Chile.Valdés case

In the early hours of 25 April 1977, Second Corporal Armando Valdés Garrido, aged 22 (born 24 December 1954), and seven conscripts of the Huamachuco Regiment (Julio Rojas Suárez, Germán Riquelme Ovalle, Iván Robles Riveros, Humberto Rojas Véliz, Raúl Salinas Vásquez, Juan Reyes and Pedro Rosales Arancibia) were standing guard at a stable in Pampa Lluscuma, about five kilometres from Putre, on the altiplano near the borders with Peru and Bolivia. The press and the Army later spoke of a 'patrol'; according to journalist Patricio Abusleme, the Army delayed the release, 'demanded that what was really a stable guard be dressed up as a military patrol, and asked for the horses to be changed to sheep'. Valdés later said he was not supposed to be there that night: he had been sent as a punishment.

The case has two layers, and they are worth keeping apart. The first is what the whole group saw. Rosales, on guard with Reyes, saw a light come down behind some hills; Valdés first thought of a truck coming down the road or a meteorite, and as it fell, 'the light made an incandescent flash behind the hill'. Shortly afterwards a second object appeared about 500 metres away, ovoid and violet, with two red lights on its sides that Valdés compares to beacons. The horses, more than three hundred, bolted, and the group, unarmed according to NCO Antonio Flores, huddled together to pray. No source proposes an explanation for that second object: Valdés maintains that the phenomenon existed, says he still has no answer for those lights and adds that they 'have more of the human than of the outside about them'. This layer does not arrive clean either: the only record of that night is the collective account that teacher Pedro Araneda recorded hours later, and according to Alejandro Agostinelli, Araneda showed the soldiers pictures of flying saucers 'to help them recognise the shape of the object'.

The second layer is the one that made the case famous. Valdés stepped away from the group and his companions lost sight of him for about fifteen minutes; when he reappeared he collapsed, seemed to be in a trance and said: 'You will never know who we are or where we come from, but we will return soon'. At six in the morning he went to fetch NCO Antonio Flores in Putre and told him: 'It seems I fell asleep, and when the conscripts woke me it was chaos'; according to Flores, he did not mention having disappeared: 'The soldiers said that'. That same afternoon Araneda, a UFO enthusiast, recorded the only group interview with the soldiers, and in that collective account the beard of several days and the watch calendar showing 30 April emerged; it was Araneda who linked the beard and the watch to a 'time distortion'. According to the newspaper El Día, the Army tasked a Corporal Roca that same 25 April with interviewing all the conscripts to look for contradictions, and he found none; that file, described as 'secret', has not been published. The story ran in La Estrella de Arica in mid-May and from there spread worldwide; on Canal 13 in 1977, Valdés said he had shaved and that the watch was digital.

Over the years, Valdés wavered. In 1999, on TVN's De Pé a Pá, he said: 'I feel I went through the portal'. In 2002 he told Las Últimas Noticias: 'I was never abducted!'. In 2007, to Agostinelli and Diego Zúñiga, he said that during those fifteen minutes he had been watching the conscripts through gaps in the wall, that he had stepped away to urinate, and that he then came down from a stone wall, 'which is where they see me jump from', when he heard them talk of shooting: 'I was always watching them, always listening to them… They were more hallucinated than I was'. About the beard he said: 'I was not shaved'. About the watch, that it had hands and was not digital, and that after handing it in at headquarters he never even claimed it back; it was never studied or photographed. In an interview in early 2009 he called it 'a joke or histrionics born of stress', but in the interview he gave Iker Jiménez for Cuarto Milenio, aired in 2008 or 2009 depending on the source, he confirmed the original version of the disappearance and the amnesia; at the 2nd Maipú UFO Meeting in 2013 he said again that he had never been abducted. At the same time he holds that the soldiers 'do not lie': they lost sight of him and told what they believed they saw. One conscript had already hinted in Araneda's recording that the corporal had gone to urinate, and Flores said in 1999 that the soldiers thought the same at the time.

No source consulted records that the others have retracted, and almost none has spoken. In 2002 none of them agreed to meet Valdés. The only one willing to talk, Raúl Salinas, mixes his memories with later additions (a humanoid half lizard, an extraterrestrial he calls Amalia) and says the conscripts want nothing to do with Valdés because he 'has profited from a story he knows through us'. Iván Robles, who died in 2016, always refused an interview. Researcher Rodrigo Fuenzalida (AION) said in 2013 that 'the statement of the rest of the squad is more urgent than ever'.

The Valdés case is worth studying for the distance between its two layers, and for how little in either is firm. The one that made it famous (the disappearance, the phrase, the beard and the watch) now has an explanation from its own protagonist: he was hiding and watching his men, came down from a stone wall, had not shaved, and the watch was never examined. No conspiracy is needed: the conscripts told in good faith what they saw, and a UFO enthusiast gave them the 'time distortion' frame within hours. But that confession is not stable (Valdés gave it and withdrew it several times) and those who knew him read it in opposite ways. Psychologist Carlos Domínguez sees a histrionic scene born of an anxiety crisis ('everyone was under suggestion'); Flores recalls that his classmates had him 'pegged as a showman' and sums up: 'He could perfectly well have been faking. But it did not seem so to me'; the psychiatrist who saw him at the Military Hospital, Raúl Molina, says: 'I do not recall him faking'; and Patricio Abusleme 'does not rule out that Valdés's new version turns out to be an alibi', while holding that his lapses 'show that his shock was real'.

The other layer, the lights, has no explanation in any source, but it does not arrive clean either: the only record of that night is a collective account recorded hours later by an amateur ufologist who showed the witnesses pictures of saucers to help them recognise the shape, and Valdés himself believes those lights 'have more of the human than of the outside about them'. His first impression (a truck or a meteorite) referred only to the first light. There is no sensor record, the Army's file has not been published, and the 1977 press (La Estrella de Arica, El Mercurio) could not be consulted directly: what is known of it comes through the investigations of Abusleme and Agostinelli.