Puerto Rico: Shaky Alien in My Backyard
Excerpted from Don't Talk to Strangers: CE-3s Examined
By Scott Corrales, Institute of Hispanic Ufology/INEXPLICATA
(c) 2001, 2023
From the late 1980s and well through the 1990's, the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico held pride of place as the no-holds-barred strangest place on the planet: sightings of UFOs in the air, land and sea, strange creatures like the Bigfoot-like Comecogollos and the ubiquitous Chupacabras, and the possibility of collusion among the military and island authorities to keep these matters a secret, filled the pages of many a book and magazine around the planet.
In spite of these and other paranormal goings-on, it is still possible to come across traditional CE-3 cases. One of the most compelling ones occured on July 31, 2000 in the densely populated Bairoa sector of Aguas Buenas, a bedroom community of metropolitan San Juan.
According to researchers Lucy Guzmán and Edwin Plaza, the Aguas Buenas incident began in the early morning hours of the 31st, when Marie Molina, the witness to the events, was awakened by an unusual sound on her corrugated zinc roof at exactly five o'clock in the morning, followed by the sudden and frantic barking of her neighbor's watchdogs. Parting the items of clothing she'd hung across the window in order to peer out into the darkness, she was startled beyond words.
Standing with its back to her, at an estimated distance of 15 feet, was a tall creature with pallid, wrinkled skin, long ears, arms and legs, and an egg-shaped head. Ms. Molina was apparently able to see the corners of its elongated white eyes with black centers, but unable to make out the details of its mouth and nose, nor the number of fingers on its hands.
But the most curious detail of this backyard encounter was the fact that the strange entity shook its body incessantly, with its hands clenched in what Molina took to be a prayeful attitude. The witness would later tell Guzmán and Plaza that the creature's shudders reminded her of "a person afflicted with a muscular cramp and who is trying to relieve it [by shaking]."
Ms. Molina watched the creature for approximately fifteen minutes until she developed a sudden, perhaps irrational, fear that the shaking creature would somehow try and get into her house. This prompted her to reach for the phone and call another person (described as "a sister, friend or neighbor" by the researchers) who urged her not to call the police for help, since "she would not be believed", and asked her to hold on while a relative was sent out to rescue her.
Five minutes after having made the phone call, Ms. Molina decided to check on her unwanted visitor again, but this time accidentally bumping her leg against an object near the wall. The sound caused the creature to stop its activity (but apparently not its shaking) and turn to look at her. Clearly able to see its face now, the witness remarked that it appeared to be giving her a telepathic command to shut her eyes. This prompted her to step back from the window and rub her eyes repeatedly in an effort to focus and somehow break the suggestion placed by the entity. The fact that it had been able to "command" her to take action only served to ratchet Ms. Molina's fear even higher--if the shaking creature could control her mind so readily, what might be in store for her?
Another five minutes of barely restrained panic elapsed until Molina heard her name being called from the street--it was the person that her telephone contact had sent to rescue her. Perhaps feeling heartened by this, she ran back to the window to see if the creature was still in the backyard, but it had vanished. In an article for Inexplicata (Fall 2000), Lucy Guzman notes that Marie Molina had experienced some mild changes in the wake of the event: a chain smoker all of her life, Molina no longer felt the urge to smoke, "nor was she in bad mood over not smoking."
The 2000 Aguas Buenas case brings to mind another Puerto Rican case which occurred in mid-'70s during the UFO wave which included the mutilations caused by the Moca Vampire. On April 17, 1975 Orlando Franceschi, an ambulance driver for a hospital in the city of Ponce, on the island's Caribbean shore, returned to his house after 8:00 p.m. that evening only to become aware of the fact that something unsual was going on in his backyard. Franceschi's could see his watchdog jumping into the air in a frantic effort to clear the fence get away from whatever it was. The homeowner, tired after a long day's work, angrily set off for the backyard, taking the precaution to arm himself with a shovel which he kept against one of the house's exterior walls.
Nothing could have prepared the ambulance driver for what he found in his backyard: a bizarre entity with long, pointed ears, a long nose, lipless mouth and greyish, ashen skin. Franceschi would later describe it eyes as being "black spots", and having a jawline reminiscent of an ape's. The creature walked toward the homeowner with a jerky, stiff gait.
In a mixture of fear and anger, Franceschi struck the five foot tall intruder with the shovel, but was surprised to see that it was unharmed by the terrific blow. Oddly enough, the entity backed off, perhaps deliberately allowing Franceschi to deliver a second shovel-blow without any effect. But when the human was winding up to deliver a third strike, he began to feel his body becoming numb and paralyzed, leaving him at the mercy of whatever it was that could withstand such physical punishment without flinching. Helpless, expecting the worse from the non-human figure, the ambulance driver was shocked to see the entity (which he described as a "zombie") fade into thin air.