- A Saltan geologist provides a curious account on
strange deaths and demands an investigation .
-
- By Juan Antonio Abarz
- El Tribuno - Salta, Argentina
- 8-4-2
-
- Saltan geologist Carlos Taballione specializes in high-altitude
highways and has carried out such tasks for the United Nations in different
parts of the country. He demanded a thorough, credible and serious investigation
to uncover the enigma of Argentina's "mutilated cows", which
recently flared up again in the Saltan community of La Troja, where six
cows were found missing their eyes, tongues and flesh and hide covering
the lower jawbones, although the rest of their bodies was intact and gave
off no odor whatsoever, and had not been caused by carrion animals or insects.
-
- Taballione told "El Tribuno" that: "as
soon as information on similar events began to appear throughout the republic,
I recalled an event which occurred in August 2000 and which I witnessed.
While involved in laying out the new Santa Victoria-La Quiaca road at the
request of the Secretary of Mining and the local municipality, I found
half a dozen lifeless animals in an esplanade located a little over 4,000
meters high. All of them showed the same signs which have characterized
the unsolved mystery of "cattle mutilations". They had no eyes,
tongue, flesh or hide on the lower jawbone. Nor did they issue any odor
or attract flies. Condors, the world's most powerful winged predators,
and which can cosume a large bovine in less than two hours, seemed to ignore
the carcasses. And not only that: I also recalled that in the recent cases
and the one I witnessed, there were further similarities--the beasts appeared
to have been slain simultaneously and did not make a single movement after
hitting the ground. There were no tracks around them save their own, interrupted
by a sudden and instant death. It was as if they hadn't even lost balance
before dying. The left no signs of erratic movement, nor signs of a struggle
for their existence. But there were even stranger things. All of the animals
fell in the same direction, on their right flank, heads pointed toward
the north and forming an almost perfect circumference of 100 meters in
diameter."
-
- Taballione, 55, noted that on said occasion he was "accompanied
by a backwoodsman, who was startled by the discovery but attributed the
deaths to lightining, which is very common in Abra La Apacheta, where we
were standing. The man's reasoning was questionable," he added, "beacuse
when lightning strikes, it falls in a given location and not over a wide
area. It is therefore impossible for one of these meteorological phenomenons
to cause the death of 6 animals over such a wide area. Still less to think
that they were slain by individual lightning bolts. However, after taking
a few snapshots, I continued my work and never forgot the incident, which
represents a mystery I've never been able to solve."
-
-
- The geologist noted that "the challenge to really
find out what happened in these cases has spurred me on even more, now
that similar claims have been made everywhere. The carnivorous mouse hypothesis
put forward by SENASA is groundless: rodents are vegetarians, and the Puna
[high Andean upland--SC] is not inhabited by the "red-muzzled"
species to which the official explanation has ascribed the deaths. Nor
are vamipre bats to blame, and the theory put forward by my colleague
Domingo Jakulica--who attributes lethal properties to the saliva of the
flying hematophage Desmodus Rotundus -- can be rejected, at least
in cases occuring in the Puna. The only way to dispel all doubts is to
conduct a thorough investigation. I don't mean to say that the Chupacabras
or aliens will be found behind all of this, but the fact is that the nervous
explanations given to justify the natural are so weak that they make those
who believe in alien intervention or fantastic predators seem credible,"
he concluded.
- ___
- Translation (C) 2002. Scott Corrales, Institute of Hispanic
Ufology.
- Special thanks to Alicia Rossi and Gloria Coluchi.
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