by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
Argentina, especially in the area of Bahía Blanca, has had its share of high-strangeness UFO reports ranging from cars being lifted up in the air to abductions. This week, we’re looking the 1973 case involving Dionisio Llanca, a truck driver who reported he’d had an encounter with a UFO and three creatures. When questioned under the influence of hypnosis and Pentothal, he recounted being taken aboard a spacecraft, but could not recall the details when in his regular, conscious state. Whatever criticisms one might have of abduction tales told by people under hypnosis, the circumstances around the case, as reported in newspapers in the region, were unusual and mysterious.
Llanca’s case is presented in the November-December 1973 APRO Bulletin under the headline “Occupant Encounter in Argentina,” and in the Volume 26, Number 4, 1980 Flying Saucer Review under the headline “The Extraordinary Case of Dionisio Llanca and the UFOnauts” by Gordon Creighton and Charles Bowen. The Bulletin article seems to have been written prior to the hypnosis and Pentothal sessions that began on November 6, 1973, according to the Flying Saucer Review article, as there is no mention of them or the details Llanca recalled during them.
According to the Bulletin article, Llanca (described as 25 or 26 years old) was getting ready for a two-day journey carrying building supplies from Bahía Blanca to Rio Gallego. He inspected his Dodge 600, noticed the right rear tire was low, and set off at 12:30 a.m. on Sunday, October 28, without doing anything about it. He stopped at an Esso gas station at 1:00 a.m. to get some gas and still did nothing about the tire. Then, fifteen minutes later, on a desolate and dark section of route 3, the tire had gotten low enough that he had no choice but to change it.
The story from here is presented as told by Llanca in quotes both in the Bulletin and Flying Saucer Review, and they’re almost identical with differences most likely attributable to translation. According to Llanca, as he was kneeling down next to the tire getting ready to change it, a yellow light came up behind him that he thought was from the headlights of a Peugeot. It then changed to a bluish light that he described as being like a welding arc. He went to stand up and was unable to. He was able to turn his head, and when he did so, he saw three creatures right behind him with a large plate-shaped object hovering in the air behind them.
According to Llanca, he was unable to speak, and the creatures, a female with a male on each side of her, just stood and looked at him for five minutes. He said they were around 1 meter 75 tall (5 feet 8 inches), wore tight-fitting lead-grey suits, and that he recognized the creature in the middle as a female because of the outline of her breasts. He said they wore boots that were orange like the color of chamois cloths and wore gloves that went halfway up their arms that were the same color. He described the female as having long blond hair that went halfway down her back and said the males had blond hair as well that was short and combed back. He said, “Their faces were like ours, but they had great wide foreheads and elongated eyes, like those of the Japanese, and slightly protuberant.” He said they were talking in a language he couldn’t understand that “had no vowels and sounded like a badly tuned radio with squeaky, sharp notes.”
According to Llanca, after five minutes, one of the males then lifted him up by his collar, forcefully, but not violently, and the other male placed a “nozzle” coming out of a device that looked like a “battery operated electric shaver” against the base of his, Llanca’s, left index finger. He said that when he removed it, he saw two drops of blood on his finger and then passed out.
According to the Flying Saucer Review article, Llanca next found himself lying among some wagons in the corral of the Sociedad Rural de Bahía Blanca 9.6 km away from his truck and had no memory of how he got there or who he was. He found his way back to the road, and his next memory was of waking up in the Bahía Blanca Municipal Hospital.
At this point, he knew who he was and remembered the encounter and waking up in the corral. However, he was still unable to fill in the gaps between the encounter, waking up in the corral and getting to the road, and then waking up in the hospital. He asked about his truck and was told that the police had found it by the side of the road and that it was still jacked up.
The article includes an entry from the hospital security log book that was taken from the account published in the November 8, 1973 Gente y la Actualidad:
Name: Not Known.
Site of accident: Highway 3, beyond El Chola.
Cause: Says a very powerful light blinded him; that it was a flying saucer, and that he
remembers no more. Saw two very blond men and one woman.
Lesions: Traumatism of the skull and right temporal forehead, with total amnesia.
After the log entry, a description of how Llanca ended up at the Municipal Hospital from an interview with Dr. Ricardo Smirnoff, “an expert in traumatology and forensic medicine,” is presented. According to Smirnoff, a man found Llanca wandering in the center of town “like an automaton” asking people where he could find a police station. The man took him to the Spanish Hospital, and a doctor there called him, Smirnoff, and told him they had “a rather curious case.” Smirnoff said that when he got there, he found Llanca weeping and asking what town he was in.
According to Smirnoff, Llanca “was suffering from total retrograde amnesia.” He said he suspected a blow to the head had caused it, but that he could find no marks on Llanca’s head. Concerned about a possible skull fracture, Smirnoff had Llanca sent to the Municipal Hospital. As for Llanca’s claim about seeing a flying saucer, Smirnoff said he didn’t believe in flying saucers but was “obliged to admit that this case of Dionisio Llanca is very strange, very extraordinary.”
Creighton and Bowen then present details that came out during the examination of Llanca over many weeks as reported in the January 19, 1974 La Cronica. According to the account in La Cronica, Llanca recalled finding himself “inside a space-craft” that had a lead-colored floor. He said he communicated with the creatures telepathically and was told that they had been coming to Earth since the 1950s and that they were establishing contact to determine the adaptability of humans should the need arise to move them into interstellar space. Llanca is quoted saying, “These people said that our planet is bound to suffer very grave catastrophes if our behavior continues as it is at present.”
Another detail Llanca described was seeing a cable sent out from the craft that connected to a high-tension power line. According to Creighton and Bowen, on the night in question, “the local consumption of power rose by about 10 amperes.”
Creighton and Bowen then reference an article in the January 25, 1974 Asi which contains an interview with a psychiatrist, Dr. Eduardo Mata, in which he describes the team that examined Llanca as four psychiatrists, two psychologists, a surgeon and a traumatologist. He said there were several sessions that involved the use of hypnosis and Pentothal. He said Llanca knew nothing about what he said during the sessions and that he would likely read about it in the newspapers as if it had happened to someone else. Mata is quoted in the Flying Saucer Review article from an interview that appeared in the February 17, 1974 O Globo, expressing some doubt about the investigation due to questions in the initial sessions that had “implicit in them, their own reply.” According to him, these may have contaminated the later sessions. This was also the opinion of Dr. Eladio Santos who took over the sessions. Even so, Santos told O Globo that Llanca “told what he thinks he experienced.”
Mata described Llanca as simple and primitive and more concerned with everyday matters such as his job and his truck than his unusual experience. According to Creighton and Bowen, Llanca’s life fell apart after his experience, and he was kicked out of his parents’ home.
Llanca’s story of torment at the hands of the team conducting the hypnosis and Pentothal sessions as told by him is presented in an article by Marcelo Metayer headlined “The story of Dionisio Llanca, the Trucker Abducted on the Side of Route 3” posted November 2, 2021, on the diarios bonaerenses website. According to Metayer, Llanca was found by Rosario UFOlogical Café investigators who spoke with him via Zoom, and he told them that the Pentothal injections were “an ordeal, I thought I was dying, my skin became like fish scales and fell off.” He added, “They took me to the office and gave me the serum every two or three days. It was the greatest suffering. The injections were tremendous.”
Metayer includes the information that the doctors were accompanied by Argentinian UFO researcher Fabio Zerpa, who won an award for his research on the case at the First International Congress of Ufology in Acapulco, Mexico, in 1977. According to Metayer, Zerpa wrote about the case “in several books and continued to highlight it in many subsequent interviews.”
https://anomalien.com/abduction-case-of-dionisio-llanca-kidnapped-by-three-humanoid-aliens/
https://www.diarioeltiempo.com.ar/nota-la-historia-de-dionisio-llanca–el-camionero-abducido-a-la-vera-de-la-ruta-3-174537
The story of Dionisio Llanca, the trucker abducted on the side of Route 3
One day in October 1973 Llanca left Bahía Blanca for Río Gallegos. He stopped to change a tire when a UFO appeared to him and he saw three beings, who invited him to come on board. Days later he was interrogated by a team of Fabio Zerpa and eight doctors. Today, after almost half a century, he says that he went through “terrible suffering” caused by the pentothal injections he was given.
Dionisio Llanca watched an episode of “Thief Without Destiny” while having a steak for dinner and a couple of glasses of Cepita. After a while he got ready, greeted his uncle, put on his jacket and went out. It was just after midnight on Saturday in Bahía Blanca, but Dionisio (25) was not going to a bowling alley, but to work: he got into his Dodge 600 truck and set off for Río Gallegos with construction materials. One tire was low, but he decided to leave anyway. After a while the truck began to sway on Route 3 and he decided to change the tire. It was almost 20 kilometers from Bahia. He got out of the vehicle and started working. He suddenly looked to the left and saw a yellowish light. It was 1:15 in the morning on October 28, 1973 and at that moment began what is considered the most famous and controversial abduction case in Argentina, a workhorse of UFOlogist Fabio Zerpa, but which will leave a bitter mark on its protagonist.
Dionisio thought that the approaching light was that of a car, but it came upon him and paralyzed him. He turned and saw “a large, saucer-shaped thing, suspended in the air, about seven meters high” and three beings, two men and a woman, next to him. They touched his right hand and made an incision. He lost consciousness. He woke up in the corrals of the Bahía Blanca Rural Society, almost 10 kilometers from where he had stopped with the truck. He started walking. He didn’t know who he was. He wandered around police stations, where they believed he was just another drunk. He ended up in the Spanish Hospital and there he was seen by Dr. Ricardo Smirnoff, a forensic doctor on duty, who would later have him admitted to the Municipal Hospital.
It wasn’t until October 30 that Dionisio partially remembered what had happened to him.
Operation Bordeu
Journalism began to be interested in that truck driver who had gone through those strange circumstances. The first article in Gente magazine was published on November 8 and at the same time Fabio Zerpa entered the scene. “Operation Bordeu”, as the case was named based on the town where the events occurred, began with “five doctors from Bahía Blanca: Roberto García del Cerro, psychoanalyst; Eduardo Matta, psychiatrist; Nora Milano, psychologist; Eladio Santos, hypnologist, and Ricardo Smirnoff, forensic doctor,” as Zerpa wrote in “The UFO and its Mysteries.”
Later Llanca would be taken to Buenos Aires, where he was seen by three more doctors: Agustín Antonio Luccisano, a toxicologist from La Plata; Juan Antonio Pérez del Cerro, president of the Ontoanalysis Association, and Héctor Solari, hypnologist and psychologist.
In the first stage of the “operation” Dionisio was hypnotized by Santos and began to narrate the entire story. He said that “the extraterrestrial beings took out a compact and coherent beam of light, through which they descended as if it were a luminous concrete slab. The woman precedes the men, and they begin to walk to make contact with Dionisio, whom they make the incision in the right hand, in the thumb and index fingers”.
Then they entered the UFO. There Llanca saw “many devices, two televisions, a radio. The radio speaks to me. They tell me not to be afraid, that they are friends, that they have been coming for a long time. They want to know if we can live in their land,” Dionisio said.
Pentothal time
After the hypnosis sessions came the injections of sodium pentothal, known in those years as “truth serum” because it produces relaxation that makes it impossible for the patient to produce fantasies, that is, lie. “Dr. Smirnoff applies intravenous pentothal to the truck driver’s forearm and he repeats (as if it were a broken record) what he had said in the hypnosis sessions,” Zerpa said. Psychological tests and analysis followed in Buenos Aires.
This research was his perfect case for Zerpa and with it he won the award for the best research at the First International Congress of Ufology in Acapulco, Mexico, in 1977.
However, other researchers doubted Dionisio’s testimony. Thus, Guillermo Roncoroni published in 1977, and updated in 1983, a report in which he assures that “there is unequivocal evidence of fraud.” At the end of the text he adds the conclusions of Dr. Solari’s study: “Llanca is not a skilled witness.” The curious thing is that this specialist had been provided by Zerpa himself.
The Calvary
Meanwhile, Dionisio Llanca’s life went into a shadow. Nothing was heard from him for many years and there was speculation about his death. This 2021, Lorena Sciarratta and Marina Giaveno, from the Rosario Ufological Café (CUR), found him and another story began: that of Llanca’s suffering, subjected, according to his testimony, to endless pentothal sessions.
Via Zoom, the former truck driver repeated the story of the abduction and said that with the pentothal injections his life “was an ordeal, I thought I was dying, my skin became like fish scales and fell off.” He added that “they took me to the office and gave me the serum every two or three days. It was the greatest suffering. The injections were tremendous.”
Dr. Smirnoff would later say, also in a conversation with Sciarratta, that “it was not common to use pentothal, but it was one of the possible methods to be able to extract as much information as possible from a person without harming them. It was the first case in which that a witness to something like that was given pentothal.
Smirnoff assured that he regretted “what happened after the sessions he did with me. They undoubtedly did not know how to protect him.”
Doctors Santos and Matta said in Gente that “we do not have any way to prove that he WAS never in a flying object. Nor do we have a technique capable of proving that he WAS. Dionisio Llanca has always told, under hypnosis and pentothal, the same story”. That story, that of his encounter with the beings with blonde hair and silver suits, ended up marking the trucker’s life. For better or worse, Dionisio Llanca will always be the man to whom, in the words of Eduardo Matta, “something fantastic and terrible happened to him.” (DIB) MM
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