Chile Forum

The article 'Enigmas in Empty Places: Haunted Deserts' by Scott Corrales <http://inexplicata.blogspot.com/2011/03/ruins-in-shifting-sands.html> wrote:
Salt Deserts of the South

In February 2001, residents of the northern Chilean town of Calama - located in the vicinity of the country's northern salt deserts - claimed having seen a "caravan of UFOs" in the Salar de Atacama, one of the driest spots on Earth. A strange silvery sphere had been causing a great deal of consternation among locals, but it wasn't until February 24 at 8:30 pm that Adolfo Trigo, a young resident of the outlying village of San Rafael, claimed having seen a UFO taking off from one of the village's quarters. The object, he would later tell the Diario de Calama newspaper, was a "fish-tailed cylinder with a phosphorescent green front, an electric blue middle and a violet-hued tail."

Trigo was spellbound as the multicolored object made a full turn in the air before rising into the night sky at full speed. But what makes Trigo's account unique is that he did not see the object lose itself among the stars, as is often described in UFO sightings, but rather "disappear into a doorway in the sky."

Others would become witnesses to this latest desert mystery. Weeks later, Gustavo Glade would become a witness to UFO while traveling by truck along Cuesta El Diablo on the southernmost reaches of the Atacama Desert. The driver, accompanied by five other passengers, was able to see a sequence of bright rectangular lights that appeared to be flying in tandem. It looked, in his own words, "like seeing a train riding through space", a description corroborated by the others aboard his vehicle. However, the same peculiarity as in the Trigo sighting was noticed: the heavenly convoy did not fly away or shoot up into space - it seemed to enter into a cloud or "dimensional doorway" through which it vanished completely. Glade's sighting lasted a total of eighteen to twenty seconds and the objects involved were no more than a dozen, flying in an upward direction, which discarded the suggested possibility that the driver and his passengers had seen a meteor.

The UFO phenomenon's interest in Chile is mirrored by the U.S. military's interest in both the country and the phenomenon. According to journalist Cristián Riffo (http://www.ovnivision.cl), a Col. Hubert Brandon prepared a dossier on the anomalous activity in this country in 1965. This Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) dossier documents UFO sightings and encounters reported by trained professionals, including the September 1965 encounter between a LAN Chile airliner piloted by Marcelo Cisternas over the city of Arica, in which a zig-zagging object buzzed the aircraft for a number of minutes.

Months before the Trigo and Glade sightings, researcher Jaime Ferrer of the Calama UFO Center managed to collect a compelling account from the desert community of Chiu-Chiu which took place in October 2000. A man named Gonzalo, owner of a hard candy factory in the area and who distributed his product personally to the local towns, told Ferrer the following story: he had been driving some forty kilometers along the road when he saw a bright light the size of the full moon which appeared to be coming in for a landing. However, the bright object was actually suspended in mid-air. Gonzalo pulled his delivery van over , turned off the headlights and lowered the driver side window for a better look. To his astonishment, the object "exploded" and vanished, scattering three lights - red, yellow and blue-- in separate directions. What truly astonished him, he told Ferrer, was that no sooner had the lights scattered, he could hear a helicopter taking off in the darkness, although he couldn't see it. The helo kicked up a dust storm and Gonzalo noticed " a powerful ultraviolet light" aimed at the ground. Three wheeled vehicles, which he took to be Jeeps or 4x4s followed the helicopter's beam and lost themselves in the desert - proof that the Chilean military is as interested in UFOs as it ever was, despite strenuous protestations that it keeps no files on the phenomenon?

Why Chile? Why the Atacama Desert with its thousand year-old mummies and vestiges of the earliest civilizations in South America? Archaeologist Juan Schobinger has written in his Prehistory in the Americas (NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000) that Chile faces one of the richest seas in the world and is backed by one of its most forbidding deserts. The dryness of the salt desert, where rainfall is measured in inches per century, made it ideal for preserving cultural artifacts such as baskets, textiles and even food.

It also preserved something darker - the rituals of forgotten shamans who would bury sacrifices deep in the desert for the "gods" to feast upon. The sacrifices would be held at night and the victim, usually a llama or a dog, left out. At daybreak, the ancient medicine men would return to the site to insure that the gods - the meandering lights of the desert - had accepted the offering. The carcass would be utterly exsanguinated and a puncture mark could usually be found somewhere on the body, which was then transported back to the primitive settlement to be consumed by the community. Subsequently, evidence of this communion between man and his deities was buried under a cairn known as an apachetca, a tangible link of the trade between ancient man and supernatural forces. It is easy to dismiss this as the savagery of ancient man until we remember that the books of the Pentateuch mentioned that the blood of the sacrifice belonged to the godhead. Contemporary thinkers of the paranormal like Salvador Freixedo have written at length about this curious aspect of the human worship (Defendámonos de los dioses, Spain: Quintá, 1985).