Chile.Karim Bianchi · the Chilean senator who says he was abducted

In May 2024, the talk show 'Not News' on the Chilean channel Vía X, hosted by Nicolás Larraín, aired an interview with Senator Karim Bianchi Retamales, independent representative for the 15th Circumscription (Magallanes Region) since 2022, in which he publicly recounted for the first time an episode he said he experienced in 2012, when he was a regional councillor and worked at Radio Soberanía. By his account, he was driving between Puerto Natales and Punta Arenas, alone, at night and talking on the phone, when 'a spinning light approached, large, a saucer'; to Chilevisión he described it as 'a very large light, circular in shape, of different colors.' The vehicle shut off entirely (engine, lights, radio and the phone he was talking on) and the next thing he recalls is 'appearing' about 200 kilometers further on, with no memory of the stretch in between; in a later Instagram video he added: 'it was hard to start the car and I got back on the road.' He resumed the call with the same person to tell them 'I've arrived.' He placed the encounter 'at the height of the Rubens', on Route 9, about 60 kilometers from Natales and about 185 from Punta Arenas, but the sources contradict each other on the direction of travel: to BioBioChile he said 'I was on my way to Puerto Natales from Punta Arenas', which would leave him about 60 kilometers from his destination, while Infobae's version implies the opposite direction, so the 200 kilometers cannot be checked against the route. Bianchi has not publicly identified the person he was speaking with nor produced any record of the call.

By his account, the episode had aftereffects. When shaking hands, he said, he 'gave something like electric shocks for many months, almost a year I'd say.' He also began noticing owls everywhere (an owl given to him as a gift, a friend's owl T-shirt, a restaurant called 'Las lechuzas', a bedspread with owl eyes), something he narrowed in another interview to 'for a month'; an 'expert' told him it was linked to extraterrestrials 'because of the turn of the neck and the eyes.' The most specific element of the account came about three days after the roadside episode: an 'old, bald, short' man, whom he said he had already seen a couple of times in Punta Arenas and who had insisted with the radio station's secretary, showed up at his office, told him he was 'a person from another planet' and handed him papers he described as 'NASA secrets', with the charge that he 'had to spread the message.' Bianchi says he keeps those documents at home, but has not made them public or submitted them to any examination. He also said it was not the only time he had seen something like this, but it was 'the only time I've had an effect.'

The tone of the interview matters for reading the case. La Prensa Austral, the Magallanes daily, described the panelists' 'incredulous look'; when the host asked whether the man with the papers was former senator Andrés Zaldívar, Bianchi answered 'he looked like him', and closed with 'maybe I could be a candidate on another planet.' The same paper recalled that Bianchi is a recurring guest on the show and that in an earlier appearance he had read Chile's future in tarot cards. The interview went viral in the Chilean press (BioBioChile, 24 Horas, La Cuarta, El Mostrador, Meganoticias, Chilevisión, La Prensa Austral) and reached international outlets such as Infobae. Bianchi explained that he had not wanted to talk much about it because of the criticism, and after the broadcast he answered a wave of mockery on Instagram: 'I very much regret the violence that people unleash on social media.' He repeated the account without retracting it, though downplaying it: 'it never mattered to me, nor changed my life, nor anything.' There is no record of a statement from the Chilean Senate nor from the Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena (CEFAA) (the Chilean state body that investigates UAP) regarding the case.

The case matters for a structural reason more than for the content of the account itself: a sitting national legislator claims in the first person to have been abducted, rather than commenting on the phenomenon from an official post or investigative committee. Bigelow and Grusch bring institutional authority about a subject they say they know through others; Bianchi brings the authority of public office to an experience he says he lived himself, with no documentary anchor, third-party testimony, or institutional backing whatsoever. It is the same 'authority without material' pattern found elsewhere, taken to its barest form: here there is not even a meeting confirmed by a third party, as in the Bigelow case, or a formal complaint channel, as in Grusch's: there is only the word of a public official.

The account also gathers nearly the entire classic repertoire of the contactee tradition into a single case: lost time and unexplained displacement, aftereffects with no documented medical diagnosis, an animal-synchronicity pattern (the owls) with no proposed causal mechanism, and (the genre's most recognizable element) a messenger who delivers secret documents and demands the recipient 'spread the message'. That last element in particular replicates, almost point for point, the narrative structure of contactee encounters documented since the 1950s and 60s, which proves or rules out nothing about what actually happened, but is relevant for calibrating how much weight the account carries as evidence: so recognizable a narrative structure suggests, at minimum, the possibility that the memory was organized (consciously or not) around pre-existing cultural scripts.

No source proposes a concrete cause. Fayerwayer accompanied the news with a generic review of what science says about abductions (quoting researcher Michael Raduga, the feelings of paralysis, fear and helplessness of vivid dreams 'can be so powerful that they blur the line between dreams and reality'), and explanations pointing to 'paranoia, dissociation, or even intense fantasy'; it does not apply them point by point to the senator's account. The setting fits that repertoire (at night, alone, on a long, monotonous Patagonian route), and the context also weighs: the account was given in a light tone on a talk show where the senator had previously read tarot cards, and he himself downplayed it afterwards, although he defended it despite the pressure, so humorous exaggeration can be neither ruled out nor taken for granted. What remains is a single witness, with no corroborable element, speaking twelve years later. It remains to be seen whether the documents Bianchi says he keeps are ever made public.