The Little Men of Villa Montoro
OVNIRADIO ICOU
[Intro Voiceover]
A compilation of anecdotes of fifty years of travels and skywatches in fields, mountains, rivers, lagoons, hills, ranches, chapels and graveyards. An interesting diary of UFOs and the paranormal, between reality and fiction, the credible and the incredible...Astonishing Tales...a visual compilation you must listen to...if you are a skeptic.
[Luis Burgos speaks]
"It was around 1983, a year rich in humanoid cases, with a lot of reports of strange characters all over the Republic of Argentina, we had the opportunity to research a very well-known case. Very well-known not only in La Plata, but also widely known throughout the country. It acquired national notoriety. It was case of the "Little Men of Villa Montoro".
"Villa Montoro is a community in southern La Plata, mainly consisting of modest homes, and in 1983, since November of that year, the story went around about sightings in an abandoned house surrounded by a cane field on Calle 600 between 2 and 2 (streets), again, in the city of La Plata's Villa Montoro district. Some strange small beings had been reported, little midgets glimpsed between the trees late at night.
"Well, the story was picked up by the local news. I remember that La Gaceta and El Dia (local newspapers) ran the story and journalists visited the location, where night after night people would hoping to see something, nosing around. The case achieved such prominence that we set in motion. It was our group at the time, CIFA, since FAO wasn't around yet. We started visiting the area by day in order to survey the abandoned house in the middle of the cane field, surrounded by wilderness - there was also an abandoned mill nearby. Calle 600 was an unpaved road at the time, but what struck us the most, what was most curious, occurred after dark.
"I can assure you that on those first nights, I don't know, there must have been 20 or 30 people present. On subsequent nights there would be 200 or 300. The minute the streetlights came on, people would gather for a glimpse of the little men. What's more, there would always be a 'nutjob' - as we call them - willing to fire gunshots into the air, targeting the boughs of the eucalyptus trees in hopes of dislodging any little man up there. Madness. Well, the situation gave rise to all manner of remarks, conjectures, madcap ideas, hoaxes, people saying it's here, it's there, it ran off, I saw the midget between the canes, I saw it between the trees...anyway, it was a madhouse of stories that left us mired in confusion. And we were a group of six or seven people engaged in research. As an anecdote, let me add that Carlos Omar Rodriguez was with us at the time, when he liked engaging in field research at the time, before he set off down another road and became known as "Clomro", right? Well, he died a few years ago in Mexico, unfortunately, and it was after this time that he joined Valentina de Andrade's LUZ cult, a very dangerous cult that operated in the city of La Plata at the time. But Claudio started doing on-site research with us.
"There are many more anecdotes to be told. One night, around 2 a.m. - because we were going to the place every night at one point, staying there from afternoon to evening and overnight. At one point we saw a group of twenty or thirty all dressed in black, carrying candles, even children dancing in circles, very bizarre, something straight out of the pages of an American horror film. So, when we saw all those people we ran off, because either they were going to tamper with what we were doing, or we were going to tamper with what they were doing. But two very strange things occurred on subsequent nights.
"One night, the six or seven members of CIFA were there, researching, standing quietly at different locations, with photo cameras, the old kind, obviously, when suddenly we heard a sound - it was like a burst of machine gun fire, well and truly impressive. So we hit the deck. We thought "we're being gunned down!" or something like that, all very sudden.
"Minutes later, when it had all stopped, the entire area was flooded with a very penetrating reek of sulfur. It penetrated the abandoned house, the cane field, and the trees. This would always be brought up at meetings, this peculiarity. And we kept researching by night and day. People would come up to us saying they'd seen the little men here and there. One night - and this would be the epilogue, as the case had lasted nearly two months - November and December 1983, we were sitting around talking, some were drinking soft drinks, holding a watch in pairs. Then we saw two characters coming down the street.
"The approached us slowly without saying a single word. We exchanged glances. The twosome looked like they had stepped out of a Hitchcock movie. We dubbed one of them "Toothless", as he essentially had none, and the other "The Stranger", because he was very, very strange - he looked like a mixture of vampire and gargoyle, something like that. And these two people just babbled. We would ask them something and they would reply incoherently. They stuck around for half an hour or 40 minutes the first night, they looked at the house, this and that, and then left without a word, heading toward Calle 1, toward our left, and by the light of the streetlamp, watched them go the same way they'd come.
"I can assure you that ten or twenty seconds went by when one of our group members exclaimed: "Look at those two over there!" but they were coming from Calle 4, that is to say, in the completely opposite direction. We all exchanged looks of disbelief. It was these two characters - "Toothless" and "The Stranger". It was uncanny - how did they manage to appear when they had taken off in another direction twenty seconds early? Because these two had retreated in one direction only to show up at another. They practically covered a two hundred meter(650 ft) distance in 15-20 seconds. We didn't see them go past the alleyway, as it was facing us, but they couldn't have walked around the block, as that was a considerably longer distance. Nor could they have gone through the cane field, because that would've taken forever with all the growth.
"[Laughs] What matters is that panic spread. How did those two guys pull it off? At the time I was writing articles, and there's one somewhere around about "The Stranger" and "Toothless". It was one of the oddest moments we faced while researching the Little Men of Villa Montoro.
[The Spanish audio can be heard at https://youtu.be/pRXg8Ay2i4s]
[Translation and Transcription (c) 2021 S. Corrales, IHU]