REMOVED FROM REALITY: MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCES
by Scott Corrales
Posted: 12:35 April 30, 2008
Teleportation has traditionally remained in the province of science fiction:
Isaac Asimov’s “Pebble in the Sky” features a protagonist who steps out of a 20th century Chicago building to find himself in a dead, radioactive Earth of the far future. Non-fans are aware of teleportation and its perils from the events in the 1950’s classic “The Fly” and its sequel. Even generations raised on Star Trek’s apparently seamless transporter units know that teleportation entails risks.
Is instantaneous – though unwilling – abstraction from one location to another possible or merely the stuff of fantasy and hearsay? Recent scientific advances in the field of teleportation have given a smattering of dignity to what until recently was dismissed as “crankery”. In 1993, a group of scientists of international repute stated that teleportation, far from science fiction jiggery-pokery, was theoretically possible. This opened the door to a number of experiments in this direction, none of them, however, involving the translation of solid objects, much less living ones. For the time being, science has restricted itself to experimental demonstrations of teleportation using “trapped ions” and laser beams. Possible applications for these research endeavors include long-range quantum communications, but no transporter rooms a la Star Trek, since the scientific principles at work suggest that the original must be destroyed in order for teleportation to work.
But what about events of teleportation that do not involve any inconvenient machinery? Sudden, unexpected transportation to “somewhere else” is without a doubt one of the most terrifying things that could conceivably happen to anyone. Imagine yourself walking down a familiar street or driving along a road on the way to work or play when a sudden, unexplained force removes you from your surrounding reality to deposit you elsewhere: another city, state or even country, without any memory of how you got there or in many cases, how to return.
Gone for Good?
Mist-shrouded El Yunque has always been a source of mystery involving paranormal phenomena and more recently, UFOs. Dozens of individuals, largely weekenders and campers, have disappeared inexplicably from this mountain rainforest. A child disappeared while walking down a trail with its parents, and even rescue teams sent to investigate have been swallowed by this deceptive wilderness area. Forestry officials are quick to blame quicksand and unexplored sinkholes as the reasons for these evaporations, even when they occurred in areas far from where any of the aforementioned conditions would be encountered.
The following appeared in a privately circulated paper entitled Abductions in El Yunque - Are Aliens Responsible? by Hermes Rivera (1989). “About ten years ago, some 15 children disappeared in El Yunque while on a school trip. The teacher responsible for the kids committed suicide because the students were never found. A search team from the U.S., sent to the mountain to try and find the missing youths, ran into a short humanoid creature wandering around the bushes. As soon as the creature realized it had been seen, it ran and disappeared. The search was fruitless: no trace of the creature or of the missing children was ever found. The involvement of Tupamaro revolutionaries was suspected, since they had long before threatened to kidnap children all over the U.S. and Latin America to sell them for money [...]. Two Italian kids, about 9 years of age, were also reported missing between 1976 and 1978. Their case was put on hold because of their father’s involvement with the Mafia. The Colón brothers, who used to live on the road that leads to the top of El Yunque where the first UFO landed, were also reported missing without a trace about 25 years ago.”
Not even well-trained and armed soldiers are immune to whatever force is behind the disappearances. In March 1976, two Marines stationed at the Roosevelt Roads naval facility vanished in El Yunque. Ten years later, a man named Angel Bernard and his son had vanished from the same spot, and also in the month of July. The Bernards, father and son, were lost for 4 days after wandering off one of the area’s many trails, coming across strange features such as bottomless pits, not normally a feature of the rainforest, pools of quicksand, and the most distressing feature – the skeleton of a hapless, unknown person who never made it out of El Yunque’s shroud of mystery. Angel Bernard added another interesting note – while the moment they became lost in the rainforest was four o’clock in the afternoon, “there was a sudden, abnormal nightfall” at that time – a feature that has been observed in high-strangeness experiences associated with alien abductions. The elder Bernard encountered a red-eyed, human-looking being surrounded by what he first thought were children, only to see them vanish a lightning speed. Their peals of laughter made him realize that some paranormal force was a work; it prompted him to tell his son that amid their precarious situation, they were also facing forces against which only the deity could ward them. Four days later, they found themselves on another trail on the far side of El Yunque rainforest, having no idea of how their wandering could have led them to that location.
Were these individuals possible victims of alien abduction? Unwilling guests of the elemental forces that traditionally occupy such places? There is no shortage of speculation in this regard.
When the Dutch sensitive Gerard Croiset was employed by the Puerto Rican police in the mid-1970's to find two children belonging to a local millionaire, he concluded, chillingly, that the children were nowhere to be found on this physical plane. Unwilling to be blinded by what they perceived as mysticism, the police thanked Croiset and resumed their investigations with conventional means: the children remain missing to this very day.
Certain locations on the planet have acquired the reputation as places where human disappearances are quite common. Some of them, like the Bermuda Triangle and the Devil's Triangle of Japan, have formed part of "pop" paranormal study for decades. Nonetheless, mountains play a greater role as locales for mysterious disappearances than any other site. In ancient tradition, travelers straying too close to Greece's Mt. Parnassus or Mt. Olympus would often be lost for good. Puerto Rico's El Yunque, Vermont's Mt. Glastenbury, and Eastern Zimbabwe's Mt. Inyangani never quite managed to acquire the name recognition of the better-known ones, despite the vast number of unexplained cases which have occurred in and around them.
Author Salvador Freixedo, who looked into the subject of these bizarre disappearances as part of his book La Granja Humana, cites the curious case of a vehicular accident in Burgos, Spain which caused the deaths of a number of people and the disappearance of a 10 year-old from one of the trucks involved in the accident. He was not found among the victims of the crash, and has never been seen again. The police initially believed that the boy had wandered away from the crash scene in an amnesic state, and a thorough search of the area was mounted by both civilians and police officials, yet nothing was turned up. In order to bring the case to a close, the authorities suggested that the boy had been disintegrated, in fact, by a cargo of sulfuric acid being hauled by the tanker truck in which he was a passenger.
Jose María Carnero, a 26 year old medical student, vanished off the face of the earth in April 1987 while on maneuvers with the military unit to which he belonged on the Montelareina Military Base in Zamora, Spain. Reports indicate that José María wandered away from his squad in the midst of a light rainfall, while the other soldiers tried to find shelter under the trees. The young man was never seen again, even after a massive search by the Spanish army, which to this day lists him as a deserter.
Enigmatic Argentina
Anyone who has been following the UFO/paranormal press with certain regularity should be aware of the wealth of paranormal events coming out of the southernmost country in the Americas. However, unexplained cases of teleportation are perhaps Argentina’s greatest claim to fame. Despite the controversy surrounding the now legendary disappearance of the Vidal family from an Argentinean highway and their sudden reappearance in the Mexican countryside thousands of miles away, there are other cases involving mysterious roadside disappearances that cause even the most prudent researcher to wonder. Many of these unusual vanishings take place in a curious location that local investigators of the unusual have come to know as the Triángulo Interprovincial (the interprovincial triangle, in reference to the Bermuda Triangle) between the towns of Victoria (Entre Rios), Pueblo Esther (Santa Fe province) and San Nicolás (Buenos Aires province). Juan Carlos Gauna, a private pilot who has dedicated himself to reporting about this strangeness-prone region of his country, suggests that this arbitrary triangular area “activates” every forty-five to sixty days and either unusual aerial phenomena or disappearances occur. He takes his conclusion a step further by noting that these disappearances take place in a straight line running from the city of Victoria (UFO and cattle mutilation hot spot) to the banks of the Paraná River. “The disappearances of human beings from the southern reaches of the Triángulo Interprovincial,” he writes, “are much more alarming than those occurring elsewhere in the world, since people here have vanished before the eyes of friends and relatives, as though gobbled up by space itself.”
Gauna is a first-hand witness to one such disappearance. One day in June 1996, while at the headquarters of the Pueblo Ester Aero Club, accompanied only by the airfield’s staff, a distress called was received at 19:00 hours from a Cessna 172 Skymaster belonging to a club member. The pilot anxiously reported that he was lost and that his VOR was inoperative. He had taken off from Junín for the 40 minute flight back to Pueblo Ester, but now, after 90 minutes aloft, had completely lost his bearings. Gauna took the microphone headset and asked the frightened pilot to give him some visual reference in order to steer him back to the airfield, asking if any large communities such as Arroyo Seco or San Nicolás were in view, as should have been the case from a small aircraft flying at 1000 feet. The answer was negative – the pilot could see only darkness.
An effort was made to guide the pilot verbally toward the air field, but the answer was still the same – nothing at all except inky darkness could be seen from the small cockpit. At one point, Gauna and the staff could hear the Cessna flying over head, but could not see it nor its lights (and the pilot couldn’t see the runway lights either). Suddenly, a wild cheer of joy came over Gauna’s headset: the pilot’s VOR had suddenly come back to life as mysteriously as it had died, and the runway lights were now perfectly visible. An uneventful and very welcome landing followed.
In January 1997 it would be Gauna’s turn to face the unknown. He was a passenger aboard a Piper PA-11 toward San Nicolás and was suddenly awakened from a nap by the plane’s pilot, who worriedly told him that “he didn’t know where he was”. Thinking it was a joke, Gauna looked out the window and saw a landscape he had never seen before. He inquired if the pilot had at any point crossed the Paraná River, to which the flyer said no, but the landscape below was filled with unknown islands similar to the ones in that river’s estuary. This alarming situation went on for thirty minutes until “there was a sudden change in the landscape below” and both men were able to recognize the town of Zarate, which meant that in 50 minutes of flying time they had covered a distance that usually requires 90 minutes.
Others were affected by whatever space/time distortion was taking place over Argentina at that time. Gauna reports that a phone call was received from the Casilda Aero Club requesting emergency search assistance in finding a missing Cessna that ultimately appeared after nine hours aloft over utterly unknown territory – an event made all the more mysterious by the fact that the small plane’s endurance was a little over four hours.
At this point we can only wonder what would have happened if the pilot had ditched his plane in this bizarre new landscape – would he have found an uninhabited wilderness, a parallel Earth? Or had Gauna and his fellow pilots flown into that world that appears to exist side by side with our own, and whose denizens have often come into our reality?
The Other Vidal Case
Teleportation is not exclusive to flyers. According to a case researched by Drs. Nelson Berlanda, Luis Reynoso and Juan Acevedo, a family bearing the apparently unlucky surname of Vidal vanished from the road that connects the towns of Cipolletti and Viedma on February 10, 1995 only to find themselves in the vicinity of General Conesa, 15 km of their original destination.
Juan and María Angélica Vidal, accompanied by their teenage son Julio and an unnamed nephew remember having stopped at a service station on Highway 3 to fill up their “Traffic” passenger van before resuming their drive. Shortly after, they pulled over on the side of the road to see the lights of the nearby port of San Antonio Oeste. But something unexpected happened: all of the vehicles occupants fell asleep at once – uncharacteristic behavior for them, according to Juan Vidal, as one of them would always stay awake. Maria Angelica added that she wasn’t given to taken naps during trips, either.
Yet sleep they did, for an hour and a half. Upon waking, Maria Angelica prepared her husband a hot cup of “mate” (Argentina’s national beverage) and told him about the strange dream she’d just had: odd people dressed in white, who she described as “small children with Asian features and long fingers” were touching her and laughing, but at no point did she feel afraid.
But when Juan looked out the window, he realized that they were no longer on the side of the road, parked under tall trees: they were in the middle of an unknown, empty field. “Where are we?” he asked his wife nervously. The nephew was just waking from sleep and reportedly said: “Uncle, this isn’t where we stopped.”
Mr. Vidal set the van in motion amid the consternation of his passengers. Only minutes later they saw a sign that read: “General Conesa – 15 km.” Bemusedly, the Vidals realized they had somehow, in their sleep, gone from Highway 3 to Route 251, backtracking some 90 kilometers that they could not account for.
Attesting to the family’s physical condition, Dr. Berlanda, a clinician, and Acevedo, a psychiatrist, performed a variety of tests and hypnosis to obtain more details on Maria Angélica’s “dream”, in which family members had been removed one by one from the van. The new Vidal case was of great interest and importance to these researchers, given that nearly a dozen UFO cases had taken in that area between 1994 and 1995. Only thirteen days prior to the Vidal family’s teleportation, UFOs had been photographed in Las Grutas, only a few kilometers away from the port of San Antonio Oeste.
Vanishing Children
Chile, Argentina’s neighbor on the other side of the mighty Andes, has also been the scene of perplexing disappearances that while not immediately associated with UFOs or the paranormal, certainly result in invitable associations due to that country’s extensive chronicles involving unexplained lights, monsters and high strangeness situations. On July 10, 2003, the city of Calama’s La Estrella del Loa newspaper ran a story on the deserted mining camp of Pampa Unión in the country’s unearthly northern deserts.
“One of the most chilling and still-unsolved ones,” reads the article, “was experienced by Nora Suarez when she spent a day in this settlement in the company of her sister Mireya and their relatives. In the blink of an eye, Mireya walked away from the family group, causing concern among them and prompting them to search for her. Despite their best efforts, Mireya was never seen again among the ruined walls of Pampa Unión. Her mysterious disapperance is an unsolved mystery that has many incredible details. The case reached the law courts, before which any and all who might have something to say about the matter were summoned to appear. However, all those called by the court to testify in the girl's disappearance died under unexplained circumstances without ever telling their stories. The family has made heroic efforts to unravel the bizarre situation that has remained unsolved for so many years. Nora Suarez has even appealed to Carabineros (state police) and television broadcasters in the search for her missing sister.
There exists the theory that she may have vanished in Bolivia, but not even this hypothesis has aided the efforts to find the whereabouts of that girl--today a woman--who vanished forever in Pampa Unión.”
Skeptics will inevitably – perhaps even correctly – argue that hapless Nora Suarez fell through a poorly covered mining pit or a crack in the ground, not into another dimension or whisked away by unfriendly non-humans covetous of young females. But during northern Chile’s Chupacabras epidemic in the summer of 2000, researchers discovered that there had been an unusual increase in reports of missing young women from the mining communities that found themselves besieged by the paranormal predator. The official explanation involved “white slavery”, but it nonetheless prompted author Ramon Navia Osorio of Spain’s I.I.E.E. organization to write: “All of these disappearances took place in Iquique, in the northern reaches of the Atacama Desert, where the [Chupacabras] attacks commenced. Assuming that a band of human traffickers was involved, it would be more logical for them to behave more discreetly and not operate in the same area constantly. We must bear in mind that the entity has always expressed a preference for females, and if they are pregnant, so much the better...whenever this subject is brought up for discussion, I am reminded of the case of the young woman from Gavá (Barcelona, Spain) who vanished in broad daylight not far from the town’s only police station, and as she walked behind two young men. A year after her disappearance, her parents asked why we associated their daughter’s disappearance with the UFO phenomenon. Upon explaining the elements that come into play under such circumstances, including some of a meteorological nature, the parents were reminded of a particular incident. They had kept the circumstance to themselves,as it was incomprehensible and illogical. The forces that we are at war with are always present, and appear to have an intelligence that employs camouflage as a quotidian device (my italics). Time has shown that this has served them well and they continue to make use of it, due to human intransigence, which avoids facing reality, because it feels afraid....” (Navia, Ramon. La Verdad Oculta, IIEE, 2005).
As this disturbing passage from La Verdad Oculta has unwittingly taken us from South America to Spain, let us examine a case involving the disappearance of a young celebrity – a gifted youth named David Guerrero, remembered to this day as el niño pintor (the artist child).
Had David Guerrero not entered the chronicles of high strangeness, he would have certainly gone on to become one of Europe’s talented young visual artists. Thirteen years old, an introverted loner with a spectacular gift for drawings and paintings, David lived in the Spanish city of Malaga with his parents and older brother, who also shared his love of the paintbrush. On April 6, 1987, David Guerrero left his home to visit the La Maison art gallery where one of his works was going to be exhibited (an image of Christ). At 6 p.m. on that fateful day, the young artist left his building to walk the hundred or so meters that separated him from the bus stop from which he would travel to the downtown atelier.
But David never reached the exhibit that evening, and he never returned home.
As could well be expected, a massive police search ensued. Relatives and classmates were grilled for answers, all of the spots where a putative criminal could have disposed of a body were searched to no avail. Some theories suggested that the young genius had deceived his parents and gone off to a rendezvous elsewhere; even more bold theories posited the likelihood that he had been abducted by an international ring of art forgers, interested in putting his talents at their service. The only possible suspect in the case, an elderly Swiss gentleman who had been lodged in a hotel in Malaga at the time, died two years later. Twenty years have elapsed since el niño pintor vanished without a trace, and no satisfactory explanation has ever been put forth. However, Salvador Freixedo suggests the intriguing and otherworldly possibility that the non-human djinn – creatures of Islamic tradition occupying a level between humans and angels – may have spirited the boy away. “Faced with such strange and terrifying circumstances, as they are to the human race, we must be filled with wonder at the fact that centuries ago, other cultures and civilizations had already become aware of this and set it down in writing. It matters not at all how they passed judgment on it, or what names they gave the culprits. What is important is that they were aware of it, while our technological civilization has not yet become aware of this alarming situation,” writes Freixedo. “The explanation they gave it then is the same one we seek to give it now: that non-human entities endeavor to kidnap human beings, especially children, to places unknown and for reasons equally unknown.”
ufodigest.com |
