Tabies, though, firmly believed the Caleuche exists. He cited Tim Dinsdale, author of Loch Ness Monster. “There are two types of mysteries: those which are accounts of experiences which have occurred and cannot be explained, and those born of the history of a people.” The Caleuche, said Tabies, is a mystery of both kinds.
Before we left Ancud and continued our way across the island, we walked along a dirt road toward the outskirts of town. We passed a low-lying neighborhood where many of the homes were built on stilts that kept them above water when the river flooded. We paused on a bridge that crossed the Rio Pudeto and gazed out over the bay. It was here where, one night in 1968, Aaron Garcia Gonzalez, a pastor in Ancud, was startled to see a large sailing vessel enter the shallow, unnavigable waters of the Rio Pudeto. “I saw several brilliant lights, then a mast, then two more masts and finally, a ship illuminated in brilliant colors.” Father Garcia watched the ship for half an hour before it faded away in the same slow manner that it had materialized.
While sighting the ship from a distance, as Father Garcia did, might be enchanting, meeting the crew face-to-face was another matter, islanders told Tabies. Like the MIBs, who have infiltrated popular culture through movies and stories of encounters, the members of the Caleuche crew sometimes come ashore and knock on doors with strange requests. Jose Barrientos, a farmer, claimed that one night in 1945 a man he believed was a crew member of the Caleuchecame to his house with a message.
“He was tall and thin. He had large eyes and was dressed in a dark suit and tie and black shoes.” The stranger told Barrientos that his mother, who had recently died, had found a box of china and if she had kept her discovery secret, she would have become a wealthy woman and lived to an old age. Instead, she and Barrientos’ sister, brother and several friends had sold the china.
“Because of this, your mother and sister died and so will your brother.” The man gave Barrientos a letter to take to another women who he said still had some of the china. Barrientos was told that if that woman didn’t return the goods, she would die and so would her two sons. “You are to give her my message,” the stranger instructed him. “Then you are to gather up the remaining pieces of china and leave them in the woods, where we will retrieve them.”
Barrientos delivered the message to the woman the next morning. But when her husband found out why he had come, the man turned his dogs loose on Barrientos. Shortly afterward the woman, her two sons and Barrientos’ brother died, just as the stranger had predicted.
Parallels to Alien Abductions
This “stranger in the know” is another facet of the alien abduction experience that is sometimes mentioned by experiencers. Typically, the abductee has never seen this individual before, but the stranger has inside information about what’s actually going on. The stranger offers advice, confidential information, or may deliver a threatening message.
Barrientos was convinced the deaths were a reprisal because the individuals had kept something that belonged to the Caleuche. “The rest of the people involved saved themselves by throwing the china into the sea,” he said.
But why would the crew be so interested in dinnerware? Probably because the china wasn’t china, but something else altogether.
According to Tabies, the crew members also occasionally make pacts with islanders who act as agents for them. If, for instance, the crew wishes to hold a celebration, the agent arranges the details. He might draw up a contract with one of the villagers, stating that in return for the use of his home and his silence, he will be rewarded with gold.
Other times, crew members confront islanders directly. Elena Guerrero’s first experience with the Caleuche involved what she believed was an attempt by crew members to establish a pact. “I was young, still living with my parents at the time. Around twilight we saw a brilliantly-colored ship headed toward land. Maybe my parents realized it was the ghost ship because they sent my brothers, sisters and me off to bed. I was the only one who disobeyed. Through the window I could see seven seamen approaching the house.”
When the men knocked, her father asked what they wanted. One of them replied: “Water and provisions, and for this you will be well paid in gold.”
Elena heard her father tell the men he would rather be poor the rest of his life than give them even a drop of water. “To this day, I still don’t understand why the mariners didn’t take reprisals against my father.”
While many islanders fear the sight of the Caleuche, Graciela Ruiz, a seamstress of the nearby island of Lemuy, sought out the ghost ship. She claimed that each year on the same date the ship surfaces in the Bay of Lincay near Lemuy. On this particular date in 1976 she and some friends walked to a small hill where they had a view of the bay.
“We hid behind some rocks on a hill because the mariners of the Caleuche can see a great distance, and there we waited. Midnight finally arrived and suddenly we saw a light rising from the depths of the water. It lit up the entire bay. A gigantic ship emerged, bright as gold, and we were so close it was like we were on board.”
Ruiz says she saw an immense salon where men and women were dancing to a majestic orchestra whose music she and her friends heard clearly. The festivities lasted three or four hours, she recalled. Then just before dawn, the boat started to sink. “We watched until it vanished beneath the surface. Only then could we leave because it would have been dangerous before.”
Anna Tabies Diaz, a native of the village of Huidad on Chiloe, recalled that one morning a tree trunk some 90 feet long and 18 feet wide at the base appeared in the salt marsh near her home. There had been no wind during the night that might have swept such a trunk into the marsh, and the sea didn’t reach that far inland. By noon, a flock of crows had perched on the truck.
“From that day onward for the next ten years, the crows and trunk remained,” Diaz said. “There were storms with high winds, but the giant trunk never moved – until one day a villager chopped into it and the trunk bled.”
That same night, also windless, the trunk disappeared. Shortly afterwards the villager who had hacked into the trunk with an axe, also vanished. “I have no doubt the trunk was the Caleuche, anchored there,” she said. And the crows, she contended, were the mariners.
That story, more than the others, links the ghost ship saga to one of the most mysterious aspects of the modern alien abduction scenario. Like the Caleuche, UFOs and their crew are known to shape shift. One life-long abductee you’ll meet in this book found herself abducted with a rock star, who she had just seen in concert. When she angrily asked what he was doing there, the rock star shaped shifted into a Gray. That ability makes us wonder about the abductions that involve U.S. military personnel mixed with Grays. You’ll read about such a case in a later chapter.
In essence, alien abductors may be archetypal tricksters who not only manipulate our view of reality, but tear it apart and leave abductees with their worldview in shreds. The abductees, like Humpty Dumpty after his fall, struggle to tape the pieces back together again and discover it’s impossible. They can no longer accept reality as they once perceived it.
The UFO and alien presence fits perfectly into our high tech world as a twenty-first century mystery, a science fiction saga merging with our everyday reality. Just as in centuries past, when fairies, Djinn and other mythical creatures were said to abduct people, the residents of an isolated island in southern Chile experienced their version of the story in the form of a ghost ship and its crew. And we are experiencing ours.
Is it part of the collective unconscious being made conscious? Or is it something else entirely? What’s really going on here?
In Chile, like many places in South America, the culture is more open to the possibility that myths and legends are real. In the Amazon, for instance, indigenous tribes believe that the pink dolphin is actually a shape shifter who, on the nights of the full moon, becomes a human male who wears a hat to cover his blowhole. He sneaks into the nearest village, abducts the prettiest woman, then takes her to the rive
r, to his underwater lair, and impregnates her. Sound familiar?
When we first heard this story during the years that we led adventure tours to the Peruvian Amazon and elsewhere in South America, we laughed about it: The dolphin did it! We figured the story was an explanation for pregnancies out of wedlock. But the pink dolphin version of the shape shifter/abduction story bears some uncanny parallels to the tales of the Caleuche and its crew and to the alien abduction story.
In Arab countries, the abductor, the one who terrorizes the masses, is the Djinn, beings described as “master tricksters,” who abduct humans for unsavory purposes. The Djinn, like the legendary Grays, try to manipulate and control their victims. They are not nice guys.
In San Augustine, Colombia, there’s an archaeological park that consists of statues that are as anomalous as those on Easter Island or on the Markawasi plateau in Peru. A businessman we met during our Amazon travels described his experience in San Augustine as horrifying. He claimed he was “taken over” by several entities, spoke in some ancient language no one with him understood, and that he “was shown things” about the beings who created the statues. And, guess what? They weren’t from Earth.
In North America, abductee experiences are generally written off as the result of false memories recalled under hypnosis, lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis, delusions, schizophrenia, or as a mask for childhood sexual abuse. Careers have been built on such theories. But suppose these stories, these anecdotes, are a part of something larger, part of an emerging paradigm that will be as alien to us now as smartphones, WiFi and the Internet, Facebook and Twitter would have been to a resident of the 1800s?
Imagine Edgar Allan Poe with a cell phone and an iPad. Ridiculous, right?
But suppose that’s the equivalent of where we humans stand now in the early twenty-first century relative to UFO encounters and alien abductions? Are we, through these tales about UFO encounters and abductions, coming face to face with an emerging new paradigm?
Like Hansel and Gretel, we’re babes lost in the woods and struggle to leave a trail of breadcrumbs so that we can find our way back home to – what? The choices for Hansel and Gretel weren’t exactly great. They could follow the breadcrumbs and return to their father’s abusive and sadistic second wife, who wanted to lose them in the woods so she and her husband wouldn’t have to share their food with them. Or, they could move on into the unknown.
Hansel and Gretel encountered a beautiful little house in the woods made of sugar and settled in. They didn’t realize the house was a trap created by a cannibalistic hag who wanted to fatten them up and eat them.
Are the alien abductors our cannibalistic hags? Or are they our liberators? In the fairy tale, the children outwit the hag, the wicked witch, and we imagine them moving on in their lives like characters in a movie sequel that hasn’t been made yet. Do they live happily ever after? Is such a thing possible for abductees?
According to many, the answer is no. Like the couple in the next chapter, abductees try to integrate their experiences into their lives and find it incredibly difficult as they repeatedly face some basic questions: What happened to me? Why did it happen? How do I deal with it?
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