The Creeping Reality
If the abductees could speak as a collective voice, they might point out that an alien intelligence known as the Grays collect sperm and ova and DNA from abductees and are using this material to create a hybrid race. These Grays wipe away the memories of abductees and implant screen memories. They also implant devices in their abductees – in the ears, brains, sinuses and elsewhere, and track them like branded sheep. There are shape shifters among them.
Perhaps they are us from the future. Perhaps they are, as famous abductee Betty Hill believed, from Zeta Reticulli. Maybe they are from the land of the dead, mythical, archetypal, inter-dimensional travelers. And maybe we’re all living in The Matrix and just don’t know it yet.
When we laugh at alien abductees and their stories, and many of us do, they become even more hesitant to tell us their experiences. So when we meet a few who are willing to talk, to go on the record, we should listen to their stories, even if they sound like science fiction.
Something About Us
On a shelf in our library is one of the classic books in UFO literature, published in 1968: John G. Fuller’s The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours ‘Aboard a Flying Saucer.’ Beneath the title is a short description: The strangest story of our time – the abduction of an American couple aboard a UFO – as revealed by them under hypnosis. The couple was Betty and Barney Hill and their story is often cited as the first abduction in modern times. Inside the book is an inscription:
To Rob and Trish
Keep your eyes on the skies.
Warm Regards,
Betty Hill
Betty Hill signed the book for us when we covered a UFO conference in Hollywood, Florida for OMNI Magazine in 1986, twenty-five years after her and Barney’s experience. Betty and author Budd Hopkins, both of whom we got to know, were the featured speakers. We had read Fuller’s book, but weren’t entirely convinced of the Hills’ story – that she and Barney had been taken aboard a UFO on September 19, 1961, and were subjected to terrifying physical examinations by aliens. Yet, it seemed that something had happened to them. But what?
For our part, we have never experienced an alien abduction. We approach the subject not as experiencers or as scholarly academic researchers, but from a journalistic perspective. We’ve been interested in the subject for decades, and in fact wrote about UFOs and paranormal phenomena for the Anti-Matter section of OMNI for several years in the late 1980s.
By the time the edgy science magazine shut its doors, we had moved on to writing books and novels. Through the years, some of the people who passed in and out of our lives claimed to be abductees. A few had uncovered their traumatic memories through hypnosis, others had remembered their experiences through dreams or spontaneous recall and chose not to explore them. Regardless of which path these abductees took, their lives in the aftermath of their encounters had been profoundly and permanently changed.
In 2009, we started a blog on synchronicity – meaningful coincidence – mostly as a research experiment. Two books grew out of the blog that were published in 2010 and 2011: The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity and Synchronicity and the Other Side. Because synchronicity is often a component in UFO encounters, the blog has featured a number of UFO and abduction stories. Those stories attracted the attention of other abductees, who have come forward with their experiences.
But long before our blog and even before our work with OMNI, we explored the roots of the modern abduction phenomenon when we journeyed to the island of Chiloe in southern Chile. Here, we researched the legend that men in black on a brightly lit ghost ship were abducting islanders. That’s where our interest deepened.
Chapter 1
Aboard the Caleuche
We arrived in Santiago, Chile on July 23, 1983, in the midst of winter. A wet chill seeped through our clothing and into our bones. We were a couple of South Floridians, who hadn’t packed enough warm clothing.
We’d been married a week and were on our honeymoon. We had chosen Chile as our starting point because Ladeco Airline, which had just started flying between Miami and Santiago, was offering an unbeatable introductory round trip fare of $299, for a flight of more than four thousand miles to the tip of South America. This was in the day before Internet and Google, so our travel information about the country was mostly limited to our Fodor guide and focused primarily on Santiago and the tourist spots along the Pacific coast. We had no particular plans other than to allow synchronicity to determine the course of our trip.
On the long flight from Miami to Santiago, with more than two hundred passengers aboard, we happened to sit next to a Chilean woman who inadvertently proved pivotal to our journey. We asked her if she could suggest any mysterious places in Chile where we might encounter something mystical or mythical.
“Oh, Chiloe,” she said without hesitation.
We’d never heard of it. “Where is it?”
“It’s an island off Puerto Montt, where land transportation ends in my country. From Puerto Montt, you take a ferry to Chiloe. The name means land of sea gulls. There, they believe in pincoyas – mermaids – and in a ghost ship, the Caleuche, that is manned by sorcerers or brujos, who are immortal and possess the power to alter their shapes at will. Supposedly, they can transform themselves into wolves, fish, rocks and birds, and when they take human form they are usually tall, foreign, blond. Sometimes they abduct the islanders.”
“Do these abductions actually happen?” Trish asked.
“That depends on who you talk to.”
She went on to say that some islanders believed that the ship itself could transform its shape. In fact, the name, Caleuche, comes from Mapudungun, a Native American language. Caleutum means to transform or change states, and che means people or person. We were struck by the cultural parallel to the alien abduction scenario, recognized the synchronicity, and knew that Chiloe was now our destination.
We spent two days in Santiago, then boarded an overnight train to Puerto Montt. That evening in the dining car, synchronicity was at work again. We were seated with a young Chilean couple on their way to Puerto Montt to visit relatives. They were curious about why we Americans were headed to a place as remote as Puerto Montt, especially in the dead of winter. “If you want to ski, you should be going into the mountains,” the woman said.
“We’re actually headed to Chiloe,” Rob explained. “To research the legend of the Caleuche.”
Her husband laughed. “Ghost ships, mermaids, abductions… it’s all just silly stories.”
“No, it’s not.” The woman sat forward, her eyes lit up. “My abuelita lived for years on Chiloe. She said the stories are all true.”
“But your grandmother wasn’t right in the head toward the end of her life,” the husband added.
The woman made a dismissive gesture. “Don’t pay any attention to what he’s saying. If you can read Spanish, find a copy of Aboard the Caleuche by Antonio Cardenas Tabies.”
Her husband just rolled his eyes and sat back, but we made note of the book and author for future reference.
Chiloe and the Ghost Ship
As soon as we arrived in Puerto Montt the next morning, we found a place to stay, a modest but comfortable B&B across the street from the water. The manager of the place directed us to a store where we could buy winter coats and also gave us the schedule for the daily ferry departures for Chiloe.
“Do you know anything about the Caleuche?” Trish asked her.
“Eerie legends,” she replied with a smile. “Just folklore. But in the living room, on the bookcase, you’ll find a book called Aboard the Caleuche. You can take it with you, if you want. It’s been there for years.”
It was the book the woman on the train had mentioned. Another synchronicity, we thought, and left to buy our winter coats and our ferry tickets. That evening, as a thick fog rolled in off the water, we sat on our balcony, bundled up in our coats, sipping Chilean wine and reading from Aboard the Caleuche.
The following morning, we hopped
the ferry for Ancud, one of three towns on Chiloe, located at the northernmost part of the island. We checked into a small family-run hotel, and were surprised we were the only guests. Then again, it was the middle of winter.
We walked around the picturesque little town with its weathered wooden buildings, small, intimate shops, colorful restaurants and cafes. Everywhere you looked, the sea was usually visible – the water a shocking blue, the beaches curving gracefully along the coast, and yellow wooden fishing boats beached on shore or bobbing in the water. Fishermen with nets were visible through the mist. Sea gulls shrieked and swept in low over the beaches, stealing bits of whatever the fishermen unloaded.
On Chiloe, there’s a palpable sense of the mysterious, the unseen. It’s in the very salt of the air you breathe, and rides in the mist, daring you to explore it. For a couple of South Floridians accustomed to the tourist tackiness of Key West, Chiloe was another world altogether.
We found a place to eat near our hotel, on a street that sloped toward the harbor, and quickly discovered that the ghost ship wasn’t just a myth to the locals. The owner of the restaurant contended that the stories are based on real events that involved encounters with the brujos, or witches, who allegedly manned the ship.
The island’s stories were spiced with tales of mermaids that supposedly inhabited the waters near the island, with the ghost ship and its mysterious appearances in a local harbor, and with its strange crew. The legends were cultural emblems of the island, depicted on ashtrays, postcards, and wall art. Model ships of the Caleuche were complemented by figurines of the mermaids and the brujos, who looked like tiny men-in-black.
We asked our waiter if anyone in town had seen the Caleuche and he waved his hand toward the harbor. “Ask the fishermen down there.”
After we ate, we walked down the road toward the harbor. We encountered a hunched, elderly woman wrapped in a heavy woolen poncho who moved along with the aid of a walking stick. We greeted her in Spanish and she looked us over, pegged us as tourists, then told us we should have come during the summer – in January. “Ahora, no hay turistas aqui.” There aren’t any tourists here now.
When we asked if she or anyone she knew had seen the Caleuche, she considered the question a moment. “If I did, I would not say. But talk to him.” She motioned toward the same fisherman our waiter had pointed out, then moved on.
A cold breeze blew in from the harbor as we continued to the pier and then down to the beach. The fisherman was unloading his catch from one of the small, yellow wooden boats we had seen during our walk through town. It didn’t look as if it would survive the waves the breeze had kicked up, much less a squall. But instead of fish, he had two large buckets filled with sea urchins.
We greeted him and he glanced up, his face as wizened as Yoda’s, each wrinkle a story, an experience, a secret held. “Buenos dias,” he said, then picked up one of the sea urchins, sliced off the spines and cut it in half. He splashed the jellylike innards with lime juice and offered us each half.
While Rob sampled the local delicacy – and then devoured it – Trish asked the fisherman about mermaids. She had grown up in Venezuela and was fluent in Spanish. The fisherman chuckled and gazed out to sea. “The legend says that when the fish are running, the mermaids face shore. When the fish are gone, the mermaids face the ocean, so their backs are to us.”
“Have you ever seen a mermaid?” she asked.
He shook his head. “It’s a story from long ago.”
“Have you ever seen the Caleuche?”
“Me? No. But my grandfather did. And there are villagers who have seen the ship. But many are afraid to talk about it.”
Fortunately, some islanders have been willing to tell their stories and Chilean author Antonio Cardenas Tabies interviewed many of them for Aboard the Caleuche. Like many authors who write about a particular subject, Tabies had a personal experience that intensified his interest in the Calecuhe.
Some years earlier, he and four friends were in a rowboat when they encountered a thick fog that suddenly engulfed them. A small launch approached him and his companions and even though it passed within a few feet of their boat, they never saw anyone on board or heard any noise from the motor. They kept rowing in the direction of the shore, but couldn’t find land. They rowed for hours and at dawn, found themselves in the same spot they’d been when the fog had swallowed them. “We hadn’t advanced a meter in any direction.”
That description parallels an historical account in Massachusetts reported by John Winthrop in The History of New England, 1630-1639. Winthrop was governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony at the time and witnesses brought the incident to his attention. While rowing a boat on the Muddy River in Boston, several men glimpsed a bright light in the sky that “flamed up,” hovered, and darted about. It remained in the sky for about three hours. When the light finally disappeared, the men were dismayed to discover that they had somehow been carried against the tide back to the place where they had started their trip. Governor Winthrop noted, “... other credible persons saw the same light, after, about the same place.”
Tabies believed that the launch was the Caleuche in one of its altered forms, and as they crossed paths with it, the crew of brujos had cast a spell on them. Could it be that Tabies and his companions were actually abducted and only believed they had rowed all night in the same position? Loss of memory is one of the common attributes of the alien abduction scenario. Regardless, that experience enhanced Tabies’ interest in the legend and led him to seek out islanders who had witnessed an appearance of the ship or encountered members of its crew.
Many of the stories Tabies recounted deal with crew members, who bear an uncanny resemblance to MIBs, and were notorious for abducting islanders. When the abductees returned to their villages, they either didn’t remember or refused to talk of where they’d been. One man, who was supposedly taken at the age of 18, returned to his village fifty years later. When questioned, he simply said he had been on a boat, and implored his brother not to ask anything more about it.
Elena Vera Guerrero of Ancud met the man. “I was visiting Marcelino Saldivia, a friend who lives in another village, and took offense at the strange behavior of one of the men present. He didn’t bother to say hello, practically never spoke, and seemed so remote he might as well not have been there.”
Saldivia told her the man was his brother, who had disappeared half a century ago while sleeping on the porch. During Easter week 1976, Saldivia was feeling nostalgic about his lost brother and visited their old home on the banks of the Rio Pudeto. There, seated in the living room and dressed in the same clothes he’d worn as a young man, was his brother, now old and evidently demented.
Tabies told of another man, Juan Antonio Fernandez, who was 16 when he left his home at dawn one day to go fishing and was abducted by the crew of the Caleuche. He recalled that when he arrived at a small hill that overlooked the beach, he heard a strange humming noise, like motors. Two days later, his family found him wandering aimlessly on the beach. “I had a terrible scar on my chest, shaped like a gigantic hand with long, narrow fingers,” Fernandez said. “It didn’t hurt and the strange part was that it looked as if it were old.”
When Tabies spoke with Fernandez’s family, they said Juan was never quite the same after his disappearance. He assaulted people without provocation and spoke and worked only when he was in the mood. Tabies coaxed Fernandez, then in his sixties, into showing him his scar. “I have never seen anything like it,” he said. “The hand covered almost his entire chest, like a scar from a severe burn. When I questioned him about it, he said that if he revealed the secret he would die.”
Armando Pacheco, another Chilean writer, theorized that the legend of the Caleuche is so deeply ingrained in the psyche of the islanders that they are predisposed to sightings. He contended that the Caleuche is an archetype of the collective mind of the islanders, “given reality through their intense and prolonged belief in it.”
The belief in the
ghost ship runs so deeply through the Chiloe culture that the islanders take special care with aquatic birds and animals for fear that one of them might be a brujo – a sorcerer – from the ghost ship, but in an altered form. “The legend,” wrote Tabies, “states that if any harm comes to a crew member while he is transformed, the guilty party will be killed or abducted and condemned to sail the seas forever as a galley slave.”
One night in March 1976, a farmer in Chauques, an archipelago to the northeast of Chiloe, heard a cry that awakened him, a “kind of bleating,” that seemed to be coming from under his house. He got his dogs, woke up the maid and they went outside to investigate. A wolf was trapped between some mud-wall panels. The farmer quickly unfastened three of the panels and the wolf scampered out into the darkness and toward the sea. “I have never before seen a wolf in these parts,” Tabies wrote. “I have no doubt the animal was a mariner from the Caleuche.”
When we visited the National Museum in Ancud, it was a rather humble building that housed a small, straw-woven sailing vessel, representing the ghost ship. It rested in the center of a table of the main room. Surrounding it were an assortment of straw creatures – wood nymphs, sea monsters, trolls, mermaids and brujos, all symbolizing the island’s mythological inhabitants. Uribe Velazque, who at that time was the museum’s director, believed the ghost ship exists only in the fertile imaginations of the islanders, as part of their rich folkloric tradition.
“What would Chiloe be without her Caleuche, her trolls and mermaids and sorcerers?” she wrote in an article. “I can’t imagine a night of the full moon without the sudden appearance of the illuminated ghost ship. I cannot conceive of a summer twilight when the profound silence is not broken by the Caleuche’s enchanted music.”
Total Silence Page 34