It was highly possible, I was informed, that some attacks attributed to Puerto Rico’s most famous vampire were really the result of the predations of very aggressive, SIV-infected monkeys. Arguably, that would be a very good reason for the U.S. government to create and circulate spurious tales about the Chupacabra: The story would act as very good camouflage in the event of any truly horrific attacks on local livestock, or, worse still, on people. As a bonus, the tales suggesting a Chupacabra presence in the area would hopefully ensure that the terrified locals kept their distance. On all of these thorny issues, the Caribbean Primate Research Center offers nothing more than an intriguing silence.
With the Chupacabra mystery, and its links to both the U.S. Navy presence at Roosevelt Roads and the Caribbean Primate Research Center now detailed, let us focus on the other big mystery that dominates Puerto Rico: that of unidentified aerial craft. As with the saga of the Chupacabra, one could wax lyrically for countless pages on the many and varied UFO reports that have emanated from Puerto Rico since the late 1990s.
Rosario’s sighting
Rosario is a middle-aged woman living in the old San Juan district of Puerto Rico who earns her living in the island’s food industry. In March 2000, she was working in a grove near the foot of the El Yunque rainforest. As she picked plantains (a type of fruit similar to a banana) her attention was drawn to a deep, resonating hum that seemed to come from directly above her. Looking up, Rosario was startled to see a black, triangular-shaped object, about 35 feet in length and with a shiny coating, hovering overhead at a height estimated to be around 90 to 120 feet.
Surprise and amazement turned to horror and shock when a pencil-thin beam of light shot out of the bottom of the object. The light-beam fanned out and enveloped Rosario in a pink glow. For what seemed like an eternity — but what was, Rosario says now, certainly less than a minute — she was rooted to the spot, while her mind was flooded with stark imagery of widespread nuclear destruction and environmental collapse in the Earth’s near future. The final image was that of a large, bald head with huge black eyes staring at her — a definitive alien entity, in other words, of the type that has become infamous in today’s world. Suddenly, the UFO soared upwards and headed slowly towards the thick rainforest. In the wake of the encounter, Rosario developed an overwhelming interest in environmental issues, and, quite literally overnight, after a lifetime of eating meat, became a staunch advocate of vegetarianism.
Alien Bases
Given the sheer scale of the UFO activity and Chupacabra encounters on Puerto Rico, this matter has inevitably given rise to a widely supported theory among the populace that the island is home to an underground or undersea base of extraterrestrial origins. Certainly, stories abound of UFOs seen entering and leaving secret alien bases across and around Puerto Rico. For example, Carlos Manuel Mercado maintains that in June 1988 he was taken to one such base, located in the Sierra Bermeja, which is adjacent to Puerto Rico’s Laguna Cartagena National Wildlife Refuge. (Interestingly, the refuge falls under the jurisdiction of none other than the U.S. government’s Fish and Wildlife Service, whose 2009 recommendations to restrict public access to large portions of the cave system are discussed in another chapter of this book in the context of the 2012 controversy.)
According to Mercado, he was taken to a huge, futuristic, factory-like alien installation buried deep inside a mountain known as El Cayul, where row after row of aliens were hard at work building and repairing a multitude of extraterrestrial spacecraft. The aliens, Mercado said, encouraged him to spread his story of encountering them in their secret installation far and wide, after his return to civilization.
In a similar vein, the UFO researcher Timothy Good, who personally interviewed Mercado in 1997, spoke with a Puerto Rican investigator of both the UFO and the Chupacabra phenomena named Jorge Martin, who advised Good that he, Martin, had received confirmation of the existence of the alien base within El Cayul from a high-ranking military officer.
Of course, stories like this are bound to provoke deep controversy. But it might be argued that everything about Puerto Rico’s many mysteries and cosmic wonders provokes controversy, so why should the story of this apparently secret, mountainous facility be any different? So much for the base within El Cayul. But what about those rumors of undersea installations of a distinctly nonhuman nature?
Much of the evidence (which is admittedly fragmentary) points to the island of Vieques, a 21-mile-long landmass located, interestingly enough, near to the old Roosevelt Roads U.S. Navy facility where, as I discussed earlier, a number of very bad-tempered Chupacabra were supposedly briefly held in the early 1990s. Jorge Martin has uncovered a wealth of data on sightings of strange-looking craft of unknown origin and intent, both entering and leaving the waters that surround the island. In one case, from 1996, Martin was told by the primary eyewitness — a fisherman out at sea — of a huge, brightly lit, saucer-shaped craft that rose out of the waters near the Playa Grande lagoon.
A similar report from the same location, involving the sighting of a huge, triangular-shaped, silver-colored UFO, was provided to Jonathan Downes and I in 2004 by a former civil-defense employee, who had seen the gigantic craft rise silently out of the coastal waters of the island while he was on an early morning jog in the spring of 1999. In this case, the vast device, which was viewed at a distance of around half a mile off the coast, wobbled slightly, rather like a falling leaf, as it took to the skies, and then streaked vertically at a fantastic speed, growing ever smaller until it was finally lost from view due to the effects of the bright, rising sun.
Further rumors were provided to Downes and me on that expedition: They came from a retired police officer who had heard rumors to the effect that, somewhere off the coast of Puerto Rico (he was not entirely sure where, exactly), in late 1993, elements of the U.S. Navy spent several days tracking, via sonar, the movements of a huge UFO in the deep waters off Puerto Rico. Perhaps aware of its potentially hazardous nature, the U.S. Navy contingent, Downes and I were told, was ordered to merely carefully log the movements of the undersea craft, but never to engage it any way that might be interpreted as hostile.
Taking all these accounts into thoughtful consideration, is it truly feasible that Puerto Rico might be home to a massive undersea installation? When one realizes that we, the human race, have had the ability to construct such futuristic facilities for decades, then the possibility becomes not so unbelievable after all. And make no mistake: Evidence of our own undersea abilities is far from lacking. For example, an October 1966 document prepared by C.F. Austin of the U.S. Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake, California, includes a truly remarkable statement. Titled “Manned Undersea Structures — The Rock-Site Concept,” it states in part: “Large undersea installations with a shirt-sleeve environment have existed under the continental shelves for many decades. The technology now exists, using off-the-shelf petroleum, mining, submarine, and nuclear equipment, to establish permanent manned installations within the sea floor that do not have any air umbilical or other connection with the land or water surface, yet maintain a normal one-atmosphere environment within.”[52]