The UFO Diaries Travels in the Weird World of High Strangeness

319 Pages·2011·2.71 MB·English

by  Martin Plowman

The UFO Diaries
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The UFO Diaries
Travels in the Weird World of High Strangeness
Martin Plowman
First published in 2011
Copyright © Martin Plowman 2011
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For Priscilla Jane and my family
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COnTenTs
PrOlOgUe ix
1 MelbOUrne 1
2 A rOyAl sOCieTy 19
3 rOswell 37
4 new MexiCO TO nevADA 59
5 The COnTACTees 77
6 Chile 101
7 bOliviA 121
8 The AlTiPlAnO 139
9 nAzCA 157
10 MArCAhUAsi 177
11 MelbOUrne 195
12 MexiCO CiTy TO TePOzTlán 209
13 Alien AbDUCTees 237
14 OAxACA 265
15 The Answers 283
bibliOgrAPhy 295
ACknOwleDgeMenTs 305
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Prologue
My liFe As A UFOlOgy-OlOgisT
I never thought I’d grow up to be a grave robber. It may well be
the world’s third oldest profession after politics and you-know-
what, and I hear the pay is good as long as you don’t mind working
with a bunch of stiffs, but grave robbing just doesn’t have the
romantic appeal of, say, arms dealer, nor the dinner party cachet
of Peace Corps volunteer. What did you do in Peru, Martin? people
would ask me back home, and I would have to say something like,
‘I trespassed upon the burial grounds of civilisations that were old
before the country I was born in even existed.’ Unfortunately my
camera would be stolen on a bus exactly two days later as I left
the plateau of Marcahuasi to return to Lima, Peru’s smog-bound
capital, so I don’t even have the photos to prove my guilt.
Mercifully, the tomb was empty. All that remained were
the dry-mortared stonewalls perhaps five feet in height, with a
tiny square entrance on one side through which the shrunken,
mummified corpse of the ancient lord would’ve been interred.
I breathed a sigh of relief. There was nothing to disturb here;
any remains once laid to rest in the tomb had been stolen or
removed many years ago, and I was just a visitor en route to my
own eventual destination.
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Martin PlowMan
Besides, I had not come here for buried treasure – for months
now I had been travelling through South America in search of
UFO stories. In total I spent no less than four hundred and
twenty-two hours sitting on buses and other wheeled transport
in South America (excluding ox-carts and inline skates), a tally
I began keeping after one especially murderous eighteen-hour bus
journey over a road in lowland Bolivia so rutted and corrugated
that my kidneys ached for days afterwards as if kicked by a
territorially challenged llama.
My UFO witnesses were the folk I met waiting in bus
terminals, or villagers buying potatoes in the marketplace, or
fellow travellers with a story to tell, and I encountered them all
across the teeming cities, trackless jungles and soroche-inducing
mountains of this vast continent. Ever since arriving in South
America I’d been hearing that Marcahuasi, an archetypal lost
world soaring some four thousand metres above sea level, was
one of the continent’s major UFO hot spots. After a tiring
day’s journey from Lima I was finally here, about to violate an
ancient Andean lord’s burial ground . . . b ut I’ve already said that.
I stood up now to gain a better view of my surroundings and,
less hopefully, see a UFO.
The things you do in search of truth. Thing is, I don’t really
believe in a solid, grab-it-by-the-ears-and-lock-it-in-a-cage kind
of ‘Truth’ – which was why I was attracted to the idea of UFOs
in the first place, for these unnameable little objects whose fragile
existence is debatable at the best of times compel people to take
the strangest of journeys.
My own journey into the world of high strangeness began
in Australia, a country so distant from Peru as to be considered
semi-mythical. Australia? these descendants of the vanquished
but not forgotten Incas would ask quizzically, frowning beneath
their alpaca wool caps or bowler hats. What language do they speak
x