Puerto Rico: Saucers on the AM Band

 

 Puerto Rico: Saucers on the AM Band

By Scott Corrales 

©2023 Inexplicata

 Throughout the Seventies and early Eighties, WBMJ-AM "Radio Rock" was the undisputed leader of popular music in San Juan, Puerto Rico, playing an eclectic mix of rock, disco, country and salsa tunes for both local listeners and members of the armed forces stationed in the San Juan region. The station's slogan, "broadcasting from the fabulous Cloud Room at the Vista Bahía Hotel" caused listeners to involuntarily cast their eyes toward the towering building from which both the music and the deejays' chatter emerged.

 April 1975 had been a month of considerable UFO activity over the island, tied in with the depredations of the enigmatic creature known to the media as the "Moca Vampire" for its activities in that town of the island's western half; sightings had become commonplace over the San Juan metro area, which had nearly a million inhabitants at the time. With a view commanding San Juan Bay and most of the metropolitan area, disc jockey Willy López was able to see stunning sunrises and sunsets from the aptly-named Cloud Room, but nothing had prepared him for what he was about to see on April 6, 1975.

At ten forty-five in the evening, López was cueing up the next round of songs when he was startled by three loud, solid knocks on the large glass windowpane leading out to a narrow terrace which could only be accessed from within the Radio Rock offices. The deejay reportedly saw a "luminous figure" running along the terrace. Plucking up the courage to part a curtain and look outside, López saw a glowing yellow-white object suspended in the only a few feet over a nearby cooling tower. The object was saucer-shaped and he estimated its diameter at approximately forty feet; it appeared to balance itself gently over the cooling tower and its unearthly luminosity remained constant. Frightened, the deejay closed the curtain and did the first thing that came to mind: interrupt the music to tell his listeners exactly what was happening in the skies over the city's Miramar section--an important moment in radio history remembered only by a few.

 A friend came into the station's broadcasting studio and joined López in venturing out to the terrace, which they found to be unnaturally hot. The bright object had since disappeared.

 According to author Sebastián Robiou, the Willie López experience was never picked up by the newspapers, but it caused considerable interest among other broadcasters, who even urged the Civil Defense to take Geiger counter readings of Radio Rock's terrace area. Public officials apparently did this, but the results were never made known. Two days later, another event described as "strange" occurred at Radio Rock as considerable part of San Juan was plunged into a blackout.

Radio Rock went off the air in the early 1980s. The Vista Bahía Hotel and its Cloud Room are the only remaining witnesses to the strange phenomenon...and they aren't talking.

But the disappearance of a certain radio station did not mean that the UFO phenomenon's interest in the medium had evaporated. Two decades later, Sammy Acevedo, a popular radio disk jockey who goes by the moniker of "Happy" on his radio show on X-100 FM, claims to have seen the nocturnal maneuvers of an unidentified flying object on the 24th of July, 1993. Ironically, "Happy" has become well known for his radio parodies of the numerous UFO sightings which have taken place on the island over the past years. The disk jockey qualified his sighting as "a unique experience" in his life.

 "I had never seen any of that, but on Saturday I realized that those things are real," he stated. Acevedo's sighting took place while he was inside a phone booth near the old El Comandante racetrack. The entire event lasted 8 to 10 seconds--all it took the metallic object emitting a pale yellow glow to move across his line of sight, soundlessly. "I don't think the object was round. Rather, it was wide in the middle and narrow at its sides." When asked about the possibility that it may have been an advertising helicopter, Acevedo stressed that it was completely silent.

Two years after Acevedo's CE-1, another radio personality, José Raúl Arriaga from the town of Barranquitas, would have his own story to tell.

 In the fall of 1995, Arriaga had taken so many phone calls from eyewitnesses of UFO activity over the preceding twenty months that to say that such cases no longer moved him would be an understatement. However, his interest was about to be rekindled as the control boards at Radio Prócer went crazy during his turn at the mike. The cause: a UFO was hovering over the station's transmitter.

Arriaga stated that at 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, November 18th, he became aware that all the needles on the station's control boards had gone haywire. At the same time, he heard a clamor of voices outside the studio. Upon checking to see what the reason for the commotion could be, he noticed a glow in the night sky and what appeared to be an oval shaped vehicle in mid-air, orbiting Radio Prócer's antenna.

"Whatever that thing was," Arriaga told the press later on, "it was spinning around the station's transmitter. I think that's what caused the boards to distort. After a few more spins, the vehicle took off in the direction of Barrio Helechal. We were showered with phone calls soon after from people who, like me, had been witnesses to the situation."