This article was published in the daily newspaper El Tribuno, Salta, Argentina, on January 11, 2004.
In Cachi, on the Tin Tin road
He traveled with 7 other people on a bus
All of them witnessed the strange and fantastic event
"It was incredible. We could see an object with impressive lights, side by side, spinning in a circle at high speed. Then other lights appeared which came and went over the same spot. It made our jaws drop," were the first words uttered by Julio Espinoza, a farmer and shepherd from La Poma.
It all happened on the Tin Tin road on December 16, 2003 at midnight, some 120 km west of Salta, the gateway to Cachi; which crosses the Los Cardones National Park.
This location was not only the site of a new UFO sighting. This time, according to the eyewitness, the phenomenon was accompanied by the strange manifestation of humanoid creatures walking stealthily amid the scant vegetation of the Puna.
They Were on the Road to Puna
Eight people traveling in a bus were among the witnesses to the phenomenon, among them a 5 year-old girl. But the main witness to the events, Julio Rafael Espinosa, 39, told his experience to El Tribuno only last Friday.
That Tuesday, the passengers on the bus were Benito Salva and his father, Ricardo, four other men, Espinosa and his young daughter Tamara, age 5. At the entrance to the Tin Tin road, some 400 meters to the right in the direction of Cerro Negro, Benito Salva, the vehicle's driver, said: "Hey guys, look over there" before parking the bus, while the travelers looked through the window toward the indicated spot. Espinosa says that he managed to climb on top of the bus, but curiosity got the better of him and led him jump off and walk toward the luminous phenomenon.
A Stunning Tale
"Upon reaching a bramble, in spite of the darkness, the landscape was very well-defined. I couldn't go on any further; I was moving away from the road and I was getting scared when my eyes started to see something that couldn't be made out clearly at a distance."
"There was a device measuring some 100 meters wide resting over some kind of struts or legs which kept it some 10-12 meters off the ground. Some sort of hoses emerged from its middle, with lights on their tips. Suddenly, the lights on the object went out and these strange beings appeared. They walked slowly in single file, they were thin and their glow was so powerful they blinded me. At that moment I hid behind a bramble and I could see when one of them jumped onto a bramble - don't know how he did it - and began to pull pieces off it, as though taking specimens."
Some twenty minutes had gone by. It was then that Espinosa decided to return to the truck to report what was going on. "When I told them what I'd seen, they told me that they couldn't see the creatures because they were very far away. However, they saw the luminous phenomenon, which was visible from the roadside," he concluded.
