UFOs Over Goodyear Are Not Blimps

Say the words “UFO” and “Goodyear” together and it brings to mind a famous incident from the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. This is not about that. Two witnesses recently reported seeing four lights above the mountains in Goodyear, Arizona. This is not the first UFO sighting of this type in Goodyear either. Are aliens looking for blimps in all the wrong places?

According to their report on the MUFON website (case # 81684), a woman and her daughter were driving on the night of January 22, 2017, when they saw four solid white/yellow glowing lights in the sky over Goodyear. They described them as being “larger than stars” and detailed how one of them acted independent of the other three, moving around them before returning to the alignment. The witnesses had the presence of mind to record the sighting.

They also mentioned that “our neighbors also saw them while out driving” and that this has happened before.

We have seen them before in a dark night sky over the Estrella mountains to the East. They are common in this part of Goodyear. We see them several times a year.

Estrella! The name conjures up tales of the so-called Estralla lights. Not to be confused with the (here comes the obligatory mention required in all UFO stories centered in Arizona) Phoenix lights, Estrella lights have been seen over these mountains frequently from Goodyear, which is close to them. One string of lights was seen in 2004 and another in 2015.

Yes, the mountains are located between Luke Air Force Base and its favorite practice target – Barry Goldwater Range. With an ancient Native American history, the mountain range was once part of Mexico and often rumored to be hiding the gold known as Montezuma’s treasure, but it’s never been found.

Then there’s that name … Goodyear. Until the TR-3 Black Manta is proven to exist, no manmade object has been mistaken for a UFO more often than a Goodyear blimp. Perhaps the most famous confusion came in 2012 when the Summer Olympics-watching world saw a blurred white saucer-shaped object over the Olympics opening ceremony.

Goodyear finally admitted that it was the “Spirit of Safety” blimp flying over London without the usual “Goodyear” name on it because the company, although it was covering the ceremony for NBC, was not an official sponsor of the 2012 games.

See how easy it is to get confused? Which brings us back to the Goodyear UFOs of 2017. Could be those pesky Chinese lanterns. Could be military flares. Could be ancient spirits. Could be aliens. Definitely not blimps. The witnesses had an interesting attitude about their sighting.

We felt excited and in awe, and happy they would reappear so we could get good pictures and videos.

Whatever it is you think you see in the sky, that’s a nice outlook to have.

 TAGS: Estrella, Estrella lights, Goodyear, Goodyear blimp, mufon, mystery blimp, Phoenix Lights, podcast, space, ufo

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

The Night of the Shape Shifting Humanoids (Part 2)

The Debunking

As we briefly mentioned by the end of part 1, it only took a few days until the incidents occurring on the night of September 29th, 1989 became a matter of public knowledge. After El Diario de Cádiz ran a story about the case on October 5th, members of the Spanish Group of UFO Investigations (GEIFO in the Spanish acronym), a skeptically-oriented organization, visited Conil de la Frontera to conduct a field research and interview the witnesses; they asked the same local newspaper to publish their findings, which it did on October 16th.

Cover of El Diario de Cádiz from October 16th, 1989, running the debunking explanation by the GEIFO group

The conclusion by GEIFO’s researchers? The whole episode had been nothing but a big misidentification caused by over-excited imagination. The red UFO observed by the group of local boys and girls for the past couple of weeks —“as big as the moon” according to their testimony– had actually been a British ship in charge of laying down underwater cable for the Telefónica phone company in that area, which was near the coast of Conil during the night in question according to their findings, and used ‘light signals’ to coordinate the work with ground personnel. The ‘aliens’, according to the skeptics, were two crew members of said vessel wearing scuba-diving equipment and covering themselves with blankets or towels, and the ‘white cloud’ they had observed coming down from the sea, was nothing but the wake left by a Zodiac boat they divers had used to reach the beach. Case closed, Scooby Doo!

“But wait!” you may be asking, “what about the trench the ‘divers’ dug out in the sand? What about the blue light they passed around each other while they were lying down on it? What about the TEN-FOOT-TALL GIANT which appeared after the couple walked to the town (leaving their ‘towels’ AND all their equipment behind?)?”

GEIFO’s answers to all these questions –and the way they left other questions unanswered– seem to be more incredible than the testimony of the witnesses itself: The trench was built by the divers because they wanted to ‘remove their gear in privacy’ –you know, instead of doing it much more easily onboard the British ship or the Zodiac?– or maybe because after a hard night’s work laying out cable, they wanted to spend a few hours under the Cádiz’s fair weather doing *ahem* ‘other things’ *wink wink*. The ‘orb’ they had on their hands was a mere torchlight, and the black-suited giant was another diver, possibly in charge to pilot the Zodiac boat (!)

So, in the eyes of the ‘scientifically-oriented’ investigators –the ones who think any sort of explanation, no matter how tenuous or downright improbable, is always better than entertaining the possibility of a truly anomalous event– the 5 Conil witnesses rather than being UFO hoaxers seeking publicity, were just a bunch of gullible idiots. I’ll leave you Coppertops to decide which is more insulting…

The Counter-Debunking

Juan José Benítez: Reporter, UFO investigator, author and globetrotter

5 months after GEIFO’s report had ‘satisfactorily’ solved the case –and quite possibly subjected the 5 witnesses to all sorts of ridicule in the process– investigator Juan José Benítez visited Conil to make a research of his own. Benítez is one of the most famous UFO hunters in Spain and has been instrumental in coaxing his government to declassify a good number of cases which were investigated by the Spanish Air Force. He has also traveled thousands of miles all across the globe to conduct field investigations and interview hundreds of witnesses, most of them humble townsfolk living in remote villages, who had never shared their testimony outside their circle of friends and family. He is a bestselling author not only in his home country but in all of Latin America, and it was in 1990 when he described his involvement on the Conil case in his book La Quinta Columna.

Benítez’s approach to put GEIFO’s theory to the test was simple and straightforward: The skeptics’ main argument was that the UFO observed by the witnesses had been one of two British vessels laying down underwater cable –this despite the boys’ insistence that during the night in question there was NO ship or boat on sight.

Benítez did corroborate the existence of two oceanographic ships, the British Enterprise Two and the C.S. Monarch, which had been hired by a Spanish subcontractor to conduct work for the Telefónica phone company. According to GEIFO, the Monarch had been the one near the coast on the night of September 29th; yet their first mistake was in stating the ship was laying down the cable, whereas in fact they were conducting preliminary prospecting of the littoral.

It took some hard work, but in the end Benítez managed to uncover 3 important pieces of the puzzle:

• When the Monarch started working in the area (September 18) its position was 60 miles away from the coast, which was too far to have been able to be spotted from the beach (not to mention the witnesses started to observe the red UFO on the night of September 14th).
• On the night of September 29th the meteorological report indicated the weather conditions were inadequate for any medium-to-large ship to even approach the coast, due to the strong winds winds mixed with the low tide and the littoral currents.
• But the coup’ de grace came when Benítez was able to contact captain, J. A. B. Simkins –Chairman and Chief Executive of BT Marine, the oceanographic fleet which owned the Monarch– who on July of 1990 wrote him a letter stating the approximate position of their vessel during the night in question (36º 23′ N, 06º 44′ W), placing it 30 miles away from the Bateles beach. Consider how during the best viewing conditions, the horizon line on the sea only extends 8 miles.

And if that is not enough, here’s a link to Benítez’s own web page describing the Conil case, where if you scroll down you can find a scanned copy of Simkins’ letter. In it one can read the final nail in GEIFO’s coffin:

“[During our operation] (W)e would not have employed frogmen.”

Check. And mate.

As an aside note, Benítez also managed to discover (according to an article written by Bruno Cardeñosa published by the magazine Año Cero in 1996) that around the time of the incidents two individuals bearing the characteristics of the ‘changeling’ couple were lodging on a small guest house in Conil around the days of the encounter; these ‘tourists’ registered themselves using the passports of German citizens who, supposedly, hadn’t abandoned their country in those days –unfortunately, La Quinta Columna doesn’t mention this detail, nor can further information be found in Benítez’s website.

But wait, there’s more! Benítez also uncovered another interesting part to this mystery: On the nights from Sept 27th to Sept 30th, the military radar station located in Algeciras (Cádiz) suffered an inexplicable malfunction, which rendered the whole Conil area ‘dark’ during the period in which the alleged UFO activity and close encounter took place. Coincidence, or did someone (or something) was trying to avoid detection?

Benítez’s detective job showed GEIFO’s main argument failed to convincingly explain the events that took place at Conil. But although it proved the UFO was not a British oceanographic ship, and the humanoids were not British scuba divers, it can’t unfortunately substantiate the testimony of the witnesses and what they claimed they saw.

Corroboration to their fantastic story did take place, though; albeit indirectly and in the typical inconclusive manner in which the phenomenon tends to conduct itself…

The Return

How many UFO hunters, I wonder, feel as if they are doomed to always remain 2 steps behind their ‘prey’? Always trying to document cases, interview witnesses and collect whatever evidence remains AFTER the objects and their occupants take off or leave the area; but never having the chance, just for once, of actually be able to witness the high strangeness with their own eyes.

Well, for local UFO hunter Jesús Borrego López that was about to change when he decided to travel to Conil in search for more answers on October 15th. A police officer of 44 years old assigned to the Security and Control office of the Cádiz town hall, Borrego López easily managed to locate four of the witnesses (Loli, Isabel and the two Pedros) who politely accepted to answer his questions.

Once they finished talking at one of the witnesses’ home, the researcher asked them to accompany him to the Bateles beach, which they accepted even though it was already late at night. Once Borrego López was satisfied with his field survey, he invited the group of boys and girls to a local bar for a refreshment, where they remained lively discussing the incident.

It was around 10:35 pm when the group instantly fell silent, because they had all taken notice of a strange couple crossing in front of them toward the sea. Borrego López was the first to say “have you noticed the forehead of that man?”

The youngsters said nothing and kept looking at the odd individual and each other in total amazement. Borrego López insisted: “look at his height! He measures 2 meters tall, easily!”

The boys finally dared to open their mouth, confirming that was indeed the same ‘man’ and ‘woman’ they had observed leaving the Bateles beach after their ‘transformation’ inside the ‘sand trench’.

The male with the prominent cranium was walking 2 steps ahead of his female partner. Like the witnesses had described in their original testimony, he had long blond hair reaching up to his shoulders, and was wearing a denim attire which looked somewhat worn out and tightly fit. The woman was way above regular height (1.90 meters) and wore similar clothes as her less-conspicuous companion.

Borrego López and Pedro Sánchez quickly got up the table and left two of the witnesses behind, with the clear intention of intersecting the couple who were ahead of them by at least 150 meters.

“Visibility was perfect,” Borrego López reported later to Benítez, “despite the fact the streetlights at the marine promenade were turned off  (according to town hall’s regulations). But the night was very clear. There was a full moon and also low clouds reflecting the town’s illumination and lunar light over the sea.”

La Quinta Columna (The Fifth Column). The book where Benítez narrates (among many other encounter reports) the events surrounding the Conil case

Yet despite these optimal viewing conditions, and the fact the two UFO hunter and his young sidekick were keeping pace with the odd couple, the individuals suddenly vanished in front of Borrego López and Pedro’s very eyes. Bewildered, the two chasers looked in all directions, but their pursuants were nowhere to be found.

The unexpected disappearance raised goosebumps on both Pedro and the seasoned researcher, who had now become another witness of this incredible case. But the surprises were not over: When they both looked toward the east they noticed what looked like a ‘black dot’ the size of a soccer ball approaching rapidly from the sea shore.

Meanwhile the two other kids they had left at the bar joined them in time to observe the dark ‘ball’ which kept moving toward them at a preternatural speed. As it got nearer, the witnesses saw how its shape started to change; its trajectory became more erratic, at times looking as if it was floating above the ground, and at others as if it was being ‘yanked’ or ‘dragged’ by an invisible force.

The group continued to observe the mesmerizing vision, until they finally realized the incoming dark mass was actually a human figure; though its legs were moving so fast they were a mere blur.

When the ‘sprinter’ was just 60 meters away from the witnesses, it stopped. It was a woman! She was standing in front of the group very close to the water age, and without any warning she removed the upper portion of her clothes to reveal her female curves, and started walking toward the Roche cape, faraway in the west. And when she had put some distance between herself and the astonished group, these observed yet another figure who joined her and watched the two individuals lose themselves in the night.

According to their later calculations given the apparent size of the figure from their position, the strange female had managed to traverse a distance of 4 kilometers in around 45 seconds; something impossible to achieve even with a land vehicle. Not to mention the woman didn’t raise a tremendous wake of sand while racing through the beach, nor even make any discernible noise.

Had that been the same man and woman Borrego López and Pedro had tried to pursue? Or were they an additional element to this absurd stage play, intended to distract the witnesses the same way the ten-foot-tall giant had done on the night of September 29th, when it showed itself floating inches above the ground while the couple of changelings were making their move toward the anonymity of the Conil streets?

Whatever the case, the only thing Borrego López could do was analyze the footprints left by the (original) couple before they vanished. While the tracks made by the woman were very light and faintly discernible, the man’s were very profound; so much so that Borrego López estimated the individual had to weigh more than 100 kilograms. The size and shape were consistent with the ones found by the youngsters on the night of the 29th, not only in their unusual shape and monstrous size, but also due to the fact the researcher found tracks hinting how whomever made them, had been apparently making strange swirls as if going in circles –movements unobserved by neither Borrego López nor Pedro, the same way the original witnesses had watched the couple walk straight toward the town, yet they later found a great number of large footprints going in different directions.

After the ‘circles´, only one set of footprints was detectable… and it went straight into the water.

It was close to midnight when Borrego López confirmed there were no more tracks to be found in a 100-meter radius, and with that he was ready to call it a night. While he was advising his young acquaintances not to reveal to anyone what had transpired that night, Pedro suddenly yelled “here they come!”. Sure enough, the enigmatic couple was making yet another uncalled-for appearance right in front of the witnesses. One of the boys was (finally!) carrying a super-8 film camera and began recording the seemingly hurried movements of the couple as they passed by.

The man looked straight into Borrego López’s with cold, unfriendly eyes. His face was very pale. The woman on the other hand was stunningly beautiful, and she seemed to have somewhat oriental features, with her eyes slanted slightly at the edges and glimpsing at the gathering of witnesses with an expression of animosity or nervousness. The seasoned UFO hunter noticed both their clothes were completely dry, which ran counter to the evidence of the tracks heading into the sea.

The witnesses never dared to address the couple. They just kept staring at them until, for the second time, they reached the streets of Conil and were lost out of sight. They didn’t return that night, nor any other subsequent night.

When they revealed the Super-8 film, nothing appeared on screen. ‘Convenient’ would say the hardcore skeptic; ‘customary’ would reply the experienced Fortean, who knows fully well these sort of things happen all the time.

The Epilogue

Our tale has basically come to an end, which doesn’t mean the UFO activity in the area fully ceased; Benítez reveals other interesting incidents near Conil during that time of 1989 in his book La Quinta Columna –including the observation of another giant being by a local artisan on the morning on September 22nd. Further confirming the supposition made by few people in the UFO field –including yours truly– that high strangeness events almost never happen in isolation; rather, it seems the ‘energy’ conducing to these  manifestations slowly increases, until a final dramatic ‘crisis’ unfolds.

And if someone needs further confirmation that the year 1989 was exceptionally ‘charged’ with high strangeness, we but need to remind our dear Coppertops of another remarkable close encounter report, which happened just two days before the Conil case: I’m talking of course about the landing in the Russian city of Voronezh, where children and other witnesses interacted with giant humanoids and robotic entities.

Which begs the question: Why does the phenomenon chooses to manifest so prominently in places like Voronezh, or in Conil de la Frontera?

The Conclusion

In the comic book world, the Marvels mini-series created by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross holds a prominent place because it managed to show all the familiar stories of the Marvel super-heroes from a fresh new perspective: That of the human bystanders, who are forced to observe their actions and epic battles of these god-like beings from a safe distance, not fully understanding their motives or even what’s really going on.

When I think of the Conil case, I feel it is a similar situation. Because this amazing story is far more suggestive by what it doesn’t reveal, than by what it actually does. The testimony of the main witnesses feels like broken pieces of a larger puzzle, hinting to a bigger tapestry of events that took place covertly in that placid beach town of Cádiz, which we will probably never fully understand.

Comparing Conil with a comic book story may look like a cheap literary trick on my behalf, yet it you think about it there are MANY aspects of this close encounter that seem almost plucked out of a pulp novel or a Sci-Fi B-movie. Forget about the grotesque appearance of the male ‘changeling’, which we already equated to that of the extraterrestrial invaders in This Island Earth (1955) or how the ten-foot-tall giant is slightly reminiscent of Gort in the classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) –at least in the sense of how it seems to serve as a ‘protector’ of the couple, by distracting the attention of the witnesses away from them. Consider also how there’s this strong link between the humanoids’ ability to transform themselves into a human form, and the ability of the extraterrestrial visitor portrayed by Jeff Bridges in the 1984 movie Starman to do the same thing –and do you remember the main form of ‘technology’ shown by this alien? That’s right: small metallic spheres which glowed with a blue light. Sound familiar?

Make no mistake, my dear Coppertops: Those who read the previous paragraph as an attempt to shoot down the case on my part, should do well to grab a copy of Jeffrey Kripal’s book Mutants & Mystics. Kripal is a scholar of comparative religious studies at Rice University, and rather than being skeptic on the subject of UFOs and paranormal phenomena –his last book was co-authored with Whitley Strieber– he points out there’s an undeniable ‘cross-pollination’ between these type of events and the pop culture we consume in our literature, television and films; to the point that trying to play ‘chicken-and-the-egg’ between fantasy tales and paranormal cases becomes a rather tricky proposition…

Because the truth of the matter is that stories of paranormal agencies infiltrating our world in human guise have existed way before the existence of Sci-Fi movies, or even cinematography. In fact, such folklore goes back centuries –if not millennia– into the dawn of Time. Oxford scholar W.Y. Evans-Wentz managed to gather the remnants of the belief in the Fey folk in his seminal book The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries (1911), and talked to a lot of honest, hard-working country folk who still believed –or had actually interacted– with these elusive beings who from time to time chose to meddle in the affairs of men:

“They are able to appear in different forms. One once appeared to me, and seemed only four feet high, and stoutly built. He said “I am bigger than I appear to you know. We can make the old young, the big small, the small big.”

The Celtic peasants also believed lakes and bodies of water acted as ‘bridges’ or conduits in which the transmutation from the human to the fairy state took place. But if that is the case… couldn’t the OPPOSITE be also possible? Could water be a medium by which liminal beings could get entrance into our world? Both Evans-Wentz and Guillermo Del Toro would probably concur…

When you boil them down to their bare essence, and you stop the bickering caused by either trying to validate or debunk a given case, the true main difference between fictional stories and factual close encounters is that Fiction HAS TO MAKE SENSE. A novel or movie plot needs to have a core of consistency in order to make all the elements fall into place.

Finding sense in the events that took place in Conil on the night of September 29th is practically impossible: If what Juan José Benítez reveals in La Quinta Columna concerning the military radar station which remained inoperable during those days is true, then it would hint the beings making their appearance at the Bateles Beach wanted to perform their infiltration activities covertly, away from the eyes of the Spanish government; yet if that is the case, then WHY choose a tourist town, instead of a more remote location? WHY suffer the presence of pesky human interlopers near them? WHY was Pedro González the only one in the group who could see the giant at first? WHY perform their shape-shifting spectacle lying down on a beach, instead of the safety of their own ‘craft’ (if that is what the ‘red moon’ observed by the witnesses was)? WHY the imperfect transformation, which still rendered the male with such abnormal-looking facial features? WHY the incapacity to cover the unusual shape and size of their tracks?

…And WHY O WHY the need to reappear in front of the witnesses not once, but twice??

These are just a few of the open questions left by the Conil case. How one chooses to approach them tells more about one’s personal opinion about the UFO phenomenon, than about what really happened on that fateful night. In a polarizing world demanding to view things as either ‘black’ or ‘white’, I personally feel this case was always meant to remain ‘gray’. I consider the actions allegedly performed by the entities manifesting at Conil de la Frontera as *deliberately* absurd; like a well-crafted act enacted for the benefit of the young witnesses, who also had a part to perform in this play, even if they didn’t know it or were capable or comprehend it. The high strangeness of this encounter is both equally suggestive of non-human intervention, while at the same time being sufficiently devoid of enough concrete evidence so that almost 30 years after the story broke, it sadly remains scarcely known outside the Spanish-speaking UFO community.

“We want you to believe in us,” said one of the UFOnauts who abducted patrolman Herbert Schirmer in 1967, “… but not too much.” If the tall blond who left those inhuman footprints on the Bateles beach had ever opened his mouth and talked to the witnesses, he might have said similar words. Just as it was in 1989, his cold eyes remain an open question hinting at answers that could be not just incomprehensible… but also deeply unsettling.

 TAGS: close encounters, Conil, humanoids, Juan José Benítez, Spain, Voronezh

Scientists Sustain Microbes in Simulated Martian Atmosphere

Since the 17th century, scientists and astronomers have searched for clues of life on Mars through every method available to them. While the search for Martian life began by peering through telescopes, we now have the ability to send autonomous robotic rovers to the Martian surface to dig through the soil by hand. Creepy robotic hand, that is.

That’s some nice soil you got there. It’d be a shame if someone roved all over it.

While concrete evidence of life on Mars has yet to be found, there have been some recent promising developments. Evidence of flowing water on Mars, including a massive underground frozen lake, has been found which gives some hope to the theory that where there is water, there is likely life. However, scientists are still uncertain if the geological and atmospheric conditions of the planet are hospitable for any forms of life. Just last year, however, a team of Dutch scientists found that Martian soil – the most abundant resource on the barren planet – is capable of sustaining plant life.

Lead author Rebecca Mickol, left, poses with her Martian pressure chamber.

Now, more promisingly, a new research project at the NASA-funded University of Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary Sciences have found that Mars could indeed have the necessary conditions to sustain certain microbial life forms. The study resolved one of the most enduring questions surrounding life on Mars: whether or not any life could withstand the low Martian atmospheric pressure. To test this question, researchers placed four separate species of methanogens – microbes which survive on ambient hydrogen and carbon dioxide – into a hypobaric chamber which simulated conditions on Mars. According to the published data, the microbes survived for days, meaning they could hypothetically survive the Martian climate:

The study reported here tested the survivability of four methanogen species under low pressure conditions approaching average martian surface pressure (6 mbar – 143 mbar) in an aqueous environment. Each of the four species survived exposure of varying length (3 days – 21 days) at pressures down to 6 mbar.

The Martian atmosphere pressure ranges anywhere from one-hundredth to one-thousandth of Earth’s. Water does not easily stay liquid at pressures so low, which could be one reason why liquid water has yet to be found on the Red Planet. Despite the lack of water, this research shows that life could exist in places we haven’t examined yet, such as deep below the Martian surface. 

The methanogens survived for several days. If there are microbes on Mars, they are likely more adapted to the environment than puny Earth microbes.

In a NASA press release, lead researcher Rebecca Mickol stated that while this study gives researchers hope in the search for life on Mars,  more testing is of course needed before any firm conclusions can be drawn:

These experiments show that for some species, low pressure may not really have any effect on the survival of the organism. The next step is to also include temperature.

Temperatures on Mars fall far below temperatures found on Earth, meaning any potential life on Mars would have to survive an extremely inhospitable environment. However, given that microbial life has been found in some of the most inhospitable depths of our own planet, it’s not an impossibility that life might indeed be somewhere on Mars.

 TAGS: biology, growing food on Mars, life on Mars, mars, mars water, microbes, microbial life, nasa, NASA experiment, Science, space microbes

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

The Night of the Shape Shifting Humanoids (Part 1)

Sooner or later… it happens.

If you develop a passion for the UFO phenomenon for as long as I have, sooner or later you wake up to notice them saucers are not as sexy as they used to be. Aerial sightings, photos of disk-shaped or triangular objects, they all start to feel irrelevant. Even the landing cases, with their trace evidence on the ground, eventually lose their allure.

Perhaps UFOs, like any other dependency, cause the user to slowly grow a certain ‘resistance’, forcing you to ‘increase the dosage’ in order to get that thrilling buzz…

Thus, the seasoned saucer addict ends up getting his kicks from the hardcore stuff: The close encounters of the 3rd kind, in which witnesses end up in hair-raising, hand-trembling proximity with the enigmatic entities in (apparent) control of the phenomenon. And make no mistake, my fellow junkies! When it comes to this old Fortean fiend, the weirder and more nonsensical the case, the sah-weeter!

And so it is, my dear Coppertops, that I present to you a prime-time, vintage humanoid encounter so head-scratchingly bizarre, you’ll probably end up with a mean case of the munchies: The Conil case.

The Location

The Spanish province of Cádiz, part of the autonomous community of Andalusia, has always had its fair share of exotic visitors. Its capital of the same name was originally founded by the Phoenicians, and was subsequently occupied by the Carthaginians, Romans and Arabs, until the latter were expelled by the Catholic kingdom of Castilla. Because of its enviable geographical position, Cádiz has always been a crossroads of civilizations, and its future will probably remain closely tied to the sea just as it has always been for thousands of years; although instead of Phoenician traders, Roman conquerors or Ottoman invaders, the local economy now depends on attracting tourists with dollars or euros to spend.

The Light

Aerial view of ‘Playa de los Bateles’ at Conil de la Frontera. Cabo Roche can be seen in the distance.

Our story takes place in the coastal town of Conil de la Frontera –Conil for short– on the night of September 29th, 1989. Although to be precise, our story began weeks earlier, with 2 couples of local youngsters: Loli Bermúdez and Pedro Sánchez, Isabel Sánchez and Pedro González (relationship between the members is not entirely clear) who were taking a placid stroll along the ‘playa de los Bateles’ or ‘Bateles beach’ (“Batel” is a traditional local term for a small, oar-propelled boat). The age of the kids varied between 17 and 23 years old, and just when they were enjoying the cool breeze from the sea and each other’s company, at around 8:30 or 9:00 pm, they suddenly noticed something odd: A glowing, round, reddish-orange object, as big as the full moon, which appeared to be standing still, some 200 meters directly above the Roche cape, approximately 5 kilometers away from their viewing position.

The amazed group contemplated the ‘light’ for around half an hour, until it silently moved toward the horizon and was out of sight. Driven by curiosity, the young witnesses decided to return the next night at the same hour, equipped with a pair of 7×50 binoculars, to see if by any chance the object would return; sure enough, the ‘red moon’ was punctual to the meeting, and performed exactly the same as the night before. The binoculars allowed the adolescents to discern 4 white dots in a square formation at the center of the glowing circle, like the flamboyant button missing from a god’s jacket.

The ‘button‘ would emit a random flash from time to time, and then it was lost out of sight towards the western horizon, after completing it’s indecipherable ‘mission’. The same bizarre operation was repeated for 14 or 15 consecutive nights, always leaving around 9:30; the kids would always remain up until 10, in hope the light would make a second come-back; it never did.

The Encounter

By that time, the witnesses’ families and others in their inner circle were aware of what the youngsters had been witnessing for a whole fortnight –whether they all gave credence to their testimony or not is clear. What we do know is that on the night of September 29th, a 5th member had joined the group of intrepid UFO hunters: Lázaro, the brother of Isabel, and the youngest member of the party.

As it was by now their routine, they all sat on the beach at 8:30, directly in front of the Los Corales bar. The sea was calm and the coast was practically empty, with no boat in sight (we’ll get back to this on part 2). Their approximate distance from their position to the bar was around 300 meters. And they waited.

They didn’t have to wait long. Aside from their old friend, the “red moon,” which had faithfully appeared in its accustomed position, for the first time the witnesses also saw a new development: What looked like a bright white ‘semicircle’ coming from the sea; with the help of their binoculars they could observe, at the center of it, a group of ‘red lights’ forming a sort of triangle. This new UFO silently flew past above their heads, moving toward the town, leaving the group amazed, and excitedly commenting the impressions of the event among themselves.

But then a third, blaring light appeared right over them, seemingly so high or bright they couldn’t discern any sort of shape. The witnesses noticed that when the UFO above them made three consecutive flashes, the red UFO at Roche cape would respond with two, and so on and so forth. A sort of ‘communication’ between these two objects seemed to be taking place, which lasted for around half an hour.

While they were fascinatingly observing this luminous ‘exchange’, something else caught the attention of our young witnesses: At around 9 pm, they noticed two strange figures standing by the beach’s shoreline; their presence raised the alarms of the UFO hunters, not only because of the literally ‘alien’ appearance of the entities –identical in appearance, almost 7 feet tall, covered with white flowing ‘cloaks’ whose ends reached all the way down to the water, and with round, featureless white heads with no hair– but because their arrival had not been detected by the youngsters; almost as if they had suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

Sketch of the ‘cloaked’ figures observed by the witnesses

One of the girls of the group, understandably unnerved by this observation, proposed to the rest of them to leave. Pedro González urged his companions to remain calm, suggesting the two ‘cloaked’ individuals could be some ‘pranksters’; perhaps two of their town neighbors had decided to play a joke on them by –rather lamely– dressing themselves as ‘ghosts’ with white sheets? The idea, however improbable –if nothing else because the tunics of the two beings were so bright they almost looked as if glowing– momentarily swayed the fears of the witnesses, who decided to stay.

But suddenly, the two entities started to move out of the water, towards them. Their gait was awkward and laborious, as if they were unable to bend their knees, and while they walked they kept their arms firmly on each side of their torso. Their long clothes covered their feet, as well as their hands.

The approaching figures finally managed to trigger the fight-or-flight response in all the members of the group. Panicked, they started to run away –in all honesty, could ANYONE blame them?

The group broke down their escape, though, once they realized the beings were not in pursuit of them. Instead, they had stopped and turned on their axis to face the sea, apparently looking in the direction of the ‘red moon’, which had faithfully remained on its fixed position the whole time. The group of witnesses miraculously controlled their nerves, and decided to remain observing the amazing sight from a cautionary distance (approximately some 30 meters or 100 feet away from the figures).

The unfolding of otherworldly events on this fateful night were far from over…

The Transformation

While the two cloaked visitors kept their attention toward the glowing red object in the distance, the young UFO hunters observed something akin to a ‘shooting star’ on the night sky: a small, white-blue light the size of a tennis ball falling toward the beach, yet vanishing or ‘turning off’ just 2 feet or so before crashing over the heads of the entities. As if on cue by the disappearance of the orb, the two humanoids proceeded to seat on the beach, with their backs kept stiffly straight, while at the same time swiftly digging into the sand to build a sort of u-shaped wall surrounding them; once completed, they presently lied on their backs of this makeshift fortress.

In-situ reconstruction of the ‘trench’ built by the beings, in which they laid down

If the purpose of the sand ‘trench’ was to obstruct the sight of the humanoids from uninvited interlopers, it was only partially successful; let’s not forget our original witnesses were still at the scene and quite capable to observe the prostate figures, although with more difficulty. Pedro González was once again forced to calm the nerves of the more jitterish among them, while the rest kept passing on the binoculars to better watch the bizarre spectacle, which proceeded to yet another unexpected act.

Soon after the beings lied down on their backs, they proceeded to pass around them a bright, small sphere of a cyan-blue color –perhaps, we could speculate, the same orb which had fallen down moments before– although this time it seemed as small as a ping-pong ball in the eyes of our young witnesses, who observed this strange ‘ball game’ performed among the humanoids around a half-dozen times or so, until Pedro González –the one who had bravely convinced the rest of the friends to stick around– without any warning tossed the binoculars to the ground and started to flee the scene. The other Pedro (Sánchez) quickly intercepted him to know what was going on, and that’s when the terrified young man informed his friend he had observed a third figure at the scene, at the foot of the other two entities. This new humanoid was considerably taller (around ten foot, according to their testimony), clad on a dark, tight-fitting suit and displaying an enormous pear-shaped head. The two young men decided not to tell the rest about the ‘giant’ and returned to their friends, but when Pedro González took the binoculars, he could not longer find the enormous humanoid near the two others, who still remained lying on their backs and passing the little blue sphere back and forth between each other.

The strangest act in this alien stage play the young men and women had been observing, was about to commence.

Suddenly the little blue light disappeared, and a few seconds later the two beings got up from the sand. To the amazement of our witnesses, though, they no longer retained their original appearance: The white, cloaked figures had somehow changed into what looked like a human couple! The male was tall (around 7 feet, which was the original height of the white beings) had long blond hair and was wearing dark jeans and a checkered shirt; the woman was slightly shorter than the man, her hair was also long but dark in color, and wore a thin blouse and long skirt.

Without saying any word, they turned and started walking toward the town, one in front of the other, without even bothering to ever once look at the startled group of youngsters who had bore witness to their entire transformation; a transformation, it should be pointed out, that for some reason wasn’t 100% perfect: The witnesses later revealed to the researchers who went to Conil to investigate the case, that although the features of the ‘female changeling’ were very beautiful and perfectly ordinary, the forehead of his male companion on the other hand was abnormally prominent. How could someone looking like an extra in a cheesy sci-fi flick could go around unnoticed in a tourist town??

Exeter, the extraterrestrial leader in the B-movie This Island Earth (1955). Did the Conil male ‘infiltrator’ look like this?

The Giant

Just when they were about to reach one of the Conil’s dark alleys, the witnesses’ attention was shifted once again toward the beach, where they could see above the water a small, white cloud coming from the coast toward them at great speed. When the compact ‘cloud’ reached the shore it stopped and rapidly evaporated, and at that moment is when Loli –who was using the binoculars– alerted her friends about the presence of a dark figure near the water. Pedro González snatched the field glasses out of the girl’s hand, and confirmed it was indeed the same enormous being he had seen before.

The black giant with the pear-shaped head stood motionless in front of the young, baffled witnesses, until it quickly moved rapidly away toward the west. As if this wasn’t already strange enough, the humanoid –according to the witnesses– wasn’t even ‘touching’ the ground! Rather, its feet hovered some 8 inches above the sand, and as it floated away its arms were kept firmly on each side of its torso.

The being’s departure elicited a strange response among the members of the UFO party: The oldest and the youngest in the group –Pedro G. and Lázaro– suddenly started to run in pursuit of the giant. Asked later why they reacted in such a way, they couldn’t give a proper explanation; their chase turned out fruitless though, since no matter how hard they ran, the giant moved (or ‘floated’) even faster. When the two were about 50 or 60 meters away from the being, they finally heeded the desperate shouts of their companions pleading them to stop, which they did.

Sketch of the black-suited ‘giant’ observed by the witnesses

It was at that moment when the giant also stopped moving and turned its head toward Pedro and Lázaro. Its black eyes, huge as hen eggs, robbed the two of whatever courage they still possessed, and even though the being’s attitude was not menacing, it somehow gave the impression to the young men that it was warning them not to follow any further. At last they returned to their frantic friends and let the giant lose itself in the night.

With the couple nowhere to be seen, and the giant gone –was its purpose just to deviate the witnesses’ attention and prevent them not to chase the other beings?– the incredible events of the night were apparently over… or so they seemed.

The Aftermath

Graphic explaining the location of the sand trench in relation to the witnesses’ viewing position. It also shows the distance between the beach shore and the town

As the group of young men and women remained at the beach, excitedly commenting among themselves on what had just transpired at that humble location of the Cádiz province, they were able to witness one last unknown phenomenon around 10 pm: By the coast and heading from west to east, a small white light followed a silent, zigzagging trajectory, like a bouncing ball in one of those old sing-along children TV shows. A rather unimpressive finale, judging by the sort of spectacle preceding it.

Shortly after, an additional witness appeared on the beach and joined the group. Juan Bermúdez was an adult town resident –possibly related to Loli, one of the girls– correspondent for a local radio station as well as a painter; he had heard of his young neighbors’ nightly escapades at the Bateles beach, and as he had done on previous occasions decided to go there and see if anything interesting occurred –in a later interrogation with UFO investigator Bruno Cardeñosa, Bermúdez confessed he himself had actually had the chance to observe the giant humanoid on 3 previous separate occasions, during the first hour of dawn; if true, that would mean the Bateles beach had been the scene of extreme high strangeness even before the night of September 29th.

When the boys and girls told him what had happened, Bermúdez helped them investigate the area where the two cloaked humanoids had accomplished their incredible transformation. The group noticed the ‘trench’ the beings had built –which was approximately 2 meters wide by 1 meter long– showed discernible ‘scratch marks’ on the sand, as if it had been done by long and slender fingers.

Reconstruction of the footprints left by the couple, compared with the size of an ordinary foot

But was even more interesting were the ‘footprints’ the beings had left on the beach as they made their escape toward the town. They were enormous: 18 inches long and 6 inches in their widest part, with a very prominent arc as well as a huge toe impression that seemed to go deeper than the rest of the foot. Which raises the question: When the young witnesses saw the ‘transmogrified’ alien couple walk out of the beach, why didn’t they notice such abnormal feet?

…Unless the image of the human couple wearing ordinary clothes was just an elaborate illusion, one that was nevertheless unable to conceal their actual imprints left in the sand? This might serve to explain why both set of footprints had exactly the same size, despite the fact the female walk-in was not as tall as her 7-foot companion.

Adding to the confusion was the fact the group also found many more footprints than they expected. Aside from the ones going from the ‘sand trench’ to the Conil, an action observed by the witnesses, 20 paces away from the trench there were imprints of the same size and characteristics, but going in several different directions and covering an area of approximately 10 feet in diameter. What’s confusing about this is the fact the 4 boys and girls NEVER observed the couple deviate from their straight line toward the town alley, so they couldn’t had the time to leave all those additional prints.

But if they didn’t do it, then who did?

Local newspaper running an article about the Conil encounter (October 5th, 1989)

The fantastic Conil encounter with what seemed to be shape-shifting humanoids took little time to garner attention from the local media. First through the radio station Juan Bermúdez worked for, and then via an article published by El Diario de Cádiz on October the 5th. On the second part on my retelling of this wonderful episode, we will explore what else transpired after debunkers attempted to shoot down the case. But far more interestingly, we will discover what happened after the enigmatic couple of alien infiltrators returned to the ‘scene of the crime’.

To be continued…

____________________________________________________________________________

Main References:

• Juan José Benítez, La Quinta Columna (1990)
• Bruno Cardeñosa, “Infiltrados.” Año Cero magazine (12-96)

 TAGS: giant, Spain, The Humanoids, UFOs

UFO Over Washington DC and Reptilian at Inauguration

Hot on the heels of the video of what looks like two different UFO’s flying near then president-elect Donald Trump’s plane on the day before his inauguration comes two new reports of strange inauguration-related sightings. Another video allegedly taken the same day (January 19th, 2017) shows an interview with what looks like a cigar-shaped UFO flying over the Capitol Building where the inauguration was held. But the best one appeared a day later when sharp-eyed watchers of the inaugural parade spotted what they believed to be a shape-shifting reptilian Secret Service agent. If that sounds familiar, it’s because there was a report in 2012 of a shape-shifting reptilian Secret Service agent guarding President Obama who looked very similar to this one.

The UFO video was broadcast by the CTV Television Network and shows what appears to be an interview about the inauguration conducted on January 19th, 2017, according to the date displayed on the screen. There’s no sound in the segments provided by the UFOvni Youtube channel, which spotted the UFO. While there is an allusion to the video being deleted, it appears to be readily available, although the UFOvni version seems to be the only one. The fast-moving object doesn’t become much clearer under magnification or in slow-motion so its cause is open for speculation.

The video of the alleged reptilian Secret Service agent is more interesting, especially because of its historical implications. Two things are pointed out in most accounts of this scene during a short time when the president-elect and his wife stepped out of their limo to walk in the pre-inaurguration parade. One is that the bald agent behind Mrs. Trump seems to have unusually long fingers and that his hands never move from the odd position he’s holding them in. One though is that they’re fake hand and arms and his real ones are under his coat holding a weapon.

That would make sense if it weren’t for the other observation by many that this agent strongly resembles another bald agent who was seen guarding President Obama while he spoke at the 2012 AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) conference. In the video, the agent’s face and nose appear to change shape slightly with one of his ears seeming to disappear. Skeptics point out that the agent is in shadows (like a smart reptilian would be) and the lighting and camera angles make some of the shots distorted, while he looks normal (human) in others.

There was enough attention given to this video that Caitlin Hayden, the chief spokeswoman for the National Security Council, issued a statement:

I can’t confirm the claims made in this video, but any alleged program to guard the president with aliens or robots would likely have to be scaled back or eliminated in the sequester. I’d refer you to the Secret Service or Area 51 for more details.

Is there money in the budget again for reptilian agents? If President Obama could have reptilian agents, even if for only a while, shouldn’t President Trump be offered the same protection?

Whether you believe the UFOs and reptilian agents are real or anomalies, President Trump has had multiple encounters in just a few days in office. Is this what we should expect during his entire term?

 TAGS: alien, Conspiracy, Donald Trump, modern mysteries, Paranormal, reptilian, reptilian aliens, Reptilians, ufo

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