By Pablo Omastott – Investigadores de Campo OVNI Unidos
Within the framework of encounters with unknown entities recorded within the Province of Corrientes, some of which have been investigated by Ufology as close encounters of the third kind, we find some which are of interest to the researcher without being directly related to the UFO phenomenon. This is the case with the Paso Lovera incident (San Luis del Palmar – Corrientes), an event with an elevated quotient of high strangeness and which would not be considered, in of itself, within the case histories of ufology, had it not been that the events occurred in an area that has been surveyed before and after the incident within the local case histories. We shall briefly explain this later on.
Toward the second half of January 2002, on a Sunday night, we were doing a radio show on the subject of UFOs with journalist Francisco Villagrán. We had been on air for two seasons at the time, and our broadcast enjoyed a measure of popularity. It was during the show that we received a call from photojournalist Omar Vallejos, who frequently remarked on new UFO events from the interior of the province. Within the customary accounts involving strange lights – very common near the Route 5 area – there was one that became the center of attention that evening.
“We have here some girls who had a creature appear before them…standing over three meters tall,” he told us. We exchanged startled looks at the station, as it was the first time we’d heard anything like it, at least in our area, even for Villagrán, who had several decades of experience in the subject under his belt. So the communication ended with two stunned researchers arranging a visit with our correspondent so we could learn more details about this one-of-a-kind event.
We adjusted details mid-week and set off the following Saturday toward San Luis del Palmar, some 25 kilometers distant from the city of Corrientes. The travelers included Eduardo Lopez, of the Federación Corrientina de Ovnilogia, Francisco Villagrán and this author, who at the time was also a member of the aforementioned group.
Our first stop was in the town of San Luis, where we collected Omar Vallejos and his wife, who would act as our contact with the female protagonists of the case. We took the road again, following a long dirt trail that eventually led us to the young ladies’ place of residence. Along a side-street of the trail we found a typical rural house surrounded with trees, where we first spoke with their father. After a brief introduction, we were finally able to speak to the witnesses.
Gabriela Lencinas, age 15 at the time, was the first witness we interviewed. She told us that every weekend it was their custom to visit the town some 8 kilometers distant from their farm. That Saturday, January 12, as they headed back around 20:00 hours, they were able to see – in their own words – how “something like a cloud formed in their path, and a gigantic image appeared.” Before this, they said, a car used as a taxicab had passed them, and it too had stopped upon seeing the phenomenon. When asked about what happened to the driver, she said: “We saw him get out, see it, then get back into his vehicle and take off quickly.”
At the time, the girls were a little more than 10 meters distant from the apparition, but even then Gabriela was unable to be more specific or provide details about the sighting. She only said that “its shape was visible.”
After this, the figure began to rise and vanish, and the car drove directly under it, after which the girls proceeded forward. When asked if it seemed like something solid or vaporous, and if they managed to see its features, she told us that it was “real”, highlighting that it had frizzy, “sharp” hair, and at the moment of its manifestation, the apparition seemed to approach them with open hands “as though trying to scare us.” They were little more than 2 kilometers from their home, and upon arriving, they told their parents what happened, and subsequently told friends who remarked about sightings of strange lights in the area.
Later – and always separately – we interviewed the second witness, Griselda Olivera, 19. She was much more consistent in her story and gave us much more interesting details. She said that as they came down the road, they saw something dark that swiftly turned into a figure resembling “a giant ape” with “unruly” hair. At that moment she asked her companion if she was seeing the same thing, to which she replied in the affirmative. She also mentioned the fact that the driver got out of his car to look at the figure before taking off in a hurry, after which they were able to see [the figure] turn into “black smoke rising into the air.” When asked about the being’s aspect, she coincided in the description of “longish, unruly hair” and “full of static”. However, she was unable to make out the presence of eyes or a nose. According to her, its arms were outstretched, and when asked about its hands and whether it wore any gloves, she replied that its fingers were visible, but not its feet, which she was unable to see. As to her feelings at the time, she was somewhat frightened, and when asked about the height of what she had seen, using a mango tree (5 meters tall) as reference, she replied in the negative, pointing instead to a eucalyptus tree standing 10 meters tall).
The girls were separately shown images of humanoid entities corresponding to various morphologies. Both pointed out the one commonly known as Type 3: tall, slender and with long hair. After the interview was over, we asked them to take us to where the events occurred, heading there for a brief analysis of the location and to take a few photographs, some of which are shown here.
While the facts reported herein have not occurred simultaneously with the UFO phenomenon in this small section of the Province of Corrientes, both the manifestations of lights and high-strangeness incidents such as entity sightings appear to take place with a certain parallelism or temporality.
Provincial Route No. 5, links the city of Corrientes with San Luis del Palmar and other towns of the interior. During this first phase of the journey, we collected reports from people who have seen everything from incandescent spheres (1 and 2) ) hanging on the side of the road and “flying fluorescent tubes” (3) to helmeted figures (4) and very tall figures leaping through the undergrowth, as was told to us during this same visit, where “field laborers of that property” had seen very tall figures moving “in leaps and bounds” several nights earlier.
The details gleaned from a survey of this case at the time, shortly after it occurred, do not allow us reach a thorough conclusion as to the type of phenomenon faced by these young women, and whether it is indirectly related to the presence of lights in the area. Furthermore, alternative analyses have been put forward, such as the one proposed by Scott Corrales and the holographic theory (5), which could explain the sudden apparition in part, but the fact is that this incident has added new veins that create even further questions on the true nature of the manifestations, which occur in this location recurrently at given periods of time.
NOTES
(1) On the evening of August 21, 1997, a group of journalists traveling along Route 5 to the locality of San Luis del Palmar before the town’s religious festivities saw an “antenna light” in the distance before reaching the police check point (some 6-7 kilometers distant from the city). A little bit further along, they could see the light was beyond the police checkpoint by 100 meters and at a height of 20 meters, over what must have been a lagoon in the area. The light did not blink and remained static. However, upon returning in the early morning hours, the light was no longer there - Federación Correntina de Ovnilogía (1997): Case: Red Sphere. Corrientes, 21 August (unpublished).
(2) Eyewitness G. Acevedo, 35, a policeman, was in the back yard of his home in the Parque Cadenas neighborhood outside Corrientes , 500 meters from Route No. 5. At 21:35 hours he saw three luminous spheres forming a static triangle in the sky, which later took off at speed toward the NE and turned off – in his own words – like a TV set. López, Eduardo (2001) Case: Acevedo. Own research., Red Mensajero, Corrientes, 06 January (unpublished).
(3) At 06:30 a.m., witness J.C.R., a policeman, was in the back of a pickup truck with a colleague, driving along Route 5 toward Corrientes, when in the vicinity of Sapucay, his colleague was startled by an antenna light some 200 meters distant from the road. It suddenly turned into something resembling a fluorescent tube that accompanied them for the following 2 km before vanishing. López, Eduardo (2001) Case: Flying fluorescent tube. Own research., Red Mensajero, Corrientes, 29 May (unpublished).
(4) A renowned doctor at the San Juan Clinic of the city of Corrientes, who requested anonymity, told researcher Francisco Villagrán that toward 1982 or 1983 she was returning home at sunset, driving her car from San Luis del Plamar along Route 5, when she was able to see – at an unspecified point on the road, along the side of the road and in the wilderness – a towering, 2 meter tall figure that appeared to be dressed in an astronaut’s helmet and suit. This captured her attention, but what surprised her more so was that the being moved quickly some meters sideways, but not walking, but rather in a way suggestive of sliding in the air. Frightened by the unusual sighting, she sped away from the site. Villagrán, Francisco (1983) Case: Dra. G. I. Own research. Corrientes (unpublished).
(5) Analyzing the Paso Lovera case within the context of the numerous animals found in 2002 in Argentina with strange mutilation marks, Scott Corrales proposes in his article Holograms and High Strangeness, published in the U.S.A.’s Fate Magazine that the events surrounding the mutilations and sightings could have been related to the use of sophisticated holographic projectors.
[Translation (c) 2014, S. Corrales, Institute of Hispanic Ufology with thanks to Pablo Omastott, Guillermo Gimenez and Investigadores de Campo Unidos]