- Second only to Brazil in UFO events, Argentina has been
a hotbed of UFO activity since late last century, when the survivors of
the catastrophic earthquake that rattled the provincial city of Mendoza
in 1866--a quake of such magnitude that the ground shook for a month afterward--witnessed
"a glowing meteor...perfectly visible despite the bright sunlight,
leaving smoke in its wake.
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- Argentina has played the unwilling host to a vast array
of UFO-related phenomena throughout the length and breadth of its territory,
from the vast expanses of Patagonia to the largely unpopulated Gran Chaco.
Ufologists have known for years that two notorious and highly active "windows"
of paranormal activity, one by the city of Salta and the other by Bahía
Blanca on the Atlantic Ocean, perhaps due to the fact that the infamous
BAVIC line (an imaginary line devised by the late French researcher Aimé
Michel) runs right through the country.
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- It was Flying Saucer Review's polyglot editor, Gordon
Creighton, who first began translating reports on the astonishing number
of mind-bending and often downright terrifying manifestations that the
phenomenon was taking in the world's fifth largest country: giant multi-eyed
entities emerging from gleaming saucers, a family trapped in their farmhouse
by six heat-ray emitting UFOs, the heroic escape of truck driver Eugenio
Douglass from twelve-foot tall helmeted aliens--matching their heat-rays
with bullets--and the abduction of Dionisio Llanca, with its startling
posthypnotic command implanted by the UFO entities. APRO's Jim and Coral
Lorenzen faithfully included research on Argentina in all their books,
aware of the country's importance in the study of the phenomenon. Among
the experiences they collected was that of Ricardo Mieres, a 17-year-old
from the town of Paraná, who was attacked by a round-headed entity
with long, whitish hair and three piercing eyes. The frightened teen tried
to flee unsuccessfully. The strange being "did a half turn, like a
robot" and walked away, leaving visible marks on the ground.
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- Argentina remains high on the UFO activity list. In
1982, two state troopers, Andrés Soria and Ramón Carpio observed
the nocturnal maneuvers of a UFO that eventually issued a long tongue of
flame that served to ignite a brush fire that damaged a dozen homes and
wounded scores of innocent residents of Catamarca. Gale-force winds that
appeared in the wake of the glowing vehicle's departure only served to
spread the blaze.
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- Nor is the country any stranger to the crop circle phenomenon:
the enigmatic "agriglyphs" puzzled the residents of San Jerónimo
del Sauce in November of 1990. According to a published report, a number
of perfectly interlinked semicircles were found in a field belonging to
the town's mayor, who stated that the semicircles "were free of weeds
as if they had been made by a shovel." The mayor observed that he
had in the past seen azure UFOs over his field, and recalled that the experience
"was not too pleasant."
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- Argentinean investigators, while little-known in the
United States, have distinguished themselves for their scholarship in Latin
American ufology: Guillermo Roncoroni, for instance, conducted the first
statistical analysis of the myriad cases that have made Argentina famous,
thus compiling ARGENCAT, which aided in proving that the BAVIC line indeed
had as much influence over Argentina as it did in Spain or France. He went
on to publish UFO Express, which was considered for years to be one of
the most important journals available on the subject in Spanish.
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- Dr. Antonio Las Heras, a parapsychologist, is well known
throughout South America for his Control Mental self-help disciplines as
well as his exhaustive UFO research and often "revisionist" conclusions.
The famous case involving Chilean corporal Armando Valdés, who disappeared
before the eyes of his terrified platoon while investigating a landed UFO,
reappearing minutes later with a dense growth of beard and claiming to
have sojourned with aliens for five days, is a good example: in Las Heras'
scenario, the corporal's facial hair was stimulated by unknown radiation,
his wristwatch was affected by the same unknown emanations, and the event
lasted only the time perceived by the external witnesses. However, he
has forwarded exciting new theories concerning the disturbing phenomenon
of mysterious disappearances. In his book Respuestas al Triángulo
de las Bermudas ("Solutions to the Bermuda Triangle") he posits
the parapsychological phenomenon of telergy, the power emanating from a
person's untapped psychic resources. One of the effects of this telergy
is teletransportation of objects or people in open areas, produced by the
complete and utter blinding of the five senses by fear, prompting the psychic
state of paragnosia (awareness of the paranormal) which causes the subject
to levitate and/or disappear into some unreachable "place".
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- Dr. Ricardo César Calderón investigates
more terrestrial but not less elusive matters, such as the vast folklore
that exists concerning the existence of dwarfish beings and "subterranean
cities" under Argentine soil. He points to the overwhelming number
of South American traditions which speak of the existence of such eldritch
realms, some of them as recent as 1971, when former Swissair pilot Ferdinand
Schmidt ran into a compatriot in the city of Manaús (on the Brazilian
Amazon). The man, Karl Brugger, related the amazing story of the subterranean
kingdom of Akakor, which has been the object of countless searches since
his stunning revelation. The existence of other underground cities, such
as those in the region of Argentina's Sacred Mount of Uritorco have also
been the subject of a book by another Argentinean scientist, Guillermo
Terrera.
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- Other phenomena abound along the inaccessible reaches
of Argentina's Andean border with Chile. The ski resort city of Bariloche
has been the site of an intense UFO flap since 1992, and sightings of "Nahuelito",
a monster in nearby lake Nahuel Huapí, have been on the rise. Reports
of the Ucumari, large, hairy "manimals", are also common to the
Argentinean Andes, particularly around the vicinity of Mount Umahuaca in
the Salta Province.
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- But Bariloche is hardly alone. The community of Victoria,
on Argentina's eastern half, experienced a flurry of UFO activity of such
magnitude in 1992 that specialists from NASA allegedly paid the area a
visit, according to a news item gleaned from the Spanish EFE news agency.
The NASA investigators were lodged at the Niño de Dios de Victoria
abbey, located some 320 kilometers to the north of Buenos Aires, joining
the local residents in their nightly sky watches. King Juan Carlos of Spain,
whose traveling retinue has often included ufologist/journalist J.J. Benítez,
allegedly requested reports on the UFO flap from Victoria's municipal authorities.
A Japanese investigative group was also reportedly on hand, proving beyond
a doubt that there exists a renewed interest among international UFO community
regarding the oft-unsung apparitions taking place in Argentina.
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