by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

In last week’s blog, we looked at a case from Spain that involved three airmen who were stationed at a Spanish Air Force base near Talavera La Real. It was investigated by Juan José Benítez who wrote a report (page 4 of the pdf) and sent it to Flying Saucer Review. The report was translated into English by Gordon Creighton, and it was published in the Vol. 23, No. 5, February 1978 issue.

According to Benítez, the three airmen, José María Trejo, Juan Carrizosa Luján, and José Hildago were on guard duty after midnight on November 12, 1976. Trejo and Carrizosa were in their sentry boxes, and Hildago was on patrol with a German Shepherd. At around 1:45 a.m., Trejo and Carrizosa heard what sounded like radio interference, which then turned into a piercing, high-pitched whistle that hurt their ears. The whistle started and stopped repeatedly, and the two men, armed with Z-26 quick-firing rifles, searched the area where it seemed to be coming from.

They then saw a light that looked like a flare high up in the sky that lit up a wide area. Hildago came by with the dog and he had also seen the light. They were joined by a corporal and two support guards, and they went to do a search.

After hearing branches breaking in a stand of eucalyptus trees and sending the dog in repeatedly, they saw a luminous green figure that was about three meters tall with what looked like a helmet on its head, long arms, thick body, and it didn’t seem to have any legs or feet. The men described it as being like a bobbin or a spindle.

Trejo went to fire, was unable to move, and then felt weak and fell to the ground yelling, “Down! They’ll kill us! While he was on the ground, the world around him faded away as his vision slowly failed.

Carrizosa and Hildago fired 40-50 shots, and the figure vanished. The next day, 50 men searched the area and found no cartridge casings on the ground or bullet holes in the wall that was behind the figure, even though it was determined “by Air Force experts” that the men’s rifles had been fired.

Over the next month, Trejo’s vision failed repeatedly and after multiple hospital stays and tests he was told he had “a nervous maladjustment.” At the end of his report, Benítez tells the reader that Trejo, 21, “has experienced no further abnormal symptoms.”

There is a follow-up report (page 11 of the pdf) on this case in the Vol. 30, No. 6, August 1985 FSR. Editor Gordon Creighton says in the introduction, just before the reprint of the original report, that FSR is not normally able to offer follow-up reports on “all these weird happenings, 99% of which are never referred to again by anybody!”

After the reprint, “Part Two: New and Dramatic Material on the Case at Talavera La Real” is presented, translated from French. It was written by Geneviève Vanquelef and originally appeared in the November/December 1984 Lumières Dans La Nuit, No. 245/246.

According to Vanquelef, a cassette tape without a case was found in the baggage compartment of a French train running from Geneva to Port Bou. The railway employee who found it, gave it to Michel Rouanet, who he knew was enthusiastic about taping music. When it was played, it was found to have a conversation in Spanish, so before erasing it, Rouanet, who was French, played it for his wife, who was Spanish. What she heard was “a lively discussion about UFOs, blinded soldiers, a dog burnt to death, etc.” As it turned out, Rouanet belonged to the Béziers-based Orion UFO Investigation Group, and he took the tape to a meeting where one of the members translated it into French.

Research indicated that the conversation was about the Talavera case, an account of which was published in the August/September LDLN No. 187. What was on tape was an interview that was clearly done on the train where the tape was found, as announcements for stations on that line were heard.

According to Vanquelef, the person being interviewed was Trejo, and after providing a summary of the case from “Jacques Scornaux’s story as given in LDLN No. 187,” she presents transcripts of portions of the tape. There are major discrepancies between Trejo’s account on the tape and the account as reported by Benítez and Scornaux, but Vanquelef ignores most of them.

Vanquelef describes a discussion of “vital energy” with Trejo expressing the idea that this energy is controlled by “something” that is operated by “someone.” The interviewer asks if Trejo had seen “this someone” during a séance, and this is his reply:

No. During my military service on guard duty. I saw a machine about 100 metres wide, as big as a football pitch. I had my rifle and I had a dog with me. I saw a million lights underneath it. A door opened, held by an individual. I wanted to shoot. I received a discharge, the sort that leaves you blind! The dog leapt into the air, and was burnt to death before it touched the ground again.

After an interruption, Trejo starts the story from the beginning. It’s similar to the original account except that he says he and his fellow airmen left “the guard room” after hearing “intermittent noises, like a radio,” and then saw “an explosion of light brighter than the Sun.” According to Trejo “all the lads turned out,” thinking there was an attack on the base, and the corporal, as opposed to Hildago, came up with a dog and asked if they had seen anything.  Trejo says they tried to contact the base “but there was no telephone, no electricity, no radio contact.”

As for the figure, Trejo describes it this way:

A glass globe on his head, a sort of astronaut’s space-suit, all made of metal, of a green, phosphorescent colour…  Arms and the rest of the body much bigger…

At the end of the final transcription, Trejo claims to have gone through some changes:

After this contact I felt an intense development of my brain, I experienced a sensation of superiority, of quickness of mind…  It happens to me that I re-live moments that are past, or that will come in a thousand years’ time… One has the power to travel mentally… I had never had any premonitory dreams about what has happened to me… But at present, I often have extrasensory perceptions about my future… However, I’m not a daydreamer, I prefer the present, action, studying people, society, animals…

In the last part of her report, Vanquelef addresses two discrepancies between the accounts. One is Trejo saying that the electricity and phone failed, and the other is Trejo failing to mention his first hospital visit after his blindness. As for his “psychic transformation,” Vanquelef notes that Trejo has “an admiration (very suspect) for the unparalleled power of this ‘extra-human’ intervention.” She asks, “Do contactees become ‘manipulatees’?”