Covering
the May 6, 1978 “UFO crash” south of Tarija, Bolivia (for that story, click
here) was a significant time for me. By then I had traveled quite a bit
in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Uruguay, reporting stories
for the National Enquirer, many of them about UFO encounters. But going deep
into the Andes Mountains of Bolivia was the first real adventure of my life.
Over
the years since then I’ve had half a dozen more little adventures. None of
them were as dangerous as covering a war or going undercover to investigate
mobsters or corrupt officials, but they were exhilarating, especially for
someone who turned fifty-two just three months after visiting Tarija.
What
was also remarkable about this story is that it was never published even though
I worked on it for nearly four weeks and four other Enquirer staff members
put in an addition three weeks of effort on it. More on that later.
Tarija
– capital of the department, or state, of Tarija – was a pleasant little city
about six thousand feet up in the mountains. Today it has a population of
around a hundred thousand, but the first time I was there, in May 1978, it
had about twenty thousand souls.
I
remember being impressed by the fact that most of the houses looked clean
and were nicely painted in various pastel shades, and that nearly every morning
I would see people sweeping the streets in front of their homes. I learned
soon that this might have been due to the fact that the army colonel who was
governor of Tarija had decreed that homes and streets would be kept clean
and neat.
COOPERATIVE AUTHORITIES
Even
though the country was under military rule, I never saw any signs of repression.
The governor, the major commanding the local army garrison and the colonel
in charge of 
the
Tarija air force group all treated me cordially.
All
three found the border incident a mystery and they cooperated in my efforts
to find out what happened. At least a half dozen Bolivian and Argentinean
reporters were in the area but I was the only American reporter to show up.
On
May 16 I had flown to Rio de Janeiro to look into a report that a Brazilian
Air Force colonel had seen a fleet of perhaps a hundred UFOs pass low in formation
over an air base near Rio. I also intended to work on several other UFO stories
in Brazil as well as one in Uruguay, where I had
been in 1977.
This
was my first real trip to Brazil, although not my first time in Rio. The previous
July I was one of more than a hundred unhappy passengers who had spent a miserable
night in Rio after our Pan American jetliner from Montevideo to Miami developed
engine trouble over Brasília.
Then
early the next morning we were bused all the way back across the busy city
to board the plane after the engine problem had been fixed.
This
visit to Rio in 1978, however, was far more pleasant. Arriving on the morning
of May 17, I checked into a good hotel that was just off Rio’s Leme beach
and only a block or two from Irene Granchi’s apartment. Irene was one of Brazil’s
best-known UFO investigators and at the time was my sole source for UFO news
in Brazil.
Irene
(say Ee-RAY-nee) kept me informed of what was happening, and later, through
her, I was to come to know many other investigators throughout the country.
The
story about the fleet of UFOs, however, was going to be tough to get because
the colonel had told her he wasn’t going to talk about it anymore and there
apparently were few if any other witnesses. But I had to drop the story before
I ever really got started.
Before
I left the United States, Irene had phoned and said newspapers in Rio and
Buenos Aires had been publishing stories about a UFO incident in a remote
section of the Bolivian Andes. But the details were slow in coming out.
GO TO BOLIVIA RIGHT AWAY
By
the time I got to Rio, it was getting more and more attention, so much so
that on my second day in Rio I phoned my editor and told him the newspapers
were claiming a UFO had crashed near the Argentinean border. He told me to
get to Bolivia right away.
“Right
away” took a good two days. I flew to Cochabamba, Bolivia, where I had to
spend the night before catching another plane south to Tarija.
Another
American, Charles Tucker, then from Nappanee, Indiana, had joined me just
before I left Rio. He is a former minister-turned-businessman who became a
successful manufacturing and could afford to fly almost anywhere in the world
whenever he wanted to pursue his interest in UFOs.
I
had met him in 1977 at an international UFO congress in Acapulco, Mexico.
We became friends, stayed in touch by phone and he had joined me later that
year when I went to Puerto Rico to look into some UFO stories there.
This time, he flew into Rio a day or two after I did and arrived just two
or three hours before I checked out of my hotel to go to Bolivia. (He was
to join me a third time, on a trip up the Amazon
River in Brazil in 1981 right after I left the Enquirer.)
A
jetliner took us to Cochabamba but from there we flew in a twin-engine turboprop
plane to Tarija. This leg of the trip is almost entirely over mountains and
can be very rough when the winds sweeping up out of the valleys below are
just right.
While
blasé flight attendants casually lean on a seat back chatting to you, some
passengers have all they can do not to throw up as the plane bounces all over
the sky. Not me, though. By then I had flown thousands of miles for the Enquirer
and was a veteran of air turbulence.
The
weather in Tarija was warm and sunny in the daytime but it could get very
cold at night. My hotel room didn’t have any heat and most nights I soaked
in a narrow bathtub filled with water as hot as I could get it, then jumped
into bed under a pile of blankets. My room had a tiny vestibule with a broken
window that let the cold air flood in.
Charlie
stayed only one week and went home, saying he had to get back to business,
but I sometimes wondered if the frigid sleeping conditions made that business
more urgent.
INFLUENTIAL INTERPRETER
Once
in Tarija, I was able to find an excellent interpreter almost immediately.
Olga Castrillo spoke flawless English and had lived in the United States.
The
first thing she did was put me in touch with a young geologist, Daniel Centeno,
who had interviewed a number of people who had seen something flying through
the air toward the border and heard an explosion. He told us that an expedition
to the suspected crash site was due to return the next day to Cañas, the small
village where the last road leading into the mountains ends.
Olga,
Daniel, Charlie and I went in a hired taxi to the village of Cañas, about
thirty miles south of Tarija. On the way we stopped and talked to four or
five rugged-looking men on horseback, probably gauchos. I started to take
a photo of them but Daniel frowned and told me I shouldn’t do it. I thought
the men were picturesque but he thought such a photo would reflect poorly
on his country, and I put my camera away.
The
details of meeting the expedition members as they straggled back into Cañas
are reported elsewhere (see Mysterious Crashes in the
Andes) but not the feast that soon took place. The expedition consisted
of a physicist, an astronomer, an army lieutenant and three or four soldiers,
plus half a dozen or more newsman from Bolivia's capital city, La Paz, and
Salto, Argentina, the nearest large city south of the mountains where the
incident occurred.
Right
after they all came trudging back into Cañas, the physicist climbed into a
waiting army truck and left for Tarija even before I knew he was there. But
I was able to talk to the astronomer and several of the newsmen.
Then,
before I knew it was even happening, everyone gathered in the courtyard of
one of the houses where someone had roasted a goat or a cow. I didn’t know
which it was because by then night had fallen and the only light we had was
from the fire in an outdoor adobe oven used to cook the animal.
In
the darkness someone thrust a piece of roast meat into my hands, so I began
eating. Everybody else was chewing away in the darkness too. It was quite
messy but also quite good.
Eight
days later I was to go off on my own expedition into the mountains from Cañas.
With me were the geologist Daniel Centeno, the same army lieutenant, Jorge
Antequera, who had gone with the first expedition, and Omar Forti, a young
pilot who had flown me over the crash site several times.
In
Cañas, unfortunately, we were able to rent only three horses for the four
of 
us.
None of the other three guys was willing to walk, so I said I would. They
were going simply out of curiosity about what had happened, but I was on assignment.
My job was to get the story and the lack of a horse was no excuse. That's
us at right, with Centeno on the white horse, me on foot, then Forti and Lieutenant
Antequera.
We left at daybreak. The path rose gradually higher and higher, twisting and turning, until we went through a pass some ten thousand feet high and then on down into another valley and beyond. Most of the time we followed trails around the sides of mountains. I had no difficulty and walked for hours, stopping from time to time to drink from small streams. The other three men were ahead of me at times, and sometimes behind.
Two
young army soldiers were also with us, men I had hired to take care of the
three burros we rented to carry our food and gear. They walked all the way.
I
set out on foot, in effect leading the way. The trail that led some twenty-five
kilometers or so through the mountains to the village of Mecoya on the border
was relatively easy to follow. That’s because I kept seeing what I thought
were the intermittent tracks of a motorcycle tire.
It
was kind of strange because the "tire tracks" were never continuous.
But then one of the men explained that what I was actually seeing were imprints
of sandals that had been cut from old tires.
FRIED EGGS EDGE SIDE UP
Around
noon we stopped at a small two-room school on the side of a hill. One room
was used as a classroom and the other as the living quarters of the young
man who was the teacher. For some reason there were no kids there that day
– it was a Monday – and the teacher was delighted to see us. He had some adult
company for a change.
He
insisted we have lunch with him, and it took him only a few minutes to fry
some sliced potatoes, cook some maize and fry up some eggs. He had only three
dishes, one for the potatoes, one for the corn and one for the eggs. And no
utensils.
We
simply ate everything with our hands. The potatoes and corn were easy, and
so were the fried eggs, as long as you held one horizontally, like a flying
saucer on its side, and ate from the top down to keep the yolk from dribbling
all over your hands.
When
we left our teacher friend, I continued walking, going ever higher upward
and through a pass to go down into another valley and beyond.
Several
hours later, late in the afternoon, Daniel the geologist took pity on me and
gave me his horse. He had been in these mountains many times doing geological
studies and knew the area well. He left us to follow the trail around the
steep hills while he hiked straight up and over one mountain in a short cut
to our destination, the village of Mecoya.
I
was glad to have the horse. Before long, night fell and it got very dark.
There was no moonlight or starlight to show us the way. The lieutenant had
gone on ahead and the pilot Omar Forti and I had lost contact with him. I
was on a white horse but it was so dark I couldn’t see any part of Omar or
his horse or even my white horse.
Omar
was just a few feet ahead of me and I could hear his horse but I couldn't
see him. His horse seemed to know the way to Mecoya. I would never have found
it myself. We spent a lot of time walking in a rocky creek bed with both horses
occasionally stumbling over the rocks. An hour or two after nightfall, someone
shouted to us. We had arrived, and the two soldiers and the burros came in
shortly after.
In
Mecoya, the nights were truly bitter cold. The six of us slept on the concrete
floor of a two-room school (the building behind us in the photo below right),
using blankets and rugs and whatever else we could find to put under and over
us, trying to stay warm.
Our
hosts in Mecoya were a young man named Ciro and his wife Alejandra and another
young man named Arturo, all three of them teachers who shared a one-room house
next to 
the
school. All of our meals were cooked in an outdoor adobe oven (left) in the
courtyard, and again we had few plates and utensils.
We had brought our food with us and after it was cooked we took turns sharing the plates and spoons to eat. (In photo at left above, I try to get warm at the oven while one of the teachers, Arturo Casso, then nineteen, wasn't bothered by the cold. In the photo at upper right are, from left, Alejandra, me, Ciro, Antequera, Arturo and Centeno.)
There
is no electricity or running water in that area along the border. The people
of Mecoya get their water from a furiously-flowing stream in a narrow gorge
two
hundred feet or so below the village. (At right, a gaucho leads his horse
across the stream, which is the border between Argentina on the left and Bolivia
on the right). I brushed my teeth there in the mornings but had to be careful
because the steep path down to the stream was icy.
THE COCA LEAF KID
Other
than the “crash” itself, two things stand out in my memories of Mecoya. On
the first full day there we started out on horseback, hoping to reach the
crash site from the Argentinean side of the border. We stopped briefly just
outside the village to buy a bag of coca 
leaves
for me to try (left) because of the altitudes we would be reaching. I chewed
the leaves and chewed them but never felt any effect.
About
that time we also saw a horseman galloping several hundred meters below us
near the stream that is the border between Bolivia and Argentina in that part
of the world. The lieutenant shouted for him to stop, indicating to me that
the rider was an Argentinean in Bolivian territory. The man didn’t stop and
the lieutenant fired his pistol into the air. The man just rode on out of
sight.
The
other incident occurred late that day after we failed to reach the crash site
– we tried tackling it from the Argentine side of the border but found ourselves
getting farther and farther away from Cerro Bravo – and had returned to Mecoya.
I was taking it easy in the school room when a man came to the lieutenant,
who was the only law within a hundred kilometers or more. The man was talking
rapidly. He was agitated, even angry. My Spanish was very poor and no one
spoke English. I understood very little.
But
using pigeon-English and gestures, the lieutenant and others explained that
another man had had sex with the angry man’s fourteen-year-old daughter and
the father wanted something done. In a short time the lieutenant had the culprit
leaning against a wall of the school, patting him down for weapons. Then he
locked him in the other room of the school for the night.
I
wondered how the locked-up man had stayed warm while we huddled under our
blankets and rugs for the second night. Early the next morning I heard two
pistol shots. I rushed outside but by the time I got out there, the wrongdoer
had vanished and I discovered only two nervous goats tied to a log.
It
seems the lieutenant had tried the man, convicted him, fined him by making
him give the offended father the two goats, and had sent him scurrying with
two shots in the air. The lieutenant was only twenty-one but a very confident,
capable and apparently wise twenty-one.
One
more memorable thing about that trip, even though we never got close to the
crash site, was the quick trek back to Cañas.
Somehow
we had picked up a fourth horse the first morning in Mecoya and until the
morning we left we had always walked our horses wherever we went. I hadn’t
ridden a horse in many years but by that final morning had gotten used to
the feel of the saddle and a horse’s gait again. However, just after leaving
Mecoya to return to Cañas, the lieutenant suggested we pick up the pace and
we all broke into a gallop. We raced much of the way back.
What
made this particularly exciting was that we were often galloping along really
narrow mountain trails where a misstep could have sent both horse and rider
tumbling hundreds of feet down the steep hillsides. Exhilarating. There were
no mishaps, however.
We
made it to Cañas in about five hours, a journey that in the other direction
several days earlier had taken nearly fourteen hours. My fellow riders called
it a “marcha forcada,” or forced march, and congratulated me. They
said I was the only foreigner to have ever done it… at least from Mecoya to
Cañas.
The
story about the “UFO crash” on the Bolivia-Argentina border was never published
in the National Enquirer, even though I spent three weeks in Bolivia trying
to find out what happened and another week traveling and working on it back
in Florida.
Almost
every day while I was in Tarija I sent radiograms or cables to my editor in
Florida, briefly telling him what I had learned and what I was doing, but
I never got any replies. There were no phone lines linking Tarija to La Paz
at that time and all cables were supposedly transmitted by radio to La Paz
and forwarded from there. Apparently the radio link was not working well,
if at all.
GOT TO GET OUT
By
the end of the third week I had done all I could do in Tarija and was frustrated
because I hadn’t heard from my editor. By then I had also gotten ill – sooner
or later I nearly always get sick when traveling in other countries – and
wanted to get out.
I
had been scheduled to go on to Uruguay to follow up on a story there, but
my wife and I were supposed to close on a new house soon and our son was about
to graduate from high school. I wanted to be home for that. I was now so way
off schedule that I decided to leave Tarija without consulting my editor.
I
flew to Santa Cruz, one of the major cities in Bolivia, and phoned my wife
Faith from the airport to tell her I was coming home. “Don’t leave!” she practically
shouted. “They’re trying to find you!”
It
turned out that none of my cables had gotten through to my editor either.
The office thought I was missing and had sent a reporter and photographer
to Bolivia to look for me. My wife didn’t know who they were or where they
were.
Annoyed
that I had to stay on another night, I went outside the terminal, found a
taxi and asked the driver to take me to the very best hotel in town. If that’s
the way the Enquirer wanted it, the Enquirer could pay for it.
The
best hotel in Santa Cruz at that time was, believe it or not, a Holiday Inn.
It was truly luxurious compared to where I had been the last three weeks.
And as I was checking in, I happened to glance down the hallway toward the
bar… and there they were, the two guys who were supposedly looking for me.
They’d just come out of the bar and were surprised to find me walking toward
them.
I
flew back to Florida the next day while they stayed on, going to La Paz and
Buenos Aires to talk with government authorities about the incident. After
I got home, the Enquirer also sent a reporter to Washington to look into official
aspects of the case, and an editor came to my home to work with me on the
story that I was writing. I wasn’t that sick but my editor insisted I stay
home.
The
story, as I said in the beginning, was killed, never used. Why? Something
extraordinary did happen on the border but I didn’t get the story that I had
gone after – that a UFO had crashed in Bolivia.
In
those days (I left the Enquirer in 1981 and don’t know how things were done
after that), Generoso Pope, who then owned and published the Enquirer, personally
approved every story idea ever used, killing far more proposed stories in
the process (“NG” was the term scribbled on the lead sheets, meaning “No Good”).
This
procedure was applied to virtually everything covered in the Enquirer, celebrities,
medicine, human interest, UFOs and everything else. And the story idea that
Gene Pope OKd was that “a UFO had crashed.”
Despite
all of my efforts and those of the other staff members who worked on it with
me (altogether about seven weeks of manpower), there was no proof that a UFO
had crashed. That meant there was no story.
BACK TO TARIJA AGAIN
In
spite of that, I was still very curious about what happened on the Bolivian
border and went back to Tarija on vacation the following year, in September
1979. My curiosity, as usual, was alive and well.
With
me was a good friend and fellow staff member, Allan Zullo, a writer who left
the Enquirer not long after and went on to write and publish eighty 
books
at last count.
But
Zullo (left) and I had no better luck getting to Cerro Bravo than I did the
first time. With Olga Castrillo’s help, we hired another army lieutenant,
Ariel Avila Pino, and a couple of soldiers and hiked to Mecoya in a day and
a half. We then hired Juan Orihuela (right) as our guide and after 
another
night’s sleep (in the now abandoned teachers' quarters) set out to walk to
the crash site. But after climbing higher and higher for four or five hours,
I gave up. We were up at least ten thousand feet and the last forty-five-degree
ascent did me in.
Zullo
and Lieutenant Avila also stopped and waited with me on a sloping plateau
more than ten thousand feet high while the two soldiers – both of them university
students fulfilling their required year’s service in the army – and Juan went
on to the crash site. They took photographs for me and hiked back to us.
While we waited for them to return, Zullo and I lay on our backs on the ground most of the time, resting and watching several condors soar overhead. We could even hear the slight noise their wings made. Another great adventure.
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