The standard version of the story is as follows.
On variable dates of mid-August of 1953, Mexican cabdriver Salvador Villanueva was driving near or in Ciudad Valles, or Ciudad Valleys, or Ciudad Vallejo, when his car broke down. His passengers abandoned him, or went to seek a breakdown truck, while he slipped under the car to examine the breakdown or to fix it.
He then heard footsteps, saw feet, and standing up, was confronted to one or two pleasant-looking beings, approximately 4.5 feet tall, in one-piece suits from neck to the toe, with broad and shining perforated belts, small shining black boxes on their backs, and metallic collars round their necks. They carried helmets similar to those of pilots or American football players under the arm, and thus Villanueva concluded that they were probably Indian pilots from a nearby country.
One of them spoke in good Spanish but binding the words together without respecting punctuation. He discussed the breakdown of the car with Villanueva, and when it started to rain he agreed the latter's offer to shelter in the car with him.
When the night fell, Villanueva realized from the conversation that they were actually space people.
At dawn, he accompanied them towards their apparatus parked in a clearing within approximately 1600 feet of the road. To reach the place, they had to cross marshy grounds, and Villanueva noticed that the feet of the ufonauts did not penetrate the mud like his, because they forced mud away using some field force activated when they manipulated their strange luminous belt.
The beings invited Villanueva in their saucer-shaped apparatus, but he declined, and run away to his car, and saw the saucer take off in oscillating moves. The saucer started to glow and "disappeared at a fantastic speed", leaving physical traces in the vegetation.
In reality, it was at the time promotion tour by US "contactee" George Adamski in Mexico into 1955 that Villanueva, who attended the lecture on the space flights with Venusian friends by Adamski, that he came up with this story.
While the story more or less starts as told above, more or less like told in many ufological catalogues, Villanueva actually described these visitors in the purest "contactee" fashion: beautiful human-looking beings, pure white like ivory faces, with long moderately curly silver-blonde hair set, otherwise hairless skin, emerald eyes and so on.
Far from having run away at the invitation to accompany them in their saucer, he actually claimed to have done it, and told in 160 pages book of the purest Adamski-inspired tale, that he made a 5 days visit of the home planet of these nice space people, this home planet being, of course, Venus.
Venus is, unsurprisingly, a very habitable planet, with one single sea where seals and fishes swim, at the bottom of which the Venusians have built their gigantic factories. The Venusian civilization is, obviously, thousands of years in advance compared to ours, and war has been eradicated long ago when nations and national flags were suppressed at the installation of a centralized council of Wise Men who governs in justice and love.
Children are separated from the parents, to be scientifically educated in dedicated areas. The tires of solar-energy driven Venusian cars are manufactured by molding-injection of a flexible matter similar to our rubber. Venusians churches are splendid, poverty is quasi non-existent, the motherships ar cigar-shaped, and the vegetation is luxuriant. Some Venusian live among us on Earth, to inform their chiefs on human affairs, and they are unnoticed because they dress like us to that effect. Villanueva also had the opportunity to note and to comment on the ugly appearance of earthlings compared to the glabrous beauty of the Venusians when he is invited at a dinner party by two Frenchmen who had emigrated to Venus.
Initially self-published, Villanueva's book enjoyed enough success to be reprinted, translated into at least three languages, and it made the other contactees and Adamski-follower among ufologists very happy, as rather than noting the incompatibilities between Villanueva and Adamski's tales, they stressed that it must be a true story, since Adamski performed some rather esoteric secret "tests" on Villanueva and so determined that the latter was being truthful.
Unfortunately for them and most of the other "contactees", it would prove a few years later that Venus is actually not the paradisical planet they talked about but a burning hell, with fishy seas, not shining paved metallic highways, no hundred meters tall cathedrals, no luxuriant valleys. Villanueva thus explained that in fact, his trip on Venus was not real: it was put into his mind by the extraterrestrials by means of some technique of mental manipulation, to discredit him, obviously.
This all did not prevent the "acceptable" part of his tale to appear and survive in the ufological literature as "UFO landing case" or "UFO case with physical traces", without any allusion to Adamski or Villanueva's trip on Venus, nor even a word on the existence of his book - which also makes Mexican rationalists very happy to scoff at ufologists' gullibility and ignorance - only a half-truth, but an inescapable situation in this case and many others as well.
Allow me to recall these words of Charles Fort: "A camel and a peanut are really the same object - if you consider only the bumps."
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 Adamski and Villanueva. |
[Ref. sv1:] THE WITNESS:
The - alleged - witness wrote an entire 160 pages book about his claimed experiences.
The book is discussed in the "Points to consider" section of this file.
[Ref. gc1:] GORDON CREIGHTON:
Gordon Creighton indicates that in the Valleys of Ciudad, in Mexico, at 06:00 p.m. between August 17 and 20, 1953, Salvador Villanueva, 40, a Mexican taxi driver, was under the frame of his broken down vehicle on the main road, when he saw two pairs of legs covered with something which resembled "gray seamless corduroy."
He stood up and saw two pleasant-looking men, measuring 1.35 meters, dressed in a one piece suit from neck to toe, with broad perforated shining belts, metallic collars around the neck, and the small black and shiny boxes on their back.
They held under the arm "helmets similar to those of the pilots or the American football players." Their small size did not appear strange to him because many Indians of Mexico are very small, and it he concluded that they were probably pilots from some nearby South American republic.
One of these men spoke good Spanish in a particular manner, linking words together with a strange accent, whereas the other obviously understood, but did not speak. Both smiled sympathetically, and talked about the car and trivial matters. When it started to rain, they accepted Villanueva's invitation to be sheltered with him in car.
During the night, various remarks started to worry Villanueva, and finally they said: "We are not this planet. We come from a very remote world, but we know a lot about yours."
At dawn, he went with them to their apparatus landed in a clearing some 500 meters of the road, noticing that although they crossed a muddy ground in which he inserted deeply, the legs and the feet of the little men remained clean: "When their feet touched the mud pools, their belts shone, and mud deviated as if pushed back by some invisible force."
Their craft was a saucer approximately 13 meters in diameter which resembled two brilliant soup plates one reversed and over the other. There were portholes in the flat dome, and the craft stood on three large metallic spheres. A soft buzzing sound came from it. A section opened in the bottom of the hull, forming a staircase with support cables.
The two small men entered there and invited Villanueva to follow them, but he turned back and run away. He then saw the craft take off slowly, with a kind of pendulum motion, "or like a dead leave which would fly away ", until a hundred meters. Then the object started to shine intensely, sprang vertically at a tremendous speed, with a gentle whistling sound, "and was invisible at once."
Gordon Creighton indicates that the source is "Mexican taxi driver meets saucer crew," by Desmond Leslie in the Flying Saucer Review.
[Ref. lo1:] CORAL AND JIM LORENZEN:
The authors indicate that a report came out of Mexico in mid-August of 1953, describing beings and clothing which match up with other reports. They indicate that at about 06:00 p.m., Salvador Villanueva was underneath his broken-down taxicab on the main highway near Ciudad Valley, Mexico, when he became aware of a couple of pairs of "legs" encased in what appeared to be gray corduroy.
He came out and was confronted by two pleasant-looking men about 4.5 feet tall, clad in one-piece garments from head to toe, with wide shiny perforated belts, small black boxes on their backs and metal collars around their necks. They carried helmets similar to those of "pilots or by American football players" under their arms.
Villanueva concluded that they were probably pilots from a neighboring country. One of them spoke good Spanish but in a peculiar manner, "stringing the words together" and with a strange accent. He discussed the car trouble with Villanueva, and when it began to rain he accepted Villanueva's offer to get shelter into the car with him.
When the night came Villanueva realized something was amiss and finally the speaker told him they were from another world but that they knew much about this one. At dawn, he walked with them to their craft which was parked about 1600 feet from the highway.
To reach it, they had to cross a swampy terrain and Villanueva noted that the men's feet did not sink into the mire, as his did, but that when they walked into mire they touched their belts, which glowed and the mud seemed to spring away as if repelled I by some force.
The upshot of the report was that the men invited Villanueva into their craft, a classical "two washbowls stuck together", but he declined, so they boarded and took off. The object glowed and made a faint swishing sound.
[Ref. jv1:] JACQUES VALLEE:
In his catalogue of UFO landings, Jacques Vallée indicates that on the approximate date of August 18, 1953, in Ciudad Valleys, Mexico, in the evening, cab driver Salvador Villanueva, 40, observed two creatures, 1.2 meters tall, wearing coveralls with wide, shiny, perforated belts, metal collars, and small, black, shiny boxes on their backs. They had helmets under their arms.
The witness thought they were pilots of Indian race. One of them spoke to him in Spanish, "stringing the words together" in a strange accent. Trivial matters were discussed until dawn, when they returned to their craft, 13 meters in diameter, through a staircase under the lower disk. The witness ran away when invited to follow them.
The object rose with a pendulum motion and shot up vertically. Vallée indicates that his source is "Humanoids 32; FSR 56, 2."
[Ref. hd1:] HENRI DURRANT:
In his study of the behaviors of the alleged extraterrestrial, Henri Durrant quotes a work of professor P.M.H. Edwards of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, published in the Flying Saucer Review, volume 16, #1, pp 11-12,14 and volume 16, #2, pp 23-25.
Among the quoted and classed cases groups by Doctor Edwards, in the class of those in which the extraterrestrials speak the witness' language, the case from August 20, 1953 in Ciudad Vallejo in Mexico is mentioned. The witness El Salvador Villanueva is known to have specified that one of the two humanoids seemed to understand the Spanish language whereas the other spoke it but with a particular accent, linking the words together without being concerned about tone or punctuation.
[Ref. bh1:] ROBERT E. BARTHOLOMEW AND GEORGE S. HOWARD:
The authors indicate that between August 17 and 20, 1953, in Ciudad Valleys, Mexico, at 06:00 p.m., Salvador Villanueva, a Mexican taxicab driver was working underneath his broken-down vehicle on the side of a highway, when he noticed two pairs of legs standing nearby.
He discovered two pleasant-looking men about 4.5 feet tall and clad in one piece "seamless gray corduroy" garments from neck to toe, with wide shiny boxes on their backs. They held "helmets like those worn by pilots or by American football players" under their arms. As many Mexican Indians are short, their height did not alarm him.
Only one of these men spoke, in Spanish, "stringing the words together" in a strange accent, while the other apparently understood the conversation but did not speak. They first discussed trivial matters, including his car. Then, at one point the man said "We are not of this planet. We come from one far distant, but we know much about your world."
At dawn Villanueva went with them to their saucer-shaped craft in a clearing by the road, they crossed a swampy area in which Villanueva's legs sank deeply, but the legs of both men remained clean. He told, "When their feet touched the muddy pools, their belts glowed, and the mud sprang away as if repelled by some invisible force."
He was invited aboard the craft, which stood on three great metal spheres, but he declined and ran away. The craft took off, began glowing intensely, "then shot off at fantastic speed."
The authors indicate that the source is Gordon Creighton's "The Humanoids in Latin America" in Charles Bowen's "The Humanoids", Great Britain, Futura, pp 90-91, citing Desmond Leslie's "Mexican Taxi Driver Meets Saucer Crew?" in the Flying Saucer Review 5, March/April 1959 page 8.
[Ref. ug1:] "UFO-GEHEIMNISSE":
The story indicates that at 6 p.m. on August 21, 1953, Mexican taxi driver Salvador Villanueva had a car breakdown and awaited spare parts. He was under the frame of his broken vehicle on the main road at 500 km in the north of Mexico City, when he saw two pairs of legs, and when he stood up, he saw an appearance, a small man hardly 1 meter 20 tall, with a pleasant face, the undulating silver hair down to the shoulders.
He was dressed un a velvet-like fabric and asked in good Spanish, "what happened to your car?" Villanueva asked back in a shy voice, "You are probably an aviator?", and the man answered, "yes, my apparatus is over there", pointing a hill. He also answered that he is not from Mexico.
The pilot went away and returned with a second man, and they chattered and described their native planet, "we already underwent thousands of the years before what you undergo now. Our world survived many wars, destroying return to primitive ages, as well as times of progress. Finally an agreement between the national governments was reached. The nations disappeared and we are now all the children of the same world. A council of wise men was set up and they which govern us now. They are all characterized all by a particularly elevated spirit," or by a specialization in one of the branches of science. The headquarters of this government are centralized. In each group of men, a representative of this council has the mission of studying and collecting the desires of the inhabitants and of fulfilling them. In the "lower classes", there is no extreme poverty, since each inhabitant works readily where he is sent to, and has enough to live. Nobody keeps their children with him: as long as they are small they are educated in a special sector, in conformity with their physical and psychic capacities.
The pilots take Villanueva along on Venus, and on his return in town, he was so bizarre that the person at whom he had ordered the part to repair his cab believed that he must have smoked marijuana, but his story was deemed authentic by George Adamski.
[Ref. tp1:] TED PHILLIPS:
Ted Phillips lists that on August 17, 1953, in Ciudad Valles, Mexico, at 06:00 p.m. Salvador Villanueva, 40, noted a failure in his auto engine. As he tried to make repairs, he was approached by two men, 4 feet tall, wearing gray coveralls and carrying helmets. An object, 40 feet across, disc-shaped with a dome and humming sound was seen. It ascended vertically at high speed. Bushes and sticks were found broken at the site, forming a circle 40 to 45 feet across.
Ted Phillips indicates that the source is FSR 1-70.
[Ref. jc1:] JEROME CLARK:
Erudite ufologist Jerome Clark indicates that in 1953, Salvador Villanueva, taxi and limousine driver, was hired to drive from Mexico City up to Laredo, Texas with two Texan passengers. They left Mexico City on the morning of August 22, and in the late afternoon, the car's differential gave out. Villanueva rolled the car to the side of the highway before it came to a complete stop.
The passengers decided to walk to the nearest village to see if they could find a mechanic, while Villanueva stayed with the car and did what he could to get it running again, jacking up the car and crawling underneath to begin tinkering.
There was little traffic on the road, he felt very much alone, and darkness had fallen when he heard footsteps and saw from underneath the vehicle two legs covered in what looked like corduroy. He crawled out uneasily and stood, to face a man with a pale white face, dressed in a one-piece suit, a 3 inches wide belt around his waist, with lights shining from little holes in it. He was holding a helmet under his arm.
The man had fine features and a penetrating stare, shoulder-length gray hair and a hairless face, and was 4 feet tall.
Stunned and frightened to speak, Villanueva could not find the words to respond to two questions about what was wrong with the car spoken in fluent Spanish by this man, but finally asked if the man was an aviator. The man said he was, added a weird remark about his "machine which you people call an airplane", and indicated that his airplane was parked behind a nearby mound.
Feeling more comfortable now, Villanueva invited him in the car, but at that moment the lights on the belt started to flash, a buzzing noise sounded, the stranger donned his helmet and walked toward the hill.
Villanueva returned to work on the car, then not long afterward two motorcycle police officers came by and ordered him to take the vehicle off the road. He then lay down to sleep inside.
Sometime later he heard knocks on the window, he sat up expecting his passengers had returned, but it was the "aviator" with a taller companion. They entered in the car and chatted with Villanueva, the shorter doing most of the talking.
As they described their home, Villanueva realized that they were people from space although he first thought they were joking. They talked a few hours about their home world, its civilization, its cities, its technology, etc.
There had been destructive wars thousands of years ago on their world, until the inhabitants established a world government under a benevolent dictatorship of a council of wise men. Children are raised by the state, there is no serious poverty. Some of secretly live among humans for reporting on our affairs to their chiefs.
Near dawn, the helmets or the belts of the two men buzzed, and they left the car followed by Villanueva, reaching their a saucer-shaped ship. The men invited him inside the craft, but at that moment he lost his nerve and fled back to the car, and saw the saucer take off and fly away in the direction of the rising sun.
His story was soon known and he was compared to the contactee George Adamski, who met Villanueva in Mexico in the spring of 1955 and asked him a series of questions. An American couple who was at that meeting - the author mentions the 1957 book by the Reeves - wrote that Villanueva answered these odd questions correctly, and that they were a test devised by Adamski to determine whether another contactee was truthful of not.
Adamski's associate and co-author Desmond Leslie also visited Villanueva later that year, and claimed that Adamski had confided "the Key" to him, explaining that "every man who has received a true and physical contact with men from other worlds has been given a certain "Key" whereby it shall be known that he is speaking truly. It is told by Tim Good in 1998 that ...Villanueva gave it ["The Key"] without hesitation".
Clark specifies that unlike Adamski and other contactees of the time, Villanueva did not embark on a professional career and as far as it is known, claimed no further meetings with extraterrestrials.
Villanueva's claims sparked international excitement, and followers of the emerging contactee movement saw it as evidence that the space people were now expanding their mission to Latin America, and "for a time Villanueva became something of a hero in that region's occult world."
[Ref. jr1:] JEAN-PAUL RONECKER:
The author presents some cases of alleged UFO occupants in which the occupants speak and mentions that sometimes, they speak the witness' language, more or less fluently, as in the Villanueva case in Mexico in August 1953, in which they talked to the witness in Spanish with a light accent.
[Ref. am1:] AUGUSTE MEESSEN:
The scientist indicates that Timothy Good presented a series of case where people had a direct contact with UFO occupants; among those, Salvador Villanueva, Mexican taxi driver. In August 1953, his car had broken down on an isolated road, his American passengers had left angrily, and he was consequently all alone and in distress.
At about 6 p.m., he slipped under his car to inspect the damages, and in this position, he was surprised to see two pairs of feet beside the car. Standing up again, he saw two people that he mistook for airplane pilots because their suits and the helmets they held under their arms suggested that. Their size of approximately 1.35 meters did not surprise him because Mexicans of small size are not so rare.
One of these people spoke to him nicely in Spanish, the other seemed to understand the conversation but did not speak. As it started to rain, they all sat down in the car to continue to chatter about varied topics; which they did all night.
When one of the pilots told him that they came from a remote planet, Villanueva believed he was joking, but after the sun rose, when they said that they were to leave, they proposed to him to accompany them to look at their apparatus. In the walk there, Villanueva was amazed by their way of walking in the marshy ground.
At approximately 500 meters of the road in a clearing, what he saw was not a plane but a large shining object in the shape of two soup plates glued at their edge, of approximately 12 meters in diameter and resting on three spheres. A portion of the lower part dropped down to form a slope, the small men got there and invited Villanueva to come to visit the apparatus and to make a brief trip with them, but he was afraid because he had heard talked about somebody who had disappeared without traces. He turned back on his heel and ran for the road from where he observed the departure of the machine. He is quoted saying:
"Something which shone of a white-pink light emerged slowly and hovered one moment. Then, it took speed and began a kind of pendulum motion, a movement back and forth, following an arc, like a falling leave, but going up instead of going down. By this method, the object came to an altitude of a few hundreds feet. Then, becoming more luminous, the object left vertically at an incredible speed. In a few seconds, it was out of sight and that had produced only a soft whistling sound."
As argued in his article "How far are we in ufology?" in Inforespace, N.101, 4-56, 2000, Auguste Meessen explains that he does not discard that the "contactees" could have lived real experiences, even when they start to spread absurd ideas, because the extraterrestrials would have invested them of a "mission". He indicates that a great number of noted facts of various types become comprehensible when one admits that extraterrestrial intelligences could carry out psycho sociological experiments to test us, and that in the case of Villanueva, it is interesting to note that he was approached in a situation of distress in which his capacities for rational judgment could have faded, a well-known method of the sects.
Auguste Meessen indicates that the sources are Alien Base - The evidence for extraterrestrial colonization of Earth, by Tim Good, Arrow, 1998, pp 217, and Mexican Taxi Driver Meets Saucer Crew, by Desmond Leslie, in FSR, volume 2, #2, pp 8-11, 1956.
[Ref. rc1:] RYAN J. COOK:
The anthropologist notes that taxi driver Salvador Villanueva Medina claimed to have been visited in on August 14, 1953, by small alien beings in their spaceship on the highway north of Mexico City. He was repairing his broken-down taxi on the highway near Ciudad Valles when he was surprised by several small humanoids, one of whom spoke in accented Spanish about his people and their purpose on Earth.
[Ref. lg1:] LUIS R. GONZALES MANSO:
Luis R. Gonzalez Manso notes in his FirstHumCat catalogue that on August 15, 1953, in Ciudad Valles in the evening, cab driver Salvador Villanueva, 40, observed two creatures 1.2 meters tall wearing coveralls with wide, shiny, perforated belts, metal collars, and small, black, shiny boxes on their backs. They had helmets under their arms.
The witness thought they were pilots of Indian race. One of them spoke to him in Spanish, "stringing the words together" in a strange accent. Trivial matters were discussed until dawn, when they returned to their craft, 13 meters in diameter, through a staircase under the lower disk. They invited him and he spent 5 days in Venus.
Luis Gonzales indicates that his sources are Antonio Ribera in Platillos volantes en Iberoamérica y España, 1968, pp. 27-30, "Salvador Villanueva, Yo estuve en el planeta Venus" 1958, and the MAGONIA Catalogue case 116 which does not mention the space trip.
[Ref. jb1:] JEROME BEAU:
Jerome Beau reproduces Vallee's summary in a chronology for year 1953, indicating that at the approximate date of August 18, in the evening, at Ciudad Valleys, Mexico, Salvador Villanueva, 40, cab driver, observed two 1.20 meters tall beings wearing a suit with a large shining perforated belt, metallic collars and at their backs one little shining box of black color. They have a helmet under the arm. The observer thought they were Indian pilots. One of them talks Spanish, linking word together with a strange accent. They talked of ordinary matters until dawn, when they return to their 13 meters diameter craft through a trapdoor located under the bottom disc. The observer then runs away when they invited him to come with them. The object rose while oscillating then rushed away vertically at full speed.
Jérôme Beau indicates that the source id "Bowen, C. Humanoids 32."
[Ref. dj1:] DONALD JOHNSON:
Donald Johnson indicates that on August 17, 1953, in Ciudad Valles, Mexico, at 06:00 p.m., S. Villanueva, age 37, had an engine failure as he was driving. Two 4 feet tall beings approached, and he next saw a domed disc of 40 feet making a humming sound. The beings entered the craft, and the UFO ascended vertically at high speed.
The landing traces included crushed bushes and broken sticks in a circular area 40-45 feet wide.
Donald Johnson indicates that the sources are Gordon Creighton, in The Humanoids, FSR Special Edition No. 1, page 32; P. M. H. Edwards, FSR for January-February 1970, page 11; Ted Phillips, Physical Traces Associated with UFO Sightings, case 100.
[Ref. hc1:] HECTOR ESCOBAR:
The author indicates that the Mexicans could not be unaware of the huge success of Adamsky [sic, Adamski], and that during the Sixties, Salvador Villanueva benefited from the success of this hot dogs salesman by also claiming to have established contact with the Venusians in 1953. The author indicates that Villanueva went further than Adamski and claimed to have been in person on planet Venus on board a flying saucer.
He indicates that Villanueva abundantly talked about all this in his book, "Yo estuve in el planeta Venus" ("I was on planet Venus"); which enjoyed immediate successes and was reissued many many times, in Spanish as well as in other languages. It was even said that a movie made after the book was proposed to Villanueva.
In his book, Villanueva let his imagination run free and described the planet Venus, its inhabitants and its civilization. Unfortunately for Adamsky, Villanueva, Menger and other contactees, a few years later, the Soviet probes Venera discovered that Venus was a sulphuric and carbon dioxid hell and not the tropical paradise of seas and plants that cheap science-fiction of the time told about.
Currently, Villanueva, who is not an idiot at all, denies his stays on Venus and offers a version he made more credible in which he claims that he must have been hypnotized by the aliens who made him him believe than he traveled on another planet.
[Ref. mv1:] "EL MARCIANO VERDE":
This website with a goal of denouncing pseudo-sciences introduces the case as "the Mexican Adamski", providing a photograph of Salvador Villanueva with the US "contactee" George Adamski:
The article makes it clear that Adamski visited Mexico in 1955 to promote his hoaxed contacts books and met Villanueva.
[Ref. wi1:] WIKIPEDIA:
In their French version, the online collaborative encyclopedia indicates at their "History of Ufology" that in 1953, Mexican Salvador Villanueva published his book "Yo estuve en el planeta Venus."
[Ref. id1:] IGNACIO DARNAUDE:
In an undated electronic text about the "People from other planets - the Venusian fashion", the Spanish ufologist and ummologist indicates that in 1953, Mexican taxi driver Salvador Villanueva Medina was approached in an isolated road by a 1.20 meters tall Venusian who took him along on its world of origin, and this tasty experience can be read in its book "I was on planet Venus."
May the few colleagues ufologists so often eager to lecture me about the merits of "famed ufologists" such Jacques Vallée and Ted Philips understand with this story that there work is not always as serious as they want to think, and that many "catalogues" by famed ufologists are not inevitably always at the level of their prized fame.
I also want to stress that while some ufologist see "disinformation" everywhere, it proves that many stories of the caliber of this one do have a taste of "disinformation", not by sinister government agencies, but by a number of ufologists, unquestionably with a sensationalistic aim. In this case, it is blatant how "ufology catalogues" conceal either very questionably or by ignorance originating from an utterly stunning lack of even the least basic checking even, many of the most "too fantastic to be believed" aspects of "the case".
A "disinformation" height is reached in the presentation without any expression of the slightest doubt and absolutely no warning by Ted Philips: this is supposed to be a case of "physical traces of UFOS." Such a presentation, stripped of all the real information about the real nature of the case is unfortunately far from being an isolated example of uncritical and useless "UFO catalogue."
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I am obviously not going to narrate the entirety of the book. But it is perhaps not useless to give the big picture, so that everyone can measure the shift between a summary of the "case of UFOS with physical trace" type as certain ufologists conceived, and the real nature of the story told by the alleged witness.
For indeed, the book exists, and had a certain worldwide success, with translations including Japanese and German ("Ich War Auf Einem Anderen Planeten", selling 80.000 copies).
Salvador Villanueva is currently a mechanic, repairing cars in his own workshop. He is not "crazy", he is a family man, completely integrated in society, and it would not be right to think that he told his tales only for the lure of money. He has friends in the Brazilian Gnostic circles, he is not indifferent to esoteric topics, another similarity with Adamski.
We has seen that almost every "summary" of his story, including the skeptical sources, gives some precise date for his adventure, or at least a date interval. Actually all these dates were given arbitrarily by the various authors. For Villanueva, the date is simply in "second tens of August 1953", i.e. between August 10 and August 20, 1953. In my own catalogue, I keep an arbitrary date, quite simply because it hardly really matters and that it will best help my readers to spot the file.
We also see that even the place is variously altered. The alleged place is somewhere in the area of the town of Ciudad Vallès, not in "Ciudad Vallejo" which is a California city, and not some "Ciudad valleys", i.e. "the valleys of the city."
That day Villanueva was driving a Buick model 52 to Laredo, USA, where he took along an American couple who wished to return on their premises. He said to have heard an abnormal noise in the car's transmission at approximately 6 p.m. after a "484 kilometers" trip. He pulled up, anxious of a coming breakage, and his customers left by foot towards a village to seek a breakdown truck. The night fell, he lifted a wheel with the jack and slipped under the car to try to find the nature of the problem or fix it.
At one time, he started to come out of underneath the car, and he then heard the footsteps of somebody approaching in the sand, and who asked in perfect Spanish with a strange accent, "what happened to your car?"
Villanueva did not answer, but stood up and found himself in front of strangely dressed man about 1.25 meters tall.
His description is more picturesque than in most ufological sources, which say nothing of his perfectly human face, "the eyebrows, the nose and the mouth formed an admirable ensemble", but of color "surprisingly similar to the ivory," and "of a perfect beauty", the emerald green eyes, the long and slightly curvy blonde-silvery hair. He wore a belt with perforations from which "strange lights" came out, and a metal helmet. His gray uniform was of one piece, covering all the body except the head, it had a metallic ribbon as collar and "was made of material similar to velveteen or a wool fabric."
The man has a voice "of a musical tone" which "proved to be incredible, coming out of a perfect mouth framed of two lines of small toothy-pegs of the purest white." He "produced a smile of gentle softness".
Villanueva tells of his amazement, and asking the man if he is a pilot, was informed that "his plane" was not far away. And after these words, the man left him and walked to the mountain.
Villanueva decides to sleep in his car, but soon, he is awaked: someone knocks on the window pane. When Villanueva opens the door, he faces the same pilot accompanied by another, similar pilot. He invites them inside the car and talks at length with them.
He thus learns that the two men live on planet Venus, which he does not believe, so they lengthily describe their planet to him.
We are thus informed, among many other details, that on Venus, the roads are made of large unequal paving stones so that the cars do not drive with excessive speed. The cars are not polluting as on Earth, as they function with solar power.
The streets and the pavements of the towns of Venus are metallic traveling carpets. Young Venusians are wiser than our kids, they never run amidst road traffic, which is happy for them since - without fear of contradiction - Villanueva explains that the roads on Venus are made of conducting metal, to distribute the solar power to the driving cars.
On Venus, which is "million times more advanced than the Earth", there were wars as we know them, but peace reigns since thousands of years thanks to the intelligence of their leaders, who suppressed nations and national flags. A central committee of Wise Men spreads wisdom and love, and local delegates gather and satisfy the people's needs.
Children are scientifically educated by special devices in a special area. In all resemblance to the future "Ummo planet", Villanueva tells that the infinitely wise and scientific Venusian Government totally controls children until their majority, and they are then sorted according to their physical and psychic qualities and rationally assigned to a job that perfectly fits.
A stable climate is created artificially on Venus. There are only one sea on Venus, but three times deeper than ours. All the raw materials used by the Venusian come from the sea: building materials, textile, and the fishes that constitute 60% of their food. The factories, huge, are at the sea-bed; their saucers can just as well fly in the sky, in space and under water.
The Venusian are quite shocked when Villanueva tells them that according to the scientists of the Earth, there can be no intelligent beings on any other planet than Earth. The Venusians protest, and proposes that this pretentious error of our scientist must come from faults in their calculators.
The Venusians explain that some of their people discreetly live on Earth among us, to study us, getting dressed like us so they won't be recognized as Venusians.
To prove all this, the Venusians invite Villanueva on a trip to Venus. He readily accepts, and all join a majestic ship in the shape of a sphere which rested on three spheres, which makes him think of a strongly build fortress. This saucer has round port-holes all around, like those on our boats.
On board, he learns how to use "the screen": "it was enough to turn each side-wheel, to point it to what you wanted to look at outside, as well above, than below, on the right, on the left, using the horizontal middle to approach the image until it gave the impression that it was at one meter of us. I forgot to mention that at the right end of the screen, there is a ball in a hollow which is prolonged by a round lever. This lever allowed to move on all the surface of the screen a black spot which is used as a sight when the use of the various weapons that I will try to describe later was necessary."
Villanueva spends 5 days on Venus and was brought back to Earth.
Pages after pages, Villanueva explains details of the life on Venus. The whole is merely unimaginative and uninspired science fiction. He describes, for example, how Venusians manufacture the tires of their cars, by molding some plastic "which might be rubber as we know it, and the molding process is without any one exotic aspect. Actually, these Venusians supposedly million years in advance could leave the reader convinced that they did not even have a single year in advance on us.
We read:
| "But the huge contraption, which one could easily imagine to be like the round breasts of some fabulous woman, was nothing other than two spaceships. No more no less; spaceship, that my friends told me to be automatic, they did not need any kind of crew, and you could say without showing exaggerations that in fact they were huge electronic brains equipped with eyes, ears and noses in large numbers." |
As description of Venusian spaceflight technology, we read:
| "The volume of the walls of the ship, is more than ten inches. The material is transparent, and has a greater visibility in the lower part in which, in some cases, you can see sees the wheels of this machines turning, and it is those wheels that produce the luminosity which increase or decrease in intensity depending on the area where they operate. These wheels rotate at various speeds and the lower ones are the slower... I believe that it is the principle which is used to propel the independent vehicles; but there is a remarkable thing which can be used as data by our scientists and this is it: the number of wheels, the diameter of those wheels and the number of their energy sources depends on the size of the ship." |
There are, of course, cigar-shaped motherships, carrying smaller saucers for the exploration trips.
He is invited by Frenchmen residing on Venus:
| "When I saw them I immediately recognized in them the anachronistic late product of our world of ugliness. And now that I had the occasion to compare my friends [the Venusians] with those of my own kind, the contrast was obvious. Bent, club-footed, disproportionate, thus were my hosts... In fact, they were two twin brothers, sons of a wedding between an individual of French nationality and a Spanish lady, born and raised in a French colony on other side of the Mediterranean sea. They do not speak Spanish, because they were orphan of mother when they were very young and assimilated the paternal language. They have good stature, in the standards of measurements of our race, and it is curious to observe them in comparison with the smaller inhabitants of this fantastic world, because the latter are deprived of body hair, having hair only on the head, and my co-Earthmen seem like orangutangs in comparison." |
He sails on the Venus sea in Venusian boats:
| "Now we hear the cries of the seals, contrasting with the commanding voices of the captains responsible of their respective command posts. Then the noise produced by more machines starting to raise the pressure in their boilers..." |
Villanueva explains that he first wrote an incomplete version of his story to a journalist, then later, attending a lecture by "G.B." - actually an Adamski lecture - when he was asked whether somebody in the assistance had experienced contacts with extraterrestrial beings, he had felt the overwhelming urge to tell his adventures.
He also claims that the high vegetation at the place where the saucer parked had been burned, and that "the Philipps Laboratories" had made "conclusive" analyses of samples, in his words: there were found to have "very marked molecular differences."
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| Id: | Topic: | Severity: | Date noted: | Raised by: | Noted by: | Description: | Proposal: | Status: |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| None. | ||||||||
"Contactee" tall tales.
* = Source I checked.
? = Source I am told about but could not check yet. Help appreciated.
| Main Author: | Patrick Gross |
|---|---|
| Contributors: | None |
| Reviewers: | None |
| Editor: | Patrick Gross |
| Version: | Created/Changed By: | Date: | Change Description: |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.1 | Patrick Gross | June 26, 2007 | Creation, [sv1], [gc1], [lo1], [jv1], [hd1], [bh1], [ug1], [tp1], [jc1], [jr1], [am1], [rc1], [lg1], [jb1], [dj1], [hc1], [mw1], [wi1], [id1]. |
| 1.0 | Patrick Gross | June 26, 2007 | First published. |
