- Summer can be the cruelest season when the mercury soars
past the hundred degree mark and the nights are almost just as hot. Without
an electric fan or air conditioner, sleep can be reduced to an incessant
tossing and turning. The Spanish town of Bollullos (Huelva) was certainly
a perfect example of this unrelenting heat in the month of July 1975, when
what little relief offered by mechanical cooling devices was interrupted
by a sudden, unexpected blackout.
-
- The power outage had occurred at eleven o'clock in the
evening, prompting locals to look out their windows for a possible explanation.
Three local youths had gone to the movie theater in search of some relief
from the heat, only to find their enjoyment interrupted by the blackout.
With nothing left to do, the dejected trio returned home, only to have
a startling encounter with the unexplained.
-
- Francisco Esquivel, Diego Sanchez and Diego Salas suddenly
became aware of a strange yellow ball of light at the edge of the road--the
only source of light amid the surrounding darkness. It appeared to be hovering
above the power lines.
-
- Cautiously, the driver slowed down to allow his vehicle
to coast gently past the unknown object. In a newspaper interview with
Spanish journalist J.J. Benítez, Francisco, the driver, said that
the object's fuselage shone with a metallic sheen, surrounded by an aura
of bright white light. He added that he felt the strange presence was "trying
to drive them away" by hurling flashes of light in their direction.
-
- This did nothing to allay his curiosity: Francisco got
out of his car to take a closer look. Just as he did so, the high voltage
lines began producing a shower of sparks. Fear gripped the driver and his
friends, and they sped away from the area even as their car's engine began
to sputter and die. Running into town in a panic, they told anyone who
listened what they had seen: a UFO had been responsible power outage.
-
- The Great Northeastern Blackout
-
- One of the earliest factual cases of UFO interference
with the flow of electricity to our residential areas occurred in November
1953, a football-sized UFO stormed down from the heavens over New Haven,
Connecticut. The mini-UFO proceeded to smash through a billboard close
to a residential area and head skyward after the impact. Lights all over
the neighborhood dimmed as the event took place. Tamaroa, Illinois, also
had its lights cut by a giant hovering UFO in 1957. Porto Alegre, Brazil,
was plunged into darkness on August 30, 1954, and the city of Rome had
lost power on August 3, 1958. In 1962, an UFO touched ground at Eureka,
Utah, not far from Stead AFB and left a nearby power substation inoperative
for 40 minutes until the object took off.
-
- Was it inconceivable for UFOs, with their apparent interest
or thirst for electricity, to affect even larger population centers? On
November 9, 1965, twenty-nine million residents of the northeastern United
States, and millions more in Canada, were plunged into darkness as electricity
was affected by a mysterious source. At five thirty p.m. on that fateful
day, thousands of terrified New Yorkers were trapped in subway tunnels
and within elevators in the heart of skyscrapers. No one was spared the
event, not even military bases.
-
- The blackout spread like an ink stain from the Niagara
Falls area to the cities of Buffalo, Rochester, Utica and the smaller communities
along the Great Lakes in a matter of minutes. Shortly after, it grew to
encompass the states of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire
and Vermont. In a country still in the throes of the Cold War, and with
the Cuban Missile Crisis a fresh memory, it was first feared that the blackout
heralded nuclear armageddon. An airline pilot allegedly exclaimed that
the vision of utter blackness on the ground below him made him think it
was "the end of the world."
-
- Radio stations, operating on backup power, were able
to keep the frightened population calm, although news items in the broadcasts
made reference to "trouble up north" without providing any specifics.
A private plane instructor north of Syracuse,NY reported seeing a colossal
fireball hovering above the quarter-million volt lines of the Niagara Mohawk
Station in Clay, NY. Precisely at that time, operators in the New York
City area registered a massive onrush of power to the north, perhaps drawn
by the "fireball". The blackout occurred minutes later.
-
- Thousands of witnesses in the darkened cities and countryside
would later claimed to have seen strange lights crossing the skies with
impunity on that fateful evening. Others reported seeing "fireballs"
hovering over power transmission cables, changing in color from blue to
orange to green.
-
- The official explanation given at the time was a relay
break in the massive Sir Adam Beck Plant No.2, located a few miles to the
north of Niagara Falls. According to experts, the break allegedly overloaded
the U.S. lines and the load detectors failed to perform according to design
-- a fact which was never satisfactorily explained.
-
- The entire Northeastern U.S., plunged into darkness,
commanded global attention. Not so the equally mysterious blackouts that
followed: New Mexico, Texas and Mexico itself suffered unexplained power
losses in later weeks: On December 3rd, Ciudad Juárez in Mexico
and the major cities of the American Southwest were left in shadow as Socorro,
NM (a UFO mecca), Holloman AFB, White Sands Missile Range and other sensitive
installations were rendered inoperative. Blame was placed on a pair of
defective units somewhere in New Mexico--however, local witnesses claimed
to have seen a glowing object over the power station.
-
- In 1979, author Yurko Bondarchuk accused Canadian prime
minister Lester Pearson of covering up the UFO aspect of the Great 1965
Blackout. Bondarchuk cites the explanation offered by Dr. James McDonald
that the explanation given about a broken relay as the cause of the power
outage was a cover. The prime minister, suggests the author, must have
believed that disclosing the real source of the blackout was unwise."UFOs,"
writes Bondarchuk, "create sudden power surges in transmission lines
as the craft flies overhead...in theory, these power surges could produce
blackouts of massive proportions." (National Post, 2003)
-
- A Precursor to the 1965 Blackout?
-
- The age of the great UFO-induced blackouts continued
throughout those troubled years. A harbinger, perhaps, of would happen
later on across the northeastern U.S., were the three separate power failures
of September 23, 1965 in the Mexican city of Cuernavaca -- fifty miles
away from Mexico City.
-
- The Ultima Hora newspaper indicated that the blackout
had been caused by a large luminous flying saucer which crossed the heavens
over the city--an inverted soup-bowl device which was seen not only by
thousands of citizens but by city mayor Emilio Riva Palacios, who was attending
the opening of a film festival with members of his cabinet. The lights
went out during the showing, and upon going outside, the city fathers were
treated to the sight of the massive object's glow, which reportedly filled
the entirety of Cuernavaca valley.
-
- But the force behind all these aerial phenomena appeared
to be take a shine to Mexico City itself, with its juxtaposition of massive
colonial structures, modern skyscrapers and ancient ruins: it chose the
16th of September, the one hundred fifty-fifth anniversary of Mexico's
independence from Spain, to manifest half a dozen luminous objects over
the city's skies, casting downtown Mexico City into unbreakable gridlock
as drivers left their vehicles to take a better look at the phenomenon.
Newspapers reported that aviation authorities had received in excess of
five thousand telephone calls from people asking if they had also seen
"flying saucers". On September 25, a citizenry weary of craning
their necks skyward endured another leisurely display of the unknown as
a vast luminous body passed overhead, remaining motionless for a while
before shooting out of sight at a terrific speed. Only days later, two
smaller objects would buzz the gilded dome of Mexico's Palacio de Bellas
Artes, a turn of the century structure that dominates La Alameda park.
The early evening sighting was witnessed by a few dozen people waiting
at a bus stop; they described the objects as "enormous luminous bodies
with intermittent sparkling lights."
-
- By this point in time, some of the world's major newspapers
had picked up on Mexico's saucer situation. Paris's Le Figaro reprinted
an editorial from Italy's Corriere della Sera on the subject: "Mexico
City International Airport has officially recorded, of late, some three
thousand cases of mysterious apparitions described in detail. At nightfall,
people gather on the terraces and balconies of their homes to search the
skies...a clamor of voices can occasionally be heard, saying: "There
goes one! Can you see it?" Invariably, what follows is this: traffic
is paralyzed on neighboring streets, since drivers also want to partake
of the spectacle. The roadways grind to a halt, leading to monstrous traffic
jams. After a while, witnesses to tho the event are willing to swear that
the presence of platillos voladores causes engines to stall and plunges
homes into darkness. Throughout Mexico, the number of blackouts has been
inexplicably high..."
-
- Candles and Flashlights
-
- Respected Argentinean author Roberto Banchs mentions
the July 4, 1968 blackout that darkened the entire sector of Tigre (province
of Buenos Aires). During this incident, a number of witnesses reported
seeing a UFO. A woman named Isabel Gómez stated that the object
"seemed to emit light. It was the only lighted object at the time."
A few months later, the city of Chascomús was plunged into darkness.
Mrs. Blanca Davis witnessed a UFO measuring some 7 or 8 meters in diameter
hanging motionless in the air, directly above the town square. "When
we looked toward the west," she reported, "we saw two [more]
discs and another one which gave the impression of being ready to land.
Suddenly the UFOs headed toward the lagoon area, from which twenty more
objects appeared, flying from north to south at fantastic speeds."
Banchs reports that electricity was restored the moment the objects disappeared.
-
- The 1968 wave of UFO sightings, which extended from
the Dominican Republic to the island of Puerto Rico, also caused a series
of blackouts. On August 11 that year, police officers in the town of Yauco
on the island's southern coast were startled to see "a brilliant moon-shaped
object which lit up the area completely. The following day, a similar object
was seen in the neighboring Dominican Republic by residents of Puerto Plata
and Sosúa. According to researcher Sebastián Robiou, the
minute that the locals saw the phenomenon approach, they would hurry up
to find "candles and flashlights, since electricity always failed
whenever the objects flew over their homes."
-
- UFOs and blackouts plagued Argentina again in January
2001, when the La Voz del Interior newspaper ran a story about the harrowing
experience suffered by a local motorist named Julio Salguero. At 3:30 a.m.
on New Year's Day, Salguero was on his way home in the town of Corralito,
cutting across the community of Rio Tercero to save some time.
-
- "We were calmly driving along," said the driver,
"when suddenly my wife screamed: "Be careful!" and we saw
a light heading straight for us. I hit the brakes. What I could see was
a round, very powerful light, like a welding light, over a meter in diameter.
It seemed to be heading straight for the car, but it suddenly stopped and
backed off. It remained at the hight of the power cables that are now at
the side of the road, moving up and down," he explained. "The
light lit everything up for a few minutes, without any exaggerations,
as if it were broad daylight, due to its intensity. It then rose some 30
meters into the air and suddenly vanished. Neither I nor my family can
state which way it went, because we'd be lying. What we saw is that it
vanished suddenly, like a light being switched off."
-
- Salguero and his family were startled to hear that the
strange object they had seen over the high-voltage lines had deprived the
town of Corralito of electricity on a night without storms or high winds,
and even more so when they discovered that nearby Rio Tercero had lost
power at exactly the same time they had their experience. "As far
as I know, no reason for the power outage has been found," he said.
-
- Argentina has not been the only South American nation
bedeviled by blackout-causing UFOs: in the Summer 1998 issue of the Samizdat
newsletter, Brazilian researcher Oriel Farías told the world about
the incredible and still little-known UFO wave that covered northeastern
Brazil and which centered on the town of Guarabira. According to Farías,
the outstanding characteristic of the '98 flap was the sheer variety of
objects reported, ranging from standard disk-shaped craft to massive objects
projecting powerful beams of light. "Lengths of 30 meters have been
reported, the size of a 20-storey building," he writes.
-
- The Guarabira "invasion" began on March 3,
1998 and was spearheaded by 26 UFOs flying over the city at 6:45 p.m.,
when the lights went out in Guarabira, and lasting until 3:45 a.m., when
power returned to the city. This blackout remains unexplained to this day.
-
- Lights Out in Puerto Rico
-
- UFO and paranormal activity ran almost non-stop throughout
the 1990s after a decade of inactivity. Earlier saucer flaps had created
their fair share of electromagnetic interference with automobiles and aircraft,
and even some widespread power outages
-
- In September 1977, residents of the Colobó sector
of Loiza, P.R., were treated to the sight of a UFO flying low over the
local beach at around 8:30 p.m.. The object, according to Sebastian Robiou,
made an occasional buzzing sound and then "shut off and disappeared".
When interviewed, the same residents noted that the lights browned-out
in the sector while the UFO was in evidence.
-
- Fifteen years later, residents of the Mayagüez
Terrace development ran out of their homes in response to the shouts of
students from the nearby university, who were reacting to the sight of
a spherical UFO crossing the skies in the general direction of Cerro Las
Mesas. The orange-hued sphere materialized after having apparently been
the cause of a blackout which affected a considerable part of the city
for a few minutes.
-
- Puerto Rico can also boast the distinction of being
the only place in the world where a blackout was deliberately caused by
the authorities to disprove the presence of the UFO phenomenon in the island's
UFO-ridden southwestern corner. Since 1987, reports had pointed to UFO
activity in the vicinity of a shallow lagoon known as Laguna Cartagena:
all manner of solid craft and intriguing "lights in the sky"
had been seen in the area, and in some cases, emerging from and vanishing
into the water, leading many to believe that an "alien base"
must exist underground in the Lajas Valley.
-
- On October 2, 1991, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority
(PREPA) left hundreds of homes without electricity for thirty minutes.
Ramón Montalvo, an engineer at the PREPA plant in San Germán,
claimed that the unusual lights vanished from the darkened sky "the
minute the power was cut off." Lt. Rafael Rodríguez of the
Lajas police argued that the blackout proved the lights believed to be
UFOs were merely the reflections on the lagoon's surface.
-
- The authorities went to the extreme of placing a series
of large reflectors on the crest of nearby Mt. Candelaria. The experiment
failed miserably -- no such reflection was seen, despite official claims.
Any individual armed with a map would have noticed that the lights on Candelaria,
twenty miles away, could not possibly account for the situation being experienced
on an almost daily basis by the residents of the Lajas Valley.
-
- In mid-March 1992, residents of the Puerto Rican city
of Trujillo Alto were roused from their sleep by an unearthly noise and
a spectacular display of blue light. The light changed to other colors
of the spectrum in rapid succession as two powerful searchlights scanned
the darkened surface from above. Hundreds, if not thousands, of residents
were able to see a massive UFO hovering directly over a local power substation.
The airborne goliath began drawing electricity from the substation in a
stunning visual display that filled onlookers with awe.
-
- Equally awed were the technicians from the local power
utility, who reported early the next day to repair the burned out substation:
according to estimates, the UFO had caused well over a $250,000 in damages
that could not be readily explained, such as the molten transformer terminals
and the inoperative automatic breakers which should have prevented such
a tremendous loss of current.
-
- They Said It Couldn't Happen Again
-
- Computer screens suddenly went black as the hum of 21st
century civilization suddenly stopped to be replaced by an unaccustomed
silence. The time was 4:11 p.m. on August 14, 2003.
-
- In a matter of minutes, battery-powered radios would
report that a widespread blackout had plunged New York city into darkness
for the third time in forty years, and at precisely the worst time of day,
as tens of thousands of office workers were getting ready to return home
on one of the hottest days of an otherwise unremarkable summer. The problem
affected not only the Big Apple, but a wide swath of territory stretching
westward: Toronto, Lansing, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester...the
litany of affected cities included major urban concentrations and minor
villages. Politicians rushed to occupy their places before the cameras
to assure the population that the blackout of 2003 was not an act of terrorism
and that power would be restored soon.
-
- The blame game started almost immediately, with New
Yorkers blaming Canadians, and placing the blame on a "lightning bolt"
which had allegedly struck a power stations. The blame then shifted to
an alleged fire at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, and so forth.
The Great Northeast Blackout of 2003 had affected fifty million people
and as of this writing, no official explanation has been put forward.
-
- Is it perhaps naive to ascribe this blackout to the
UFO phenomenon, especially as no reliable reports have come in? According
to the National UFO Reporting Center, New York state alone reported 703
sightings since the beginning of 2003 (with heavy activity in June and
July) so something unusual could conceivably happened. Forty-eight hours
after the blackout, it was suggested that a strange "power inversion"
along the Lake Erie Loop had caused the blackout, but no explanation had
been put forth as to the external force capable of causing the phenomenon.
The fact remained that "a huge field of electricity dropped out and
drained north," in the words of an Associated Press teletype. Could
this have been one of the UFO-induced "massive surges in power"
that Yurko Bondarchuk mentioned in his book?
-
- As far as the cause is concerned, it seems as though
we will remain in the dark for a long, long time.
-
|
