Diminutive UFO Occupants or Elementals?
By Scott Corrales (c) 2016
Traditional cases involving “close encounters of the third kind” are as rare as hens’ teeth these days. These occurrences – involving contact between alleged non-human entities and ordinary humans – filled magazine articles and news columns in the ‘60s and ‘70s, petering out in the 1980s as UFO research went into a deep sleep, or into a cocoon from which an entirely new thing emerged. A media-savvy ufology, front-loaded with images and situations drawn from television series (“V”) and conspiracy literature. Roadside encounters in the night were replaced by the more convenient non-humans visiting witnesses (now “experiencers”) in their homes. These too would slow down to a trickle, and other pursuits would fill the agendas of a new generation of researchers.
The old-fashioned, quaint encounters did not go away, however. A careful search will show that human lives are still affected by contact with the unknown in remote corners of our planet, and while they may lack the impact of a Travis Walton or Pascagoula-type case, they are compelling in their own right.
One such incident comes to us from Costa Rica’s Exploración OVNI website (www.exploracionovni.com), which presents us with a case that reportedly occurred on May 7, 2012 in the small hours of the morning – 1:30 a.m. to be exact – at a small community known as Bagatzi near Guanacaste in the smallest but loveliest of Central American countries. No names are given, but webmaster Fernando Távara provides a transcript of the report as it was received. It reads thus:
“A friend and I were involved in tourist service business in a community known as Bagatzi, in Bagaces, Guanacaste, Costa Rica. The town of Bagatzi is one kilometer distant from the Palo Verde National Park, and we chose this location because I had visited it with my family for 15 years and its vegetation and natural attractions are incredible. I moved to the community and rented somewhat rustic lodgings. There was no glass on the windows, there was a screen to keep bugs from coming in, and some bars [around the window] but from within I could see the surroundings and distant landmarks from the room. Only a few people make up the community, fifty at most, and the school only has two classrooms. There’s a soccer pitch and one store from which essentials can be purchased.”
The author of the report goes on to provide additional details on the area, concerning agricultural production, the vast amount of wildlife, and the fact that the Guanacaste area received the most amount of sunlight during the day while being the darkest location in the country at night. Light pollution is non-existent.
One night, described as excessively hot and dark – so dark that he was unable to see his outstretched hands before him – the witness saw what he believed was the light of a motorcycle headlight reflected against the wall of his room, but was unable to hear the sound of a distant engine. Local dogs started to bark as the light grew nearer, no longer white or light yellow, but orange. “[The light] came through the screen mesh, a tube of powerful orange non-halogen light whose brightness appeared to dim as entered the room.”
Far from being frightened, the witness marveled at the tube of orange light, realizing it had nothing whatsoever to do with a motorcycle headlight. “It measured some fifty centimeters wide and made a fluid, watery motion which I compared to gelatin. It had a life of its own, and it stopped a meter and a half from my head, since I was lying in bed with head to the west and my feet to the east. The thing came in through the window, and I was able to see that the tube of light contained an object in its rounded tip.”
What follows is the most astonishing description. The object contained in the orange shaft of light appeared to protect a small entity standing some forty centimeters tall (15 inches), described by the witness as reptilian, “similar to a manta ray, except it was contained within this substance, its hands and feet outstretched, as if floating within the gelatinous tube, giving it sustenance and protection.” The diminutive creature’s head was described as rhomboidal, with small eyes and mouth, a featureless nose, and no tail.
“I saw my entire room illuminated,” goes on the witness, “and could not take my eyes off this animal, as it considered it to be such. I felt no fear, and thought that I could easily catch it in my hands, since it was level with my chest. I had the feeling that this creature was a watchman, a monitor of the area, and entered my room out of curiosity in a relaxed, very natural manner.”
Upon realizing that the room was occupied, and its occupant awake and alert, the light became “solid and rigid”, according to the eyewitness’s testimony, contracted and left the room in a split second. “I jumped on my bed and managed to see it turn to the northeast, as if terrified at having been seen. It left the way it came, through the trees and where the dogs had been barking – a 300 meter stretch – in two seconds.” He adds that he was accustomed to making use of Stellarium (software that creates a planetarium effect) to study the stars and follow man-made satellites and one of the lights in the sky was brighter than normal. Despite the absolutely clear night sky, the unusual “star” stopped being visible after a few minutes.
Cases involving diminutive non-humans are nothing new, and the Costa Rican case shares characteristics with others in Latin America and elsewhere around the planet. Although the witness makes a connection between the tiny reptilian creature and the elusive “star”, there is nothing to suggest that it is a craft from another planet.
In May 2008, an Argentinean news wire reported that the citizens of San Carlos in the northwestern part of the country had witnessed a small creature standing no more than 40 centimeters tall – again, 15 inches -- with the uncanny trait of being able to generate a kind of “force field” that kept people from getting to close to it.
The witnesses to the high-strangeness event, whose names are given as Walter Lopez and Omar Ferlatti, reported their sighting to officials, describing the entity as “small, glowing and wearing pants”, and apparently shielded by “a magnetic field”. This apparent close encounter of the third kind took place as the entire valley region (the Valles Chalchaquíes of Salta) was in commotion over a large UFO reported in the area.
“Kids aren’t going out at night out of fear of the strange creature and the UFO,” claimed a resident of San Carlos in a statement to the COPENOA news agency. Ferlatti and Lopez’s account dovetails with the one given by a shepherdess on the hills, who was startled by the strange visitor. Police have stated that both stories coincide and that local residents are indeed frightened. “It hasn’t been seen again. It would be good for it to return, to ascertain that the events were indeed as described,” said deputy sheriff Luis Comenares.
Not all locals were as agitated about the diminutive visitor. Andean peoples have an extensive tradition of small creatures usually lumped under the classification of imps or goblins, and they are purportedly the spirits of children who died unchristened or attacked their parents. Pablo Villarubia, a tireless journalist of the occult, visited the Cafayate Museum in the city of Salta to speak to curator Elga Brabo, who was very forthright in their discussion on the subject of these half-magical, half-real sub-humans.
When asked if imps had ever been reported in Cachi, she replied affirmatively, adding that the creature was even known as “el duende de Toma Colorado” (the Toma Colorado Imp) – an entity that was more playful than perverse, but which hadn’t been seen for years.
One wonders whether these entities could be related to elemental forces of the Earth, nature spirits of a kind. Not the slightest hint of technology is evident. The orange tube of light in the Costa Rican case did not seem to have a generator or controls; the personal force-field used by the Argentinean imp did not appear to be related to a device worn on its body, at least not one that the witnesses were able to see.
Since the early days of ufology, and going even farther back in history, accounts of diminutive intelligent beings have played a crucial role is shaping our perception of the phenomenon. The sizes of these creatures range from a scant twelve inches to a not-so-small four feet in height. They occupy a special position within the study of the unknown, since they straddle the divide that separates folklore from contemporary approaches to enigmatic creatures: every culture on earth has a tradition which involves small beings that can be good or malicious, intelligent or brutish. That accounts of such creatures occur in our highly technological twentieth century, and in relation to the UFO phenomenon, constitutes an enigma in itself.
The brownies, pixies, gnomes and dwarves have their equivalents in the Mexican ikhals, chaneques and aluches. It is extremely odd to find such a variety of names to describe creatures that supposedly do not exist.
Batteries Not Included
For those bent upon an ETH-centered approach, the thought of a civilization sending miniaturized explorers to look over the galaxy isn't far-fetched. Small crewmen would consume fewer resources, and these tiny explorers would more than likely be biological robots (biots, in the parlance of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama) as opposed to shrunken members of the spacefaring society, a concept that brings to mind Gordon Williams' The Micronauts (1979) in which a future society beset by environmental collapse and famine decides that the only way forward lies in Project Arcadia, an initiative at miniaturizing human beings to a size far smaller than the fifteen to twenty inches reported in these cases.
Ufology provides us with a fair number of cases that should remind us of Batteries Not Included, the Matthew Robbins film in which small mechanical life forms render assistance to beleaguered humans. One of these events – a particularly charming one – was researched by Antonio Ribera, the dean of Spanish ufology, and translated by Gordon Creighton, editor of Flying Saucer Review. The case involves a tiny flying saucer that disgorged a crew of uniformed ufonauts in the Spanish town of Villares del Saz, Province of Cuenca (Central Spain) in July 1953. Máximo Herraiz, 14, was tending to the family flock when he heard a “faint, muted, intermittent whistling” sound that caused him to turn around. He was surprised to see what he took for “a big balloon”, in his own words, which glowed with brightness that he was not accustomed to seeing.
Herraiz tried to grab the object, whose diameter he estimated at a meter thirty (four and a quarter feet), but “a door opened and little guys started coming out of it”. The object’s three diminutive occupants had an estimated height of 65 centimeters (25 inches) and addressed him in an unknown language. When the young man was unable to reply, one of the mini-ufonauts slapped him and all three returned to their object. “They went off very fast, like a rocket.”
Corroboration for this unlikely tale came from the boy’s father, who found landing marks on the ground, measuring thirty-six centimeters on either side. The local police chief, Crecencio Atienza, added his own testimony: “When the affair at Villares del Saz occurred, we saw what appeared to be a greyish white object which was stationary in the air, and then vanished shortly afterward. Its shape was very much like a ball. It left no trail, and when it disappeared it went toward the east.”
Riberas’s extraordinary report appears in the anthology The Humanoids (Chicago: Regnery, 1969) and is one of several events involving diminutive occupants from that period in history.