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“I showed up late for work on Monday morning,” Soler added. “Rather than reporting at 0500 I showed up at 0900. In the afternoon I went to see the doctor, but he didn’t put me on leave. He did on the following day, and I was on leave for fifteen days. I told the story to a number of people: friends, contemporaries and people at the factory, all of them serious, well-informed people, but no one believed me.”
There was an added detail to the story. Soler’s description of the entities as resembling Bibendum the Michelin Man was ironic in view of the fact that he worked at the Pirelli tire factory for many years, and his buddies began calling him “Gagarin” after the history-making Soviet astronaut.
Soler made efforts over the years to speak to the landowner who had fearlessly barked at the non-humans, prompting their departure. On one occasion, he went to the man’s home to discuss the bizarre experience, only to be slapped by the old man’s fiery tempered daughter. “The man died in later years, and I never had the pleasure of talking to him. In 1994, the daughter’s husband agreed to speak to me, but he had nothing new to say. His father-in-law died nearly at age 90 at the farmhouse.” An effort to discuss the subject with the parish priest also earned Soler a slap in the face.
“A long time after the incident,” Soler reminisced, “and while I was in the town of Peralta de la Sal, I got to speak to José Rami, the community’s jack-of-all-trades. He described an incident very similar to my own. He was a kilometer outside the town of Peralta with some mules and their tackle when he saw a white vehicle with two pilots. He was so frightened that he covered his eyes for a while, allowing the mules to lead him into town.”
The fact that Juan Soler would later drift into contactee circles would only cause serious researchers and journalists to overlook his experiences. Scientists are tired of telling us that the odds of finding human-looking intelligent beings somewhere in the universe is impossible, citing a number of evolutionary and genetic factors. But one researcher, Edward Ashpole, allows a loophole that will be of interest to those interested in humanoid CE-3s and which many will find vindicating. “This line of thinking,” writes Ashpole in his book The UFO Phenomena: A Scientific Look at the Evidence for Extraterrestrial Contacts (London: Headline Books, 1995), leads us to the conclusion that creatures with some kind of primate form, though not like us, might emerge from flying saucers, should flying saucers have a physical reality with biological beings inside them.” He then adds the important cautionary sentence: “But no ET could be like the beautiful people reported by many contactees and abductees, unless they were specially bred from human stock.”
Sidestepping any pro-ETH pathway for a moment, could the answer to the humanoid riddle lie in manipulation of the human race not by “ancient astronauts” but by advanced “next door neighbors” from another dimension, who have meddled with humanity since the earliest days of recorded history, and certainly before that? After all, the Sons of God looked upon the daughters of Men, and found them fair…
Humanoids from a Parallel Universe?
Science fiction enthusiasts, or perhaps more specifically, devotees of the oeuvre of Gerry and Silvia Anderson (UFO, Space:1999 and the supermarionation classics Captain Scarlet, Joe 90 and others) surely recall their motion picture Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, whose plot involves the discovery of a planet similar to Earth occupying the same orbit, always concealed by the fiery bulk of the sun. A mission is launched from our planet and promptly crashes on the alien world, where the protagonist, American astronaut Glenn Ross, portrayed by Ray Thinnes (The Invaders), finds himself on a world that mirrors our own in every way. In a way, the movie explores the ages-old legend of “the land on the other side of the looking glass” for a contemporary audience.
It’s very likely that Miguel Herrero, a resident of Alcalá de Henares on the outskirts of Madrid, had never seen Journey to the Far Side of the Sun when fate catapulted him into the pages of UFO history in the early hours of 18 December 1977. An avid fisherman, Herrero had borrowed the company truck to visit a favorite fishing spot, the Buendía Reservoir. Well on his way around six o’clock in the morning, the fisherman’s borrowed vehicle suddenly died on the road (National Hwy 320), and despite Herrera’s best efforts, he found himself unable to restart it. He pushed the truck to the curb and waited for daylight and the possibility of assistance.
He suddenly heard a voice calling out in the morning gloom, and suspecting it might be another stricken motorist, proceeded to go off into the distance to render assistance. He found that the source of the voice was a man wearing a white outfit, asking him to follow him. Thinking it might be a mechanic, Herrera fell in behind the figure.
To his astonishment, he found himself being led to a “hat-shaped object” that projected a metal cylinder to the ground, and a door opened. Herrera would alter tell Madrid’s “El Diario” newspaper: “I found it foolish to think about running at the time. If they wanted to hurt me, they would have done so already.”
The cylinder – described as “metallic and icy cold” – contained an elevator that led them to a large control room. Herrero suffered a brief blackout after his first view of the craft’s interior, subsequently being able to write detailed notes as to what he remembered seeing. The crew, from his notes, were all dressed in white overalls, except for one who bore a red circle on the upper left side. The character introduced himself as “Major Martins”, advising Herrero that the vehicle was able to materialize and dematerialize upon command. Unusually talkative, the humanoid described the crafts operation and other intricacies. Herrero was told that the non-humans “had come to our world by chance. They had calculated a given speed at which to travel, found a void, and reached our dimension two thousand years ago.”
But this Jules Verne-like presentation of technological wonders to an unsuspecting Earthling soon took an ominous turn. Herrero was at first shocked, then frightened, when he saw a man looking exactly like him seated at one of the stations. “My first reaction was to approach him, not to strike him, but to see someone who looked just like me up close.” He was prevented from doing so, advised that he could not come into contact with his doppelgänger, or “his negative”, as Herrero put it. “He was exactly like me, except that the scar which I bear on my left cheek was on his left.” He adds that his double was asked to leave the room, and was not seen again.
It should be noted that a more detailed version of the above appeared in The Journal of Scientific Exploration (Vol 8, No.1, 1994) in a report by Vicente Juan Ballester Olmos. This version includes photographs of the hypnotic regression session performed on Miguel Herrero Sierra and other cases (dismissed as hoaxes by the author) in which the subject of doppelgängers also plays a part. One such event is the 1985 Vallgorguina Incident, in which Xavier C., a young man, develops a roll of film taken after a visit to a megalithic site. The developed images show claws and “monstrous green faces”. Under hypnosis, Xavier C. claims that strange creatures manufactured “a double” of him which he would later see getting onto a bus in Barcelona.
More Encounters
Rodrigo Andujar of the Zona Ovni podcast reported a humanoid case of the 1950s involving “little men from a strange artifact” seen in the province of Cuenca (1 July 1953 Villar del Sainz). Maximo Munoz, the protagonist, was described as an illiterate shepherd who heard a sharp whistling sound – common on these cases – that prompted him to turn around. To his amazement, he found a tank-shaped object on four legs projecting a powerful light. Intrigued, Muñoz approached the device, and a “door” opened in its upper section. Two diminutive figures, referred to as “tietes” (little guys) by the witness, emerged from the structure. The “little guys” were described as 60 centimeters tall, with dark features and slanted eyes. They surrounded the young shepherd, who at no point felt any fear, by his own admission, only as sense of curiosity. He described the creatures’ language as “very odd”. Apparently losing interest in the human, both entities looked at the landscape before boarding their “tank”, which “took of quickly” according to the witness.
Despite his protestations of fearlessness, young Maximo returned home in tears and deeply shaken, according to his parents. The father would eventually return to the scene of the alleged humanoid encounter in the company of the Guardia Civil (state police) captain, being able to ascertain the presence of “many footprints as if from children” on the ground, as well as four square impressions supposedly made by the unknown artifact.
The thoughts of the late John A. Keel on the matter bear repeating in this case: “One basic fact should be obvious from the foregoing – these entities and things are not necessarily from some other planet. They are actually closely tied to the human race, are a part of our immediate environment in some unfathomable fashion, and to a very large extent are primarily concerned with misleading us, misinforming us, and playing games with us.”