The UFO Diaries This page intentionally left blank The UFO Diaries Travels in the Weird World of High Strangeness Martin Plowman First published in 2011 Copyright © Martin Plowman 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Arena Books, an imprint of Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia www.trove.nla.gov.au ISBN 978 1 74175 981 5 Maps by Ian Faulkner Set in 12/14 pt Requiem by Bookhouse, Sydney Printed in Australia by Griffin Press 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper in this book is FSC certified. FSC promotes environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable C009448 management of the world’s forests. For Priscilla Jane and my family This page intentionally left blank CnOnTe Ts PrOlOgUe ix 1 MelbU O rne 1 2 AO r yAl sOCieTy 19 3 Ro swell 37 4 n Oew MexiC TO nevADA 59 5 TheO C nTACTees 77 6 Chile 101 7 Bo liviA 121 8 The AlTiPlAnO 139 9 NaA zC 157 10 MAi ArC hU s 177 11 MelbU O rne 195 12 MexiO C CiTy TO TePOzTlán 209 13 Alien AbDUCTees 237 14 O AxACA 265 15 The Answers 283 b rPyibliOg A h 295 An eCk OwleDg MenTs 305 This page intentionally left blank Prologue My liFe As A UFOlOgy-OlOgisT I never thought I’d grow up to be a grave robber. It may well be the world’s third oldest profession after politics and you-know- what, and I hear the pay is good as long as you don’t mind working with a bunch of stiffs, but grave robbing just doesn’t have the romantic appeal of, say, arms dealer, nor the dinner party cachet of Peace Corps volunteer. What did you do in Peru, Martin? people would ask me back home, and I would have to say something like, ‘I trespassed upon the burial grounds of civilisations that were old before the country I was born in even existed.’ Unfortunately my camera would be stolen on a bus exactly two days later as I left the plateau of Marcahuasi to return to Lima, Peru’s smog-bound capital, so I don’t even have the photos to prove my guilt. Mercifully, the tomb was empty. All that remained were the dry-mortared stonewalls perhaps five feet in height, with a tiny square entrance on one side through which the shrunken, mummified corpse of the ancient lord would’ve been interred. I breathed a sigh of relief. There was nothing to disturb here; any remains once laid to rest in the tomb had been stolen or removed many years ago, and I was just a visitor en route to my own eventual destination. ix Martin PlowMan Besides, I had not come here for buried treasure – for months now I had been travelling through South America in search of UFO stories. In total I spent no less than four hundred and twenty-two hours sitting on buses and other wheeled transport in South America (excluding ox-carts and inline skates), a tally I began keeping after one especially murderous eighteen-hour bus journey over a road in lowland Bolivia so rutted and corrugated that my kidneys ached for days afterwards as if kicked by a territorially challenged llama. My UFO witnesses were the folk I met waiting in bus terminals, or villagers buying potatoes in the marketplace, or fellow travellers with a story to tell, and I encountered them all across the teeming cities, trackless jungles and soroche-inducing mountains of this vast continent. Ever since arriving in South America I’d been hearing that Marcahuasi, an archetypal lost world soaring some four thousand metres above sea level, was one of the continent’s major UFO hot spots. After a tiring day’s journey from Lima I was finally here, about to violate an ancient Andean lord’s burial ground . b ut I’ve already said that. I stood up now to gain a better view of my surroundings and, less hopefully, see a UFO. The things you do in search of truth. Thing is, I don’t really believe in a solid, grab-it-by-the-ears-and-lock-it-in-a-cage kind of ‘Truth’ – which was why I was attracted to the idea of UFOs in the first place, for these unnameable little objects whose fragile existence is debatable at the best of times compel people to take the strangest of journeys. My own journey into the world of high strangeness began in Australia, a country so distant from Peru as to be considered semi-mythical. Australia? these descendants of the vanquished but not forgotten Incas would ask quizzically, frowning beneath their alpaca wool caps or bowler hats. What language do they speak x the UFo Diaries in Australia? The irreconcilable fact that I could converse in heavily accented Spanish (sometimes more fluently than these Quechua-speaking highlanders, for whom the tongue of Cervantes and Lorca was often a distant second language) led many of the people I met throughout the isolated valleys of the Andes to conclude that Australia must be some far-flung former colony of the Spanish empire, just as Peru itself had once been. The chain of events that brought me to the other side of the world stretched back to the southern winter of 1999, when I made the fateful decision to undertake a PhD at my antipodean- Gothic alma mater, Melbourne University – largely as a means to retaining a heated office on campus, truth be told. My research subject was what might be considered ‘niche,’ in the same sense that an incurably mad professor might be bricked up in their office: I would write a comprehensive history of the belief in UFOs, as seen through the eyes of the world’s true believers. Ufologists, these cardigan-clad seekers of proof of the existence of extraterrestrial life are called. Me, I’m not a ufologist myself, but I am fascinated by their fascination with UFOs. Perhaps a little too fascinated for my own good, although I doubt I was ever in danger of going fully native in a subculture where paranoia is considered an attractive personality trait and binoculars the very height of fashion. I never set out to discover the Truth; I never wanted to believe. Honestly. But I did walk in the footsteps of ufologists, a sinuous and broken trail, glowing with the light of other worlds, that I would follow for seven long years. So let me say from the outset: I have never seen a UFO. To the best of my knowledge, I have not been abducted by aliens. I cannot communicate telepathically, and I was definitely born on this planet (as were my parents – I think). If you are looking for answers, talk to a priest or a psychologist, for you will not find them in this book. xi Martin PlowMan Despite all that, when I meet a person who tells me they’ve seen something in the sky they can’t explain, I tend to believe them. The world is a big place, and the cosmos even larger and stranger than we can yet imagine. This book is not about belief or disbelief; it’s about chasing the stories of wonder human beings tell each other and seeing where they lead. Some years ago now, I was at a party when word got around that I was writing a PhD on UFOs. I don’t recall telling people about my research, but somehow the news always seemed to move through conversations on its own accord, as it still does today. At any rate, the three people who lived in that house got wind of the situation and called me upstairs to answer some questions. We sat cross-legged on the floor, the three housemates facing me in a semicircle. I felt like I was going for a house interview. Should I tell them I owned a fridge? A slow-burning fuse of a joint was passed around the assembly, but manfully I refused, for I knew I would need all my wits about me. ‘We hear you’re writing a thesis about UFOs,’ said the first of the trio. I nodded. ‘Does that mean you believe in UFOs?’ asked the second housemate. I shook my head. I was more interested in how people attempted to make sense of UFO sightings, I said. The housemates exchanged sceptical glances. ‘Now just wait a minute here!’ the third housemate almost shouted, voice rising in sceptical indignation. ‘I have to ask: how the hell were you allowed to take a topic like that?’ This last question was more an exclamation of disbelief, and he stabbed his fingers in the air before my nose for effect. So I told them. I spoke at length and with great rhetorical dexterity about the sheer inventive strangeness of UFO sight- ings, about how ufologists must truly belong to one of the most enduring subcultures of the past century, how there was a word xii the UFo Diaries for ‘UFO’ in almost every language, and that it was my job to pull this colourful but threadbare tapestry of belief into some kind of overarching story.