by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
2023 was quite a year for aliens in the news which included reports of creatures in a backyard in Las Vegas, alleged alien mummies being presented to the Mexican Congress, and an alien invasion of a shopping mall in Florida. In between, there were reports from a remote village in Peru of harrowing encounters with aliens that moved on hover boards. The story was first reported in Spanish by Radio Programas del Perú and quickly gained international coverage. The Daily Mail covered it with the same amount of detail as RPP for English speaking readers and published a follow-up article long after the story had seemingly been laid to rest by a somewhat implausible explanation by a spokesperson for the Peruvian National Prosecutor’s Office. A private paranormal investigator, Timothy Alberino, took it upon himself to look into the reports and found that they were widespread throughout the region. While the descriptions of the creatures and the encounters were quite strange and raised a lot of eyebrows, there is a history of these sorts of reports linked to outsiders seeking to exploit natural resources in areas occupied by indigenous people, often with little concern for their rights.
On August 8, 2023, the article headlined “Terrified Peruvian villagers claim they are under attack from 7ft-tall ‘aliens’ dubbed ‘Face Peelers’ as they plead with authorities to send backup” by Chris Jewers was posted on the Daily Mail website. According to Jewers, the villagers were members of the Ikitu tribe living in a remote village northeast of Lima, Peru, in the district of Alto Nanay, and reported they had been subjected to repeated nighttime attacks since July 11. They described their attackers as having large heads, yellow eyes, being impervious to weapons, and having the ability to hover and fly. Some villagers are said to have compared the attackers to creatures from folklore known as “pelacaras” (face peelers) that, according to the stories, eat human faces and organs. Community leader Jairo Reátegui Dávila described them this way:
They appear to be armored. I shot one of them twice and he wasn’t injured, he rose and disappeared. Their shoes are round-shaped, which they use to float… Their heads are long, they wear a mask and their eyes are yellowish. They are experts at escaping.
A 15-year-old girl is reported to have been taken to a hospital with injuries to her neck that she sustained during an attack, and police are said to have toured the village, including the area where the girl was attacked, but it was unknown whether they found anything to corroborate the reports.
A follow-up article by Matthew Phelan headlined “Flying 7ft-tall ‘alien’ attackers in Peru were actually illegal gold mining gang on JETPACKS” was posted on the Daily Mail site on August 12, 2023. The conclusion announced by the headline came from Carlos Castro Quintanilla, the prosecutor investigating the case for the Peruvian National Prosecutor’s Office. According to Quintanilla, the miners might have first used the jetpacks as a means to explore deeper into the jungle. Phelan speculates that, based on this theory, “the gold cartels’ use of the jetpacks to stage their violent, otherworldly attacks would have been something of an afterthought.”
Much of the article is devoted to a description of the illegal gold mining prevalent in Peru since the 2008 financial crisis, which caused a sustained rise in the price of gold. According to Phelan, the Artisanal Gold Council (artisanal is another word for “illegal”) estimated that illegal mining accounted for one-fifth of the total world gold production. He describes water filled gold prospecting pits contaminated with mercury being so prevalent in Peru that they can be seen from space, and a picture taken from the International Space Station on Christmas Eve 2020 showing them glittering in the sunlight is included in the article.
According to Phelan, RPP reported that members of the Peruvian Navy “faced fire” while engaging with illegal miners and managed to destroy a good deal of their equipment but found no jetpacks.
Included in the article is a picture captioned “a local teen shows an image of the jetpacks she and others witnessed during the flying ‘alien attacks.’” The teen is actually the 15-year-old girl who was attacked, and the image is of French inventor Frank Zapata demonstrating his creation, the “Flyboard Air.” As for this possibly being a device used by the miners, the flight time is listed on the website promoting it as 10 minutes, making it impractical for any sort of sustained exploration. Another invention by Gravity Industries that they call the Jet Suit has a similar limitation which, according to an ad in Vices Magazine, is a flight time of 5-10 minutes.
Coverage of the story dropped off after Quintanilla’s explanation, but Phelan wrote one more article headlined “Girl, 15, in Peru who was ‘kidnapped by gang of 7ft tall aliens’ shares traumatic experience” posted on the Daily Mail site on December 16, 2023. The girl is identified as “Talia” and the article includes details of her attack as described to the paranormal documentary team 5-MeO Productions.
According to Talia, she went out to her back yard to get some tangerines to make herself a drink when she noticed dry leaves blowing around her. She turned to find the cause and saw “a very tall man” behind her whom she believed was a “gringo,” or white man, though she told the 5-MeO team that her attackers were wearing black body armor and masks with green eyes. She said that when she tried to run, he grabbed her, turned her around, and covered her mouth.
According to Talia, her second attacker first appeared as a light (it was nighttime) that lifted into the air, came towards her, and then landed in front of her. She said that this person grabbed both of her legs and started dragging her off. She said that as this was happening, both attackers were touching what seemed to be a button on the inside of their calves on what seemed to be a boot and that the circular platforms they were on would elevate when they did so.
According to Talia, she struggled, and this caused her attackers to drop her. The taller of the two pinned her to the ground and asked the other one for some cream. He then mixed the cream with some powder and used a syringe-like device to inject it into her nostrils and also smeared it on her face. According to Phelan, she told the 5-MeO team that she felt the cream was burning her. She said that one of the assailants took out “a little stick” with a retractable point and used it to cut her neck. She said, “It made a sound, but I couldn’t feel anything. I could hear it. My own skin made a sound.’
Talia described her escape this way:
When I tried to lift up the mask, that’s when he let go of me, so he could lower his mask. That’s when I began screaming. When everyone, my brothers, the neighbors, came to see me, that’s when my brother saw from my cousin’s garden how they flew away.
She said “The taller one spoke like a gringo. He didn’t speak well, he didn’t say the words correctly.” She described the other one as speaking fluently in a Peruvian dialect.
According to Phelan, the 5-MeO team posted pictures of Talia’s hospital records confirming her injuries, and they are included in the article.
Timothy Alberino is a documentary film maker and paranormal enthusiast based in Bozeman, Montana. While news coverage of the story dropped off after Quintanilla’s explanation, Alberino, who had spent a good deal of time as a young man living in the jungles of Peru, returned to investigate the story first-hand.
Next week: Alberino’s investigation and earlier reports of strange attackers.
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