Greetings Earthlings: An Alien Miscellany

Where: Ciudad Valleys. Mexico.
When: August, 1953.
Witnesses: Salvador Villanueva.

Introduction

3-2-1…and…I'm back - a mere three and a half months since since my last appearance. After a lengthy slumber spent in my (stolen) Venusian hibernation pod, I emerge refreshed and reinvigorated - ready to face both January's inclement weather and matters extraterrestrial. Without further ado…

Today's entry takes us back down Mexico way, where an amiable pair of space brothers await. For the third time running I'm drawing heavily (if not exclusively) on Gordon Creighton's "The Humanoids of Latin America".¹

Art duties have (once again) been tackled by the wonderful "Q". I thank her.

Event

Creighton's account is drawn (according to his source list) from the piece "Mexican Taxi Driver Meets Saucer Crew?" (FSR, March/April 1959) by that old rogue Desmond Leslie. UFO enthusiasts will no doubt recognise Leslie as the Anglo-Irish co-author of Adamski's seminal Flying Saucers Have Landed. Fans of unscripted fisticuffs will probably know him better as the man who once punched the late Bernard Levin in the face live on TV.²

Note: When I say "the late Bernard Levin" I'm not trying to suggest that Leslie's hay-maker actually killed him. It's a safe bet that the two events were unrelated - given that Levin died some 31 years after the punch landed.

Anyway, back to Gordon Creighton:

At 6 o’clock one evening in mid-August of 1953 (between August 17 and 20), the 40-year-old Mexico taxicab driver Salvador Villanueva was underneath his broken-down vehicle on the main highway when he became aware of two pairs of legs in something like ‘seamless grey corduroy’ and, scrambling out, found two pleasant-looking men about 4 feet high clad in one-piece garments from neck to toe, with wide shiny perforated belts, metal collars round their necks, and small black shiny boxes on their backs. Under their arms they carried ‘helmets like those worn by pilots or by American football players’. Their small height was not too strange in Mexico, where many Indians are quite short, and he concluded that they were airmen, no doubt from some neighbouring Latin American republic.

One man spoke good Spanish, but in a peculiar manner, ‘stringing the words together’ in a strange accent, while the other evidently understood it but did not speak it. Both smiled sympathetically, they discussed his car and trivial matters, and when it began to rain they accepted his invitation to shelter with him in the vehicle.

During the night various casual remarks began to make Villanueva nervous, and finally came the statement: ‘We are not of this planet. We come from one far distant, but we know much about your world.’

At dawn he went with them to their craft in a clearing half a kilometre from the road and noticed that, as they crossed swampy terrain in which he sank deeply, the legs and feet of the little men remained clean. ‘When their feet touched the muddy pools, their belts glowed, and the mud sprang away as if repelled by some invisible force.’

The saucer, about 40 feet wide, resembled two shining soup plates, one reversed on top of the other. There were portholes in the shallow dome, the craft stood on three great metal spheres, and a faint hum was coming from it. A portion of the lower hull opened, forming a staircase with the supporting cables as handrails. The two little men went aboard, inviting Villanueva to follow, but he turned and ran to a distance, and then watched the craft rise slowly, in a kind of pendulum movement, ‘or like a falling leaf in reverse’, until at a few hundred feet, when it began to glow intensely, and then shot up vertically at staggering speed, with a faint swishing sound, and was at once out of sight.

Thoughts

The short stature and good humour of the duo call to mind Rosa Lotti's encounter a year later, while the discussion about cars and "trivial matters" has something of a Jean Hingley quality to it.

There's also a gem of a short play waiting to be written about Villanueva and the aliens' night spent chatting in his car. A confined space, Villanueva telling the little fellas the ins and out of the taxi business, one alien listening but saying nothing, the other nattering away in his "peculiar manner, 'stringing the words together'" etc.

The bare bones, "factual" account above just doesn't satisfy - leaving one wondering what the "casual remarks" that made Villanueva nervous actually were. Sheltering in such an intimate space is bound to forge a bond I suppose, making even the most normally circumspect being let its guard down (in the manner of an interplanetary Breakfast Club). One can certainly imagine comments like the following giving one the heebie-jeebies:

Your earth cars are interesting to us.

or…

Is this what you humans refer to as 'friendship'?

The visitors did, of course, choose to remove any ambiguity with the unequivocal "We are not of this planet. We come from one far distant, but we know much about your world" - perhaps after growing tired of Villanueva's failure to pick up on their many hints.

Mention should be made (before we wrap up) of their craft's movement. We're told that it rose slowly "in a kind of pendulum movement, 'or like a falling leaf in reverse'". The "falling leaf" metaphor, one frequently found in Ufological literature, has always fascinated me. It seems rather bizarre that so many reports of close encounters describe a motion that seems perfectly consistent with "car hub-cap on a piece of string" fakery!

P. S: If anyone out there (on earth or in space) enjoys the blog they might consider voting for it in the upcoming "Irish Blog Awards" (I guess "Best Specialist Blog" is probably the most appropriate category).

The voting form (detailing instructions and restrictions) can be found here. Nominations close at 9pm, this Friday, 18th of January.

If you're feeling extra-generous you might even consider www.fustar.info in "Pop Culture" or "Arts & Culture".

Transmission ends. I thank you.

Images

The Humanoids, ed. Charles Bowen (London: Futura, 1974), pgs. 90-91. [back]
An act of retaliation for Levin's review of (Leslie's then wife) Agnes Bernelle's stage show Savagery and Delight. [back]

Greetings Earthlings

We know much about your world

Introduction

Event

Thoughts

Images