities. They walked single-file and appeared to have “flashlights on their heads” that lit the ground in front of them. The characters milled around the vicinity of the house for several hours. We investigated this incident on-site only a few days after it occurred.
· Pergamino (Bs.As.): This incident was also investigated on-site in the company of Prof. Jose Marengo, a consultant to FAO in the 80s. Four young men from the city had reported the presence of 6 small, strange entities to the police. The beings in the vicinity of the Club de Viajantes of the Gral. San Martín district. Other sightings involving 6 beings also occurred in the nearby town of Rancagua in late October and early November 1988.
· Crotto (Bs.As.): A record-breaking entity case occurred in this community near Olavarría, specifically at the Mi Recuerdo ranch. Around 03:00 hrs. on 17 November 1969, Aquilo Ramon Acosta had an extraordinary experience when he found 17 mysterious beings, good-sized and wearing reddish outfits, exploring his property for an extended period of time, bearing “flashlight-like” devices in their hands, shooting off red beams of light.
· Olavarría (Bs.As.): In the early hours of 29 April 1994, Mario Trevisan managed to photograph over twenty strange entities walking in front of the dim light outside a house on the outskirts of the city. The astonishing speed with which they moved was the most significant aspect of the case. This was a remarkable visual document that we were able to recover after 14 years of follow-up work. Please see the report and video at CIENCIA OVNI (www.ciencia-ovni.com.ar)

Conclusions

Colón calmed down some time after his experiences. His blood pressure stabilized and he had no further arrhythmias. He was only left with some questions: he is still unsure if the pickup’s engine stalled, or if he was stopped by the entities. Nor could he remember how he reached the barbed wire fence. He is certain that he was “controlled” during the duration of the experience, and the entities simply allowed him to watch the situation. There is evidently a “missing time” factor that has still not surfaced in Colón (and which is typical in such cases).

UFO sightings were periodically reported in Trenque Lauquen and its outlying communities, before and after the events discussed here. Everything points to the fact that the witness experienced an extraordinary situation that is full of information for ufology. Tall humanoids (Type III) returned to Argentina, giving the small Type I humanoids a break, as these appear to have “taken over” close encounters of the third kind.

CREDITS:
· Sr. Diego Grimberg, Bs. As.
· Supplement: "Crónica del Fenómeno OVNI" Nº 93, Bs. As.
· Alejandro Vignati, revista "2001", Bs. As.
· Oscar "Quique" Mario (CEUFO)

(Translation (c) 2011, S. Corrales, IHU. Special thanks to Guillermo Giménez)

Mexico: Sighting Reported Via Facebook

Source: www.analuisacid.com
Date: 11 August 2011

Mexico: Three Luminous Objects and The Moon
By Ana Luisa Cid

A photo taken by Mario Enrique González

Eyewitness reported the sighting on Facebook as the event was taking place; another person also wrote that they were also seeing the phenomenon.

This is what Mr. Mario Enrique González told me: “That evening, while listening to Victor Camacho’s radio program (“Los Desvelados” – the night owls), I looked through my window and noticed the presence of three objects near the Moon. I had my cellphone handy, listening to the radio over it, so the first thing I did was activate the photo function, as I didn’t want to stop listening to the show. I took several photos, but only the first one turned out well. At that time my adult nephew went out, and ask me what [those things] were. He only got to see two of them – one had already gone away. They became tiny, reddish, then boom! They were gone. No detonation or sound whatsoever could be heard. We could only hear dogs barking; they were very upset. That’s how it happened, professor. I’m telling it to you in broad strokes. It was on Thursday, 11 August at 1:38 a.m. in Villa de Jilotzingo.”

Mr. González is a renowned skywatcher. He has documented the phenomenon on several occasions, mainly in communities of eastern Morelos State, such as Tepoztlán and Cuernavaca.

Photos can be seen at: http://analuisacid.com/?p=10390

(Translation (c) 2011, S. Corrales, IHU. Special thanks to Prof. Ana Luisa Cid)

Mexico: 19th Century Mysteries

In the late 19th century, Mexico emerged from a turbulent seventy year period of warfare, civil disturbance and foreign occupation to become a well-ordered, prosperous nation under the firm hand of the dictator Porfirio Díaz. In the nearly three decades that Díaz ruled Mexico, his country rubbed shoulders economically with France and Germany, although his centralized policies created unrest and discontent that would eventually lead to the 1911 revolution. Growth was not restricted to industry and finance; the sciences and arts prospered as well. Interest in the supernatural was also to be found, mainly among the well-read leisure classes. The first “sociedades espíritas” (spiritist lodges) had opened their doors by 1870, and a “spiritist newspaper” had been established in 1868 in the city of Guadalajara by a former general, Refugio Gonzalez. Ironically, Francisco I. Madero, the president elected after Porfirio Díaz, was an avowed spiritist who’d benefitted from the openess of his predecessor’s tenure, who had also been a Freemason. A portrait of Díaz in masonic gear hangs in Alexandria’s National Masonic Temple – proof perhaps of the questing intellectual and metaphysical spirit of the times.

Astronomer Morris K. Jessup, whose study of strange crater-like formations in Mexico formed part of his interest in the UFO phenomenon, characterized the final decades of the 19th century as the "Incredible Decade" due to the heightened amount of UFO activity world-wide during this point in time. Renowned Mexican Fortean researcher Dr. Rafael A. Lara has carefully chronicled some of the strange phenomena which occurred in Mexico during the same period of time chronicled by Jessup.
On March 5, 1871, the state of Oaxaca, was puzzled by the appearance of "a burst of light followed by a clap of thunder." Since it occurred in the early morning hours (11:30 a.m.), the sun should have outshone it, yet it was so readily visible that its size was calculated at two and a half rods long by one rod in diameter. "The frequency with which these incidents have taken place in the past year is truly remarkable," reads the entry in the almanac known as Calendario Galván del Más Antiguo.

In the wake of a heavy rainstorm on January 19, 1873, red stains were found both on the grass and rocks in Papantla, Veracruz. This has been attributed to the fact that water raining down was actually red in color. Ten days later, on January 29, there was a shower of mercury over the village of San Ignacio in Sinaloa. Samples of the material, allegedly collected for posterity, were lost in the turmoil of the revolutionary war.

Three months later, on March 27, 1873, a meteor passed over the city of Querétaro between 6 and 7 p.m., leaving a glowing wake that issued sparks and roiled into twin clouds which later exploded like a bomb, scattering fiery fragments in every direction. An entry for November 7, 1878 states that for ten days, the town of Tula de Tamaulipas has witnessed "the passage of an infinite number of flies from noon until five o'clock in the evening." According to the almanac, the flies' shape was very strange and they dropped strands of material resembling gossamer.

More strange phenomena troubled Mexico as it entered into the 1880's. On September 2, 1881, a brilliant meteor crossed the skies from one end to another, traversing the Veracruz meridian. Its light was greenish and its wake formed a white "head". Green meteors or fireballs would fall in the American Southwest during the 1950's leading many to associate them with the UFO phenomenon.

Three different kinds of hailstone fell over Zongolica, Veracruz on May 9, 1883: one shaped like stars, others square, still other rounded like peaches and with a hole in the middle...the hailstorm over Oaxaca was notable for the fall of several chunks of extraordinary shapes, larger than has ever been seen before.

José Vasconcelos -- father of the “indigenismo” movement and author of the landmark La raza cósmica – was one of those landmark figures that the 19th century appeared to produce with ease in every single country. This philosopher and metaphysician, equally at home in Washington D.C. or in Paris, where he spent his exile, retold an unusual experience in his 1935 autobiography Ulises criollo (A Creole Ulysses). Raised in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Vasconcelos attended school in neighboring Eagle Pass, Texas, and the transnational, transcultural atmosphere permeated his work and thoughts. Among his experiences at an early age was an encounter in 1890 with something seemingly out of this world. One morning, while returning from Texas across the Rio Grande, young Vasconcelos and his parents and siblings were startled by the sight of points of light that became larger and wider as they approached, turning into disks with a reddish golden hue. He thought at first that the objects were simply an aftereffect of being blinded by sun, emerging from the dense morning fog. All five witnesses agreed that the disks spun and turned into “orbs of light, rising and falling over the plain,” adding: “It made us shout for joy, as those who looked upon a revelation.”

On November 9, 1894, the townsfolk of Zacatlán, Puebla were distressed by the appearance of a tremendously large bird that which had been reported elsewhere in the area. The almanac further indicates that "a hurricane blew a multitude of never-seen-before birds from the unexplored Chilá Mountains, it is not impossible that some monster, such as the one being seen these days, should figure among their number."

Transition: Bob Girard - Arcturus Books

I overheard a line of dialogue on television a few nights ago. It went something like "we've reached the age when life starts taking things away from us, instead of giving us things." My apologies to the original source for the poor paraphrasing, but this is exactly how I felt when I received word from Monica Girard that her husband Bob, "bookseller to ufology", had passed away.

INEXPLICATA owes a deep debt of gratitude to Bob Girard.

Many moons ago, Joan Jeffers, another departed UFO researcher, advised us that the best way to promote our fledgling newsletter at the time was selling through Arcturus Books. She brought up Bob Girard, and I suddenly recalled that Monica's artwork had been featured on the cover of my translation of Salvador Freixedo's Visionaries, Mystics and Contactees, published by IllumiNet Press. I phoned Bob and before long, Samizdat (as we were called then) graced the pages of the Arcturus Books catalogue with glowing reviews by Bob, and welcomed by his subscribers.

He was full of advice for someone starting out in the UFO field, separating the sheep from the goats, reminding me of people I should contact, and the do's and don'ts of the publishing world. "Don't forget, mystics are always broke," he say wryly one day - a piece of advice that made me laugh and seemed to sum up the financial realities of the weird and wonderful.

I also discovered in Bob a fellow enthusiast of ancient history, and purchased many fascinating tomes of works having to do nothing with ufology. He went out of his way to secure me a copy of W.W. Tarn's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire since the age of 12, he set me up with a complete six volume set of Gibbon's masterpiece from 1856.

If it's true that the afterlife is what we make of it, all I can wish for Bob is a gigantic library -- as vast as the Imperial Library in Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, filled with wonders to peruse. Farewell, my friend. And heartfelt thanks.

Operation Moon: The Unsolved Enigma

Operation Moon: The Unsolved Enigma
By Scott Corrales

The summer movie-going season has generally been the preserve of action-packed thrillers and buddy movies. This year promises us something a little different: Gonzalo López Gallego’s Apollo 18, a “mockumentary” centered around the premise of the secret mission known as Apollo 18, launched in December 1974 and forever lost on the lunar surface for reasons unknown. Unknown, that is, until “found footage of the lunar mission” emerges to set the record straight, in the tradition of the Blair Witch Project and other found footage cinematic excursions.

Secret lunar missions form part and parcel of UFO fringe theory and conspiracy theory. The haste with which NASA halted its lunar project (although one needs only examine the financial / political atmosphere of the early 1970s to find no mystery) has always excited the imagination of anyone with a passing interest in the space programs. There were other missions that used Apollo program hardware, to be sure: the three capsules employed in the Skylab missions (1973-1974) and the one employed for the Apollo-Soyuz linkup in 1975. Apollo 18, 19 and 20 – which would have explored some fascinating lunar features, such as the crater Tycho, one of our satellite’s most prominent landmarks.

Lost amid 1994's media swirl of Bosnia, Rwanda, and the O.J. Simpson trial was a small item signaling the return of the United States' space program to the Moon--a new age in lunar exploration kicked off by a small disposable satellite dubbed "Clementine", allegedly a spin-off from the supposedly inactive Space Defense Initiative (SDI).

"It's curious that the first American mission to the Moon in over 21 years received no more than two inches of space in the country's major newspapers,” wrote UFO author George Andrews. He went on to note that the mission's steep price tag--$75 million--should have at least drawn someone's attention. According to an AP newswire, Clementine 1's mission was that of photographing our natural satellite along with an unspecified asteroid in order to test new defensive hardware, the exact nature of which remained unspecified.

NASA's long vacation from lunar exploration has been rationalized as a result of public indifference to space exploration or even outright hostility at the high cost of space probes. It has also been suggested that there was nothing all that exciting about the Moon in the first place, the payoff for manned space exploration lying in the red sands of Mars or in the mineral-rich asteroid belt. Eight hundred pounds of lunar rocks later, it seemed that everything scientists had ever wanted to know about our closest neighbor in space had apparently been discovered – a thought actually verbalized NASA agency after the Apollo 15 mission.

But looming over our heads, the Moon is rather hard to forget. And NASA had never quite put lunar exploration out of its plans either: it had been noted during the Viking Mars Program that a lander similar to the one aimed at Chryse Planitia could easily place a thousand pounds of scientific equipment anywhere on the Moon, even on the elusive dark side, while an orbiter provided contact with Earth. In the 1980's, former Astronaut Sally Ride chaired a committee to establish the best way to return to our satellite as a stepping-stone for the more difficult Mars endeavor.

But there were other schools of thought suggesting more intriguing facts, such as that the Apollo Program had only been elaborate, low-tech window dressing to conceal the more sophisticated military space program doing the actual exploration. Some went as far as suggesting that manned bases had been established below the lunar surface, dug out by nightmarish machinery. Still others on the very fringe between reality and delusion whispered tales of alien bases, battles between humans and non-humans, and how a secret Soviet lunar landing had ended in disaster when a cosmonaut tried to kill an alien on the Moon.

Paranoia aside, many still believe this rekindling of interest in the Moon to be highly suspicious. One of the foremost arguments is that there is no reason why both superpowers should have lost interest in lunar exploration at roughly the same time: after the Apollo 17 mission left the Moon on December 7 1972, the successful Soviet Lunakhod program came to a close less than seven months later, when contact with Lunakhod 2 was mysteriously lost near the crater Le Monnier, just 110 miles away from Apollo 17's landing site. Was it true, as some suggested, that humans had been "warned off" the Moon as trespassers, and that intense UFO activity had bedeviled our lunar probes? Author Brad Steiger mentions in his Mysteries of Time and Space that on February 14, 1973, Lunakhod had probed an unusually smooth slab of rock, resembling a modern house panel, in the vicinity of the Taurus Mountains. The slab resembled, of all things, the enigmatic monolith described in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Modern Myth-Making or Frightening Fact?

During the 1970's, a series of articles in a number of magazines around the world suggested the possibility that astronauts had run into extraterrestrial craft and installations on the Sea of Tranquility and other lunar locales. Transcripts of conversations between Mission Control and the different exploration parties hinted at the fact that our fearless explorers, endowed with "the right stuff", were in way over their heads. On Christmas Day, 1968, as Apollo 8 circumnavigated the Moon, an extraordinary event took place--communications went silent for six anxiety-ridden minutes while Houston tried in vain to raise the Command Module on the radio. After the endless silence, astronaut James Lovell said: "We've just been told Santa Claus exists". Medical monitors at Mission Control showed that the pilot's pulse rate had suddenly jumped to 120 beats a minute, while it had remained normal prior to the gap of silence. The historic Apollo 11 landing on the Sea of Tranquility was characterized by the odd "serenade" of assorted train whistles and mechanical sounds which interrupted the secure communication channel between the Lunar Excursion Module and CAPCOM in Houston, prompting the latter to ask of the astronauts if "they had any company up there". It is a widespread, though baseless, belief that Apollo 13 was nearly destroyed by a UFO beam trained against the service module, although it is a recorded fact that our astronauts have been "fired" upon--a projectile-like object flashed across the sky barely missing astronauts David Scott and James Irwin of the Apollo 15 mission, while the Apollo 16 crew was startled by a ray of light that flashed across the black lunar skies. Astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt had an even more harrowing "close encounter" with the unknown when an unseen force caused the high gain antenna of their lunar rover to explode. The transcript of communication between the moonside crew and the orbiting command module remains a puzzle to this day, with the astronauts in the rover stating: "Yes, it exploded. Something flying over just before...it's still--", and the other replying: "God! I thought we'd been hit by a--by a--look at that stuff!" Their exchange is followed by a laconic reminder from Mission Control that a previous mission had experienced the very same phenomenon. According to NASA geologist Dr. Farouk El-Baz, the perplexing objects had to be considered perforce as UFOs, since there were no Soviet or American spacecraft capable of exhibiting such dazzling speeds.

In December 1969, the distinguished nuclear scientist Dr. Glenn Seaborg, then president of the Atomic Energy Commission, manifested during a visit to Moscow that Apollo 11 had discovered "suspicious tracks" on the far side of the Moon, which appeared to have been made by some sort of vehicle. This came as no surprise to a number of people, particularly astronomers who had charted transient lunar phenomena and the appearance and disappearance of odd surface features on the Moon's surface. As far back as the 18th century, astronomers had been intrigued by the lights which could be clearly observed in certain craters and in the lunar "maria". Throughout the 19th century, the crater Aristarchus displayed brilliant white lights which were originally dismissed as optical illusions until a team of observers saw the brilliant lights take off from the surface. This highly visible crater continued to be a source of strange activity well into the 1960's. During the late 1920's, earthbound observers were able to pick up curious "echoes" on their primitive radio equipment. The scientists Sturmer and Van der Pol detected the source of the radio echoes as being in the vicinity of the Moon.

Nor was Aristarchus the only location for these strange events: The crater Plato revealed lights similar to that of vehicles in a parade, and Apollo 8 noted that Mt. Pickering, located between the craters Messier and Pickering, appears to emit beams of light. Either everything that was ever written about this allegedly lifeless celestial body was wrong, or its “tenants" were very busy.
By the mid-70s, with the U.S. manned space program in mothballs awaiting the advent of the space shuttle, and with the moon shots insensibly receding from the public's memory, a number of former NASA employees and consultants began to venture their own opinions on what exactly had transpired a quarter million miles away from earth during the Apollo launches, and the UFO press engaged in articles which invariably reprinted long transcripts of conversations held between Mission Control and the astronauts, stressing anomalous incidents which pointed at bizarre, unexpected phenomena.

Dr. Maurice Chatelain, a former chief of NASA Communications, expressed the controversial belief that both American and Soviet lunar missions had been "shadowed" by UFOs, even linking the names of certain astronauts to the incidents; Dr. Farouk El-Baz, a NASA geologist, believed that the perplexing objects photographed by the astronauts or sighted in lunar orbit had to be considered UFOs, since there were no Soviet or American spacecraft capable of exhibiting such dazzling speeds. Civilian writers also entered the fray with bold new suggestions, perhaps none quite as stunning as author George Leonard's Somebody Else Is On the Moon, the result of an exhaustive analysis of thousands of NASA photographs taken of the lunar surface. Leonard's theory, simply stated, was that the Moon was indeed inhabited by an extra-solar sentient race whose tell-tale signs are readily visible, and which in fact were the reason for the "race to the Moon" of the Sixties. The photos, according to this author, showed fuzzy depictions of colossal alien excavation devices up to five miles in diameter, and other mechanical devices that were allegedly engaged in altering the lunar surface. When interviewed by the defunct SAGA UFO REPORT, Dr. Farouk El-Baz stated that a number of curious, unexplainable objects had indeed been sighted. Foremost among these were the gigantic "spires" which appeared to cast shadows, often miles in length. These strange structures, which were also identified in George Leonard's photographic analysis, are composed of a material entirely different from the lunar rock surrounding them. Other articles and reports concentrated on less outrageous and more readily verifiable matters, such as the vast discrepancy in age between the lunar rocks brought back by the various missions.

Contactees Channel Their Thoughts

In 1975, Spanish journalist Juan José Benítez visited Peru in order to interview the members of the IPRI group, who were engaged in "channeled" communication with supposed extraterrestrial intelligences bent on saving humanity from itself and in providing confidential information on our species' first steps in space. The group, composed primarily of young students of the UFO phenomenon, was led by Carlos and Sixto Paz Wells, the latter of whom has gone on to achieve global notoriety in contactee circles.

Communication with the exotic alien presence was conducted via automatic writing, and in a number of sessions, extraterrestrials hailing from the planet Apu added another piece to the lunar conspiracy: the Americans had by no means at all been first on the Moon. Earlier in the 1960's, following the Soviet space program's exhilarating successes at launching two and three-man crews into space aboard A1 and A2 boosters, made a bid for the Moon, designed to shame the Americans. The Soviet two-man mission landed on our satellite and was terrified to discover the remains of an inactive alien base in a nearby crater. To worsen matters--according to the channeled information--one of the cosmonauts fired his weapon (!) at a moving mechanism, supposedly part of the installations "caretakers". The unfortunate result was that the shot ricocheted and killed him, causing his companion to abort the mission and return to Earth alone. This, like other Soviet space failures, was hushed up in the interests of political hegemony.

While these channeled alien messages must forcibly be taken with a pinch of salt, if not dismissed out of hand altogether, there remains the uncomfortable reality that the U.S.S.R. did in fact launch in January 1959, what is believed to have been a three-stage vehicle designed to impact the Moon: Luna 1 passed within three thousand miles of our satellite, and successive probes of the Luna series both soft-landed and orbited the Moon while our own efforts were still stranded at the starting line. The possibility of a secret manned mission cannot be ruled out. An incident during the Apollo 17 mission adds disquieting corroboration: while the command module flew over the crater Orientalis, pilot Al Worden reported seeing a manmade object resting at the crater bottom, flashing its lights. Mission Control asked the cryptic question: "You don't suppose it could be Vostok?" Worden was able to notice the vehicle again on his next orbit. The Vostok Program was the earliest series of launches by the Soviet Union, some of its launches enshrouded in the greatest secrecy. One of them could have been an abortive lunar mission...as explained by the "aliens".

A final note on the "pre-emptive" Russian lunar landing. By 1969, NASA classification of the presumed Soviet boosters identified six different kinds running from A to G, this last letter being assigned to "Webb's Giant", the titanic launcher identified by NASA Administrator Dr. James Webb as being the vehicle used to deliver manned Russian payloads to the Moon.

Conclusion

It is curious that the unheralded Clementine should have been a spin-off not of NASA's highly successful planetary programs but of the Space Defense Initiative (commonly known as Star Wars). Does this mean that some of the sophisticated weapon systems developed under this Reagan-era program can assure the defense of our own space probes against the "hostiles" occupying our Moon? Science fiction often heralds science fact--Clementine 1's mission called for a lunar encounter plus a flyby of a certain asteroid to test its equipment. The early draft of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey had the crew of the spaceship Discovery testing a laser spectrograph as a weapon against a small satellite. Was Clementine designed to test its own beam weapons on a hapless asteroid?

While our return to the Moon by proxy was successful--Clementine 1 broadcast well over a million images of the hitherto unseen lunar poles--contact was lost with the probe before it could complete its mission, falling into a useless solar orbit. Subsequent lunar missions, however have fared better: NASA's LRO and LCROSS in 2009, for example, with many others slated for the future (not including the Japanese and Indian missions. Nonethless, there are those who still believe that the silencing of Clementine 1 was another act of interdiction by unseen forces opposed to our exploration of space.

[Parts of this article originally appeared in Paranoia Magazine, 1995]

Pyramids and "Ancient Astronauts"

Pyramids and "Ancient Astronauts"
By Scott Corrales

“Ancient astronauts” – a term that conjures up the covers of dozens of paperbacks in the mid-Seventies, juxtaposing advanced technical machinery, humanoids, primitive humans and some of the impressive stone monuments that have survived to the present, confounding experts and laymen, thrilling visitors who make pilgrimages to see them, and of course, representing a dynamic market for filmmakers and writers alike.

Impressionable audiences, fresh from the discoveries and adventure of the Apollo Project, had no trouble accepting the possibility that if humanity could now leave the confines of Earth, it was likely hat others had left their worlds, and perhaps visited our own in ages past. Science fiction authors of the calibre of Arthur C. Clarke had put the thought of ancient astronauts in the mind of Dr. Heywood Floyd, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, as he considers that possibility of a terrestrial civilization in the Pleistocene – albeit non-human – being responsible for the “monolith” that drives the entire story. Collectors of ancient figurines now pored over their dusty curios to see if charming native antiques suggested helmeted space visitors rather than priests in ceremonial garb. A documentary inspired by Erik Von Daniken’s “Chariot of the Gods” had a theatrical release in many countries, and its intriguing soundtrack found its way into many musical collections in the golden age of LP records.

The public was also exposed to a reinterpretation of many documents – even major religious texts – during this interest in ancient non-human visitors. The prophet Ezekiel’s vision of strange entities was reinterpreted as spacesuited, moonbooted vistors piloting an atmospheric craft; Elijah was now swept away by a low-flying spaceship rather than a “chariot of fire”. Alien big brothers had led primitive humans by the hand, leaving behind their wisdom in ways that our species could only begin to understand in the 20th century....

A Pyramid Like No Other





“The ruins of the sanctuary of the god of fire were destroyed by fire.” With these words, Jorge Luis Borges, one of South America's most distinguished authors and a pillar of modern literature, ends his story The Circular Ruins, which describes a timeless circular pyramid surmounted by a temple to the fire god in his short story. As if dealing with an onyric experience, Borges leads the reader through a surreal, metaphysical adventure. Does this well-known story describe the mysterious Mexican ruins known as the Cuicuilco pyramid?

Cuicuilco has been considered a bit of a embarassment to archaeologists: the massive, circular pyramid complex that straddles an ancient lava bed to the south of Mexico City is "a blow to the face of history," as one Mexican investigator called it. Even now, many scholars are silent accomplices to its destruction-- shopping malls, multi-family dwellings and industrial parks encroach upon the ancient ruins. The city's formidable pollution problem, coupled with the threat of acid rain, will surely take care of this archaeological embarrassment if no action is taken. “Sad to say, the current status of the pyramid is very bad and shows a state of near-abandonment. Grass grows everywhere and the museum, while having been expanded, is not in operation. The main access ramp is damaged by thoughtless human traffic and the lack of proper draining,” wrote urban archaeologist Daniel Schávelzon in his La Pirámide de Cuicuilco (Fondo de Cultura del Estado, 1983) which remains one of the few comprehensive works on the circular pyramid, compiling the orginal photographs and articles on the excavations performed at the "Mexican Pompeii". He has characterized the studies performed at Cuicuilco as “some of the most detailed work ever performed within Mexican archaeology.”

All experts agree that the Cuicuilco pyramid is the oldest structure in the Anahuac Valley, which houses modern Mexico, and the very first monumental construction in the Americas. Disagreements as to its antiquity and the people who built it continue to this very day. Official records state that the Cuicuilco structures can be no older than 600 B.C., but revisionist figures claim the structure was built between 8000 to 10,000 years ago, thus making it almost as old as the "Tepexpan Man" -- the earliest prehistoric dweller found in Mesoamerica (human remains along with those of a wooly mammoth were found at this site).

American audiences were first introduced to the mesmerizing enigma through a feature in National Geographic Magazine (Vol 94) bearing the title: “Ruins of Cuicuilco May Revolutionize Our History of Ancient America: Lofty Mound Sealed and Preserved by Great Lava Flow for Perhaps 70 Centuries.” The Society had financed a considerable part of the excavations at the site.

Cuicuilco measures some 17 meters in height and has a diameter of 115 meters. A series of ramps provided access to its uppermost tier, which housed a temple with a statue of Huehueteótl -- the "Old God of Fire", the very first deity worshipped in this continent. The mighty circular pyramid is surrounded by smaller structures and rectangular buildings with well-finished floors which must may been homes. When viewed from the roadside, or from the slight vantage point provided by the Perisur shopping mall, the visitor may well think he or she is looking upon a colossal Celtic hill-fort.

The Cuicuilco site has yielded clay figurines depicting a series of dancers, acrobats and entertainers; ceremonial masks probably employed by shamans and actors engaged in recreating ritual ceremonies. There is reason to believe that this lost culture was highly specialized and had its full complement of bricklayers, masons, administrators, priests and bureaucrats. “One generation succeded the next,” wrote Dr. Cummings in his article on the ruins, “and the cone of the old temple rose its head toward the endless blue, making its best effort to allow its builder’s children to grow close to the deity and closer to a true understanding of natrual phenomena...some powerful ruler decided to repair the damage to the pyrmaid and calm the rage of the gods by expanding the temple.”

The contented lives of the prosperous, unwarlike Cuicuilcans came to an end when the Ajusco, a 4000-foot tall peak located on the same mountain range as the Popocatepetl volcano, began to exhibit volcanic activity. The earthquakes which rocked Anahuac Valley caused an enormous hole to open in the ground -- a smaller volcano called Xitle, which poured a torrent of lava that destroyed nearby Copilco before engulfing Cuicuilco itself. The Cuicuilcans fled before the destruction, and all that was left behind was an eighty square mile lava field known today as El Pedregal.

Debate has raged on and off regarding the date of the Xitle's eruption. Scholars of the "Pre-Classic" period of Mexican history believe that the eruption took place between 500 and 200 A.D., while geologists have placed the volcanic event as far back as 7000 B.C. -- clearly a wildly divergent figure.

Efforts at "restoring" Cuicuilco in 1906-1910 led to the removal of a considerable number of huge adobe blocks from the upper tiers. Serious archaeological work, however, was not undertaken until April 1922, when anthropologist Manuel Gamio – the father of the “indigenismo” movement – appealed to Dr. Byron Cummings of the University of Arizona, asking him to bring a team of his students to Mexico to dig test pit aimed at ascertaining whether Cuicuilco was natural or manmade formation. The professor and his students, plus a brigade of laborers, worked diligently from 1924 to mid-1925 on what could well be the oldest pyramid on Earth. In 1933, Cummins wrote Cuicuilco and the Archaic Cultures in Mexico, a booklet on his findings, presenting a number of interesting photographs.

The site was apparently visited one night by an unidentified flying light which hovered over the ruins before speeding off into the distance; while this UFO event did not put a halt to the excavation of the Cuicuilco pyramid, the expense of digging through solid lava eventually did. Even though a considerable number of archaeologists have worked on the Cuicuilco site, the amount of literature on the area is very limited. The pyramid remains only partially uncovered, and the bulk of the Cuicuilco site is covered by a thirty square mile lava field with an average thickness of some twenty feet. The rapid growth of Mexico City now makes further excavations impossible, and we will never know what other artifacts might have given us a better clue as to the origin of the circular pyramid, its purpose and its builders. Scientists insist that its one-of-a-kind shape is a representation of the volcano beside it, but a reconstruction of the pyramid -- found in Mexico's National Anthropology Museum -- would cause even the most disinterested party to wonder: why was it shaped like a flying saucer?

According to historian Stuart J. Fiedel, between 5,000 and 10,000 people lived in Cuicuilco duirng the First Intermediate Period II (650-300 B.C.) and that the neighboring region was home to some 75,000 people. Population increased greatly duirng the First Intermediate Period III (300-100 B.C.), rising to 145,000 souls--twenty thousand of them at Cuicuilco and the remainder at Teotihuacan.

Today, centuries after its original destruction, a new cataclysm looms over Cuicuilco.

In June 1997, the Imbursa Financial Group received approval from Mexico's Instuto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) to undertake the construction of a modern office complex right beside the pyramid. The project includes a 22-storey tower and parking for 1.500 vehicles. The project's architects insist that their project's design takes the area's archaeological significance into consideration, but a committee of local residents remarked in the July 3, 1997 issue of the La Jornada newspaper: "The terrible and dark history of the premises in ths zone has been the product of currying favor with private industry and the constant surrender of our cultural heritage by bureaucrats serving corrupt businessmen." As of 2009, an office building belonging to the Mexican telephone company has encroached upon the circular pyramid’s fragile surroundings.

A City of the Gods

Trudging through fields of maguey and scrub vegetation toward the pyramid complex of Teotihuacán is the closest that the casual tourist can come to being on another planet. Even on a fine sunny day, there is a certain alienness to the landscape which makes the enormous pyramids of the Sun and Moon seem a trifle frightening. On a cloudy day, the entire region and its surrounding mountains appear to have been designed according to the descriptions of the terrifying otherworldly realms imagined by H.P. Lovecraft.








Thousands of tourists visit Teotihuacán every year; tens of thousands of postcards and books depicting the complex are sold throughout the country and overseas, but we still do not know who built the stone metropolis. The Aztecs treated the site with awe and reverence, naming it "the city of the gods" when they could not imagine who else but gods could have built such a place. Superstition kept the Aztecs from ever occupying Teotihuacán, and when the conquering Spaniards first reached the location, it was covered by dense layers of alluvial mud. Historians tell us that the monumental complex was built around 200 A.D. and was sacked by the Toltecs in 856 A.D.There is evidence that the Mexican pyramids are far older than the ultraconservative figures given by scholars. According to British archaeologist H.S. Bellamy, the excavations at Teotihuacán required the removal of layers of earth measuring up to one meter in thickness. Bellamy himself reckoned the pyramid to have been built around 5000 B.C..

In the mid-1930's, General Langlois, a French researcher, looked into the evidence of a strange unknown civilization predating the arrival of the Olmecs and the Toltecs on the Mesoamerican scene. This enigmatic culture was one of formidable mathematicians and engineers who may have been imitating older monuments still. The memory of their existence and the magnitude of their undertakings may have led successive cultures to regard them as giants who were swept away by floods, earthquakes and other disasters. Langlois believed that certain Egyptian pyramids were copies of the earlier Mexican ones.

Pyramids with a Purpose?

Pedro Ferriz and his French colleague Christian Siruget went on to discover a hitherto unknown property of the Mexican pyramids -- their ability to store electrical energy like batteries. Experiments conducted at a number of separate pyramids throughout the country led researchers to believe that these structures were designed to collect energy for later distribution. Ferriz and Siruget expressed a belief that ancient builders expressly painted red and blue sides on the pyramids to indicate the positive and negative poles of the battery. Ferriz notes in his book Los OVNI y la arqueología de México (Diana, 1976) that the pyramid of Cholula is a perfect example of this phenomenon. The Cholula pyramid, which is buried under a hillside and is surmounted by a church from the colonial period, was the single largest structure in the world until the building of the Boulder Dam in the U.S. Ferriz and Siruget suggest that the alignment of an artificial hill known as the Teotón with the extinct Tecajete volcano and the Cholula pyramid itself is repeated in other pyramid sites throughout the country. This concept is not quite as far-fetched as it may seem: radioactive pyramids are discussed in French author Robert Charroux's The Gods Unknown. The hundred-foot tall pyramid found in Couhard, Brittany was built with radioactive phyllite rock. Charroux writes that the Couhard Pyramid is well oriented horizontally and aligned to a shaft which led to a deep geological rift which apparently served to provide negative Coulombian waves. The structure emits K41 gamma radiation -- a fact which leads the French writer to speculate that the pyramids were employed as beacons for guiding spacecraft to safe harbor within Earth's atmosphere. He goes even farther out on a limb to speculate that the radioactive energy was used to recharge the propulsion systems of his hypothetical spaceships.


But what leads a researcher to conclude that something – a building, a statue, an unknown device – is the handiwork of putative extraterrestrials? Pedro Ferriz summed it up rather succinctly in his own investigations throughout Mexico. To invoke the presence of ancient astronauts, he said, was an admission on the part of the writer or researcher that “he or she was unable to understand the nature of the object in question.” Consultation with experts on the subject, whether architecture, anthropology or metallurgy, would be the first step to take. If these experts considered themselves stumped by the question, or unable to offer a satisfactory answer, the mystery could then be classified as the product of a higher civilization (ancient human or alien) until the contrary was established.

This was the approach taken when Ferriz and Siruget visited the shores of the Gulf of Mexico to look into the possibility that an unknown civilization had built artificial islands in those waters at a given point in antiquity. The location in question was Jaina, in the state of Campeche, surrounded by unhealthy, malarial swamps extending fifty miles from north to south. According to their estimates, four million tons of caliche and dirt had been conveyed to the swamp in ages past to fill a hole surrounded by dense, black mud. Had the operation been performed using modern machinery, two hundred thousand trips – involving large dump trucks – would have been necessary, and no roads exist in the tropical mangrove swamp.

Unwilling to grasp a convenient explanation involving extraterrestrials, spacecraft and “tractor beams”, Ferriz and Siruget wrestled with the logistics of a human culture undertaking such a project. Materials would have had to be conveyed from the mainland, two nautical miles distant, in barges capable of carrying ten to twenty tons of material. These barges would have been pulled by hemp ropes and a primitive pulley system of round stone poles. The laborious process of stone extraction, haulage and dumping would have involved a staggering forty million man hours: ten thousand workers working day in and day out for a year, or a thousand workers over ten years. So far, so good. What causes this rational answer to topple to the ground like an unsound pyramid, however, is the fact that the these workers would have required food and water in excess of what the land was able to offer: twenty million liters of water and at least seven million calories of food. Or more succinctly “two million kilos of tortilla flour and the meat of twenty-five thousand deer,” to quote the authors. The Mayan figurines found on the artificial island would correspond to subsequent occupancy at a later age, when Jaina became a ceremonial and burial site.

Teopanzolco, the block-like pyramid whose name means “old or abandoned temple” (indicating it was abandoned by the time the Nahuatl-speaking peoples reached the area known as modern Cuernavaca) has also been seen as a potential power source. One of the structures in the complex is built within a narrow moat. Theorists suggested that if the moat were to be flooded with salt water or acid, the structure would become an impressive “battery”. Scaled down versions of Teopanzolco successfully produced limited amounts of electricity.

But why would such a structure become known as the “old or abandoned temple”? When Geiger counters are employed at some of these sites, their needles often make an initial reading and then go silent. Sometimes the needles oscilate wildly, like tree branches in a storm wind. Could some of these electrical pyramids have become overloaded, “short-circuited” and burned out? Signs of fire-blackened walls, having nothing to do with the rapine of the colonial conquest, are often reported in some structures.


The King of Chacaltzingo

The Summer 1995 issue of Terra Incognita, the newsletter of Mexico's CEFP (Centro de Estudios de Fenomenos Paranormales) featured an article by noted investigator Gustavo Nelin, a chemical engineer devoted to unravelling the ancient mysteries of his country along with the more recent enigma posed by the UFO phenomenon.

Chalcaltzingo, in the state of Morelos, boasts a four thousand year old rock carving known officially as the "The King" but whose description matches more closely that of a nearly-horizontal figure giving the appearance of floating in space while holding a torch-like object in an outstreched arm. A "space vehicle" appears suspended above the figure, who is clearly meant to be flying in mid-air as the artist has surrounded him with birds. "To me his helmet looks like a real modern helmet, like the ones used by modern fliers," Nelín observes in his article. "He is dressed in a one-piece jumpsuit with thick belts and is also wearing boots on his feet."

The "Olmec Astronaut" is not unique: two other depictions, found on a jade object and on a stelae in La Venta, Veracruz, respectively, show flying humans in the same pose as the one in Chalcatzingo. The author has observed that there are sufficient elements present in all three to safely state that the art of flight had been known to the sculptors depicting the images.

Nelín has also investigated other archaeological sites overlooked by contemporary visitors, such as Cacaxtla in the state of Tlaxcala (N.E. of Mexico City). Flanked by the towering peaks of Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, Cacaxtla is a citadel 2 1/2 miles wide by 1 mile wide, boasting the ruins of palaces, dwelling places, religious structures and other edifices. The site features vivid murals depicting half-animal, half-human males and females.

While much attention has been lavished upon the enigmatic petroglyphs found at the Canyonlands site in Utah, a possibly more significant one has been completely overlooked at Mexico's Tlatilco site. This particular petroglyph clearly represents a being whose circular head is depicted as being contained within a square helmet and its feet give the impression of being covered by boots. An ancient astronaut, or an ancient tribesman wearing a box over his head? Archaeology leans toward the latter option, although the ancients had not yet manufactured the box.

Conclusion

Dozens of books about ancient astronauts -- or paleoufology -- have filled bookshelves since the 1970's and their conclusions leave the reader none the wiser for the experience. The archaeological world is crawling with anomalies that hint at advanced civilizations which existed centuries earlier than modern scholarship is prepared to accept. To invoke the participation of aliens from another planet in the achievements of these forgotten peoples is premature and unnecessary: human beings of past millennia were certainly as resourceful as they are today, and were perfectly equipped to make the best use of the materials at their disposal. It is another matter entirely to say that these cultures represented the visits of interplanetary/interdimensional creatures in their artwork, architecture and even in their language: Quetzalcoatl, the "Venusian" deity worshipped as the embodiment of the force of spirituality and good in ancient Mexico, was the son of Chimalma, the "mirrored shield". Could this mean that the deity emerged from a brilliant disk that landed on the ground, a shield-shaped vehicle? Who can say?

The mystery is as disturbing to us today as it was to the Aztecs five hundred years ago; disturbing enough to prompt Netzahualcoyotl, the Poet-King, to write the following line of verse: "There is above us a bursting of rays, spying upon us and always watching..."