UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

On the evening of January 23, 1974, something occurred on the Berwyn Mountain range in North Wales that for some within the UFO researcher community has come to be known (to some…) as the definitive British Roswell. As researcher Andy Roberts stated in his excellent book, UFO Down?: “Running south-west to north-east across central North Wales, the Berwyn Mountains separate the flatlands of Shropshire from the Snowdonia National Park. Rising almost 900 metres above sea level, they have played host and borne silent witness to human occupation for millennia.” Andy elaborated: “Prehistoric man lived and worshipped on the mountains leaving behind him a dramatic, ritual landscape dotted with stone circles, standing stones and other once-sacred megaliths – many of which have stood for over two and a half thousand years. Not surprisingly, the area is rife with stories of ghosts and eerie presences. Folklore tells us that these mountains are haunted by many types of aerial phenomena, including the spectral Hounds of Hell: those who saw them recalled how they flew through the night sky baying as though pursued by Satan himself. To the south of the Berwyn’s at, Llanrhaedr-ym-Mochnant, the locals were plagued by a ‘flying dragon’ – intriguingly, a common name for UFOs in times gone by.”

And as Andy also carefully noted: ““It is against this backdrop of history and myth that on the evening of 23 January 1974 an event took place on the Berwyn Mountains that was to perplex locals and spawned a veritable cascade of rumors, culminating in an incredible claim that, if true, would irrevocably change our view of history and make us revise our plans for the future of both our planet and our species. The claim was that a UFO piloted by extraterrestrials crashed, or was shot down, on the mountain known as Cader Berwyn and that the alien crew, some still alive, were whisked off to a secret military installation in the south of England for study.” Since then, the issue of what did or did not occur on the Berwyn Mountains on the fateful night in question has been the subject of several books, intense controversy, heated debate and, at times, unbridled fury. That something happened at around 8.30 p.m. on the night in question is not in doubt, however.

“I saw this bright light hanging in the sky,” said Mrs. Anne Williams of Bro Diham, Llandrillo. “It had a long fiery tale which seemed to be motionless for several minutes, going dim and then very brilliant, like a dormant fire which keeps coming to life. It would have been like an electric bulb in shape, except that it seemed to have rough edges. [It] then fell somewhere behind the hills at the back of my bungalow and the earth shook.” That the events caused considerable excitement and concern was something also noted by Police Constable Gwilym Owen, who was off-duty at the time and having a pint of beer in the nearby Dudley Arms public house. He stated shortly afterwards: “There was a great roar and a bang and the glasses shook. The sky was lit up over the mountains. The color was yellowish but other people in the valley described seeing blue lights.” Five miles away, Police Sergeant Gwyn Williams was at home in Corwen: “The walls shook and the mirror swung away from the wall,” he recalled. “My first thought was that a big lorry had hit the cinema – it was that kind of a roar and bang. Everyone ran into the street.”

Berwyn Mountains

At 838 p.m., the Global Seismology Unit of the Institute of Geological Sciences at Edinburgh, Scotland, recorded an earth tremor between 3.5 and 4 on the Richter scale. In response to questions posed by eager journalists, Dr. Roy Lilwall, the Senior Scientific Officer at the Institute, said that he had been told that a meteorite had possibly come down on the mountain and, had it been responsible for the “earthquake” that had been recorded at Edinburgh, it would have to have weighed several hundred tons. Approximately ninety minutes after the events on the Berwyns, Ken Haughton of Betws-y-coed viewed a “luminous sphere,” some 400 feet across and traveling at an approximated height of 15,000 feet. It was Haughton’s opinion that as he watched the sphere, it proceeded to descend into the sea in the area of the town of Rhyl, or possibly in the Dee Estuary.

Andy Roberts added, “Following the explosion, Llandrillo district nurse Pat Evans ran out into the village street. She saw no lights but the explosion and the accounts of other villagers convinced her that something had crashed on the mountains. It took her a while to get through to the police as the ‘phone lines were jammed with 999 calls [Note from the author: the equivalent of the United States’ 911 emergency telephone number], but eventually she spoke to Colwyn Bay Police HQ. They suggested it could have been a ‘plane crash so she bundled her two young daughters into the car and set off up the mountain, intending to offer help until the emergency services arrived.

As Mrs. Evans reached the point where the B4391 mountain road levels out she was puzzled by what appeared to be a large illuminated ball of light on the hillside. Unable to identify it was she drove on for a few minutes before returning to the same spot. The light was still there so she parked and observed it for a while. A light drizzle was falling but the night was otherwise clear and Mrs. Evans was able to describe the ball as ‘large,’ and forming a ‘perfect circle.’ But it didn’t appear to be three-dimensional. In an interview she recalled, ‘There were no flames shooting or anything like that. It was very uniform, round in shape…it was a flat round…’ As she watched in puzzlement the light changed color several times from red to yellow to white. Smaller lights, ‘fairy lights’ in Mrs. Evans’ words, could be seen nearby. It was too far away to reach on foot and so she returned home to bed.”

On the following day, 24 January, a Royal Air Force mountain rescue team from Anglesey was dispatched to the Berwyn Mountains and, along with personnel from Gwynedd Police, searched the location for any sign of the object or its impact point. In turn, they received assistance in the search from the RAF station at Valley, Anglesey, who flew two aircraft to conduct a detailed photographic survey of the area. Nothing was reportedly found. Adding to the mystery, and on that same day, Men-in-Black-style rumors were rife among the local and close-knit communities, suggesting that the area had been descended upon by shadowy government figures that were intent on interviewing anyone and everyone with knowledge of the incident. And only hours later, an unusual aerial object was seen by David Upton at nearby Gobowen. As he went out of the backdoor of his home at about 7.15 p.m., he was immediately struck by the brightness of an object in the western sky and quickly ran back into the house for a pair of field glasses. To his complete amazement, these revealed a disc-shaped object that seemed to be divided up into four distinct sections, each of which was of a different color – red, green, yellow, and purple. David Upton’s sister, Elizabeth, a twenty-year-old bank clerk, then took over the glasses, followed shortly thereafter by their mother, Mary Upton. Both verified David’s description.

“I had been watching it for about ten minutes and thought perhaps I should tell someone about it,” said Elizabeth Upton. She telephoned the local police, and they said that they would dispatch someone to the area. A minute or so after the call, the UFO disappeared behind a cloud. “We waited for the cloud to pass and when it did the disc had gone too,” she explained, adding: “When I first came out of the house the light from the object was dazzling, like a street lamp. When we looked through the field glasses we could define its overall disc-shape and the four sections.” Two people known to have been involved in the affair were Doctors Ron Maddison and Aneurin Evans of Keele University. Both expressed the theory that a meteorite had been the culprit. However, if the object was a meteorite they said, then it had to have (a) completely disintegrated upon impact; and (b) not left a crater, as Dr. Maddison noted carefully that: “…the only changes we could see were recent disturbances of surface soil in some areas, but we were hampered to some extent by light snowfall.”

Two days later, it was stated in the local press that “police and RAF rescue experts” had come to the conclusion that the strange lights seen throughout the area were due to meteorite activity seen – coincidentally – at the same time that a group of men were out on the mountain range hunting hares with powerful lamps. Any link with the “earthquake” was entirely coincidental. RAF search team leader, Sergeant H. Oldham, said that another search of the area was “unlikely” to occur unless further information surfaced that attributed the lights to another source. Perhaps not surprisingly, the “hare” explanation received short shrift with the local witnesses, as can be seen fin the following extract taken from a letter sent to the Wrexham Leader newspaper: “Regarding your front page article ‘Mystery Tremor’ in the issue of January 25, I find the explanation given absolutely ludicrous. The tremors shook houses over a 60-mile radius, and the lights were seen clearly miles away – this was reported by the national press and radio. I know nothing about ‘Hare hunting’ but unless the hunters use aircraft searchlights and kill their prey by lobbing a small atom bomb at them, then I fail to see how anyone can accept such an explanation.”

So what, exactly, did happen on that fateful night of 23 January 1974? Did the strange lights provide firm evidence that a malfunctioning UFO was hurtling towards its doom on the Berwyn Mountains? And was the so-called “earthquake” evidence that this same UFO had almost immediately thereafter slammed at high speed into the bleak and harsh mountain known as Cader Berwyn? Or, was the entire event the result of a large-scale misconception of a curiously synchronistic combination of a meteorite shower, an earth tremor, and a group of men hunting for hares on the mountain and armed with powerful lamps – all in the same location and at practically the same time? The questions are still being answered to this day.

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The range of types of UFO encounters is wide, and for the most part they tend to inspire awe and wonder as to what could be behind it all. Yet, in some cases this awe turns to dread and even terror, as it seems that not all UFO phenomena are friendly in nature. Within the annals of UFO incidents there are some that inspire dread and a definite sense of foreboding, and one of these is certainly the time aliens apparently invaded a small island in Brazil.

Beginning in the spring of 1977 a very strange and ominous phenomenon began at a little known place called Colares Island, in the remote Brazilian region of Pará. Frightened locals began to report an intense amount of UFO activity in the skies, describing all manner of luminous spheres, glowing orbs, balls of fire, saucers, cigar shaped metallic objects, and more, but what really stood out was how aggressive these objects seemed to be. There were numerous reports that these unidentified objects were actively chasing and attacking people, shooting vivid thin rays of light that would leave injuries such as burns or holes in the skin, as well as other instances when they were reported as approaching to actually suck blood from victims. In many cases the beams projected were described as being “always sharply defined, directed with perfect precision towards any target – houses, people, boats, trees, even the Brazilian Air Force’s helicopters deployed over the island during the investigations.”

Some of the accounts were quite spectacular, as with a boat full of fishermen near Ilha dos Caranguejos who would claim that an intense ball of light had positioned itself over their boat and fired off beams at them, burning several of them and even supposedly killing a man. Another such such frightening report would come from a local man named Carlos Cardoso de Paula, who says one evening an orb of light entered his room and tried to get blood from him. He says of his surreal experience:

Everybody else was asleep. I was just still having my last smoke when suddenly a ball of fire entered our house up near the ridgepole of the gable. It started shooting round and round the room, and then finally came right close to my hammock. It ran up my right leg as far as the knee (without touching my skin). I watched with much curiosity as it then moved across to the other leg. Then I started to feel feeble and sleepy. My cigarette fell from my hand and I came to and let out a yell. The fireball quickly vanished and everybody woke up. I think it had been searching for a vein in my body but didn’t manage to do so. As its brightness grew, I felt a sort of heat coming from it.

Many of the people targeted by these mysterious lights described a wide range of negative physical injuries and effects, such as fainting, nausea, tremors, migraines, giddiness, shortness of breath, muscle weakness, burns, anemia, bruising, blistering, perforations in the skin, paralysis, searing pain, and blood loss. In fact, terrified residents were so convinced that the lights were trying to suck their blood that the phenomena were being called the Chupa-Chupa, or “sucker suckers.” In the meantime, hospitals were soon experiencing a deluge of people claiming to have been attacked by the UFOs. Also odd was that many of the patients were found to indeed be missing blood, and their blood tests also showed certain anomalies common to all of them such as anemia and dehydration, and it was all quite baffling for medical personnel. One local doctor Wellaide Cecim Carvalho would explain of these patients:

All of them had suffered lesions to the face or the thoracic area. The lesions began with intense reddening of the skin in the affected area. The injuries varied in extension. First it started with an intense reddishness in the hit area, known as hiperemia. Later, the skin of the affected region started to fall (alopecia) and days later the skin peeled off. Later the hair would fall out and the skin would turn black. There was no pain, only a slight warmth. One also noticed small puncture marks in the skin. The victims were men and women of varying ages, without any pattern. With the increase of hurt people, I started to give more attention each time in the existing injuries. I saw things that do not exist in my medical books.

In most of these inexplicable cases, the strange symptoms would linger for days or even weeks, requiring hospitalization, and others would not recover at all, with some deaths even reported. In the meantime, reports kept flooding in nightly, increasing in intensity as the months went on, until by August of that year it is estimated that thousands of people all over the island had either seen or been chased or assaulted by the mystery UFOs, which seemed to always come from the north and in some cases were described as detaching from a “mother ship” or even coming from below the waters of Marajo Bay. People were in a hysteria, afraid to go out at night and huddling into large groups where they sought safety in numbers. Some people would light bonfires or launch armed patrols in an effort to scare the Chupa-Chupas away, and it was eerily quiet on the streets, as noise was thought to lure the hungry UFOs in. One local mayor would say of the tense situation:

Yes, indeed I can tell you, there wasn’t a moment of peace. The people were terrified by that “Chupa-Chupa” affair. I even managed to see one of the injured victims myself – Dona Mirota, a lady who was receiving medical treatment at the Health Clinic. The people were terrified because this beam of night light had already assaulted several people. The whole community was packed in only three houses, praying, sometimes singing some religious songs!

There were even reports of people apparently seeing the actual occupants of these craft, who were apparently quite hostile. One local resident named Claudomira Paixao claimed to have had just such an encounter after waking one evening to find everything bathed in a greenish glow, which would steadily become red. It was at that point that she realized it was a beam being directed right at her, and she then saw something very weird indeed, of which she says:

In one of these days, after midnight, I woke up because of a strong flash, a sort of focused bright green light ray that came down from the top roof to my left chest. I tried to shout, but my voice did not function. I felt an exquisite heat… Later, that beam of light diminished and I saw that I was burnt. I could see a creature, like a man, wearing a jumpsuit just like a dive suit. He pointed it at me, and the object shone three times, striking my chest during the three occasions, almost in the same place, it was hot, it wounded me, it seemed that I had needles pierced at all three points. I was terrified, I could not move my legs! It was hot, and it hurt. It was like a needle stick. My health never came back to be the same since that night.

Of course, considering that these reports and the panic they caused were becoming national news it was only a matter of time before the military would be drawn to this remote locale. In late October of 1977, the Brazilian Air Force would launch an investigation under Captain Uyrange Bolivar Soares Nogueira de Hollanda Lima, which would take it even further into the realm of the bizarre. They would investigate the injuries of the victims, gain eyewitness accounts, and even collect a good amount of purported photographic evidence of the phenomena. Even weirder is that during the military presence on the island it would be alleged that that even the Air Force would come under attack by the lights, one such incident of which one resident Sra. Alba Câmara Vilhena would say:

On one occasion some people saw one of the craft. It was round, and all luminous. Just at that moment, a helicopter of the F.A.B. (Brazilian Air Force) was flying quite near to our house. Then we saw the UFO direct a very powerful beam on to the helicopter, obliging it to land on the São Pedro Airfield. That happened at about 8.00 pm one evening. The helicopters that appeared from time to time, bringing materials and personnel, attempted to chase the UFOs but without much success. Indeed, on the contrary, it was the UFOs that chased them!

The military would do its study and then pack up and leave in January of 1978 without offering the populace any sort of explanation, and labelling the whole investigation as classified. At the time there seemed to be some efforts to explain it all away as weather balloons or atmospheric phenomena, but this was obviously not really bought by the people who claimed to have been attacked by the craft and left with injuries. There seemed to have been some cover-up going on, and making this all the more sinister was that Captain Hollanda would turn up dead three months later, allegedly by suicide, although no further details were given, making some wonder if this was really a suicide or not. After 1978 the incidents would die down, but not stop with sporadic accounts coming in throughout the decades since. What was going on here? It is all so spectacular and dramatic that one is left to wonder just what all of this entails. Were these actual UFOs, and if so what did they want and why did they attack people? Was there a government cover-up? Or was this all just mass hysteria and seeing things? Without a doubt, the “Cloares Invasion” remains a very harrowing, and yet remarkably obscure case of the darker side of UFO encounters.

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