Puerto Rico: Saucers in the '70s
An abstract from UFOs over Latin America and Spain
by Scott Corrales
Francisco Soto Borges, a worker living in Aguadilla, reported seeing a fleet of seven disc-shaped craft, moving in perfect formation, which flew soundlessly over the coastal community in 1968. He was privileged to have a repetition of the same experience in May 1972 during the saucer wave: “I was out on my porch at about nine o’clock at night when I became aware of a large light in the sky that lit up the surrounding area like a helicopter searchlight. I looked up, and only a few hundred feet above us, was the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen.”
Borges described the UFO as circular and partially concealed by a cloud. “It had an array of blue, red and golden lights that streamed down to my porch, bathing it in light. The display became even more dazzling when a second vehicle appeared next to the first one.” Borges summoned his neighbors to join him in witnessing the aerial display. Far from being afraid of the unknown craft, Borges expressed a belief that they came from a dimension concealed from human eyes, since the vehicles disappeared without having moved from their positions. “We shouldn’t fear the unknown,” he philosophized, “for if these vehicles had any evil intent, they would have destroyed our world long ago. They have the intelligence to cross space, come from some other dimension, and build these marvelous artifacts.”
Perhaps one of the most impressive “multiple witness” sightings on record took place on January 3, 1974, at 8:10 p.m., when ten families totaling over a dozen individuals of various ages reported seeing a slightly flattened, circular object flying low over the Flamingo Terrace development in Bayamón, P.R.. CEOVNI investigator William Santana conducted thorough interviews with the witnesses, who coincided in their description of the object. Only a few weeks prior to the sighting, local children claimed to have encountered a bizarre, monkey-like being in the woods surrounding the development. Whether this creature was linked in any way to the subsequent events was never determined.
Four weeks later, corrections officer I. Simonetti was walking back to his home in the Barrio Obrero section of San Juan, when he casually took notice of an object in the sky which he first believed to be a kite. Focusing upon it, he realized that the brass-colored object was swinging in a pendular motion (characteristic of UFOs) before taking off in a northerly direction. Simonetti noticed that people on the street were shouting among themselves and pointing at the sky. One of them, standing on a rooftop, kept shouting in excitement that he had managed to take a photo of the unusual display. Simonetti later obtained copies of his neighbor’s snapshots and forwarded them to CEOVNI: the Barrio Obrero photographs depict an object somewhat reminiscent of the black, turreted object captured on film over McMinnville, Oregon in the 1950’s. Other objects visible in the photo (rooftops, palm trees, streetlights) help to determine the object’s altitude.
During 1974, Puerto Rico’s southwestern corner became the scene of UFO and religious phenomena as devotees of Our Lady of Sábana Grande claimed that their patroness was performing “miracles”. The following year, members of the CEOVNI group would investigate the relationship between UFOs and the bizarre animal deaths taking place on the western side of the island, striking pay dirt when they interviewed farmers who claimed to have witnessed UFO involvement in the mutilations: Luis Torres, his son José Daniel, and a number of neighbors allegedly saw a flying object that resembled “the lights on a police squad car” crossing the skies on the outskirts of Moca, a small coastal town on the straits separating the islands of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola. The flying object, described as silver-colored and as large as a house, flew at treetop level and as close as 100 yards from the witnesses. CEOVNI’s researchers could not have imagined that the furor over the Moca Vampire was still in the future.