Text: Fústar
Artist: Q
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Where: Bajada Grande, Argentina.
When: July 27, 28 or 30, 1962.
Witness: Ricardo Mieres.
Introduction
While details about one-piece silver suits, enigmatic devices, interplanetary craft (etc) are often vividly recalled by those who claim to have encountered alien entities, nothing burns itself into a witness's memory banks quite like the alien eye. Whether these eyes are the oft-reported glowing red balls or inky black pools (reflecting the witness's gaze back upon itself), not many aspects of such encounters seem as memorable or unsettling.
As Bryan Appleyard succinctly puts it (in his entertaining Aliens: Why They Are Here) "When the eyes are wrong, everything is wrong".1 Given that observation, the case I present today (beautifully illustrated by the mighty 'Q') might well be subtitled: Two eyes wrong, Three eyes wronger.
Event
Details on the incident are not particularly precise (Jacques Vallée, for instance, lists the witness's name as "Roberto Mievres" and not "Ricardo Mieres") but Gordon Creighton's account (in "The Humanoids of Latin America")2 seems as good as any:
On July 27 or 28, 1962, Ricardo Mieres, a 17-year-old student at the Colegio Nacional de Paraná, was riding his motorcycle near Bajada Grande, 5 kilometres outside Paraná, when he encountered a very tall creature with a melon-shaped head, very long and almost white hair, and 'three eyes which stared fixedly, without blinking'. In his terror he tried to flee, but his engine had mysteriously gone dead. The creature came up and violently snatched his muffler from his neck. It then 'did an about-turn, like a robot', and walked off, leaving footprints in the sandy soil.
The motorcycle now functioned again, and the student rushed into town and gathered a party of other motorcyclists to hunt the 'robot', but they found only the footprints, and the muffler lying on the road. There were several witnesses who saw something luminous fly over at great speed at the time.
Thoughts
Regular readers will notice many elements we've seen before (the theft of a personal object, engine malfunction, the "robot-like" behaviour and body language), but it's those "three eyes which stared fixedly" that remain the most potent of the story's images.
The aforementioned Bryan Appleyard would no doubt agree, for he devotes an entire chapter of his book to matters ocular:
The eyes of aliens are different. They can penetrate in novel, disturbing ways. But they cannot be penetrated precisely because they are alien. We cannot know what they are thinking because we do not know how they think. We can only know that they are looking. Typically, the alien eyes are large and black, lacking the colour and detail of human eyes. Frequently they reflect what they see, like mirrors. They haunt and baffle those who see them.3
This feeling of being penetrated, of being exposed, of being known (in the face of something unknowable) is one that can inspire not only dread (as with Ricardo Mieres) but also a sense of profound intimacy, even empathy (as articulated, for example, in Whitley Strieber's Communion).
It all depends, I suppose, on how comfortable one feels with the idea of being penetrated…
Images
Added: September 16th, 2007
Tags: All, robot, Theft, Aggressive, teenager, Argentina, 1962, Engine Malfunction, 3 Eyes, White Hair, Giant, Q
Views: 2150
Comments: 4
©2007 edited & written by Fústar, designed by Jess Beeley Byrne
