Taken from Contact! and a chapter lookjing at South American reports.
I fairness it has to be pointed out that APRO also never followed up on declaring reports to be hoaxes although it did “sort of” in the case of Carlos Alberto Diaz which the Lorenzens referred to in several works including their Encounters with UFO Occupants (Berkley, NY, 1976: pp. 230-235). This is the account in its popular form from APRO Bulletin, Vol. 23 No. 5 (Mar 1975):
Carlos Alberto Diaz
a 28-year-old married man, father of one child and born in Ingeniero White, a
district of Bahia Blanca,
On the morning of
January 4, 1975 he was finishing his shift as a waiter in the Holy Protective
Society of the Naposta District in
When Diaz regained consciousness he was inside a smooth, bright sphere which appeared to be semi-transparent plastic. There was no furniture or devices and the illumination seemed to come from the walls. Diaz said he was completely lucid and conscious, half kneeling and half lying on his side against several openings of about 3 centimetres in diameter (1-1/4 inches) in the bottom of the sphere through which issued air. He said he felt ill if he turned away from the openings and felt they served to keep him conscious. He estimated the "sphere" was 2-1/2 to 3 metres (about 7 feet. by 8 feet) in diameter.
Three “creatures” resembling humans came sliding into the sphere; they appeared to be around 1.75-1.80 metres in height (approximately 5 feet, 10 inches) – their heads were half the size of a human head and completely devoid of features - no ears, nose, mouth or eyes. These heads were a mossy green in colour and the body was rather thin and covered with something Diaz defined as rubber - light cream coloured and very soft and the creatures were completely hairless. The arms of the entities were almost straight and very flexible and ended in "stumps" rather than hands and fingers.
When the entities entered the sphere they immediately began pulling tufts of hair from Diaz's head though he had no idea how they did this with no hands but he insisted that each time they would reach out their arms and pull back and they would have some of his hair. Diaz also stated that this seemed to give them great pleasure as they would then jump up and down and wave their arms.
Diaz reported that he had tried to resist the entities but to no avail and that during his struggles he had felt the softness of their bodies and ultimately noted they had "suckers" on their arms and assumed that was the method by which they removed the hair. One of them held him, another pulled his hair and the third apparently only observed. He noted that he had felt no pain as they pulled at his head and chest. The entities moved slowly but were very strong and seemingly tireless.
After this ordeal was over, Diaz reported that his sight once again began to fade and he once again passed out. He remembers nothing else of the experience.
Diaz woke up and found he was lying on the grass and had to close his eyes as the sun was high and shining into them; he felt ill and this illness stayed with him throughout the day. He was near a large, busy highway. He looked at his watch which had stopped at 03:50 hours, the time he last noted before his experience began. Next to him lay his bag containing work clothes and the newspaper he had purchased hours earlier. A motorist thought Diaz had been struck by a car and stopped and upon hearing Diaz' explanation of what had happened to him, the man offered to take him to the nearest hospital (Railway Hospital), where they arrived 25 minutes later at 08:30 hours. It was when he learned the time that he became convinced that he had been abroad an aircraft of unknown origin and in the company of extraterrestrials.
For the next four
days Diaz was confined to the
The medical examination of Diaz yielded no evidence of physiological or psychological alteration in Diaz, except the illness he described as dizziness, upset stomach, the lack of appetite and the missing hair. During the 5th January Diaz had only one cup of milk which had to be fed to him forcibly.
According to the Lorenzens:
“We are immediately struck by three similarities in the (Carl) Higdon and Diaz cases, namely: in both instances, the "creatures" had no hands or fingers and in both cases the witnesses suffered a loss of appetite after the experience and lastly, the entities in both cases "glided" rather than walking”.
They continued:
“As we have pointed out in this Bulletin in the past, we must consider the possibility of deliberate confusion in these cases of absolutely bizarre (to us) creatures and experiences. It seems likely in Higdon's case that he was under the influence (both he and his gun) of something when he went over the crest of that hill and saw the elk. In Diaz's case, he was rendered unconscious before his experience with the humanoids began. Was he also under some kind of influence? Obviously something unusual happened to him — the absence of hair in various spots on his head and chest attest to that. If we speculate that he pulled his own hair out, for whatever reason, we must then consider the fact that, outside of one interview with a magazine, he permitted no interviews with newspapers, radio or TV and was questioned by only one civilian UFO investigator — Mr. Romaniuk.
“He obviously did
not thirst for publicity or notoriety. Then we have the problem of how he got
from Bahia Blanca to Buenos Aires in a matter of 4 hours and 10 minutes — a
distance of 423 miles. In the
The Lorenzens went on to note that there had been other alleged cases of transportation of humans by UFOs in the past and concluded that:
“Carlos Diaz's alleged experience appears to be one of the most credible of them all”.
Unfortunately, in APRO Bulletin, Vol. 26 No. 2, Aug. 1977: p. 9, Roberto Enrique Banchs for the Centro de Estudios de Fenomenos Aereos Inusuales (CEFAI) of Buenos Aires and Richard W. Heiden declared that: “Carlos Alberto Diaz Was a Hoaxer”:
“Investigation revealed the following:
“1. The abduction site, on
“2. The bus leaves
“3. Finding the above discrepancies, it was realized that
Diaz probably went directly to
“4. The records of the hospital guard show that Diaz arrived there at 5:30 p.m., not 4:15.
“5. Psychological assessments of Diaz found these characteristics, among others: rich imagination, quick intelligence (but without depth), inclination to exaggerate, good memory, occasional use of poor judgment, and maladjusted personality.
“We think that under these circumstances we have enough sound arguments of the inauthenticity of the episode, and are able to consider the case a hoax, made up by the witness himself”.
Basically, the events could not have occurred as Diaz claimed. It is a long time since magazines such as Official UFO (February, 1976, Page 12) mentioned the case and one wonders what Diaz is doing today since some “noted Ufologists” have spoken to him and that includes alien abduction ‘experts’ and they all seem to think that he was genuine and much maligned. Well, he continued to go on to fake UFO videos and photographs and despite his being declared a hoaxer almost 40 years ago Ufologists do not care. If you check on the internet there are very few if any –I have found one site that does— UFO fan sites that will even mention the declaration of hoaxing.
With so many
reports proving to be hoaxes or over exaggerated what are we left with? The alleged UFO crash and retrieval of living
and dead aliens at
Then we have the “Vampire of Moca” in 1975 or as the Reader may probably know it after it evolved: the Chupacabra. I dealt with this in my book Some Things Strange and Sinister (UFO and even cryptozoological publications were not interested as they were vested in a continuation of the myth) and noted that I expected the craze to spread to Latino communities elsewhere –as it did but went on to be a term used by hoaxers and conmen out to make every mangy coyote, fox, raccoon and other animal into the legendary “goat sucker”.