Strangeness In Chile

In Jenny Randles 2001 book- Time Storms, on pages 17-18, she tells of a very strange and disturbing encounter of the unknown in 1977 in Putre, Chile:

"On 24 April 1977, a small unit of army conscripts was sent on a two day excercise into inhospitable territory above the small town of Putre, Chile. The intention was to harden the inexperienced troops for the rigours of military life. That night they camped on a windswept, arid plateau at Pampa Lluscuma, at a height of 12,000 feet. In charge of the raw recruits was Corporal Armando Valdes.

At 3:50 a.m., Pedro Rosales, the recruit on guard duty, saw something very odd. He called out to Valdes, who came immediately. What appeared to be two fuzzy, violet lights were descending from the mountains and heading their way. The ground below was filled with an eerie glow.

Unsure if these were flares being used in a mock attack, Valdes sprang quickly into action. He ordered some of the men to screen the camp fire light with blankets in the hope that they might escape detection in the dark. He told the others to secure and prepare their weapons whilst he went to investigate. He told them to crouch behind a nearby well, rifles posed. Then, uttering a plea to God to protect him-and with, they reported later, a conviction in his eyes- the corporal clambered over the well and headed into the darkness towards the purple glow.

Within seconds the inky night had swallowed him up. Moments later, the violet glow below them disappeared too. The conscripts fell into stunned silence before debating what to do next. They decided to wait and hope that their commander might return-which at 4:30 a.m. he duly did. But he approached them from behind- not from the direction in which he had just walked. Moreover, he was clearly less than well.

The startled soldiers saw him wandering as if in a trance, his voice uttering words that sounded like those of a sleepwalker. "You do not know who we are or where we come from," he said in a monotone, although he never consciously recalled saying this. He reached the camp site, looking barely able to stand, and collapsed on the ground apparently unconscious.

Having cared for him as best they could, the men waited for a cold dawn to rise over the mountains. It was then that they noticed several very strange things about their stricken leader. Although they had seen him shave only hours earlier, he was now sporting several days' growth of beard. His watch had stopped at about 4:30 a.m., the approximate time of his return to the camp, but the date display-which had to be wound on manually through twenty-four hours at a time to alter it-read 30 April. It was as if Valdes had lived through five days in fifteen minutes.

At about 7 a.m. the corporal regained consciousness, but he was still far from lucid. He appeared to be in a state of shock, with massive memory loss and no proper body coordination. The troops took the decision to abandon their excercise and get him to the nearest town, a difficult two-hour trek.

At Putre, the local schoolteacher, Pedro Araneda, was the closest to an expert on hand and he taped an interview with the still only semi-coherent officer and some of the men. This was to prove important, because when the Chilean military arrived they put a block on the tape's release and the military governor of Arica province ordered Valdes to keep silent about his experience. However, Araneda was eventually allowed to release the transcripts."

Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet had to approve a journalist's request to interview Valdes in 1983. Unfortunately, Valdes was only able to confirm the details of the original story. Valdes still had no memory of the missing 15 minutes (or 5 days depending on how one looks at the case). "They are a void in my mind," he commented. The massive time loss factor in this case reminds me of the Travis Walton case in Arizona in 1975. The last gentleman pictured is the MegaHandsome Anton Antipov-I don't know who the other one is- unfortunately;-). More here