The Mayaquez UFO/USO Incident ~ Puerto Rico, 1977.

Very interesting UFO/USO incident that was witnessed by over two thousand people in Mayaquez, Puerto Rico, 1977:

1977, Mayaquez, Puerto Rico - Two Large Glowing UFOs Enter & Emerge from Ocean.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/c453ec451b2b.jpg[/atsimg]

Two large glowing UFOs drifted slowly over a Puerto Rican city, settled down in the Atlantic Ocean about a mile off shore and appeared to go into and out of the ocean a number of times as about two thousand people watched.
Two fishermen in a boat nearby were so frightened they could hardly get their motor started, and some people on shore thought the world had come to an end. The incident occurred in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico’s third largest city, located on the western end of the island.

The objects were first seen around nine to nine thirty in the evening on September 13, 1977. The first object vanished after half an hour or so but the second was seen moving about Mayagüez Bay for hours, finally disappearing around three in the morning.

“A lot of people were afraid,” said Mayagüez Police Sergeant Ramon Ramirez.

He watched the objects for a while but then devoted the rest of the night to keeping an eye on the crowds and the traffic. “It was a strange object to them and they didn't know what it was.”

One of the witnesses was Juan Perez Rodriguez, then twenty six, who operated a hamburger stand on the beach where the biggest crowd gathered.

“Some people were frightened, especially old people,” he said. “They were afraid. They didn't know what it was. Some people thought these were things of God and thought it was the end of the world.”

Rafael Lopez and his half brother, Arturo Rivera, were in a boat out in the bay fishing when one of the objects came down near them. Both were frightened and they went into shore.

He and Rivera, then thirty six, had been fishing since four in the afternoon about half a mile from shore. They were due west of Columbus Landing, a housing development along the bay. Lopez said they saw only one of the objects. That was at about nine thirty in the evening.

Cricket Sound:

“It just appeared close to us. We didn't see where it came from. We just all of a sudden noticed it close to us in the water, and when we first saw it, it looked small, and then it seemed to grow very large.

“We were hearing a sound like a cricket screeching. I had the impression it was a cricket inside the boat. I've had crickets in the boat before and all you have to do is pound on the sides of the boat and they usually shut up. But as much as we pounded, it didn't quiet. It kept on making sounds.

“As long as we didn't move, the object stayed steady in the water and seemed to get smaller and then larger. And when it got larger, it got much brighter and then it would change colors. When it would grow brighter, it would get from like yellow to an orange color.

“I've been a fisherman for a long time and I've been out on that water for a long time and I've never seen anything like what I saw that night.” Asked what he thought the object was, Lopez said: “In my opinion, it was a UFO, a flying saucer."

Police Lieutenant witnesses objects from shore:

Mayagüez Police Lieutenant Cesar Grácia watched the objects most of the night. Other fishermen were on the shore that night, he said, but the police wouldn’t let them go out in boats to investigate because of possible danger. “But the fishermen said very clearly they had no intention of going out there for any reason."

Grácia, who was in charge of the police shift that night, said he watched the objects off and on from about nine o'clock until one in the morning. He was in a patrol car by himself when he first noticed one of the lights.

“I saw something in the sky that I didn't know what it was,” Grácia said. “It was over Highway Two about fifteen hundred feet, a large, lighted ball about six feet in diameter. It was going toward the beach very slowly.”

He was headed for the Mayagüez Hilton Hotel in the hills on the north side of the city at the time and he continued on to the hotel.

“I was in the parking lot of the Hilton when they called me from the police department,” Grácia said. “They told me to go to the beach because a great many people were watching this object.

“When I got there, the object was already hovering over the water about two or three miles off the beach. There were about five hundred people watching. There are about four public housing areas right there and all the people from the housing areas were there.

“I saw one light coming down but when I got to the beach I noticed there were two objects in the water, not together but about a mile away from each other. They were hovering over the water, right about at the water level".

“Because of the distance I couldn’t tell if it was a few feet over the water or if they were actually touching the water. The first object stayed about an hour but the second one lasted at least four hours.

[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]

Police flooded with calls:

"People came out of their houses to see the view and people came in cars, parked on the side of the street and went to the beach to see what was happening. I stayed until midnight, mostly keeping an eye on the group so there wouldn’t be any problems.”

Ramirez said he stayed until about midnight directing traffic. In describing the object as he first saw it, he said: "It was pretty high, like an orange-yellow light. I don't know exactly the size. As it came down it got larger. It was pretty good sized.

“The police got many, many phone calls, all night. We called the Coast Guard but they didn’t come. They said it wasn't an emergency.”

Asked what he thought the objects were, Ramirez said, “I think they were mystery objects. I was impressed by what I saw."

Mayagüez Police Lieutenant Luis Comacho didn't see the objects but said: "There were many other officers who saw this."

Juan Perez, who owns the hamburger stand on the beach, said: “A friend got worried and called me at home because there were too many cars in our parking lot. I came over about ten o'clock and I saw one of the objects.

“It was about the size of a basketball, very bright, yellowish-orange. It was about two hundred feet high and then it went down and stayed close to the water and disappeared into the water. It hit the water and the light just faded away.

“The second one came up and went down again, sometimes like it turned on and off. It just came up and down again and it was steady. It went in and out of the water about ten times. It took about four or five minutes each way. It would go about twenty feet above the water and come back down.”

He said a hundred to a hundred fifty cars were parked in the lot next to his hamburger stand “and about seven or eight hundred people. I sold plenty that night. I sold four hundred dollars more than what I usually make!

Object submerges:

Luis Baez, who also lived at Columbus Landing, said: “I was playing pool and someone said, 'Look!' I came outside with my pool stick and I see this thing. It was something nice to see. It was round looking, like an apple. Nice, round, beautiful. It went toward the beach.

"I put my pool stick away and went down to the beach and looked. A friend said, ‘That thing that's waiting over there is not a fishing boat.’ I said, ‘Sure it's a boat’ and he said, ‘It’s not!’ So then the one that came by overhead was coming down near the other one. They stayed like that for three or four minutes maybe a thousand yards apart.

“The bigger one, the one that was waiting, tipped on its side and BLOOM! Into the water! The small one stayed for a while. After half an hour or so I went up to the roof of this garage and laid down and watched. I wanted to make sure if it moved or not.

“And I could see this thing goes up… down… this way to the right, back again and a few times it went this way into the water. You could see the water flashing. It never went all the way down in the water".

“It did that a few times, it goes up, comes down, moved toward the beach but not too close and it goes back.At one o'clock in the morning I went home to sleep. I have to be up early in the morning.

“So I slept, went to work and when I come back I asked a few friends of mine what happened to the one that was up there. Well at three o'clock in the morning it disappeared. There were about a thousand people at the beach where he was.”

Asked if he thought what he had seen was a boat, plane or helicopter, Baez said: “We might have no schools but we are not dumb."

Other witnessess:

Another witness was Mrs. Auria Andujar, who lived on the beach less than a mile south of the hamburger stand. She knew nothing about the objects until her husband came home from work about ten thirty that night and told her about the crowds of people he had seen.

"I went out to the beach to see what I could see,” Mrs. Andujar said. “As soon as I realized this was something out of the ordinary, I stayed to see what it would do. And it started to move down into the water and then it would rise up again above the water and go back down into the water again. By then, I realized it wasn't something from this world.

“It was a large, very brilliant light between yellow and tangerine color, like the color of flames. It seemed to have a greenish light on the top of it.My daughter, Ida Luz, who lives close by, came to watch also".

“On two occasions it rose up off the water and came close to the house. When it was halfway from where it began,it seemed to be shining a light toward the house as though it were a beacon. Then it would go back down in the water and when it was under the water it would go back out to where it had been and then rise up again.
"I was frightened because I was convinced it wasn’t anything from this earth."

Links:
www.ufocasebook.com...
www.waterufo.net...
tinwiki.org...


Does anyone know any further info or developments about this incident?
Its quite an impressive case with a great many separately located witnessess -it also seems that people witnessing unknown objects going into (or out of) the waters around Puerto Rico is not that uncommon:


USO Thread

Puerto Rico Thread

Cheers.

[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]

That's a fairly harrowing experience for these poor folks. Pretty compelling as well as there seem to be plenty of witnesses to this incident. The police reports to corroborate the incident also help to solidify this account.

Lots of credibility on this one. Great find!

Cheers,

Erik

On a side note, we need to bomb the heck out of this board with nothing but relevant and verifiable research so as to dilute some of the garbage sneaking on hear. Granted, some of it is unintentional as I am guilty of being taken in by some of it until someone catches the hoax that I didn't. Teamwork is good too, I guess. It just makes me try harder.

Cheers,

Erik

Originally posted by redwoodjedi
On a side note, we need to bomb the heck out of this board with nothing but relevant and verifiable research so as to dilute some of the garbage sneaking on here..

Erik, if I could give you more than one star for that comment I would - very well said.

There certainly isn't a lack of credible (and unexplained) UFO incidents out there - Jkrog's thread has collated many of them but I suspect theres still quite a few that have been overlooked or forgotten about down the years.

The ATS UFO/Alien Chronological Thread Directory

Cheers.

Originally posted by redwoodjedi
On a side note, we need to bomb the heck out of this board with nothing but relevant and verifiable research so as to dilute some of the garbage sneaking on hear.

The only trouble is it's not verifiable research.

The case "investigators" don't know how to carry out a proper investigation, they ask leading questions, and they have no idea how to separate the facts from assumptions made by witnesses.

UFO "investigators" also completely ignore the fact that witness testimony is well known to not be reliable, especially in situations where unfamiliar things are observed. "Witness testimony" is only considered to be evidence by those who have no clue how to investigate.

That is not the same as saying "Witness testimony" is useless, and witnesses were lying or hallucinating , but it is well known that witnesses unknowingly misperceive things, and recollection of past events can be inaccurate.

Most UFOs are only "unexplained" because believers and "investigators" ignore all rational explanations and favor irrational and totally unfounded beliefs.

Originally posted by C.H.U.D.
Most UFOs are only "unexplained" because believers and "investigators" ignore all rational explanations and favor irrational and totally unfounded beliefs.

CHUD, I'd have to disagree with you there - there are plenty of UFO cases which defy prosaic explanation -sure some debunkers and UFO cynics can attempt to shoehorn in their own preconceived explanations onto events (irrespective of all the facts) or just mindlessly believe official versions of events without a second look ( link ) but that just goes to show that they're probably 'true believers' as well:








Brian Zeller makes an interesting point here about the non-objective, reductionist debunker approach and how it is at odds with true, open minded scepticism:

"UFO debunkers do not understand Occam's Razor, and they abuse it regularly. They think they understand it, but they don't.
What it means is that when several hypotheses of varying
complexity can explain a set of observations with equal ability, the first one to be tested should be the one that invokes the fewest number of uncorroborated assumptions. If this simplest
hypothesis is proven incorrect, the next simplest is chosen, and so forth.

But the skeptics forget two parts: the part regarding the test of the simpler hypotheses, and the part regarding explaining all of the observations.
What a debunker will do is mutilate and butcher the observations until it can be "explained" by one of the simpler hypotheses, which is the inverse
of the proper approach".
Brian Zeiler

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Astrophysicist Bernard Haisch also makes some pretty good points below about 'facile' UFO explanations and how cynics often hide behind science and masquerade as sceptics:

"I propose that true skepticism is called for today: neither the gullible acceptance of true belief nor the closed-minded rejection of the scoffer masquerading as the skeptic.
One should be skeptical of both the believers and the scoffers. The negative claims of pseudo-skeptics who offer facile explanations must themselves be subject to criticism. If a competent witness reports having seen something tens of degrees of arc in size (as happens) and the scoffer -- who of course was not there -- offers Venus or a high altitude weather balloon as an explanation, the requirement of extraordinary proof for an extraordinary claim falls on the proffered negative claim as well. That kind of approach is also pseudo-science.
Moreover just being a scientist confers neither necessary expertise nor sufficient knowledge.
Any scientist who has not read a few serious books and articles presenting actual UFO evidence should out of intellectual honesty refrain from making scientific pronouncements. To look at the evidence and go away unconvinced is one thing. To not look at the evidence and be convinced against it nonetheless is another. That is not science."

Dr. Bernard Haisch
Director for the California Institute for Physics and Astrophysics

www.abovetopsecret.com...

As has been said many times before on these boards, there are cases which involve unknown objects being captured, plotted and visualy correlated on (sometimes multiple) radar screens; there are cases where unknown objects have exhibited electromagnetic interference effects on actual aircraft; there are cases where unknown objects have left behind ground trace evidence...

What do debunkers and UFO cynics do with these cases? - If they can't superimpose a 'stock answer' or 'force fit debunk' which happens to fit snugly with their own preconceived view of the world then they just wilfully ignore them.

Cheers.

[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]