UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES

Sitting out in Lincoln National Forest, near Ruidoso, not far from Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a reservoir that at first might seem to be a perfectly peaceful and placid place. It’s called Bonito Lake, and among locals it is a popular place to go for a day outdoors. Here one can see fishermen, campers, and families having picnics at the lakeshore, making it all seem like a nice little spot for a day out. Yet beneath its placid water Bonito Lake holds a dark secret that many of the visitors might not be aware of, and indeed the very area is pervaded by a grim history of disaster, murder, and hauntings that thrums below the quiet exterior.

In the mid-1800s, the Gold Rush in California and the southwest was causing a major epidemic of gold fever. People from all over the country were rushing in with dreams of striking it rich, with mining camps springing up anywhere gold was rumored to be, and Bonito City, New Mexico, was one of these places. Starting as a simple ragtag collection of dusty miner tents, as more gold hungry people flooded in it grew exponentially, until by the mid-1880s it included many permanent structures such as a schoolhouse, three general stores, a saloon, a post office, a hotel, a boarding house, a blacksmith and even a law office. At one point, Bonito City and Lincoln country was supposedly the most populous place in New Mexico, but it was also a lawless, wild place full of outlaws, thieves, bandits, and other unsavory elements, as well as a place of frequent violence such as shootouts and even a Lincoln County War, but one gruesome incident in particular would stick into the region’s history like a thorn.

Bonito Lake

In 1885 a miner by the name of Martin Nelson came to town looking to get rich just like everyone else, although many in town saw him as nothing more than a drifter up to no good. As soon as Nelson arrived, there was a wave of thefts, usually small but noticeable in how frequent they were. A lot of people suspected that Nelson was a thief, but no one could prove it. At the time, Nelson was staying at the town boarding house, run by a family called the Mayberrys, where he shared a room with a Dr. William H. Flynn of Boston. According to the tale, one day, Nelson couldn’t resist stealing Dr. Flynn’s fancy watch, but he was caught in the act. Nelson called out to the Mayberry’s and they came running to the room, where Nelson was caught red-handed and panicked. Unfortunately for Flynn and the Mayberrys, Nelson was usually armed, and in his panicked state he fired on them with his .38 caliber rifle, killing Flynn, John Mayberry, Sr., and his two sons, John Jr. and Eddie. Mrs. Mayberry, as well as wounding Mrs. Mayberry and her daughter Nellie, who tried to flee. Not wanting any witnesses, Nelson allegedly chased them to shoot them both in the back and kill Mrs. Mayberry, but for some reason he spared Nellie and let her live. The carnage increased when the saloon owner Pete Nelson (no relation), came running to see what the commotion was about and he was shot and killed too. After this a standoff ensued, with Nelson killing another man, grocer Herman Beck, as he made a run for it. After this, Nelson didn’t get far, either shot by the Sherriff or killed by a posse, depending on the version of the story. At the time it was an absolutely shocking development, one of the worst atrocities the region had ever seen, and historian Lynda Sanchez has said of it:

Even the bloody Lincoln County War with its mayhem and destruction seems a bit pale by comparison to that one night of rampage by Nelson, the man to whom these murders were attributed. The violence, the blood, the macabre scenario that will forever haunt that beautiful lake country is difficult to comprehend. Was it greed only, or someone gone mad at the wrong time? What tipped the balance of sanity and changed him into a devil whirlwind of destruction? There are many theories. It probably was the wantonness and the suddenness of the murders that shocked everyone, she said. During the time of Billy the Kid, there were two sides to that violence and the conflict went on for months and many more were killed, but that situation was a ‘war. You knew what to expect. But to have this fiend from hell come at you in the middle of the night must have been indescribable.

This is the main narrative, but details vary in different versions of the event, yet they nevertheless all agree that Nelson went on a deadly shooting massacre, and that after his death, Nelson was unceremoniously buried in a simple wooden box on unconsecrated land outside the city cemetery. In the wake of this horrific bloodbath, the Mayberry boarding house was closed and left abandoned, and it did not take long at all for it to start gaining a reputation as being haunted. People described lights on in the boarding house when no one was there, anomalous noises including disembodied screams and phantom gunshots, and bloody footprints appearing and disappearing. Even scarier were reports that the ghosts of both Nelson and the victims of his murderous crime could be seen lurking about on the property. Those who were brave enough to try and enter the boarding house were said to come out screaming or to go mad from what they had seen inside. The place was considered haunted, cursed, or both, prowled by ghosts and its very walls imbued with its bloody history.

Things went on like for decades, then in 1920 the Southern Pacific Railroad began construction of a dam in the area, which meant that Bonito City was soon to become a lake. The city had already been steadily on the decline, with less and less gold being found and shops closing down one after the other. The remaining residents were told that they had to leave, the remaining buildings either torn down or left abandoned as is to await their watery fate. Eventually, by 1930 the entirety of what had once been Bonito City was underwater, now Bonito Lake. The graves of Nelson’s victims were moved to another cemetery in nearby Angus, New Mexico, before this happened, but Nelson’s body remained.

It is likely that this is why even to this day Nelson’s restless spirit is said to haunt the lake. Visitors have reported seeing the apparition of a man in old fashioned clothing, thought to be Nelson, wandering along the lake shore only to vanish into thin air, and he has even purportedly been seen eerily floating about under the surface of the water. Interestingly, most of the many visitors to the lake are completely unaware that there was once a city beneath the waves here, nor that it was the scene of such a dark piece of local history. Are there mysterious forces surrounding this place? Does this location’s dark roots imbue it with supernatural phenomena? Who knows, but it is all an interesting piece of lore and an intriguing supposed local haunting all the same.

The range of types of UFO encounters is wide, and for the most part they tend to inspire awe and wonder as to what could be behind it all. Yet, in some cases this awe turns to dread and even terror, as it seems that not all UFO phenomena are friendly in nature. Within the annals of UFO incidents there are some that inspire dread and a definite sense of foreboding, and one of these is certainly the time aliens apparently invaded a small island in Brazil.

Beginning in the spring of 1977 a very strange and ominous phenomenon began at a little known place called Colares Island, in the remote Brazilian region of Pará. Frightened locals began to report an intense amount of UFO activity in the skies, describing all manner of luminous spheres, glowing orbs, balls of fire, saucers, cigar shaped metallic objects, and more, but what really stood out was how aggressive these objects seemed to be. There were numerous reports that these unidentified objects were actively chasing and attacking people, shooting vivid thin rays of light that would leave injuries such as burns or holes in the skin, as well as other instances when they were reported as approaching to actually suck blood from victims. In many cases the beams projected were described as being “always sharply defined, directed with perfect precision towards any target – houses, people, boats, trees, even the Brazilian Air Force’s helicopters deployed over the island during the investigations.”

Some of the accounts were quite spectacular, as with a boat full of fishermen near Ilha dos Caranguejos who would claim that an intense ball of light had positioned itself over their boat and fired off beams at them, burning several of them and even supposedly killing a man. Another such such frightening report would come from a local man named Carlos Cardoso de Paula, who says one evening an orb of light entered his room and tried to get blood from him. He says of his surreal experience:

Everybody else was asleep. I was just still having my last smoke when suddenly a ball of fire entered our house up near the ridgepole of the gable. It started shooting round and round the room, and then finally came right close to my hammock. It ran up my right leg as far as the knee (without touching my skin). I watched with much curiosity as it then moved across to the other leg. Then I started to feel feeble and sleepy. My cigarette fell from my hand and I came to and let out a yell. The fireball quickly vanished and everybody woke up. I think it had been searching for a vein in my body but didn’t manage to do so. As its brightness grew, I felt a sort of heat coming from it.

Many of the people targeted by these mysterious lights described a wide range of negative physical injuries and effects, such as fainting, nausea, tremors, migraines, giddiness, shortness of breath, muscle weakness, burns, anemia, bruising, blistering, perforations in the skin, paralysis, searing pain, and blood loss. In fact, terrified residents were so convinced that the lights were trying to suck their blood that the phenomena were being called the Chupa-Chupa, or “sucker suckers.” In the meantime, hospitals were soon experiencing a deluge of people claiming to have been attacked by the UFOs. Also odd was that many of the patients were found to indeed be missing blood, and their blood tests also showed certain anomalies common to all of them such as anemia and dehydration, and it was all quite baffling for medical personnel. One local doctor Wellaide Cecim Carvalho would explain of these patients:

All of them had suffered lesions to the face or the thoracic area. The lesions began with intense reddening of the skin in the affected area. The injuries varied in extension. First it started with an intense reddishness in the hit area, known as hiperemia. Later, the skin of the affected region started to fall (alopecia) and days later the skin peeled off. Later the hair would fall out and the skin would turn black. There was no pain, only a slight warmth. One also noticed small puncture marks in the skin. The victims were men and women of varying ages, without any pattern. With the increase of hurt people, I started to give more attention each time in the existing injuries. I saw things that do not exist in my medical books.

In most of these inexplicable cases, the strange symptoms would linger for days or even weeks, requiring hospitalization, and others would not recover at all, with some deaths even reported. In the meantime, reports kept flooding in nightly, increasing in intensity as the months went on, until by August of that year it is estimated that thousands of people all over the island had either seen or been chased or assaulted by the mystery UFOs, which seemed to always come from the north and in some cases were described as detaching from a “mother ship” or even coming from below the waters of Marajo Bay. People were in a hysteria, afraid to go out at night and huddling into large groups where they sought safety in numbers. Some people would light bonfires or launch armed patrols in an effort to scare the Chupa-Chupas away, and it was eerily quiet on the streets, as noise was thought to lure the hungry UFOs in. One local mayor would say of the tense situation:

Yes, indeed I can tell you, there wasn’t a moment of peace. The people were terrified by that “Chupa-Chupa” affair. I even managed to see one of the injured victims myself – Dona Mirota, a lady who was receiving medical treatment at the Health Clinic. The people were terrified because this beam of night light had already assaulted several people. The whole community was packed in only three houses, praying, sometimes singing some religious songs!

There were even reports of people apparently seeing the actual occupants of these craft, who were apparently quite hostile. One local resident named Claudomira Paixao claimed to have had just such an encounter after waking one evening to find everything bathed in a greenish glow, which would steadily become red. It was at that point that she realized it was a beam being directed right at her, and she then saw something very weird indeed, of which she says:

In one of these days, after midnight, I woke up because of a strong flash, a sort of focused bright green light ray that came down from the top roof to my left chest. I tried to shout, but my voice did not function. I felt an exquisite heat… Later, that beam of light diminished and I saw that I was burnt. I could see a creature, like a man, wearing a jumpsuit just like a dive suit. He pointed it at me, and the object shone three times, striking my chest during the three occasions, almost in the same place, it was hot, it wounded me, it seemed that I had needles pierced at all three points. I was terrified, I could not move my legs! It was hot, and it hurt. It was like a needle stick. My health never came back to be the same since that night.

Of course, considering that these reports and the panic they caused were becoming national news it was only a matter of time before the military would be drawn to this remote locale. In late October of 1977, the Brazilian Air Force would launch an investigation under Captain Uyrange Bolivar Soares Nogueira de Hollanda Lima, which would take it even further into the realm of the bizarre. They would investigate the injuries of the victims, gain eyewitness accounts, and even collect a good amount of purported photographic evidence of the phenomena. Even weirder is that during the military presence on the island it would be alleged that that even the Air Force would come under attack by the lights, one such incident of which one resident Sra. Alba Câmara Vilhena would say:

On one occasion some people saw one of the craft. It was round, and all luminous. Just at that moment, a helicopter of the F.A.B. (Brazilian Air Force) was flying quite near to our house. Then we saw the UFO direct a very powerful beam on to the helicopter, obliging it to land on the São Pedro Airfield. That happened at about 8.00 pm one evening. The helicopters that appeared from time to time, bringing materials and personnel, attempted to chase the UFOs but without much success. Indeed, on the contrary, it was the UFOs that chased them!

The military would do its study and then pack up and leave in January of 1978 without offering the populace any sort of explanation, and labelling the whole investigation as classified. At the time there seemed to be some efforts to explain it all away as weather balloons or atmospheric phenomena, but this was obviously not really bought by the people who claimed to have been attacked by the craft and left with injuries. There seemed to have been some cover-up going on, and making this all the more sinister was that Captain Hollanda would turn up dead three months later, allegedly by suicide, although no further details were given, making some wonder if this was really a suicide or not. After 1978 the incidents would die down, but not stop with sporadic accounts coming in throughout the decades since. What was going on here? It is all so spectacular and dramatic that one is left to wonder just what all of this entails. Were these actual UFOs, and if so what did they want and why did they attack people? Was there a government cover-up? Or was this all just mass hysteria and seeing things? Without a doubt, the “Cloares Invasion” remains a very harrowing, and yet remarkably obscure case of the darker side of UFO encounters.

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