this is audiobook for personal listening, made of parts, extracts of book of EDUARDO PONS PRADES, translated via google, translated title is,
7 hours onboard an extraterrestrial spaceship, from 1982. here  may be wordmistakes. link, audio - search inside this folder,
https://rune.galactic.to/lydboker/2022/

book seems to be out of print in 2024.
here then google translated from spanish to English: remark this has been found in spanish
language online, and translated here via Google into English, for personal use, and mistakes can
certainly be found here, both in the translations, and in Googles perception, interpretation of the
language otherwise. At some point in time, these messages will hopefully be shared by the coming cosmic, open, lovely society arriving after the upcoming collapse of the present animalistic, ego focused world of today has gone.


INTRODUCTION.
This introduction, dear reader, cannot be a normal introduction, because the subject that we are going to address together in these pages is, to put it in the words of my good friend Antonio Ribera, one of the most important that the man of the twentieth century has to face. For, just as we often say that Catalonia's problems cannot be solved except by focusing on and linking them to those of the rest of the Iberian communities and, by extension, that Europe's "regional problems" will not have a fair solution unless Europeans form a united band - with that peaceful desire par excellence that is to balance and moderate the confrontation between the two great superpowers and, on a planetary level, know how to radiate desires and hopes that are common to the human race - in the same way perhaps the time has come to seriously consider whether the problems of the Earth - the danger of nuclear war, which prevents us from enjoying life to the full, hunger, which kills fifty million human beings every year, a third of whom are under 5 years old - are not going to have to be approached on a cosmic scale. And to do so, naturally, one of the first measures to be taken is to disqualify so many charlatans and freeloaders who swarm around, and to support, by collaborating with them, those who take - and have always taken - all human affairs very seriously.

Hence, so that the little or great influence that these pages may have on the friendly reader is fully positive, one has thought it appropriate to "surround" his experience with a series of texts that show that, before his encounter with them, the author had already met men and women from Earth with a cosmic vision of existence, who possessed the humanity and intelligence of extraterrestrials, before they burst into our lives.

ABOUT "MANIPULATION".

My parents were libertarians. Which means that, from a very young age, my two brothers, my sister and I were already taught to live freely. As freely as possible, in a world that is increasingly violent, aggressive and castrating. First, in our home, where my father never hit or punished anyone, preferring to explain, talk, reason, ad nauseum, about the small problems that could arise in our lives. Not so much at home as at school or on the street. At the same time, we were awakened to a sense of responsibility and criticism. I will speak in particular about my upbringing - I am the eldest of four siblings - and my education.

My father not only did not punish his children by word or deed, but also the many apprentices he had at his side. And this was when he was a young worker in his native Valencia. His emigration to Barcelona in 1915 was due to an incident with the manager of a toy factory where my father worked. He had told the manager that if he had something against his apprentice, he should tell him. But it happened that one day, when my father was away, the foreman beat up the apprentice, (a very common thing in those days and for many years)[5, and when he was asked to account for it, the henchman of the factory owner threatened my father. Never do that! A fellow worker in the workshop - the cabinetmaker Cervera - told me what happened: "The foreman gave him a bad end, Eduardo. A very bad end, because your father, as soon as he heard the threat, turned around and gave him a punch to die for. Don Santiago - the foreman - fell to the ground and did nothing but get up and your father gave him another punch. And so on until several workers intervened and took the foreman to be treated in the medicine cabinet. What a beating he gave him! I had never seen your father so out of his mind, to be honest. He, who was a peaceful man, of infinite patience, that day seemed like a beast striking out. You cannot know what it meant in those days for a worker – even if he was right, like your father – to beat up a manager.”[6

Yes, I did, because our mother had explained it to us: my father was put on the blacklist of the Valencian woodworkers’ association. It was what was known as the “hunger pact.” It was one of the many “inventions” of the employers – Spanish and non-Spanish – to try to subdue the irreducible. And, like so many others, he had to emigrate and reach the “promised land,” which was Barcelona. That perhaps explains (because my father was not, by far, the only Valencian cabinetmaker subject to the pact).


It is worth mentioning this point first of all: none of us smokes, or drinks, or is fond of gambling, or has ever slept with a prostitute, or violated private property, at least not directly and personally, and has always lived off the fruits of his own labour, never off the labour of others. I mention all this because these particularities must have had some influence, one thinks, when it came to being chosen by the aliens as their messenger. What is more, no toy that had any relation to violence ever entered our house, nor did we ever see any books that incited or encouraged it in our parents' modest library. Nor any publication that awakened the base instincts that, as is known, each of us stores in greater or lesser quantities in our entrails. The same was true of the films we watched. Our parents never forbade us anything. They explained to us the inconveniences, discomforts and dangers that some inclinations could bring us. And it was we who had to decide, from a very young age, I repeat, what we would or would not do. Hence my lack of interest in gangster, Western or horror films and my great passion for musical comedies and comedy films when I was a child. Consequently, we had no interest in weapons, nor the slightest inclination to coerce or violate anyone. Although this does not mean that one gave up airing children's street disputes with blows or clean stones, from time to time. That is, when persuasive resources failed; because I perfectly remember that, at times, the verbal warnings given by me were cancelled as soon as I heard someone say: "You are afraid of fighting!"

Until we reached July 1936, when, with a military uprising as a starting point, I was able to see that, in such circumstances, most of what my parents had taught me was of no use to me. And that to defend my freedom and my dignity - and those of my people, of course - the "saviors of the Fatherland" left me no other path than that of arms, nor any other desire than to try to eliminate my enemy before he eliminated me.

So not only did I have to jump into the Iberian ring to kill, but, being a newly minted high school graduate, I joined a Training and Command School of the Republican Army, in Escorial de la Sierra, at the foot of the Guadarrama, from where I graduated with the rank of sergeant instructor of accompanying machines. Which meant that not only did I have to learn to kill myself, but I also had to teach other boys to kill. So, I ask myself: if my parents prepared me to live in a future world, the one dreamed of by them and so many of their companions, fraternal and free — knowing very well, because they were suffering it in their own flesh, every day, as workers' fighters, that for that we had to change the world in which we lived, because it was inspired by the lowest passions of man — could it be said, I repeat, that I was "manipulated" by my parents? And even more: if that "manipulation" was oriented in the purest sense, could it be described as pejorative?

I think, therefore, that the crew of that spaceship would have manipulated me, in the bad sense of the word, if they had insisted on making me see white as black — although it is true that they showed me colors that I had never seen — and claiming that it was day when it was night. Or that, suddenly, a galactic high priest or a charming priestess appeared, dictating orders coming, for example, from the Supreme Cosmic Order, and with no other alternative than unconditional compliance and irrational resignation. For now, I have no news of the existence of galactic dogmas of any kind, or of cases in which any of those who have had contact with them have exclaimed: Here are our saviors!, or that they have built a miniature flying saucer, with their crew inside, like a Holy Communion, or images of their extraterrestrial interlocutors, which they have placed on an altar, surrounded by lit candles and votive lamps, and that they are periodically venerated. Or, what would be much worse: that they did what priests or witches have done - it doesn't matter. - in our latitudes, since time immemorial, which is to force others to venerate symbols or reproductions of "gods" or "virgins", of "apostles" or "martyrs", etc. And to me, mind you, this is the last thing that would occur to me: to give my testimony the slightest religious, evangelical or mystical touch, or a premonition of apocalyptic catastrophes or of paradisiacal beatitudes of a supernatural nature. I still believe, (como)

As before and as always, it is the Man and Woman of the Earth who must set out on their own — the path has been known since ancient times: it is that of peace and fraternity — resolutely, towards a more dignified and free life. Although sometimes, we have to repeat it until it sinks deep into our consciences, that peace and fraternity must be won by fighting tooth and nail. However, the opposite has happened: they — the extraterrestrials — know perfectly well that, given the idea of ​​interfering in our affairs — “manipulating” us — who would set the limits of that interference? On the other hand, that corresponds to a behavior, to an attitude that is presumably centuries old in them — that of not interfering in other people's lives — and I do not believe that they would break that noble tradition for anything. Or only in case of legitimate defense. But, as you will see, none of the topics we discussed during our long conversation, punctuated by long silences, presented anything very new to me. The only novelty was, perhaps, that they were so well focused, since one's mind never rested until clear, conclusive and unquestionable conclusions had been drawn. So much so that, during the course of the conversation, I asked myself the same question several times: "But how come I hadn't thought of this before?" So, if manipulation - apparently so feared by some - served to round out the analysis of each of our problems more quickly and to stop, once and for all, turning the wheel of the leaky buckets any further, I would have no other option than to shout: "Welcome, then, manipulation!"

On the other hand —ear to the footsteps, comrades!—, if one has any information about the odious and pernicious manipulation of which the vast majority of earthlings are victims by the tiny minority, for the exclusive benefit of the power and privileges of the latter, who has the moral authority, on this terrestrial globe of our happiness and misfortunes, to accuse anyone of “manipulations,” “brainwashing,” or other actions of such a nature? [7 They told me several times that they left it to my free will when, in what form, and under what conditions I could spread the message, as well as my impressions, with which, naturally, I intended to support it. I imagine that, if I had been so “suggested” by them —or manipulated, it makes no difference—, as soon as the message had been transcribed in my mind I could have appeared in any sensationalist magazine in Europe —which, as is well known, there are in abundance— and that would be it. I mean, I didn't have to worry too much about it. But instead of acting in such a way - trivializing the subject as so many others do - I started typing, at the rate of 2 to 3 hours a day, transcribing "memories" and "reflections", and I devoted 6 or 7 hours a day to reading books and magazines dealing with UFOs, published in France, Spain and Italy. Exactly four months after my encounter with them, I decided to stop reading because I already had clear the true motives of so much expectation - the "scientific" one in particular - and so much speculation, and I decided to give all my notes in person - close to two thousand pages - the form of a book.

Because for me - a historian who investigates on the ground, who never leaves the arena - the book continues to be the most worthy vehicle that exists to communicate with others. But I must say that, if I had judged it useful, I would have spent weeks or months reading the "specialists," especially if I had delved into UFO literature from American or Soviet sources - and I did read something from both sources, as you will see. I must confess, once again, that from what I have read - and not only about UFOs, but also with reference to some classical and modern thinkers - I have come to the conclusion that much of what is known as "human scholarship" is above all a mass of speculations, some more ambiguous than others, whose main disguise is the rounded phrase, which almost always - it must be admitted - "sounds" very good. That is why these "thinkers" have had no great difficulty in crossing the barrier of time, often cutting in flower other fruits of the human intellect that contained genuine truths, much more worthy of attention and study. In a word: it does not take much insight to see the common goal of so many scholar-talkers: the complexing and the constriction of the vast majority, since, how would the chosen ones stand out, if there were not an amorphous and uneducated mass? And, at the same levels, to overwhelm their colleagues with "learned texts" and "masterful communications", they feed and encourage the speculative struggles to which they regularly engage, with as little discretion as they are unstoppable pride and insolence.

That is to say, if it were possible to establish the great list - the planetaria—of the “personalities” whose passage through life and their only incentive is nothing more than a simple “covering up the record” and cultivating their insatiable egocentrism—which they magnify and elevate to the category of “sublime discourse,” shamelessly and repeatedly—then it is very possible that we would begin to see more clearly and understand the true reasons for this constant drifting of this ship called Earth. And by chance, and by extension, the origin of all the frightful rackets that have been mounted around the subject of extraterrestrials and “their countless, mysterious and alarming extensions.” And, consequently, to see who our main manipulators are and what resources they use to falsify, adulterate and sterilize the incomparable power of popular creativity—of the common people, of the vast majority—which, in my opinion, is the primary cause of our incessant misery.

I will also say that many "specialists" whom I will not name - so as not to give them publicity - who, apparently, travel from one end of the world to the other periodically to "enlighten" us about our extraterrestrial past, could write their books, calmly, without leaving their home and just by reading and rereading, among others, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne or Edgar Allan Poe.

NOTICE TO NAVIGATORS.
For some time now I have read tremendously insane things about the "UFO phenomenon." Let me explain: I have been perplexed, and deeply alarmed, before an endless rosary of ramblings and speculations, about the human mind, that produce shivers and even nausea. And not so much because of the predictions and conclusions that the "specialists" spread in their "learned" works, but because of the growing influence - which I consider dangerously harmful - in the sense of making people believe, of instilling in people that the human mind can distill the most abject monstrosities imaginable; that is, being able to imagine many just by sticking to those we have witnessed in this last half century.

But the mind is like consciousness. If it extends more and more intensely over human sensitivity every day, it is clear that, at the same pace, the space abandoned to unconsciousness is being reduced. And to be able to reach that stage that one imagines wonderful: that in which the scarce unconsciousness would act - if it could do so - in full consciousness. The mind - as is known - is something very little known and often poorly used. That is why the phrase "it has a convoluted mind" is something that is heard more and more frequently every day. Why? Simply because the “environment” does not allow for more. If I am guided by my own experience – and that of other people with a similar background to mine, apart, in any case, from religious influences – one believes that all this is a question of family and social environment.

With this “warning” I intend to get ahead of that gang of charlatans-specialists who, as my editor warned me, are going to come upon us like real birds of prey. And by giving them news of what my “mental evolution” may have been – roughly speaking – throughout that half century I spoke of earlier, I am providing them with material to whet their appetites. And see, if they still have the capacity to look – and see – without blinkers and without those pseudoscientific filters that they have invented, human things – terrestrial and extraterrestrial – with wide open and clear eyes, with clear understanding, with an expanded heart and with the most generous disposition that they can display. I know it's a lot to ask, but I don't want to leave it at that. I said I was almost ready to write this chapter before sending the outline of the book to my editor, and if it didn't figure in the initial project it's because I never had the slightest inclination to be considered a provocateur. But these days, at the end of 1981, a work entitled "Notes on the UFO theme" fell into my hands, whose introduction reads as follows: "In the same way that the phenomenon adapts to the ideas of the time and place in which it occurs, the same occurs with the messages, which adapt to the personality of the person or group to whom they are addressed." The wording of the chapters and some of the captions are also a poem. Let's read the first ones: 1). It is not a purely physical phenomenon. 2). It is not a purely psychic phenomenon. 3). Its origin is not at all clear. 4). There is some kind of intelligence (a hidden and sinister plan) behind the phenomenon. 5). It is not clear whether they are benevolent towards us. 6). If we consider the phenomenon, relating the different types of "contact" that history presents, we observe two kinds of situations, forming two groups, one with fixed characteristics and the other with variable characteristics.

And in the captions we read: "Are UFOs mere mental creations of those contacted? Imaginary phenomena created by fantasy? Unusual events, transformed into tangible by the mind, in a paranormal way? Or real events?, coming from an external intelligence, capable of influencing the human psyche? Or, "Perhaps it is in the depths of our mind where we must look for the nature of the phenomenon that we know today as the UFO? Perhaps, as some researchers claim and others insinuate, some kind of intelligence, perhaps identifiable with deep levels of our own unconscious, is capable of projecting itself, using the faculties with which the mind is endowed, outside of our physical being, to elaborate a kind of psychodrama, destined to modify our consciences" [9. The truth is that any "contactee" who reads this, or other things of a similar nature, must necessarily exclaim: "Wow, I didn't think I was so deteriorated internally!" When it would be much easier and more humane to let each person explain his or her experiences, however strange they may seem to some and others, without discrimination of any kind. Because the most dangerous individuals, alas, are not in mental asylums and prisons, but are out there, ready to catechize and evangelize, "scientifically" of course, that legion of humans who do not know their bodies or their minds very well. Even though these new earthly priests know very well, thanks to what kind of catechizers and evangelizers the people of the Earth - except for those of some tribes - do not know their bodies or their minds, nor do they have the slightest idea of ​​how their conscience could develop naturally. But let's go with my condensed curriculum vitae. My home street and my childhood friends – the survivors – can testify that the Pons Prades brothers were happy children, with no other problems – neither as children, nor as adolescents, nor as adults – than those derived from the humble condition of our parents and as worker fighters with libertarian ideas. Today I will only talk about myself.

From a very young age I slept well and from time to time I had wonderful dreams that almost always took place in the middle of nature. This was because my parents took us to the countryside almost every Sunday – in autumn, winter and spring – near Tiana – La Conreria – and in summer to Montgat beach. My mother made me explain my dreams to her from time to time. I never had the slightest nightmare, because my parents were not the kind who threatened their children with the “bogeyman” or “Pedro Botero’s boilers” or other nonsense of that kind. Nonsense that gave many boys and girls complexes for the rest of their lives. I know of several cases, even in my own street. The first teachers I had were Monsieur and Madame Gabarrou, who had their academy on Calle del Carmen, very close to the Rambla de las Flores. 

They had lived in Barcelona since 1914. They were such good people that the outbreak of the First World War must have horrified them. And since Monsieur Gabarrou was a person incapable of killing a fly and a great lover of life, he preferred to go into exile in Catalonia and teach the boys and girls entrusted to him to be good people. Then, in 1918, at the end of that new massacre, as the great Anatole France said after the first confrontation between Germans and French, in 1870, it was clear that the youth of both countries had gone to war to defend "everything" except their homeland. That is undoubtedly why I never heard any of my teachers talk about it - about a local homeland - nor about my parents, of course. We were taught – and we learned – that our homeland was the world and our family was humanity. It was that simple! The kindness of that French couple left its mark on me forever. That is why I always had beautiful dreams and never a single nightmare. Until our civil war broke out in 1936. Then I stopped dreaming, but without having nightmares of any kind, even though the situation was rather conducive to them. I stopped sleeping unsteadily. So much so that, already in 1937, many mornings, when I woke up, my mother would ask me: “Didn’t you hear the bombing last night?” Later – and with this I gave rise to all kinds of jokes – in the battle of the Ebro, hidden deep in the shelter, I slept soundly while the enemy, with their artillery and their aircraft, literally destroyed our positions. Do you remember, comrades, the special machine gun battalion of the V Corps, when we defended hill 424, on the crest of the Valí de la Torre, lost during the day several times and recovered at night as many times? Because it turns out that the Republicans, with our artillery and air cover so meager, were forced to operate in the dark. And the only thing I remember dreaming about —since my baptism of fire in the Sierra del Guadarrama, in the autumn of 1937— was my bed in Barcelona, ​​its clean sheets and warm blankets. We could say, at most, that they were dreams slightly tinged with nostalgia.[10

In 1939 —until 1944—, During my French exile, including my second war (the French campaign, 1939-1940), which I fought on the borders of France, Luxembourg and Belgium, I continued to sleep like a log. Without dreams or nightmares, despite having the Nazis within range. I slept eight, nine and even ten hours a night. A regimen of rest that I would continue to practice - after losing my second war as well - later, as a peasant, and also later, in 1942-1944, when I had to serve as a guerrilla in the South of France. I spent the years 1944-1948 virtually in Spain, living and acting in complete clandestinity. The family whose home I rented for nearly two years still lives at number 26 Vuelta del Ruiseñor, in Valencia. There I neither dreamed nor had nightmares, and it was just as well, because the lady, the housewife, was the widow of a captain "fallen by God and Spain," addicted to the Franco regime, of course, so that if I had taken to daydreaming, for example, or having nightmares, the good lady would have wasted no time in going to report me to the police.

I went into exile again, walking the Pyrenees alone, in the spring of 1948. And I continued sleeping normally. Well, what I understand by "normal" since July 1936, since I would have liked to return to my wonderful childhood dreams.

Now, fresh in my sixties - yes, I am from the "fifth of the bottle," but I enlisted voluntarily before being called up - I continue sleeping my seven or eight hours and my partner can attest that I do not have any nightmares and I can assure you that I continue not dreaming.

As for conscience —and the great importance that children's education has in shaping it— three quarters of the same thing has happened to me. Neither in the Guadarrama (autumn-winter of 1937), nor in the Segre (spring of 1938), nor in the Ebro (summer-autumn of 1938), it ever occurred to me to insult, and even less mistreat, any prisoner of war. not even the Italians —some of them quite cocky— that I had to lead to the Falset football field one day in August of 1938.

And in France, in the guerrilla, just as in Spain, my only obsession was always to harmonize the effectiveness of the actions with the safeguarding of my men. The German prisoners that my detachment took —including an SS captain— were handed over to the French military authorities in the same state that we captured them. But disarmed and without papers, yes. In a way, they also benefited from my "obsession."

And I must say that one of them was the armed "lord and master" of the eastern part of the Carcassonne region for almost a week (20-26 August 1944), during which time I dismissed several municipal councils loyal to Marshal Pétain and their respective mayors. In the case of one of them, I could have taken justice into my own hands, as in the case of the mayor of Douzens, a certain Montlaur, who, in the autumn of 1940, had behaved miserably towards a dozen families of Spanish refugees living in his municipality. With a bit of bad luck, after that inhuman behaviour, many of them could have ended up in a German extermination camp, as happened in central France, in the Angouleme region. But my detachment did not bother anyone in the least. And of their leader, a servant, those villages keep - I know, having visited them this past summer - a good memory. There, in 1944, there was no nervousness, no shouting, and even less hysterical gestures on our part.

I am not going, with false modesty, to ask for forgiveness for having presented myself as a "model." I could have cited dozens of cases - many of them are in my books - but I preferred to talk about the case that was closest to hand and that, in this situation, could best serve - if it serves any purpose - those who would feel some inclination to study my mind, my paranormal resources. or other internal or peripheral powers.

So, if it is clear that the man and woman of tomorrow are formed in today's child, and that this is formed at home, at school and on the street, it will be no less clear that what we should do is not to stir up the small amounts of bad temper that, apparently, we all store in our entrails, but to cultivate the good inclinations, generosity and love, or the companionship that one is capable of. And that is the end of the matter. And let's hammer this home: we have come into the world - Antonio Gala tells us with beautiful and, at the same time, painful words - to try to be happy, and we will not be able to be fully happy except to the extent that all those around us are also happy, even if they are thousands of kilometres away from us and their skin is a different colour than ours.

I could also talk about my experience in Spanish prison, in the winter of 1945-1946. Particularly with boys of gypsy descent - they worked as "caretakers" in Girona, apparently - whom I met in my forties and had as students in
the prison school later. I lived with one of them in quarantine for several days. According to society he was a criminal, but I can say that there he gave me proof of an exemplary spirit of solidarity, being a complete stranger to him. And a "politician", so as to not miss a detail. But that would be prolonging this chapter too much - not unnecessarily. I want to say, however, that from a very young age I heard my father say that man was born good and that it was society that made him bad. I confess that, at times, I came to doubt it, but at this point I recognize that my father, and all those who thought like him, were right. The sociologist Anne Druyan and the researcher Carl Sagan confirm it for us - scientifically - in these pages. My father also said that it was and is within the reach of each one of us, the possibility of ensuring that society fulfills its corresponding mission: to provide the means for all its members to be good people and happy people.

Before finishing, another brief clarification: from my paternal grandfather, Pons Ferrer (a federal republican who already fought with the public forces in Valencia, demonstrating in support of the autonomy demands of the Cubans and the Filipinos), through my father, Pons Sistemas (one of the founders of the CNT Woodworkers' Union in Barcelona), myself, Pons Prades, and my four children, Pons Santano, in our family we are already in the fourth generation of people totally disconnected and totally unconcerned with everything religious. In other words, we are not, nor have we ever been, immersed in "crises of faith." Nor have other people's crises of this type caused us depression or trauma of any kind. Let each one eat his own bread. Consequently, the extraterrestrials - and specifically the crew of the ship Light of the Cosmos - have not appeared to me in the form of virgins or saints, as some people apparently claim to have seen; Neither under the guise of demons or geniuses, as followers of esoteric traditions seem to see them; nor in the form of mysterious initiates, as scholars or pseudo-scholars of the occult claim to see them.[11

On the other hand, my father also told us that the best preacher is the one who preaches by example and, if possible, makes it clear that he does not obtain any material gain from preaching. Well, in view of the lucrative commercial schemes that this group of mind-altering investigators, of conscience and of the most intimate and dark recesses of the human being have set up, one wonders what these people would have been doing today if UFOs had not fallen from the sky - never so apt a phrase - on them. What kind of sects or congregations would have been invented to feed their egomania and try to conceal this sum of imbalances from which, in my opinion, most of those who hang out with the extraterrestrial "phenomenon" suffer, and which range from sexual decrepitude to the most overwhelming cultural poverty? A serious and extremely delicate state of alarming repercussions, knowing, as is well known, that both balances, to fulfill their respective functions to the letter, must complement each other admirably, fantastically and wonderfully.

We have thought it appropriate to add some notes, sometimes extensive, at the end of each chapter for several specific reasons: a) they are often the extension of the subject addressed or outlined; b) sometimes it is a subject that overlaps with the preceding one, although it is also "another story"; c) on other occasions, as is the case of the physicist and astronomer from Perpignan, François Aragô, some characters are briefly mentioned because their activities and personal career are instructive; and d) finally, because they can serve as a clue when the reader needs to obtain more information on a specific subject.

Naturally, the treatment of the subject of extraterrestrial spaceships, and above all that of their occupants and the world from which they come, has revealed to us, the laymen, the immense seduction that radiates from the stage in which we all move and act: the Universe. Hence, in addition to the appendices and notes, which we have tried to summarize as much as possible, we have considered it necessary to highlight at the end of the book, in the "works consulted", the works that we recommend to the friendly reader so that he can enter, in an enjoyable and profitable way, into the infinite and marvelous Universe.

On the other hand, the author remains at the disposal of the reader who wishes more information on any of the subjects mentioned here - sometimes very superficially - and to those who request it in a letter addressed to Editorial Planeta and in my name, he will send an extensive photocopy of the extracted works or provide all kinds of information on books, magazines and organizations from which documentation on a certain subject can be requested (agriculture, ecology, forests, the sea.).






THE MESSAGE
AND FROM OTHER WORLDS
(August 31, 1981)

WHO WE ARE
We are the representatives of an infinite number of planets inhabited by humans and animals of all species, which make up the Harmonious Universal Brotherhood.

OUR DESIRES
For many centuries: to establish fraternal contact with the inhabitants of planet Earth. Only their warlike nature and destructive actions have made definitive contact impossible. From the most remote times, and by all means at our disposal, we have tried to attest to our existence and our intentions. And we longed for the Earth to focus all its intelligence and efforts on corresponding to our attempts. Instead of that, recently the most "civilized" powers have tried to keep many of our appearances on Earth secret.

Since we are people of peace, we have limited ourselves to periodically visiting the Earth and observing it, always with the hope that one day the longed-for definitive contact would be established. Contact that has not been possible, we repeat, because of your wars, in which, over time, destructive resources of greater power have been used, until reaching the current situation, in which the planet Earth can blow up into millions of fragments, at any given day.

OUR HOPES AND OUR FEARS
When the superpowers of the Earth began to launch spaceships into the Cosmos, we harbored the fragile hope that they were messages of peace. But we soon realized that such actions were only new ventures with a view to consolidating the military power of the two superpowers that dominate and enslave the planet Earth. Thus yielding, once again, to the secular temptation of domination, enslavement and extermination of one's neighbor, the fruit of the immeasurable pride and dangerous imbecility of those who hold political, military and spiritual power on Earth. That is why our apparitions, which are now also police operations, have proliferated so much in this last quarter of a century.

Today, in 1981, we can assure the inhabitants of Earth that one of these superpowers is planning to set up military bases in space to threaten and blackmail all terrestrial communities in general, and the other superpower in particular. Although we have always been saddened by seeing the inhabitants of Earth destroy each other and use their intelligence to find more horrible means of destruction, we, faithful to our cosmic ethics of not intervening in the development of other lives, and even less of coercing or violating them, have always abstained from acting on Earth. However, today, when one of the two superpowers threatens the harmonious universal order, established in brotherhood for many centuries, with the transport of highly destructive artifacts in its space ships, we have decided to send this message, which we hope will not be intercepted or adulterated as has happened on other occasions.


OUR WARNING
Our warning, always with fraternal aims, is, however, very serious and resolute: this superpower (whose identity, for now, we will not reveal) must immediately abandon this mad project, because, otherwise and without warning (in reality this message must be considered as a warning), we will proceed to the indefinite freezing of all life in the area of ​​its national territory and in its bases scattered throughout the planet Earth and in space. We have more than enough means to do so. Means that we have been discovering, throughout many centuries, seeking the ferment of Life and not the empire of Death, unknown on the planets of the Harmonious Universal Brotherhood. And we want to emphasize that this warning also applies to the other superpower and to all those communities on Earth that may give in to the temptation of dominating the Universe. A ridiculous claim, when they have not yet been able to know and master the planet on which they are born, live and die. And to all these communities - large and small, powerful and powerless - we say that definitive contact with us can only be established when it is clear that the Earth wishes to live in peace with itself and with others. And that, instead of traversing cosmic space with warlike and destructive intentions, it should dedicate its main efforts and resources to thoroughly understanding the characteristics and marvelous resources of its planet, the only way that it can one day, in turn, defeat Death, giving Life its only source of subsistence: that of the endless discovery of the immense and infinite wonders of the Universe.

Given in a mountainous massif on Earth, in the mind of an Earthly messenger, on the night of August 31 to September 1, 1981.

A POSTSCRIPT TO A MESSAGE
If our daily work  does not sparkle with poetic brilliance, it is not Life that we will live but, day after day, Death will come our way.

					||				Henry-David Thoreau.

«Perhaps all civilizations considerably more advanced than ours have achieved effective personal immortality and have lost the motivation to wander through interstellar spaces, which, for all we know, may be a typical need of adolescent civilizations,» wrote Carl Sagan.[12

I remember that, in the early 1950s, the so-called UFO phenomenon began to occupy increasingly important spaces in all kinds of media and, very particularly, in magazines with a more or less sensational tone. I was living in the south of France at the time and, as a writer of literary scripts for the cinema, I made frequent trips to Paris. In one of them, in the spring of 1950, I came across a French magazine, Noir et Blanc, in whose pages I saw for the first time some drawings depicting supposed flying saucers, accompanied by a text that was passably fanciful, but which, in my opinion, had its own charm. For me, at least, it did, since on October 31, 1952, I deposited with the Society of Film Authors in Paris a literary script (registered under number 13,829), entitled Adventure on Venus (and later, after a revision, Destination: Venus), inspired a little by the report in Noir et Blanc, but in which I had let my imagination fly, starting from some questions that anyone, in that situation, could ask themselves: Why shouldn't there be other inhabited planets? And if there were: Why couldn't their inhabitants be more civilized, happy and perfect than us?

And if this is so, why this insistence on relating to us who, every now and then, throughout our history, were more than showing that we were neither civilized, nor intelligent, nor, of course, happy, and that we were increasingly further away from perfection?

Now that I am ready to be honest, I will say that another of my sources of inspiration for writing my script, in which the subject was treated by me as a musical comedy, was a film from the 1930s, entitled The Last Man on Earth, starring, if I remember correctly, Conchita Montenegro and Raoul Roulien, who were Spanish actors based in Hollywood. I clarify: in both cases they were rather light inspirations, let's say from the start, which one updated and, if possible, anticipated in time and space, since I pointed out "realities" that have later been confirmed.

I must also point out that, from then until now, almost thirty years ago, the subject of UFOs never particularly attracted me. To say that I did not have a single book dedicated to them in my well-stocked library says it all. I read carefully, of course, everything that fell into my hands (magazines, newspapers.), as one reads something that is already taken for granted, but which one finds, for the average person, still has a certain mysterious aura and is awakening increasing interest. It was now, after the encounter with the crew of an extraterrestrial spaceship, that, for four months, I have immersed myself in "specialized" books and magazines. More than anything to see what levels the UFO subject was going through at ground level and to what extremes of fantasy - or morbidity - the earthlings had reached, who, apparently, are so interested and passionate about the subject in question. I must confess that I was greatly disappointed. I will go into details later. Now let us limit ourselves to adding a few notes to the ultimatum message.

The famous young researcher Carl Sagan is the author who has impressed me the most. And not only because of his work, which seems to me to be extremely important, but also because of his sincerity. He does not mince his words and, above all, he is capable of asking a series of questions which, according to my own experience, contain the essence - or rather: the essences - of Life in other worlds. 1

Sagan points out the possibility of "immortality in other civilizations." This is the point that surprised and astonished me the most in the mouths of the extraterrestrials: the statement that for them Death did not exist and, consequently, neither did Time or Space. And when Sagan speaks of "perhaps they have lost the motivation to wander through interstellar space," leaving the question hanging in the air, they answer us in the message, when they speak to us of the main incentive of their lives: the endless discovery of the immense and infinite wonders - and resources - of the Universe. Discoveries that complete their already deep and extensive knowledge of the Cosmos and its latent and changing life.

Having made these clarifications, it is possible that reading the communiqué from other worlds will be more enriching. But there is still more: and it is that at this point no one can doubt that their technological resources - those of the
extraterrestrials—are inconceivable, at least from our coordinates and through our traditional parameters. On the other hand, because of the way they use these resources—appearing and disappearing before us, without harming anything or anyone, like a pure cosmic exhalation—one can suspect, and even affirm, that, in effect, they are people of peace. While we, the earthlings, no one can deny that we are precisely the opposite: people of war. This is what, without a doubt, allowed the German philosopher Kant to coin this statement: “Peaceful coexistence among men is not a natural state; its real condition is rather war.” Thus, as long as the inhabitants of planet Earth are dominated by the destructive and exterminating attitude that we have displayed since our origins, how are we going to pretend to live with other communities whose main reason for being is the cult of life? 

Moreover, now, when a little less than a hundred grams of TNT per head of Earthling would be enough to blow the Earth into millions of pieces, in 1981 we were already dealing with several kilos of the tremendous explosive per capita and in 1981, not content with having fully assured the destruction of our planet, we are preparing to export this capacity for annihilation to the Cosmos.  Are there or are there not reasons to despair of Earth civilization? The most suspicious commentators—among those who do not believe in the existence of other worlds—cannot, however, avoid asking the eternal questions: “If extraterrestrials really exist, why don't they make themselves known? And why don't they enter into negotiations with us?”

Carl Sagan, laconically, gives us a complete answer: “. or perhaps there exists in the galaxy a certain ethic of non-interference with backward or emerging civilizations. Perhaps there is a waiting period before we consider it appropriate to make contact, in order to give ourselves a good chance of self-destruction, if that is what we are going to do.

Indeed, as Sagan points out, there is an ethic of non-interference. They have repeatedly demonstrated this by their behavior. At least in the matter of “not interfering negatively.” And this is so much so that, in the course of our long and substantial conversation, they never once allowed themselves to take sides, either directly or indirectly, for anything or anyone—sharply, that is—in relation to Earth affairs. And when we spoke of ordinary things—for example: love—they were very careful not to tell me that “love is an immeasurable farce rooted in religion or metaphysics.” (that is why it gives the “loving results” generally known to all), but they limited themselves to speaking to me of “companionship” as the highest feeling of human relations on the planets that are part of the Harmonious Universal Brotherhood. But let us not anticipate.

Now they do it – they interfere – through this ultimatum message, because it is we who intend to invade their space – which is also our space, as they stressed to me several times – and interfere in their lives with bellicose ambitions. Therefore, no one should be surprised that, in the last few decades, what was once a mere observation of the ideas and comings of the earthlings, has now been transformed into close surveillance. Certainly, observed from above, our comings and goings must constitute a very depressing spectacle. On the one hand, this suicidal – and unprofitable – accumulation of destructive means, which has far exceeded the maximum level of our “needs.”[13 And, on the other, the total lack of originality in the manufacture of these apocalyptic resources, and this despite so many technological advances.

The inhabitants of the Earth, even though they have set foot on the Moon, instead of taking off from their secular mediocrity —morally speaking—, have been entering into a desolate dead end: that of their self-destruction. Because, among other misdeeds of "setting", they have committed that of adulterating and discrediting their own language, rendering obsolete the formulas of contact and understanding to which small groups of other earthlings were breathing, despite everything, some breath of life. And thus all the areas of human coexistence have dangerously cracked. They have decapitated hope and, in the field of creation, they make a total lack of communication and a growing and frightening emptiness reign.

The key question of the message remains: what is the superpower that, apparently, already has spaceships ready, prepared to transport all kinds of highly destructive artifacts? Beyond more or less reliable press reports - since psychological poisoning remains a very efficient weapon of war - it matters little to know this, because, as we have seen in the arms race, we all know how the spiral of violence develops. Whatever the accused power, everything leads us to fear that "the other" will not be long in coming, —if it has not already done so— in turn having ships capable of endangering the harmonious cosmic order. Which means that the warning contained in the message is valid for the two great terrestrial superpowers. And also for all those who dream of emulating them. Because, the truth is that it is tragicomic that miserable countries, such as India among others, instead of devoting their already scarce resources to alleviate the tremendous misery that their populations suffer, insist on wanting to possess their personal atomic bomb.[14

Caricature by the author. «To Eduardo Pons Prades, great astronomer of political constellations, his companion in the Milky Way Goñi 1965.» (Why did my good friend add this cosmic dedication to this vision of the Francoist environment? Could Lorenzo Goñi be an extraterrestrial «avant la lettre»?

Eduardo Pons Sistemas (Valencia 1895, Barcelona 1936). He was one of the founders of the Single Union of the Wood Processing Branch (National Confederation of Labor).

He was a cabinetmaker specialized in artistic or style chairs.

Gloria Prades Nuño (Valencia 1896, France 1972). She was the «classic» companion of the union fighter, acting most of the time in anonymity, but whose presence in the labor struggles was invaluable.

She was «telephone operator in chief» of the Department of Labor of the Generalitat from 1932 to 1939.

AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY.
(Night of August 31 to September 1, 1939) 1981).

I am convinced that extraterrestrial beings who observe the Earth have visited us for millennia in what are now called flying saucers. These objects are conceived and piloted by intelligent beings of a very high level.
						Hermann Oberth («father» of German space rockets). See also this.

That day, August 31, 1981, at a little after eight in the evening (six solar time), I set out on the road. But, leaving the private road of the hotel, where I had left my companion, I had to turn left and head, after passing through the town of Prats de Molló, towards Perpignan, where I planned to spend the night and leave the next morning for Barcelona. This was due to the enormous eye strain that driving at night causes me. But without knowing why, I turned right. That is: along the road that leads to the border and in the direction of Barcelona, ​​via Camprodon.

After about a quarter of an hour, and also without any reason, just before reaching the border I left the national road and went into a forest road, which I drove on for two or three minutes until the car engine stopped and the headlights went out. I calculated the time and distances to which I refer here six days later, when I went to visit the place of the meeting and to take some photographs. I immediately started the car two or three times without any of the engine parts giving the slightest sign of life. And it is reasonable to think that I pressed the button for the lights in a certain nervousness, since I kept it in my hand. Then I got out of the car and walked a hundred steps towards the interior of the forest. Then I returned to the point of departure, without having seen or heard anything, and sat on the front of the car, as if waiting for something or someone. I will say that I suddenly thought of them, of the aliens, but seeing no lights or anything that would give away their presence, I dismissed this idea without really knowing what to think.

It didn't take me long to start walking again in the same direction as before, until I reached a bend about 150 metres away. It was still getting light. But I hadn't quite got past the bend when suddenly the right side of the grove, which extended on both sides of the path, lit up - flooded with light, would be more appropriate to say. It was a veritable sea of ​​light, in which, although white predominated, there were also bands of pink and orange. Although, at times, in the rays of light, a multitude of colours difficult to define were mixed together. It was like a symphony of changing rainbows, quickly and smoothly at the same time. A curious detail: although, as I have already pointed out, I am extremely bothered by the headlights of other cars when I travel by road, I must admit that I did not feel any discomfort at all from that unsurpassed display of luminosity, and the fantastic waterfall of colours not only did not surprise me but acted on me like a delicious sedative. If I had to find an example, I would say that such a state only occurs when I listen to jazz or Brazilian music. From the first moment I had the feeling that all this, so unusual, was something familiar to me. My editor, when I spoke to him about it, spoke of "courage", of "recklessness". No, I think that, as far as I am concerned, what is happening is an unusual mixture of curiosity, undoubtedly the result of my early rationalist formation, and a certain burden of unconsciousness, accumulated throughout my eventful and exciting existence.

That is surely why I am so worried.
I walked towards the place where the light seemed to be coming from, with a slow but determined step, without leaving the path, although I soon realized that the light was coming from inside the grove. It took me a little more than a minute to reach the edge of a meadow, which was where the light was coming from, and from there I began to make out the silhouette of an enormous spaceship. About 50 to 75 meters wide. The light came from the top and the bottom of the ship. So I jumped from the path into the meadow and remained enchanted for a few seconds. As the two wide beams of light slowly faded, I heard a voice—in correct Spanish, with a sing-song, somewhat musical tone—that said to me:

—Don't be afraid. Come closer, please.

Then, as naturally as I could, I approached the ship, whose base was now illuminated by a powerful white and pink light source, which came out through an open door in its "underbelly", from which a kind of ramp soon emerged. I headed towards it and as soon as I reached the bottom of the "ladder" I stopped and looked up, perceiving at the door a tall body shape, surrounded by a kind of multicoloured halo. Immediately I heard the voice again:

—Don't be afraid. Come aboard our ship, we wish to speak with you.

The mechanical ramp took me up to the top, to the door, which was situated about 4 or 5 metres from the ground. Before that I had been able to see that the ship was resting on four legs, which seemed to be tubularly articulated. From what I could see, the ship was a rather dark metallic colour. As I crossed the entrance the voice said to me:

—Welcome aboard the ship Light of the Cosmos!

And with a gentle gesture, of the three who were waiting for me, the one closest to me—who later turned out to be a woman—indicated some seats in the center of that immense room, placed around an oval-shaped table. The first impression I had, which “struck” me, in view of the whiteness of it all, was that it was a plastic apparatus. Now, seeing them move beside me, I could already speak of human bodies, since, at least, they had a torso, a head, two arms and two legs. They were dressed in a kind of white jumpsuit, very tight to the body, and shod in boots—also white—that seemed to be made of canvas. I never observed the slightest wrinkle or crease in their attire. On their chests, at the level of their hearts, they wore an emblem in the center of which was a circle, a shining, multi-colored, multi-prism eye, which never stopped flashing for a single instant, and on which my gaze would often remain fixed.

In the distance, about 6 or 7 meters away, at the back of the room, to my right, I saw four more crew members moving around in front of a large screen, on which little lights of all colors kept going on and off, as if they were manipulating buttons on that huge "control panel" that was at the foot of the luminous screen. Later, one of them joined us at the table, around which we had already been sitting silently for a long time. When they sat down, they had become motionless, like statues. I won't say that they were "looking at me" - they were 2 or 3 meters away - because the halo prevented me from seeing their eyes - which I would later discover -; I could barely see the outline of their face, since they were wearing a small helmet. It was undoubtedly a measure of "acclimatization." I felt it as if they had been telling me: "Be assured that here, among us, you will feel at home." And to do this, naturally, the best way was to let myself be watched, and to observe and try to capture everything around me. One of the things that struck me most was the silence that reigned in the room. From time to time I fixed my gaze on the four crew members who were busy in front of the large luminous screen. They moved and gestured - this would be the general tone of all the crew members while I lived with them - slowly. They seemed like characters in a film projected in slow motion. I also looked very closely at the table in front of me. And, as Earthly pride was still a must, at all times I tried to compare what I saw with what could be its equivalent on Earth. The table looked like those we see in radio studios, with several handles, and from the center emerged some retractable screens, on one of which I could admire several documentaries that dealt with, among other things, their travels, the receptions that the populations of the planets they visited had reserved for them, popular festivals, mini-saucer dives into the seas, and several other episodes, most of the time with extraterrestrial people and other times with earthlings as the main protagonists.

I also counted several doors that I did not see open even once. Behind me, at the foot of the wall, there was a kind of semicircular console, with a table of the same shape and half a meter high.

ten little armchairs similar to mine. Perhaps half an hour passed like this. I can't say exactly, because I felt like I had lost track of time. Now, every time I think about it, I think it was because I felt very comfortable, even though everything around me had something mysterious and fantastic at the same time. Maybe because I had a premonition of what I was going to discover on board that extraterrestrial spaceship. When I stopped my visual inspection, I stared at them. And although I couldn't decipher what expression dominated their faces, I felt their gazes on me very well. After a while, I heard the voice again:

"Would you be willing to take a message from us for the inhabitants of Earth?"

I answered affirmatively without thinking twice.

And I added:

"Now, if you'll allow me, I'll go to the car to get some paper and my pen."

"No, it's not necessary." We will engrave the message in your mind. If you agree to it, of course.

I told them that I didn't see the slightest problem. A few minutes of silence passed, but I realized that they were talking to each other: the three crew members and the fourth, who had just joined us and who was always standing, leaning on the back of the center chair. I observed how they tilted their heads, as if looking at each other, but I didn't hear any noise, not even the slightest voice.

Then the newcomer approached me—I saw that she was a woman because of the shape of her body and her long reddish-brown hair, which I discovered through the multi-colored halo as she came so close to me—and placed a helmet on me that was shaped like a rabbi's cap. The first words I heard through the helmet's headphones were these:

—We don't think you're in any serious danger, but the strong impressions that your mind is going to be subjected to could cause you some complications. If you agree to take that small risk, don't move. But if not, you can take off your helmet yourself, get out of our ship, get back in the car and continue your journey in peace.

I stood still. I thought that I had faced so many dangers throughout my life, and sometimes, possibly, for reasons much less important than that one. On the other hand - why deny it? - such a situation amused me and, with each passing minute, my curiosity to know how it would all turn out increased. The truth is that I could not call curiosity the feeling that had gripped me from the moment I discovered the flying saucer parked in that meadow. And if it is true that they compressed many images into my mind, it is no less true that, before they put the helmet on me, I was already very worried about seeing how I would manage to retain in my mind everything I was seeing and what it was not difficult to sense that I still had to see.

Knowing the skepticism and distrust that most people tend to display when faced with any unusual event, I am convinced that my desire to retain those fantastic experiences in my mind was focused on my personal recreation and, perhaps, to share them with a good friend of mine. One - let me recall - has known countless disappointments and setbacks - dealing with more tangible matters - to harbor too many hopes regarding the ability of my "countrymen" on Earth to strive to understand others and, even less, to be willing to draw from our personal experiences healthy lessons for everyone. So, in this unusual situation, one cannot pretend anything else - let me warn you - than to narrate, as plainly as possible, what one saw, what one heard, and the memories and reflections that our long, pleasant and even amusing conversation aroused in me. And nothing more, but to thank the reader friend for the attention paid to my story.

And I must stress that I will do my best to ensure that these pages, despite everything, exude optimism.

Point on the Prats de Molló-Camprodón highway where I turned off on August 31, 1981, shortly before nine o'clock at night, towards the Alto Vallespir forest road.

Entrance to the forest road. Just as you enter, on the right, you can see a couple of dozen metal beehives.

A LONG CONVERSATION AND ITS LONG SILENCES

It is of no use to achieve security, in relation to men, if celestial things and subterranean things and everything in the limitless Universe continues to be the object of confused ideas.

Lucretius.

In this age of moral poverty, the fundamental thing is to awaken enthusiasm.

Picasso.

You have to love Life to love Space.

Kazuaki Twasaki.

ON BOARD A SPACESHIP FROM ANOTHER WORLD

Suddenly the voice said to me:

—We have already entrusted you with the message.

—That sounds more like an ultimatum to me.—I ventured.

—It is both at the same time, and we are very sorry to have been forced to write it in those terms.

At the moment I could not locate where that message came from.

voice. It seemed to me that it came from the top of the room and at times that it came from the center of the table that separated me from them.

During the "recording" of the message, which they did with some slowness, I had been able to read it perfectly and I must confess that its content alarmed me greatly. But one, who rarely loses his optimism (he may have something of that "cosmic fluid" that, according to them, some earthlings possess)[16, would end up calming down when thinking that, by spreading the message, he might contribute to avoiding worse evils.

"What do you want us to talk about?" asked the voice.

Many questions were running through my head and now that I could give them vent it seemed as if, as they struggled to get out all at once, none of them managed to detach themselves from the tumult. That is why I remained silent for a few minutes. I want to make a caveat: when I speak of “time,” “moments,” “minutes,” etc., I always do so by approximation and with a time span (the seven hours I estimate to have spent in his company) as a point of reference, because the truth is—and I am still aware of this even now—that there, in his ship, I lost not only the notion of time but even that of my geographical location. I mean: that although when I boarded that spaceship it was “anchored” to planet Earth, while I was there I had the sensation of finding myself in a world very different from my own; among people whose mental configuration had very little to do with the one that usually dominates on Earth. The truth is that I wanted to ask them many things and I didn’t know where to start. At last I began: “I would like to know where you come from., if there are many inhabited planets besides yours., how you have organized your lives and, above all, how you have managed to overcome death., and other things that I will remember later.” The voice, always sweet and sing-song, answered: “If you are referring to the last planet we visited before arriving on Earth, we will tell you that it was the Bright Green, so called because it is full of rivers and lakes[17. We come from different planets. Four of us are from the Ivory-White planet, two are from Violet-Flower and the other is precisely from Bright-Green. And it is very possible that none of us will ever set foot on our home planet again. Although if there are reasons for that we can be in communication with them at any time and by various means.”

“So you will never see your families again.?”

“Families, as you understand them, do not exist in our world. We live in a community regime on an interplanetary scale. Which means that when we are born we become part of the community to which our parents belong, until our experiences take us to other places, but without being tied to anyone in particular and to everyone at the same time. Do you understand? [18

The truth is that I did not quite understand it, because it is always difficult to get rid of earthly traditions and atavisms and to have our minds completely available to assimilate the unusual. Even - as I have been able to verify a priori and a posteriori - when it comes to people who consider themselves - or boast - to be progressive and who, faced with facts that go beyond the framework of their routine doctrinal ramblings, react like authentic retrogrades.

"There are many inhabited planets," the voice continued. "Each one of them with unique characteristics, which are what give it its name. As you would say: there are richer ones and there are poorer ones. One of them, for example, is the so-called Golden Desert, which we visited not long ago. If we were to look only at its surface, it is rather poor-looking, like your Sahara desert, but inside we can discover immense lakes whose waters have great sedative powers. That is why it has very few inhabitants. But there, in addition to having several observatories and many reference points for our navigation, they have set up spas for the people of our community.

—But all that, on a planetary scale, would require a monstrous organization, I cut.

—Nothing monstrous, comrade. Just a rational organization, in permanent readjustment and improvement, in which any member of our great community never feels like a stranger. Let us give you another example: since everyone knows that they can and should collaborate in the improvement of our respective existences, let us take the case of one of our comrades who is entrusted with the control of the health of one of these lakes. That he will be very attentive to his mission is unquestionable, but also that if he notices the slightest anomaly anywhere else he will immediately activate the alert device, because he knows very well, as he has been taught at school, that nothing that happens around him can be foreign to him. And he also knows that nothing should be underestimated, no matter how slight its abnormality may be, and that,

r therefore, you must do everything in your power to return to normal. Do you understand?

Naturally I understood, since, as I was able to verify, they used perfect Spanish. (Another "direct witness" spoke of "chemically pure Spanish."). The thing is that, at first glance, it was hard for me to believe all this, to be honest. Then I thought that, given the resources that we earthlings have, we could perfectly set up such an organization on a planetary scale. On condition, of course, that we had first corrected the tremendous and insulting social injustices that exist on Earth  And let's not even talk about if the Earth were to join a cosmic community! But I was still obsessed by what seemed to be the basis of such an organization. And so I put it to them.

First stretch of the forest road, which I drove slowly, despite it being “private land of the State” and “no entry allowed.”

Point on the road where my car stopped and my headlights went out.

HUMAN COMMUNITIES WITHOUT A FAMILY BASE

As we have already told you —the voice continued—, the basic cells of our communities are the groups formed by affinity of experiences. You would surely say by “professional or family obligations.” We will give you another example: before coming to Earth to carry out the double mission of exploring your planet and monitoring it, we piloted a much smaller ship than this one, dedicated to interstellar exploration.

And now, when we return from this mission, it is very possible that our crew will disband, at least for a certain time. One of our companions is in the gestation period, which means that she will be cared for on the first stage-planet that we visit, until the day of delivery. It is possible that one day he will join us again. The mere fact that we have been fellow travelers during some mission could explain why we are interested in the evolution of his condition.

And, after a brief silence, the voice continued:

—One of our companions will join another of our crewmates, which means that, at the first place we land, they will separate from us and will have time to live or travel as they please through space, visiting those planets that please them, with the certainty that they will be received everywhere as true brothers. Do you understand?

I understood it, of course I understood it, but my complicated earthling mind kept splashing those beautiful pictures with insolent questions, which I asked myself: But how can communities of any kind be formed without family ties? 2

And do they get married when they want, without asking anyone's permission, and then get married when they feel like it, and that's it? And how long do these honeymoons last? And who sets the duration of the trip? And do they go on a trip through space, just like that, without anyone marking out an itinerary for them?

A UNIVERSAL FRATERNITY

Although the truth is that a libertarian should not have been surprised by anything he was hearing, since the fraternal society that we always dreamed of, and for which we have fought so hard, had as its motto: "From each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs[19". Which means that, at an early stage of this evolution towards universal brotherhood (an important detail: people with little or no culture were already talking about "universal brotherhood"), those who, for whatever reason, have a greater capacity for understanding, for organisation, for work and for understanding human problems, should put this creative power at the service of everyone. While those who are less well-endowed, or less well-endowed - which they are, almost always, because of age-old social injustices - should be able to access everything that allows them to be happy, free and, naturally, to overcome their primary impotence with the same ease as those who are better-endowed.

I already know this - because the "wise men" and the "cretins" repeat it to us daily, in unison, although with different arguments - is the Great Utopia. But it is curious that these days —while I was typing the original of this book—, in a very popular Spanish television broadcast, one of the characters —who was supposed to come from "another world"— was made to say: "I come from a place where he who has, gives, and he who has not, takes[20".

Perhaps because I had been able to see how difficult it would be to carry out this revolution on Earth, it was now so difficult for me to admit that, on another planet, such a society could be a reality. What I had no doubt about, however, was that as I talked with them, an immense happiness took hold of me. A happiness very different from any I have ever experienced in my life. But, nevertheless, I

I still stood my ground.

—I understand it, and I don't quite understand it, to be honest, because if two beings get together, that means they're going to form a family.

—Not at all, my friend, because it's possible that one of the two, on that trip, decides to stay, for whatever reason, on the planet where they're spending, to put it in your words, "the honeymoon." On the other hand, if when a couple procreates, both, or one of the two, wishes to be assigned to the planet where the child is being formed, that assignment will be given without delay. Because the community must always respect the intimate desires of the person, as long as he or she knows how to harmonize his or her desires with his or her work. Do you understand now?

—Not completely, because, as I see, in your world there reigns such individual freedom that I can't conceive how even minimal obligations towards the community can be fulfilled. Because the individual must have some obligation towards the community. Or not?

—Of course he or she does. But it is not an obligation, as you earthlings understand it, but a personal experience that is guided, at a given moment, by what we could call the “planning of the universal community”.

“And who manages that planning?” I interrupted.

“Well, in reality it is a network of computer-coordinators.

“We would call that “robotic bureaucracy”” I interrupted again, with a hint of insolence (of which, in truth, I was immediately ashamed). “Something really frightening to imagine,” I added, “at least for freedom-loving earthlings 3

I confess that I fell once again —and it would not be the last— into one of our many “set phrases.” Because if at that moment they had asked me what kind of freedom I was referring to, they would have certainly put me in a difficult position, since we "progressives" have fallen into the trap that the "retrogrades" have set for us: that of referring to freedom - and so many other things! - always in abstract terms. When what we should always be talking about is the fundamental, concrete freedoms of the human person, which, together, form Freedom. As they would later point out to me.

- That would be true if only the chosen or the privileged were in charge 4. But there we have neither one nor the other. There, all of us, without exception, are in a position to pass through the control panels of the coordinators, since it is something that we learn from a very young age in school. It should also be noted that we never put anything into action, however attractive or seductive the project may seem to us, without it being provided with its respective elements of control and neutralization and, if necessary, self-destruction. Elements that are of human pulse in all cases. No mechanism can escape our control, however harmless it may seem. We have humanized technology[21. Do you understand now?

—Yes, but at every step we take, I am faced with new questions. For example: how do you organize the education of children? And does this kind of free love that you apparently practice never cause friction or confrontation?

THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN. AND FREE LOVE

Your reaction does not surprise us in the least because you do not know the kind of education that our boys and girls receive from an early age. As soon as they begin to have the use of reason: from the age of four or five. Without the slightest discrimination, boys and girls receive a double education: vocational and necessary. Often both coincide. But the essential thing, the key, is that every boy and girl knows from a very young age that the necessary education is what will place them in a place of service to the community tomorrow. Meanwhile, with their vocational education, they will fill what you call "leisure time," although it is worth pointing out that, given their general education, these "times," in addition to promoting and developing the blossoming of their full personality, in harmony with their environment, will in some way contribute to enriching what, if we understand it well, we could call, using your words, the cultural heritage of the community.

"By 'necessary' we would understand 'obligatory'.

"You do," replied the voice, "but we do not, since every child, at all times, has within his reach the example of those who help him to form himself. In other words: he guides others by always giving the example. That is the key: you cannot ask anyone for anything if you are not first willing to give everything you can give. Do you understand? 5

—I suppose that sports must play an important role in the lives of your children.

—Good. Sports are important for everyone: for the little ones and for the big ones. It is something that is part of our daily experiences.

—And what kind of sport do you practice?

—Later you will be able to see some practiced yourself. But we anticipate that the attitude with which we practice sports has nothing to do with the attitude of our children.

with the one who dominates on Earth. The notion of competitiveness has no place in our lives at all[22. We practice the sport that best suits our way of being, our physiological needs, and for our enjoyment and fun.

I immediately realized that I had gotten myself into quite a mess, because. what could I say to him, in relation to “our sports” and to the “sportsmen” of Earth? I found myself with another of our subjects completely distorted. Starting with the Olympic maxim of Baron de Coubertin: “The important thing is to participate.” Now, both for the practitioners and for the fans of any sport, “the important thing is to win.” Whatever it may be: bribing left and right, even threatening violence or the kidnapping of prominent players, or death - as happened to the Swedish tennis player Borg in America - with brutality by the bucketful, shouting, yelling, insulting, blaspheming, attacking the moderators or directors of the game, hitting them and sometimes even trying to lynch them.

And from the collective - team - results we move on to the cruel obsession with individual records, to achieve which the selected athletes are subjected to a lifestyle of authentic slaves of sport. Well, in short, all this can be called anything but sport. In any case, it is another palpable example of our degeneration. In other words: in this matter we could not give the slightest lesson to other civilized communities. I remained silent for a while and then I came up with another topic:

—Well, we still have to deal with free love.

—Well, that, in essence, is the result of the same childhood education. Children, from a very young age, are given the doors of knowledge wide open, without blinkers of any kind, and they are taught that in our communities no one is the owner or proprietor of anything or anyone. And that, therefore, no one, in any field, can dominate anyone or exercise power over anything.

—So procreation would be an almost mechanical act? Which is what the Catholic Church has always advocated. Because, since love or affection, or whatever it is that unites the couple in your world, seems to be something so fleeting and so fickle at the same time.

—Not at all, my friend. Couples are formed because there is an affinity that does not need to be described. Two beings are attracted to each other because some coincidence is evident between them that brings them closer and incites them to become intimate and to culminate the rapprochement as they best feel and understand it. The sexual act that can determine procreation, if they wish it, will have been propitiated by other previous acts of setting the scene, by which the way is taken, or not, to that union. This may seem complex, but in reality it is not. At least for us who, as you can see, always act spontaneously and naturally.

This last stretch of the path (70 to 80 meters long) is the one I walked twice. The second time was after the sea of ​​multicolored light had exploded in the sky and through the trees in the background, where the path turns to the left.

This is the clearing where the extraterrestrial spaceship was perched, about 50 to 75 meters in diameter and 10 to 15 meters high.

DEATH. WILL IT ALWAYS BE SOMETHING IRREVERSIBLE? [23

The first long silence of the night fell here. As if they guessed that I needed to concentrate in order to continue asking questions. And, in particular, the big question. Because, the truth is, that having conquered death was something so fantastic, so unexpected, so fabulous, that it exceeded everything that the human imagination, however fertile and exuberant it might be, would be capable of conceiving. [24

I remained looking at them, one after the other, at the four of them on the opposite side of the table, trying to see beyond the vaporous halo that enveloped their bodies. As if trying to guess if, in reality, they were people of flesh and blood or perhaps mechanical dolls, or perhaps half and half.

Suddenly, I was reminded of the good Monsieur Garric, a competent farmer from the South of France, from whom I learned the art of cultivating and tending a vineyard in the years 1939-1941. He was one of the survivors of the famous and bloody battle of Verdun – one of the greatest war carnages in history – in which he had been seriously wounded. A burst of machine gun fire had destroyed his stomach and part of his intestines, and from then on he lived, ate and digested thanks to a goat stomach that had been grafted onto him. And also by means of intestines – “pipes” he called them, laughing at his own shadow – restored as “miraculously” as the rest of his shattered organs. And I asked myself: could this have made good Monsieur Garric less human than another person with his original organs intact?

So, I said to myself, why shouldn't it be possible for these beings to carry part of their



During the time that this incomparable and impressive silence lasted, I could not say how many questions ran through my mind. Because I was still determined to find the one that would somehow put them between a rock and a hard place. I needed answers that would not awaken new mysteries in me. I did not yet realize that the prolongations of the "mysteries" that I was facing were not the result of their answers but of my insufficient capacity for understanding and assimilation. Of our deformed and deficient way of asking questions.

I kept repeating all this to myself as I pondered: how is it possible that no one, no group of inhabitants of the Earth, ever —as far as I know— had ever thought that the only great victory that the human race could achieve was precisely that: to conquer death? How was it possible that the earthlings who did not profess any religion, nor belong to any sect —including, naturally, the great secular thinkers— had simply accepted the irreversibility of death, that fatality of an eminently religious nature? How have they not realized that the other successes are nothing more than Pyrrhic victories?

Yes, I know, I know that I can be told that “man is made of perishable matter” and that a long rosary of scientific or pseudoscientific formulas could be recited before me to prove to me that pursuing that goal, enjoying infinite life, is something that is beyond human possibilities. However, these pages could also contain the repeated echoes - reflected in scientific journals, books. - of countless blind attempts made by "specialists" in all kinds of research, not to mention the discoveries made by pure chance. But, in reality, that was not exactly where I was going.

However, we thought it would be interesting to reproduce in an  a news item, referring to the research of the Soviet Institute in kyiv [appendices 6 and 7

A UTOPIA EVERY DAY.

In reality, one was thinking first of all about another aspect of the question. I was cherishing the incredible perspectives that would be offered to us if we had made a one hundred and eighty degree turn in the meaning of our life. He told me: if someone had even sketched out this utopia as achievable - even if its scope were thousands or millions of years away, it doesn't matter - and had managed to focus around it all the resources that Nature offers us and those that human beings are capable of creating, it is unquestionable that the earthlings would have been much less obsessed and mortified by the idea of ​​an inevitable and perhaps imminent end, and for that reason, I think, perhaps they would have yielded less to the temptation of practicing this obsessive and sterilizing cult of death. In particular by organizing wars. or letting millions of people perish from hunger or as victims of all kinds of epidemics. And let's not forget that the wars that have caused the most victims in the world have been the so-called "religious" ones.

Banish wars and definitively suspend this incessant and cruel holocaust of other people's lives, unleashed periodically, as if such massacres could be, for warriors, the guarantee of a better or longer life of their own. Placing this utopia in the sights of human beings would have been—would be—like setting before them, in the mind and heart of men and women, the most ambitious of objectives: an inexhaustible thirst for life, and getting them to dedicate to it, to Life, all their worries, their efforts and their know-how.

By orienting themselves, on the contrary, towards the most intricate twists and turns of dehumanization—despite, I repeat, the omnipotent presence of so many religious doctrines, which played at being a humanizing factor—the inhabitant of the Earth, with the prolongation of their life expectancy, on the one hand, and with the growing “vital anguish” on the other, the only thing they have achieved, to use the words of our admired Américo Castro, has been to prolong their mortifying “living in the throes of death,” which in the modern era has become “their daily bread.” And so, over time, man has replaced the essential part of his existence - living his life with ever-increasing fullness - with the banal, the frivolous, that is to say, everything that gives pleasures that are as superficial as they are fleeting.

More clearly: Man had to be offered this "entertainment", cosmic on all sides: that of harmonizing his existence in the image of the countless and inexhaustible resources of the Universe and trying to achieve immortality with his own hands.



Suddenly the right side of the grove lit up – it was flooded with light. It was a real sea of ​​light, in which, although white predominated, bands of pink and orange could also be seen.

Although, for a moment, in the rays of light a multitude of colours difficult to define were mixed., so I headed towards the place from which that light seemed to be coming.

SILENCE: A KEY TO SURVIVAL

But, let's see. apart from the therapies or organic modifications that may occur in your civilization, aren't there other reasons, let's say of a preventive and personal nature, that can help your bodies survive?

As the voice took a while to answer me, I began to think that perhaps I had made a mistake by insisting on the subject, and I could not help but have a certain amount of skepticism in the tone of my question. But no, that was not it. Little by little I was realizing the importance of the silences that were interspersed in our dialogue. It would not take long for me to learn a few more things about the vital value of silence, as a key to survival.

—Of course there are. One of them, the main one, is that, from an early age, boys and girls know their body thoroughly and learn to take care of it. Taking care of their body means: always being attentive to its most peculiar manifestations and treating it as what it is: as our best companion. This thorough knowledge of oneself facilitates the better identification of others and, therefore, the most appropriate harmonization of our respective bodies and, through them, of our experiences. Therefore, by looking after the health of each one's body, we also look after the health of the community. Furthermore, no one can determine the optimum moment of his personality, that is, the moment of definitive fixation of what will be his body “for immortality,” as you would say, better than the individual himself.

The voice was silent for a few minutes and then added:

—Well, apart from other measures, such as not smoking, not drinking alcohol and not taking drugs, we have physical exercise, appropriate to personal aptitudes, but there is another very important factor, which is the observance of complete silence —“cosmic silence” I will call it from now on—, which affects all phases of our existence.

“First of all, silence during regular rest. From very early on, we are taught, as we discover our body, to relax; in a word: to live and rest in harmony with the body and its environment. You would surely say “to master one’s own body.” It is this complete possession of oneself, relaxation with naturalness, which gives us total rest, with incomparable tonic and sedative effects.

»Silence, intelligently applied, helps to better preserve all organs, particularly the visual and auditory organs, while clarifying our mind. For example: there are many moments in our life that we can live with our eyes closed. And others with our ears covered. Look at the extreme care that earthlings often devote to their machines, those in the workplace or those for personal use, such as cars, and compare it with the little or no interest with which you take care of your bodies. Don't you consider this to be an unforgivable contradiction?

From the degree of indignation —“cosmic indignation” I will call it from now on, to give it a dimension in keeping with the magnitude of the outrage that provoked it— that suddenly took hold of me, I deduced that they were constantly stimulating my reflections and I, while I was amazed at having managed to amass in my mind so much “data” and “memories,” I wondered how I had not been able, before, long before, to detect so much lack of authenticity, since always, on Earth, around the existence of its inhabitants. There was not a single part of earthly life where there did not appear —and more often than not preponderantly— the fictitious, the inauthentic, the duplicity, the deceit, the most ridiculous self-satisfaction —because the deceiver of today ends up being the deceived of tomorrow—; In short, it was going to be very difficult for us to regain those identifying marks that the human beings of the Earth must have lost a long time ago [appendices 8 and 9

Without a doubt, to change my mind a bit and put a bit of joy into my body, the voice said to me:

—Now pay attention, please.

FIRST COLOR DOCUMENTARY                                      (primer docutmental en color)

In a matter of seconds, a small screen emerged from the center of the table in front of me; the lighting of the room was dimmed and from the front of my helmet came a kind of transparent, slightly smoked visor, which came down to the height of my chin. And the first color images appeared.
r on the screen. With its indescribable range of cosmic colours. And the voice said:

—We are on the planet Green-Crystal and we are witnessing the departure of three small ships that are going to explore your seas. They are piloted by boys and girls from the training centres. Each one of them has fifty passengers on board. They are going to spend a season at sea, to live with the fauna and flora of the great depths. There are minerals and vegetation of great importance for our research, and also colonies of certain aquatic species, trained to collaborate with us10

—So —I interrupted—, that you have bases on Earth, is it true?

—In a way, yes.

—How in a way?

—Of course, because if remaining underwater for a month or two or landing our ships on one of your high mountains or in unpopulated areas. if that is having bases, then we will have to answer yes, we have bases. But if that means living permanently among you, in certain places, as is the case with certain terrestrial powers, then no, it is not true that we have bases.

—Do you have them somewhere else.? On an asteroid or on a planet close to Earth?

—Yes, naturally, we have authentic space bases that move continuously or that are suspended in the air, according to our exploration programs.

—And they only serve as simple stopping points for you?

—Not at all. All our carrier ships are authentic laboratories and our activity, although it may seem redundant, is based on perfecting the resources destined to strengthen our organisms and improve our life, as well as enriching our knowledge of the places where we should live. Thus, as we gain greater immunity, we can undertake space explorations of unknown worlds. Always with the same objective: to marvel at the incessant discoveries we make, because the Universe, as we know, is infinite and generates wonders without ceasing; and the immense joy of finding more inhabited planets is not the least of these wonders.

—And, when you come across an inhabited planet, do you not have any problems?

—Of course problems arise. The inevitable ones of any unexpected contact. And then those that derive from its integration into our community and those that can arise on the fly, totally unpredictable.

—And have you never come across planets armed to the teeth, like Earth, whose leaders did not want to have relations with you?

The voice took some time to answer:

—Yes, it has happened sometimes. But never with weapons as dangerous as those currently possessed by Earth.

—And when that happened, what did you do, if I may ask?

—In that case we have not deepened our contacts. We have remained, as we do with respect to you, waiting.

—So, it is possible that there are inhabited planets in the Cosmos that are not integrated into your community?

—Of course there are.

—Could they not be populated by those aggressive little green men who, apparently, are seen from time to time on Earth and who also travel in flying saucers?

—It is very possible, although we must point out that sometimes we have sent small ships, in service of exploration, with entirely automated crews. Or remote controlled, if you prefer. And in many cases their metallic attire was precisely greenish in color.

—And they are the ones who, apparently, have attacked Earthlings on occasion?

—Well, our mechanical collaborators are programmed to defend themselves, but only if they are attacked, or to self-destruct if they are captured. They never attack first. we can assure you of that.

—But if your puppets show up like that, out of the blue, without warning, it is logical that my countrymen will be frightened and that fear will make them do something stupid.

—Yes, it is natural. These are the minimum inconveniences of these unexpected contacts.

—So no one has endangered the peace of the Cosmos like the leaders of the Earth?

—No; until now such a type of crisis was unknown to us.

—Well, but you, now that the danger is so evident, perhaps you could intervene before it was too late. For example: why not intercept, destroy or capture some of the ships manned by Earthlings? Or better yet: those that go without a crew. I say this because if there are no human victims the impact would be less unfavorable among the earthlings.

The answer came quickly and sharply:

—We cannot do that! The Universe belongs to everyone and, therefore, it is also yours! None of us would ever dare to commit the slightest aggression or violence against anyone without very powerful reasons for doing so!

—In case of self-defense! —I added.

—That's right, yes. And, even in such a case
So, we would do it with deep fear, because that would mean a regression for our community, a step back. In other words, we would fall into that cyclical, stupid and harmful game that you Earthlings practice, which is to resort to the destruction of life.

And our computer-coordinators would enter the dance, for the first time, with negative, destructive purposes, which is the opposite of what they have been built and programmed for.

—You don't mean to say that these gadgets also have sensitivity.!

—No, not at all. What we want you to understand is that, in our world, people and machines form a harmonious whole and that this is the fruit of millennia of purely peaceful work. And that any strange phenomenon or event, and even more so if it were of such dimensions, as could be an intervention of ours in some part of the Earth (he could have said: "against some nation"), would break that harmony, which is the basis of our coexistence and our life. Do you understand? It is as if within a family, and we are using another unit of measurement here so that you can understand us better, which is accustomed to living in peace and harmony, suddenly, the father or the mother - or both at the same time - began to get into a bad mood, to shout and to utter threats. It would be of little use to explain that all that unrest was caused by some neighbouring family. The reality would be, in any case, this: that the peace and harmony of that family, however exemplary the existence of its members, would be profoundly altered, disturbed. We do not know if this example is sufficiently clear.

—Yes. Naturally it is clear.

For no apparent reason I remained silent. And so did they. As if waiting for the obligatory postscript. And this would come naturally:

—Well, all this means that you will never provoke a preventive war.

—Exactly., neither preventive nor of any other kind.

One, let it be noted once again, has always moved among peaceful people. I mean: especially when I was with libertarian friends or colleagues. We were people of peace by vocation and training. But I give my word that never, in such a short space of time - Earth time, of course - had I heard so many songs of peace sung as in the few hours I spent chatting with them - men and women - in their spaceship[27

When silence fell again, the colour documentary came on again on the small screen.

I saw how the small ships glided towards the depths of the sea; slowly and with their lights very dimmed. When they reached the mouth of what seemed to be a large underwater cave, while one of the ships remained on guard at the entrance - the other remained above, between two waters, on duty as a guard, they explained to me - the third ship entered the cave. With the same slowness as before and with a very subdued light beam. As I watched that magnificent underwater landscape pass before my eyes, the voice explained to me:

—You must have noticed the slow pace of our ship and the poor light it uses to explore those depths.

—Yes, that's true —I answered immediately.

—Well, you should know that this is done to disturb the environment as little as possible and not frighten the fish. That way they don't run away, but continue living their normal life, accompanying us and facilitating our investigation. The same thing happens when we explore a forest. We must always respect the existence and, above all, the tranquility of the animal species. That way we are not feared and everything is easier. And not only the fauna, but we must also respect the flora. Do you understand? 11

I was embarrassed, that's the truth, because I couldn't help but think about the amount of gunfire that disturbs the peace of Nature, on Earth, as soon as the bans are lifted. I thought I could also hear the crazed barking of the sniffer dogs. And the thousands of other noises – most of them gratuitous – that man spreads throughout the environment.

Later, when I was on my way to Barcelona, ​​among the many questions I thought I could have asked them, was to find out if they were vegetarians. And I thought again about the cosmic peace in danger, thanks to the work and grace of the earthlings.

It took me a little more than a minute to reach the edge of a meadow, which is where the light was born, and from there I began to make out the silhouette of an enormous spaceship.

About 50 to 75 meters wide. The light came from the top and the bottom of the ship. So I jumped from the path into the meadow and I was as if enchanted., while the two beams of light slowly went out, I heard a voice – in correct Spanish, with a sing-song tone, somewhat musical – that said to me: “Do not be afraid. Please come closer."

I then approached the ship, whose base was now illuminated by a powerful white and pink light source, which seemed to be coming from an open door in its "underbelly", from which a kind of ramp soon emerged.

THE HARMONIOUS ORDER
IN COSMIC DANGER

—Does that mean —I asked— that death would reappear in your spaces, if these dangers were to materialize?

—It is not so much the reappearance of physical death that worries us, because we can quickly stop that danger, but something much more serious, such as the disruption of cosmic life, so harmoniously interwoven, and the destruction, on a greater or lesser scale, of that universal order on which our experiences flourish and develop. Take as an example the respect for the tranquility of all kinds of fauna and flora, which we spoke to you about, and the silence that is so important in our lives. The mere sound of a bomb would greatly alter the cosmic environment. It is something that you can hardly understand, because you cannot yet grasp the full grandeur of our peace.

In a meteoric vision they would parade before me, with images and sounds very much in keeping with them, that is to say: the thunderous noises invented by the earthlings that mortify our life - day and night - capable of altering and disarranging the organisms of any living species, on this Earth of our times and on any inhabited planet[28. But the truth is that I did not know what to say. My mind, however hard I tried, could not conceive the disastrous results of such a monstrosity: that we were capable of endangering the foundations of such a marvelous spatial architecture. Indignation once again gnawed at my insides more strongly than ever, when I thought of what life on Earth could be like if human beings, for the sake of the common good, proposed it.

I remembered, word for word, one of the most interesting and entertaining talks I heard about Nature during my time as a student, between 1931 and 1936. I owe it to my Natural History teacher at the CNT-FAI Militant School, Mr. Alberto Carsí Lacasa, in the 1936-1937 course. He was also one of the main promoters and organizers of the CENU (Consell de l'Escola Nova Unificada), and died in exile in the mid-1950s. In 1948, in France, when our old teacher and friend resumed his courses (but this time by correspondence) at his own risk and expense, with the new generations of young Spaniards in exile, he spoke to us again about Nature, and about what our behavior towards it should be, with the same words as before 12.

It is necessary to insist that this brief text be read and reread, the unmistakable work of the good Don Alberto, also an eminent geologist, a praiseworthy work that he shared with his brother Ricardo. A curious detail: the first was a complete atheist and the second a convinced Catholic. I had the opportunity to meet both of them and I confess that it would be very difficult for me to say which of the two was the better person. Both were goodness personified, that is the truth; perhaps because both sincerely believed in what they defended and, as I have said elsewhere, because they were of that breed of humans who preached by example. But let us return to Don Alberto's text. In it he speaks of "Nature as a source of life," and the word "harmony" is mentioned four times. He also speaks of "naturalness" and "sexuality," of knowing one's body and of all that sum of attitudes and actions centered on the march towards "Universal Harmony." Language, in short, identical to that used by the crew of the spaceship Light of the Cosmos.

Let it be clear, therefore, once again, that long before the extraterrestrials gave evidence of their existence and through a thousand different channels sent us their "messages" and "communications" of a fraternal and paternal tone, sometimes, on this Earth of ours, there was already a species of earthlings who had, to put it in newly coined words - in our long conversation and their prolonged silences - a lot of cosmic fluid from the chest inwards. Fluid that, by all means at their disposal, they tried to infuse into their fellow men. Such an attempt would lead to the firing squad, blessed by Spanish Catholicism - the firing squad, not the executed - in Montjuic, in 1909, among others, the founder of the Modern School, Francisco Ferrer Guardia.

Now the colour documentary was showing me the return of the sea-exploring ships to one of the stage planets, as they called them. There were many people in the landing area and I saw large tables of all kinds of fruit, very brightly coloured. They were men and women of smaller size than my companions. Some were light-skinned, like them, others somewhat olive-skinned and some dark-skinned. There were several groups singing and dancing, holding hands, in open circles, just as I have seen dancing in certain regions of Yugoslavia and Greece. I did not know where to look, in my eagerness to capture all the details. But as interesting as what I was seeing was, what amazed me most was seeing the faces of my four interlocutors. As I walked by, I saw the faces of my four interlocutors.

As he lowered his visor, the vaporous halo began to move away and reveal their features: those of two men and two women. They seemed to have Nordic-type faces, especially those of the men. The beauty of their features reminded me at times of certain ancient Greek statues. The women had a flatter nose and a less white complexion. It was difficult to give them a certain pigmentation; I suppose, because of the ambient light, which was generally very white, sometimes slightly interrupted by pink or blueish nuances.

They soon realized my astonishment.

"Did you think we were very different from you?"

I didn't know what to answer, because in reality I, personally, had never really known what kind of morphology was usually attributed to extraterrestrials. I was completely unaware of the variety of subjects noticed or contacted by earthlings. I continued to observe them. The two women looked like they were 25 to 30 years old, and the men were a bit older: one of them could be 40 to 45 years old and the other 30 to 35. Always measuring by our standards, of course.

The voice added:

—In our community there are groups that are different from us, but only in external appearance.

The fact is that I continued to project my "retrospectives" mentally at an incredibly fast pace. And, naturally, I remembered my school years, before July 1936. And I saw our field trips—take note: three half days a week—with the entire team of the Escuela Labor—about 80 boys and girls from 6 to 12 years old—guided by our teachers: Germinal, who was the director when he was not yet 20 years old, and his three assistants, also, like him, student teachers, the three under 20 years old 13.

For the first time I saw the person who was chatting with me through the untraceable translator smile. A device that, according to them, was capable of transmitting in all the languages ​​of the Earth and in the thousands of dialects used in its five continents. One time, I was asked if I wanted to continue the conversation in Catalan, French or the Oc language. His words seemed to me – watching him move his lips – more like babbling, but the Spanish translation was still sing-song, musical, with a very pleasant sound that, at times, still rings in my ears. I asked what language they used among themselves and they answered that they used a conventional sign code, particularly when communicating at a distance.

“Something like Esperanto?” I asked, without thinking too much.

“Well, yes, in part. We use language and signs indifferently. It all depends on the matter. Sometimes, as you could see in the documentary about the Green-Crystal planet, we also converse with our hands, as your deaf-mutes do with such harmonious elegance. Because silence, as we have already said, is very important for our sensorial balance and also for the environment.

The truth is that I had not captured all the images of that reception-party very well, always at the mercy, as I was, of the obsession to "file" as many impressions in my memory as possible. And I must have taken many of those signs-words as demonstrations of joy. However, when I observed how those people expressed themselves in that sense, I immediately remembered the effusive way of "sobamos" that we, the Mediterranean, usually practice when we say goodbye to loved ones or when we meet them.

I headed there - towards the ship - and as soon as I reached the foot of the "staircase" I stopped and looked up, perceiving at the door a tall bodily form, enveloped in a kind of multicoloured halo. Immediately I heard the voice again: "Do not be afraid. Come aboard our ship, we want to talk to you."

WITH A CENTRAL AMERICAN TRIBE
A Catalan reporter, Joaquín Grau, with the help of photographer Leopoldo Samsó, has offered us a wonderful book from which we are forced to transcribe several passages. Like this one: Life is much less terrifying than literature. The Aucas (a tribe reputed to be wild in the lands of the Eastern Ecuadorian Amazon) were simply giving me a lesson in healthy spontaneity. They do not form, like us (the "civilized"), a society of voyeurs; they have not repressed the sense of touch, they touch like a child touches another child. They absorb information through all their senses, especially through touch. It is not enough for them to see things and even less, like us, to see them, if possible, through the keyhole; things must be touched, direct contact must be established with them, felt, the purest and most intimate communion created. You have to touch. And they, especially men and children, patted my body, checked its texture, opened my pants, searched. And they laughed, laughed like children who had just discovered a new world. Quento —the guide, whose father was Quechua and whose mother was
auca—saved them all that discovery work. As soon as he reached the hut he took off his clothes and stood as naked as the aucas. I confess that I regret not having that spontaneity. Unfortunately, almost two thousand years of Judeo-Christian repression weighed heavily on me[29.

Grau and Samsó's book reached me on June 26, 1981, and shortly after reading it, I published a long illustrated review in the Diario de Barcelona. The selected texts had been underlined by me almost two months before my meeting with them. In view of so many coincidences in the essential approaches to human life, could it be suspected that the aucas are extraterrestrials or that they are related to them? 14

On the other hand, at this point one - and many people - is entitled to ask: how many senses have been annulled in us, not only by the Judeo-Christian repression - which is no small thing - but by all those "civilizations" that have taken over the world, with predominantly religious roots? And how many incalculable carats of spontaneity and naturalness have we lost along the rugged path that successive "civilizations" have traced and imposed on us throughout time? Until we ended up in this sad situation of "robots" with human appearance in which, with great strides, legions of human beings are falling. Remembering the nakedness of the Aucas, I asked another question:

-And those clothes that you wear, those overalls that look like uniforms, are they obligatory on your planets? Are there no nudists among them?

“Please pay attention,” the voice replied.

ANOTHER DOCUMENTARY

Images of people from the planet Deep Lakes—they told me—bathing naked in a lake began to appear before my eyes. I immediately realized that it was a small underground sea, surrounded by a kind of white modules, similar to the “igloos” of the Eskimos, with small holes that served as windows, and with entrances, but without doors. All of this surrounded by vegetation that gave the impression of having been miniaturized. I saw weeping willows that would not rise more than three meters from the ground. The ceiling of the lake seemed to be made of transparent plastic, and would be about ten meters above the water level.

“Clothes,” the voice pointed out, “are part of us at certain moments in our lives.” For example, this halo that you see around our bodies is only used when we approach Earth, as an immunization against your contaminations, the harmful effects of which even you are unable to calculate, and we can also use it as a protective shield if necessary. We just have to increase its density.

I couldn't help but say, with a hint of bad temper:

"So, you are not safe from accidents or breakdowns either?"

"Of course not. But any fault with us can be corrected on the fly thanks to our prevention systems. What we are most concerned about is not transporting Earth's contamination to other environments, which would create problems, but in no case irreversible results in any field."

For the first time, their words had taken on a somewhat joking tone - or so it seemed to me - which forced me to look up from the screen and look more closely at their faces, and I could see that, looking at each other, they were smiling.

—I don't know, but it seems to me that these images would be more beautiful with some music.

—That's true, sorry.

And immediately I heard the murmur, very soft, typical of a place where there are people bathing. I thought: I would like to see a football or rugby match, with these people so silent in the stands and on the grass. It would seem like a silent film.

The voice added:

—Well, unless you like to hear a particular kind of music.

That I had not yet absorbed much of the kindness of my hosts was demonstrated by the music I requested, as if to make it difficult for them, which was a record that I listened to every day while I was shaving, on the bridge between the 50s and 60s. I think I even hardened my voice a little to ask them for the Aranjuez Concerto performed by jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, with an arrangement by Bill Evans. What a surprise I had when I heard the first notes of such a beautiful piece of music, and its no less beautiful arrangement, join the last syllables of my request! I felt a great shame, to be honest, and even—why not say it?—a certain humiliation, thinking, once again, of our unfortunate earthly pride. And then a long silence fell again.

I kept watching them. And I noticed, in particular, the emblems they wore, I don't know if they were sewn, glued or embroidered on their chests, at the height of their hearts. They were about 12 to 15 centimeters high. Their profile, 3 or 4 millimeters wide, was black. Only what looked like an eye, in the center—the living eye called it—was visible.
I would call it—it was multicoloured, with bright and changing colours. It was a multi-prism eye. The first memory that came to mind was the green eyes—of a changing hue depending on whether the day was sunny or cloudy—that resembled little flowers in a permanent mutation of shades, of my first partner and mother of my four children. Those eyes, which were extinguished forever one day in July 1964, were also configured in an infinity of changing prisms, but the “eye” of these emblems was something very unusual. Looking at them, one had the sensation of sailing through space or swimming in the most exotic depths of the sea or a lake. It was a fascinating spectacle. At times they truly fascinated me. I then reproduced this emblem from memory and not only have we not been able to give it life but, with our insipid colours, I have the feeling that it is a sick emblem.

At times I had the impression that, when they looked at me fixedly, they were reading my thoughts, as one reads the pages of an open book. And I, who was gradually getting used to giving them all kinds of facilities, came to imagine that this would be the best way, if not to read, at least to try to guess their intentions. Although, in truth, why did I want to know what they were thinking of doing with me, for example, if it was very clear that they could do everything and that, as long as I had no palpable proof of the contrary, they seemed animated by the best feelings?

But, I repeat - and this must be insisted upon as much as necessary - deep down I felt on a plane of great inferiority. I said to myself: apparently, these gentlemen have everything, they can teach us everything, help us —if the time comes— in everything and, on the other hand, we, the inhabitants of the Earth (“the navel of the world”, according to a refrain repeatedly intoned throughout the ages by our most illustrious thinkers.), what could we teach them? To kill each other? To destroy the environment and export bombs to the Cosmos? To put our own home in danger of blowing up at any moment?

After a brief silence I asked again:

—So, if on your planets there are no families, as on ours, there is no love or friendship either?


next headline, 
LOVE. AND COMPANIONSHIP.

They looked at each other again, as if wondering who of them was going to answer. It was the woman in front of me, slightly to my right, less than a couple of meters from me. I saw her lips move, slightly full, of a rather faded red. Although this matter of colours or tones I must stress, once again, was something very relative, since - at least in my eyes - everything was conditioned by the dominant white light in the environment.

- In our communities there are equivalent types of relationships, although we would say that they are more genuine. We have been refining our customs and our language, as is logical, enriching everything with the greatest spontaneity. And our naturalness has reached such a point that almost never do our attitudes, acts or experiences need to be embellished with words. Our constant concern, in this interesting subject, is to maintain the maximum sincerity in our relationships. We are people who speak much more with our behaviour than with words. To better explain the feeling that presides over our relations, we will use a word that is somewhat unusual on your planet: it is the word companionship.

—Well, it depends on who you use it for —I interrupted—, because in libertarian circles that word has always been in common use.

—Yes, we already know that. But we are referring to the people of Earth in general. This state of mind or relationship sums up well the act of uniting people, communities, wills and efforts. And among us this lasts as long as the need to be in company, to accompany, to be accompanied, to recreate, enjoy, travel, investigate, explore, that is: to do something that we could not do alone. But all this has its natural limit, after which another perspective immediately opens up. You, the earthlings, must always remember that we are free people, that we enjoy total freedom, without any kind of restrictions, because each individual, each community knows their "rights" and "duties" to the letter, to use your words.

The mechanical ramp lifted me up, to the door that was located about 4-5 meters from the ground. Before that, I had been able to see that the ship was resting on four legs, which seemed to be tubularly articulated. When I crossed the entrance, the voice said to me: "Welcome aboard the ship Light of the Cosmos." And with a gentle gesture, of the three who were waiting for me, the one closest to me indicated some seats in the center of that immense room, placed around an oval table.


next headline, 
FREEDOM ON A COSMIC SCALE.
For us, the rightly understood freedom of one is not that which ends where the freedom of another begins; which, when you look at it closely, is a hollow phrase, like so many others used on Earth. Because, who can set the border between these two individual freedoms? Our freedom is that which overlaps, which harmonizes and which fuses with the freedom of others. Only in this way can collective freedom, which is genuine, be truly interwoven, and not with “free freedoms” to which only the chosen and the privileged can access, as happens on your planet[30.

“Of course we do!” the woman jumped in. “No one better than us to appreciate the efforts and sacrifices of certain groups of earthlings, throughout the ages, to channel the existence of your communities more harmoniously. And we have also been able to see that those who best represented the most beautiful human ideals have often been losers, precisely because of their goodness. Of course we make distinctions! —the woman insisted.

—Just as you cannot put all the leadership teams in the same bag. There are those who could do many good things and do not do them, while others, who would like to do them, do not have the means to do so, or are frightened by the swordsmen of the moment.


next headline, 
THE BOURBONS IN THE CANDLEHOLDER.

—In this area too we can give a very accurate opinion of reality. You know how important the Mediterranean basin is for us and what we think about the peoples who surround it (see the chapter «Why they chose me as messenger»). Well, although what we are going to tell you may shock you, because we know your intransigent republicanism, we have observed a lot of courage and a lot of naturalness in the behavior of your kings, who, if they persist in their path, are destined to play a much more important role than the current one.

I confess that, when I heard these praises about the Spanish royal couple from the mouths of extraterrestrials, I was extremely surprised. Because, the truth is, in the long time that we had been chatting, they had not shown themselves at all inclined to take sides or indicate preferences, especially in the political affairs of Earth. It is not that it bothered me, but I did not jump for joy either, to be honest. But as politeness does not take away courage, I, despite my "intransigent republicanism", reproduce here, without removing or adding a comma, what they told me. However, this "intransigent republicanism" requires an explanation: it is the result, above all, of my consistent anti-monarchy.

I have never been able to admit - nor will I admit it as long as I live - that, sometimes by providential designs and other times by the whims of leaders, leaders of any kind are imposed on me. On the other hand, in order to not have the slightest sympathy for the Bourbon dynasty, it is enough for me to know the history of Spain. But there is more: I know very well - having lived it very intensely - our history of this last half century. And in particular the period that began in July 1936. Let me explain: the worst enemy that the monarchy has had - and still has - even before it was restored - is that of having the Count of Barcelona as Chief Strategist. I said so - in passing - in an article of mine ("Francoism from within". Mundo Diario, Barcelona, ​​February 9, 1979): It is possible that the Count of Barcelona planned, in view of the situation - Franco told him, in 1948, among other "inadequacies", that he planned to keep power for twenty more years - a long-term restoration. But let it be clear that he did not do the Spanish people any favors and a very poor service to the Monarchy established in 1975 [appendices 15 and 16.



next headline, 
MORE ABOUT MY INTERLOCUTORS.

I continued my ocular inspection: of the rest of the crew, only one of the men had almond-shaped eyes, much more prominent than those of the woman closest to me. The others had them like us, round, although larger and more prominent and, generally, quite far from the nasal appendage. Later, during our long, pleasant and instructive conversation, they would tell me that this was due to periodic ocular gymnastics, which put their eyes in a position to encompass a much larger field of vision and thus capture an infinite number of details. And, at the same time, to be able to better express, with their gaze, what only the eyes can say. By the way, this "eyes that speak" thing reminded me of the times when, during my five long trips through Spain to write my book on the Spanish guerrillas (1936-1960), I regretted not having taken with me one of those little photographic devices - miniaturized - that can be hidden under the lapel of a jacket. In this way I could have photographed dozens of looks of peasants, peasant women, shepherds, charcoal burners, even sworn guards, which constituted the
mute answer to certain questions of mine. With these photos, limited to the pair of eyes of each interviewee who gave me, I repeat, silence as an answer, we could have illustrated many pages that, without a doubt, would have been among the most eloquent, with my question first, in print, and below a box with the corresponding ocular response.

The faces of my extraterrestrial male interlocutors were longer than ours, with the chin somewhat more prominent than the usual one in these latitudes. But their proportions were always harmonious. The one with the prominent cheekbones had an oriental air and was the shortest of all: 1.75 meters or a little more. Their lips were less fleshy than those of the women and the male faces seemed freshly shaven. At times they appeared to me like authentic wax figures. The ears were also elongated and attached to the head.

They explained to me that the function of hearing was very important to them, not only because of the range of sound perception, but also to "listen" to silence. They told me this over and over again, no doubt so that I would be well aware of how important the absence of noise was to them, emphasizing that the transmission of this silence to their organism exerted a highly toning and revitalizing influence on their bodies, unparalleled by any type of preventive treatment, in the therefore extensive range of those that they have, and use, to maintain their lives in what we earthlings call "good shape." Although we refer more specifically to physical shape, while in them it has a much more extensive scope.

Their arms and legs seemed longer to me, and this is something that I also understood perfectly when I discovered that they walked a lot and that they did a lot of exercise during mountain or submarine explorations. "Although we," they told me with a hint of irony, "do not climb peaks to place flags or emblems there. We prefer to climb slowly and discover the people who live in these mountains, to learn about their lifestyle, the type of vegetation that surrounds them and the animals that inhabit them. The peaks have no other attraction for us than to admire the landscape from a higher vantage point, although this is something that we can also enjoy perfectly from our ships. They - they continued to explain to me - attached great importance to not losing detail of what was offered to their eyes. That is to say: not losing the human dimension of things[31. As I was able to see in the documentaries they showed me, they only use mechanical elements when absolutely necessary.

Several times I was tempted to ask them if such a disciplined and regulated life did not end up being boring. But why was I thinking about "discipline" and "regulations" if they did everything in complete freedom? This would not be, of course, the last time that this kind of big questions would arise in me, always supported by a sharp bewilderment: that of not quite believing the reality that was before my very nose. For the umpteenth time I remembered what I received as advice from both my parents and my teachers (including my physical education teacher, in 1932-1936, Cuesta, from the Barcelona Gymnastics Club, who was the Spanish champion in Greco-Roman wrestling): to always take good care of my body, of my health, because it would be of no use to me to study, make projects and draw up plans, if later, suffering from this or that ailment or illness, at the moment of undertaking them I found myself depressed.

On the other hand, I told myself: I don't know if these companions had intended to "occupy" my mind thoroughly, but what was becoming evident, every now and then, was that I continued to be stubborn in my earthly approaches. Because, naturally, if they had put me in a position to take in sensations without assimilating them on my own—at least the most essential ones to understand life—this interview would have turned out to be a “Made in Tierra” scam and the first to be deceived would be them. It was then that I realized how lucky I had been: I was conducting, with difficulty, the first interview that extraterrestrials have ever granted to an inhabitant of the Earth. And, in addition, to a writer and historian (someone from the lineage of “anthropologists who have never set foot in the jungle” called me “chronicler of history”), a practitioner of oral history told by pedestrians of History and who, on the other hand, had been granted the privilege of boarding one of their ships and chatting with them for several hours.

I must also confess that I felt I did not know how to respond to their courtesy with greater spontaneity. I should have been less surly and tried harder—much harder than I did—to move mentally into more open, less dark territory.

Of one thing I was also increasingly certain: that I should try to love
I had these unusual materials for reflection in my head and that this was a mental effort that I had to assume, without further ado, at my own risk, if I really wanted to understand them and get some benefit from our meeting.

The table looked like one of those we see in radio studios, with countless handles, and from the center emerged some retractable screens on one of which I could admire several documentaries that dealt with their trips, the receptions that the populations of the planets they visited had reserved for them, popular festivals, mini-saucer dives into the seas, and several other episodes, almost always with extraterrestrial people as the main protagonists.


next headline, 
THE FINAL CONTACT.

The woman who was standing, leaning on the back of the seat of the one sitting in the middle, said:

—Don't try to force yourself, dear companion. Just keep your mind as clear and clean as possible and observe everything with all your senses: what you see, what you hear and also what you don't hear. Record it well in your memory. We told you at the beginning that you were going to file many memories in it. Later, when you return to Earth, you will have time to calmly reflect on your experience on board our ship. And you will be able to transcribe your memories and reflections freely, according to your earthly references, which we know you will not be able to give up. You will have already realized the great abyss that separates our respective ways of understanding life. It is not a risk to speak of the existence of two worlds. However, although for now it cannot be said that "we are condemned to understand and live together," what does seem unquestionable to us is that, because of this harmful interference of your deadly ships, which endanger the harmony of the Universe, so costly organized through millennia, perhaps a new era has begun that we could call "frank rapprochement" and "open contact," which we have been wishing to achieve since time immemorial[32.

—We terrestrials call it: "every cloud has a silver lining."

—Yes, that is right, dear comrade, but you must agree with us that it is always preferable to talk and understand each other, based on constructive options, rather than under the cover of fears and threats.

—Tell me, would you be willing, if suddenly we earthlings became civilized and generous, to establish regular and definitive contacts and to share with us all your discoveries and secrets?

—This is something that we have always practiced among the communities that have formed the Universal Brotherhood. It is logical that our attitude towards you was as fraternal as has always been our norm with others. How do you think we could have established our harmonious universal concert?

Then, I don't know why —I had these changes of course several times, just like that, suddenly—, I asked them about the fate of the messages that the earthlings had sent into space. They told me they knew them; in particular the last one, in which "such idyllic visions of the Earth are transmitted to other interstellar civilizations, that no extraterrestrial civilization —however imbecile its members may be— would believe it"[33.

—It is not that we like to witness dramatic and depressing scenes —said the woman—, but what is certain is that you earthlings have a great fondness for writing “tables of rights” and all kinds of “declarations” and “manifestos,” and dedicating “years” to the marginalized, the humiliated and the hungry, which are, in the end, nothing more than pure palliatives[34.



next headline, 
EXTRATERRESTRIALS IN THE MEDITERRANEAN AND LA CERDANYA.

The voice again begged me to pay attention and immediately they began to show me another documentary. I was able to admire some of the many riches that, according to them, our planet contains, and of which we apparently ignore the existence[35. At first the images paraded at a dizzying speed, which then, progressively, decreased until they became slow motion. I saw the depths of an African lake, then another in Latin America, and finally we “dived” into the waters of the Mediterranean.

As the documentary unfolded before my eyes panoramic views that were completely new to me, above all because of their unusual beauty —and I believe for any earthling, no matter how assiduous a cinephile they may be—[36, the voice pointed out that these types of “soundings” had been carried out recently with small ships that they would later show me.

I was also able to see a group of “excursionists” —of extraterrestrials— exploring, as I was told, the mountains of Cerdanya (what people as serious and informed as Antonio Ribera and Juan García Atienza call “the magnetic core of Canigó”), without worrying at all about the border that divides Catalonia in two. They assured me that the two superpowers would remain
They would be astonished - and humiliated, I add - if one day they were to reveal to them, as a sign of good friendship, the inventory of all our real resources, including countless unknown riches found in their own territories.

"We can assure you," they told me, "that on Earth, whose specialists in the field, Malthusian or not, are alarmed because by the end of this century your planet may reach eight billion inhabitants, you have the resources to care for forty or fifty billion inhabitants with dignity[37. And without having to plunder and ruin Nature, but quite the opposite, harmoniously in tune with it. But to do so, we repeat, the Earth must devote itself fully to peaceful tasks and stop worshipping death, as you have done until now.

—Well, that may be the reason —I interjected—, which you must not ignore, that on Earth it has been spread by little people specialized in “public relations” regarding the subject of UFOs, or in matters of national defense, that what you want is for us to lower our guard so that you can invade us and seize the treasures of our planet.; you know that it has even been said that you lack water and salt, and that you come to supply yourself on Earth.

—But you don’t believe that nonsense!

Once again I didn’t know what to answer, just like that, suddenly. I was afraid that my opinion would sound false. Because the truth is that I have often thought about how foolish that excuse is—that of being afraid of one's neighbor—to accumulate war supplies and always be on a war footing. some terrestrial nations against others. Therefore, how could I not think the same when referring to extraterrestrial communities?

—In any case—I said—somehow we will have to face the bull head on once and for all if, as you claim, you have the resources to suspend the life of the inhabitants of one of the two superpowers. If so, and I have no reason to doubt it, perhaps you could intervene, for example, in the sense of attenuating, or even stopping, this tremendous drought that we are currently suffering in almost all of Spain. or stopping any natural calamity of the many that ravage the world. (Drought, by the way, which Spanish priests in their cassocks have described as a "punishment from Heaven" for the de-Christianization of our country in particular and the world in general.). And thus demonstrate your good will.

Another great silence broke out in the room. Then something came to my mind that had been explained to me in the southern area of ​​the province of Valencia, last autumn, in lands that border on Albacete. I was told that some small planes - some personal and others rented - commissioned by one of the wealthiest families in the area, exporters of citrus fruits and vegetables and owners of large areas of fruit trees, had "bombed" clouds loaded with water, in order to drive them away from their lands, which did not need to be irrigated. Well, not only did they achieve their goal, but also another more abominable one: that of driving away from some lands - those of Albacete - towards the sea, the clouds laden with rain; they drove them away from lands where not a single drop of water had fallen for more than a year. This was told to me by a peasant from the Valencian town of Simat de Valldigna, a serious person if ever there was one, and it was confirmed to me by others from the town, also Valencian, of Sumacárcel.

I was about to tell them, so that they could see that one, despite their modest achievements, has long since known very well which foot we limp on on Earth. But, once again, hypocritical earthly prudence prevailed, because the truth is that I felt quite overwhelmed by so many truths that I was remembering, as I chatted with them. And all of them, alas, were justified, and left us worse off each time. In any case, the misdeeds of the "bombing" planes are more than enough to show that it is not even necessary to have a war - or to seek out enemies from other nations or planets - for some earthlings to make life impossible for others.

In the distance, 6-7 metres away, at the back of the room, to my right, I saw four more crew members, who were moving in front of a large rectangular screen, on which little lights of all colours kept turning on and off, as if they were manipulating buttons on that huge "control panel" that was at the foot of the luminous screen. Later I would approach it and they would give me all kinds of explanations about it.

Suddenly they made me notice - inviting me to approach the large window - that the "dome" of the ship had separated from it. It was suspended in the air a few meters away.


next headline, 
THEIR ETHIC OF "NON-INTERFERENCE"

"It is true, we could do something," they replied, "to demonstrate our power. In fact, as you will see later, we have sometimes helped people in the

to Earth.

Even to your fellow countrymen. But that, now, would be ineffective for several reasons. The first is that the superpowers, in the current state of the world, would end up uniting and launching the slogan of a planetary defense, brandishing the imminence of an extraterrestrial invasion[38. Something like an "interstellar crusade." And we have reason to believe that this reaction would not be motivated by our hypothetical intervention in terrestrial affairs, but rather by fear of the insurrection of their own peoples and of the peoples of the third world; some in protest against this suicidal arms policy of their leaders and others against humiliation and exploitation. Do you understand?

»The second reason is that, assuming that the two superpowers were to sit on their hands, which is an eventuality that is almost entirely ruled out today, these paternalistic approaches would perhaps be efficient in the short term, but negative in the long term, since any solution coming from heaven would be considered a “divine miracle,” and this is a farce that we will never agree to. Note that some “UFO specialists” have already gone so far as to claim that their God—Jesus Christ—was an extraterrestrial.

I recalled, perhaps without rhyme or reason, a Chinese proverb: “The hunger of the people is not satisfied by giving them bread and fish, but by teaching them to sow and fish.”

—Well, —the voice continued—, except through a strong and sustained information about the reality of the facts, which would lead us to an unbridled war of waves, the superpowers would restrict, adulterate, falsify and even silence that reality, and this for reasons both particular and common at the same time. As is well known, they do so around issues of lesser importance than that which could have an intervention on our part in the affairs of the Earth 17. And this would be so, dear comrade, even if we tried to show that we only pursued peaceful ends, without ulterior motives of any kind. Do you understand?

I thought, in passing, of the number of churches and sects that would jump into the fray to score a point. In Spain there are already countless of them, almost all of them—the new ones—from the Anglo-Saxon area, without forgetting, of course, those “mystical revelers”, recently coined by the Sevillian Vatican of Palmar de Troya.

I remained silent for a long time, until the woman who had welcomed me when I arrived at the ship—who was sitting in the center of the table—broke the silence:

—We would like to be well understood and for you to correctly interpret our attitude. We cannot make more gestures of rapprochement towards you than those we are making to demonstrate our existence and that we are an advanced civilization in all areas. Although it is true that, many times, we have felt the desire to do so, and that is why we talk so often with earthlings, as we are doing now with you. But we cannot go further until you demonstrate that you truly wish for us to help each other. And the first demonstration cannot be other than to put an end to your wars and your coercive and violent practices, even during those times that you call "of peace" [39. And that we see that the privileged countries of the Earth renounce continuing to dominate and exploit the poor countries, their own planetary brothers.

"Because if the communities of the Earth - the voice continued - are not capable of establishing and consolidating an effective and generous solidarity between them, how can we believe in your sincere willingness to integrate into the great cosmic community that we have been illuminating for so many millennia?

THE UNKNOWN TREASURES OF THE UNIVERSE

Judging, no doubt, that I needed to relax a little, they invited me to visit the ship. I immediately realized that the room was much smaller than I had imagined. There were some separations that seemed to be made of glass, but practically invisible. I only noticed it when we went through a kind of door and entered what I took to be the navigation and control cabin – if you will – and I heard some very low whistling sounds, which varied in intensity – but always at a very low pitch – in unison with the little lights that flashed on and off intermittently on that huge dashboard – or “wall map” – that I had already seen from my seat. Now, up close, it seemed more sophisticated: with a series of rows of buttons of different colours, with six little screens embedded in the long desk that extended to the foot of the dashboard.

“Press this button, please,” one of them said to me, with a hint of a smile on his face.

I pressed it and heard perfectly how the Opel’s engine started and the headlights came on, while the image of the car was reflected on one of the screens.

They were explaining to me


“Well,” I said, for the sake of saying something, “you should know that there is talk out there that you have come to Earth to look for minerals that you lack on your planets.”

“That is just talk for the sake of talk. On our planets there is as much or more variety of minerals and plant and animal species than on Earth 18. Because our community has the resources of many planets. That is what has allowed us to progress so quickly in our research.” In addition to the inexhaustible sources of wealth generated in cosmic space, of which you do not even know how to take advantage of one of many others: solar energy.

By a mechanical ramp, identical to the one I used to board the ship, we ascended to the large central room, where, showing me a table full of pieces of stones —minerals of different sizes, structures and colors—, they told me:

—These rock fragments, and many other samples that we have extracted from the Earth, are to enrich our data and, if the time comes, all this can serve to considerably increase the information that you have about your own planet. However, what helps us progress the most is our knowledge of the laws of cosmic harmony, of the plant, mineral and animal world.

—And is it true that no one can calculate the treasures of the Universe? —I asked with the ignorance of a layman in the matter.

—Don't forget that the Earth's seas and your continents are also part of this Universe, but we are not used to making any kind of evaluations, so we couldn't answer your question correctly. However, we can assure you that our greatest treasure is the seas and that, without them, both on Earth and on any other planet, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to continue to have our vital essences. To put it more directly: if the planets dried up, death would take over the Universe again. That's why we must take good care of them.

Suddenly, for the first time, I began to think about the possible reaction of my fellow Earthlings when I explained all this to them. In truth, up until that moment —I don't know why— I hadn't stopped to think that I was obliged to explain anything to anyone. Not because of "what will they say" —that doesn't matter a damn to me— but because I feared the uselessness of spreading the details of the meeting and the content of the message. For several hours, all my concern was focused on “filing” in my mind as many details of that unusual encounter as possible, so as to convince myself that it had not been a dream.

Having the message in my possession—a message with unmistakable overtones of an ultimatum—when I thought about how I could best spread it, very contradictory ideas ran through my head: at times I was overcome with great hope, thinking that, with this, I would be able to help my fellow men to see our future more clearly—the one that we ourselves must build with bare chest and bare hands—but at times I also came to fear that perhaps I would contribute to increasing the prevailing confusion around the very tense subject of extraterrestrials. This last impression was perhaps due to the scant information I had on this subject before the encounter with them. Hence, surely, a hesitant attitude predominated in me: hopeful and pessimistic at the same time. Until, at the end of the journey, optimism would win me over again.

In the large room I could see, above all, four small ships of different types. Two of them were round, like the carrier ship, and the others cylindrical, "cigar" type. The first ones were about 10 to 12 meters in diameter and 2.50 to 3 meters high. The others were about 6 to 7 meters long and 2 to 3 meters in diameter. They were, like the mother ship, silvery, but dull. The "cigars" were glazed in what I took to be the nose, reminiscent of those I had seen diving into the sea and exploring that underwater cave. The glazed part was like plastic, smoked, which, as I was told, served to see only from the inside out.

—These ships —one of them added, showing me the round flying saucers— are used for surface explorations, when our ship remains suspended in space as a base-station. And these —pointing to the “cigarettes”— are intended for underwater exploration, as you could see in one of the documentaries.

Between two columns and in the course of that long conversation interrupted by long and very healthy silences, m

and they invited me to drink a kind of soft drink that tasted like orange, lemon and grapefruit at the same time. And I also had a "meal" with them, which consisted of taking several tablets. In other words: synthetic food, so to speak. But after it I had the feeling of having eaten well.
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ALIENS IN A SPANISH SEA VILLAGE.

And showing me a corner console, he said:

—Take a seat and pay attention, please.

We sat down and, immediately, the light filtered and on a screen —which came out of the ceiling and remained suspended at mid-height— two cylindrical ships appeared. They flew quickly at sea level, very low above the waves. Suddenly they stopped and, diving from the nose, they slowly plunged into the sea. Through the glass window, and thanks to its extremely slow speed - always with the same objective: not to disturb the aquatic environment more than minimally - I was able to admire the underwater depths, with all its fine and multicoloured flora and the abundant and varied fauna that played around the small ships, while inside, and with their noses pressed against the glass, I could see several crew members, who seemed to be having fun like children watching all those fish.

Shortly afterwards, under a splendid moonlight, the ships surfaced, approaching a deserted beach. Minutes later, coming from inland, two groups of extraterrestrials appeared, carrying a kind of backpack on their backs. But as they came closer, I could see that they were accompanied by earthlings, who, when they reached the seashore, where the waves break up, would bid them farewell with great displays of affection, waving caps and handkerchiefs (there must have been about fifteen or twenty people of both sexes, among whom were several children), until the cylindrical ships sank back into the sea. It was clear that they were not at all surprised.

I was perplexed, not knowing what to say. At times I began to suspect that it might all be a setup, and to convince myself that it was not, I asked:

—So it turns out that this definitive contact must actually have already been established, since, as I have seen, this group of men and women seem to be accustomed to your visits.

—Exactly. We have established contact with countless isolated groups of earthlings and sometimes with families who live in very remote places, and they all help us in our investigations.

—In exchange for what.? —I cut them off., immediately regretting having asked them such a question.

—You're welcome, mate, in exchange for nothing. Well, yes, in exchange for our gratitude. because, deep down, both they and we know that we are working for a cause that is common to us.

—And could you tell me what country these people are from?

—From yours, dear mate, from Spain. They are part of a seafaring population from your Mediterranean coasts. the Andalusians, specifically.

I could almost have guessed, without being able to be sure, although they could also be Italian or Greek. But no, according to them they were Spanish. And there was no reason not to believe them.

The film session was suspended and then they invited me to go up to the dome, completely transparent, through which the starry sky could be seen. I don't know what kind of glass the dome was made of, but the truth is that I had the feeling that that sky was within my reach. There we climbed a spiral ramp and then I noticed that something kept me at all times two or three hands' length away from them. When you talk to someone, you tend to even grab them by the arm, so that, unconsciously, I tried to get closer to them on several occasions, but, I repeat, I always noticed that something, like a warm vapor barrier, was holding me back.



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A SMALL SPACE WOBBLE.

"Do you realize," one of them said to me, "that we have already separated from the ship?"

Approaching the large glass window, I noticed that we were in the air, next to the ship, about five or six meters from it. I confess that, at that moment, I was afraid, because I was afraid that they would decide to take off with the dome. since, apparently, that ship could fragment and each piece could transform into an autonomous space vehicle. I went from surprise to surprise.

And although one, in technical matters, is only on a rather primary level, at times I thought about the faces of our "great aerospace specialists" if they could observe the ease with which they evolve, transform, dissolve, restructure and remain suspended in the air, laughing - so to speak - at our laws of gravity. and who knows how many more laws.

But no, there was no flight, just a modest spatial wobble, since, within a few minutes, we were going to be stuck again at the top of the ship, without me having the sensation of having moved. Of course, everything was very fast. And my reflexes were not very fast.

Or, after all, they were no more than those of a temporarily frightened earthling.

Meanwhile—before returning to our starting point—one of them invited me to come closer to the glass wall of the dome, and shortly afterwards I realized that the mother ship was being uncovered to allow the two round flying saucers I had seen in the central room to take flight. They took off—I saw them take off a few seconds apart—silently, with a great number of little lights, turning on and off with rapid flashes around the ships.

—And where are those ships going?

—To pick up some exploration teams we had left in some mountains in central France.

Later, catching up on UFOs, I was able to confirm that the powerful aircraft and impressive rocketry available to the most important armies on Earth have never managed to intercept, let alone shoot down or capture, a single one of these ships. Nor is there any record of any damaged ships. Which would confirm the great impression of security that they gave me at all times; although I must clarify that not once did they appear presumptuous. And they could afford it!

But it is clear to me that the citizens of the Cosmos come and go, land and take off, explore, dive into our seas and lakes, in a word: they walk around “our” space and “our” planet, as if they were at home. Oh! And they settle in our mountains and live and chat with earthlings for as long as they like.

We then went back down to the room with the illuminated board and I noticed that there were two bottles and several thick glass glasses on the table. We sat down and they asked me if I was thirsty. I was not really thirsty or hungry, but to see what they were giving me, I said yes and they served me a pink, somewhat thick liquid. When I tasted it I thought it was orange juice, but then, as I drank it, I had the sensation that it had an acidic aftertaste, like lemon or grapefruit juice. Then, I don't know if it was because of the influence of the drink or what, but I felt a slight drowsiness. I think I fell asleep for a while. I couldn't say if the question that had obsessed me the most that night—what to do with the message?—came back to haunt me, while I was awake or during that short nap I took.

I thought I should get rid of it as quickly as possible, under a pseudonym, accompanied, of course, by a story that would make it credible. But little by little, I discarded this idea because it had shades of cowardice and discourtesy towards those who had entrusted it to me. I also thought of entrusting it to some personality in the world of politics or literature. Choosing the person carefully, of course.

Then I remembered Orson Welles' radio broadcast in 1938 in the United States, announcing, with an apocalyptic atmosphere, that the "Martians" were invading the planet Earth, and I imagined that, with the help of some radio friend, we could put together a similar broadcast; only, instead of frightening people, ours would serve to make the announcement known.

It should not have been difficult to organize a round table, as if they were among us, to give the event a well-adjusted sensationalism that would help to make the content of the message penetrate deeply; firstly, among the listeners and, by extension, in public opinion. I even planned to foist the package on the main tenant of the Zarzuela palace, and on his wife - apparently very interested in the "UFO phenomenon" - since they were, as I saw, considered particularly pleasant people. Possibly because they knew that they had a UFO advisor in the person of the journalist-writer J. J. Benítez. I confess that it also crossed my mind to put the message in a folder and keep it for myself. That way we would see if they respected my freedom of decision, or if they were capable of forcing me - by manipulating me or programming me, it makes no difference - to make it public. In both cases, what never escaped me at any time - the lessons I have learned throughout my eventful existence must be of some use to me - were the dangers that such dissemination could entail.

All these reflections, like all those I made during my stay on the ship Light of the Cosmos, while I chatted with them, admired their films or shared their silences, would have been impossible for me, I think, to make in an Earthly "time span" or without them having prepared my mind - as they had already warned me - to concentrate such a sum of impressions and sensations on it. As memories, reflections, images paraded by, I was more and more amazed, because, thinking of my fellow countrymen on Earth, I told myself that if all of them were put in a position to use their capacity for perception to the maximum,

If we were to observe, reflect and analyse, so that all these individual powers would increase harmoniously, then it is easy for life, our lives, to flow more placidly, without transforming a banal setback into an insurmountable problem. What we call “unnecessarily complicating life”, which – it has already been said, but it will not be out of place to repeat it – is the most characteristic sign of our “civilisation”: populating human lives with innumerable difficulties, illnesses, traumas, depressions, ghosts and other “despairs”. so that human beings do not get off track in their entire existence.

As I passed by “them” I also looked at them, one by one, in the eyes, fixedly, and I am sure that “they” realised that, with my gaze, I was thanking them from the depths of myself. I noticed that in their gazes, as never before, an immense, untranslatable kindness was reflected. I was so impressed that I was about to turn around, sit down again and continue chatting with them until the end of my days. “Will we see each other again?” I asked. “It is quite possible.”, answered the one who, hours before, had welcomed me aboard his ship.


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“ABDUCTIONS” OF EARTHMEN.

Suddenly it occurred to me to ask them a question:

—Forgive the indiscretion., what is true about these abductions of earthmen that you are accused of?

—Well, that depends on how you look at it. We do not believe that is the correct description. We should rather speak of rescue. Look carefully at what we are going to show you and judge for yourself.

In fractions of a second we found ourselves immersed again in another cinematographic projection. It was as if we were travelling on board a helicopter. Well, I forgot that their ships can fly through space at high speeds, but also at the speed of a scooter, or remain motionless and suspended in the air indefinitely. Now we were descending vertically and slowly. At first glance it seemed to me that we were “diving” over some rice fields. or a large expanse of swampy ponds. Soon I saw some groups of men and women working in those flooded fields, with the water up to their knees.

“This is the planet Yerba Fina,” they told me. “Take a good look at those people and tell us if they remind you of anything.”

When we got a few metres from the ground, the ship circled around the farmers several times and they, getting up, waved to us joyfully with their hands. I immediately saw some faces that, if they were not “familiar” to me, were not completely unknown either.

And I exclaimed:

“But they are people from India!”

There were about a hundred of them. And they were working in some rice fields. For a few minutes we flew slowly over those fields and their surroundings.

—Now look carefully at these other agricultural works.

And on the screen appeared large extensions of land—they told me it was the planet Golden Wheat—and I saw something like a dozen and a half very low tractors, tilling some rather brownish land, as if sprinkled with slate dust. Those contraptions reminded me, for a moment, of the diabolical Italian tankettes—the Ansaldo/Fiat—of the Spanish war. In one corner of that immense field I saw a kind of round tent, as if it were inflated.

—From that canvas house—they told me—those tractors and any other agricultural machine are driven. If we want, we can completely mechanize the field work. What happens is that there are people who want to do it the old way, like those men and women of Yerba Fina, who expressed the desire to continue growing rice as they did in their land, and since that seems to make them happy, they have been allowed to do so. But their children, who are already receiving the double training—necessary and vocational—will surely one day wish to have more free time to travel, explore, investigate.

“Because those people are from India, indeed,” said another of the pilots. “They were rescued on an islet formed by one of the terrible floods that occur in that country, when everything made it fear that they would be swallowed by the waters of a flooded river. One of our ships was on an observation mission there, which, after consulting with its base, descended on that islet and rescued them. There were about a thousand people. This happened a long time ago and it was the first time that a crew from our Confraternity took on such a mission. As soon as they entered the ship, they were put in a state of “cosmic rest,” while we investigated how and where they could be brought back to active life. They rested for a long time, until we managed to tune their organisms to the planet on which they were going to live and work. Then we transferred them to Yerba Fina, which is a planet with characteristics very similar to Earth, to their land. —And, with a hint of irony, he added—: But without their epidemics, nor their misery and, as you may have seen, without their sacred cows.

—Well, it seemed to me that
see some.

—Yes, they are cows, but not sacred. Here, in our communities, everything is sacred, as you would say: people, seas, animals, rivers, lakes, plants. in a word: everything that breathes life deserves respect and veneration.

—And you have only rescued Hindus?

—No, not at all! On other planets there live people from Africa, Europe, Latin America, Oceania and Central Asia.

I wanted to ask them if the rescues of earthlings were limited to people of humble condition and in particular from rural areas.

Hours later, when I had already left the ship, heading towards Barcelona, ​​I thought that I could have asked them a thousand things: how they managed without a State, without prisons or banks, without police, without military, without currency or civil servants, without psychologists, economists, philosophers, slot machines, sociologists, or psychoanalysts; In short: without those immense fairs of vanity that are the festivals, the contests, the charity parties, the biennials, the political tournaments, the social echoes, the poetic-literary meetings, the boxing evenings, the Eurovisions, the "sports" championships (with the "Olympic games" as the biggest farce), the social collections, the state charity, or without the pools (named, for greater shame, "charity-sports"), the "sex-shops", the discos, the lottery, the opium smokers, the casinos, the terrifying "gadgets", and the chains of brothels (the greatest shame of any civilization)., and all that mafia trickery that some call "the greasy pole of life", without stopping to consider that very few benefit from this greasy pole: the crooks and the "chosen ones", as always.

And I asked them if they were not also naturalists, perhaps because I remembered the great explorer that Spain recently lost – miserably, because while other television scroungers squander money by the bucketful, he, as the peasants say, “was counting chickpeas” – the Castilian Felix Rodriguez de la Fuente, and his theses on the balance of the ecosystem, from which Nature must constantly benefit if we want it, in turn, to continue to fully fulfill its function for the benefit of human beings. I have often wondered, likewise, if Professor Rodriguez de la Fuente would not be killed precisely by “his well-done work,” because awakening and cultivating the sensitivity of people – and especially those of humble condition – in this world, almost completely idiotic, is an unforgivable sin. In any case, they did not forgive Rodriguez de la Fuente.

What I no longer had the slightest doubt about was that those beings —I am referring to them, of course— and their companions from other planets, were sober people, for whom food did not seem to be a kind of delight or refined pleasure, to put it —how else?— with words from Earth. I was soon to find out because, when the screening was suspended, they asked me if I was hungry.

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FOOD IN TABLETS.

This time it was my female neighbor who took a small tray from the table, which looked like silver and on which there were about a couple of dozen tablets of various colors, the size of a pea.

“It is concentrated food,” she told me. “We use it during our trips. Take two or three of them and you will regain energy.”

I took two tablets and dissolved them in my mouth, taking a sip of the soda that tasted like orange-lemon-grapefruit. I would be lying if I said that at that moment I didn't miss a good plate of vegetables, one of those my partner prepares for me, and a grilled steak, washed down with a traditional red wine from the area.

At first I thought that those tablets tasted like stew from La Mancha or Extremadura, even with an aftertaste of chicken broth. I was surprised, as I say, to see that, in a matter of seconds, I felt like I had been "well fed." Something amazing, especially considering that I am one of those who cannot eat without bread, a "hobby" that many of us have from the difficult times when, for the working class, bread was the basic food, not even without wine. It could also be that, in that unusual situation, my appetite was not entirely normal.

The fact is that it was that frugal meal that undoubtedly inspired me to take on other kinds of subjects, let's say more ethereal ones.

—So, what effect does lyrical, poetic language have on you? Or is it that it doesn't move you at all?

—You see, verbal communication is no more important to us than communication through silence or through the gaze or through touch. Beautiful words, beautiful phrases are typical of those who, deep down, are afraid to call things by their name, who like detours and parables. What you call romantic or lyrical poetry, for example, flows spontaneously and naturally in us when we discover some new wonder of the Universe or when we hear others recount some experience.
Fantastic. We can assure you that in each one of us there is a poet or a musician, because the development and enrichment of our sensitivity is continuous, it never stops. Do you understand? Why do we need a small, select group of poets to come and sing to us the beauties of our particular environment or of the Universe, if each and every one of us has enough sensitivity to appreciate them? Or to come and recite dramatic situations that are unknown to us?

»You must never forget that, in our communities, no one has closed the door to any field of creation. We all have full access to the wonders of Nature and the Universe. We have already told you this, but it must be repeated, because in the correct understanding of this reality lies the key to understanding the other realities of our life. The most beautiful impression passes, partly erased by another, which arises later. That is why the past is immediately archived, since all our capacity for wonder, for marvelling, for achieving an exact appreciation of our discoveries, is focused on a present that is already, at the same time, the future., which necessarily forces us to keep our minds clean and open. Our past is never a burden and even less nostalgia.

There was another silence, which this time was brief. It seemed as if they had guessed that, with their long speech, I had been plunged into a disconcerting perplexity. They lived without literary cliques! Without praise and distinctions! Without lyrical-poetic nudges and tricks!

The voice continued:

—We understand, knowing as we do the patches of all kinds that you put on your existence, that all this is not easy for you earthlings to understand, that you keep your emotions and sensations too much, which, without a doubt, limits your sensitivity tremendously, when it does not sterilize it., because you abuse it a lot and subject it to more unfortunate than happy situations.

Itinerary followed by the author: from the private road of the Hotel des Tamarius (Prats de Molló), to the meadow where the extraterrestrial spaceship «Light of the Cosmos» was located, on the edge of the forest road of Les Baladres, and about 300-400 meters from the French-Spanish border.

A FEW NOTES ON THE “FINE ARTS”.

—So. the great painters, the great composers, the great sculptors, the great soloists, the great writers. in a word: our “great men”.

The voice, this time, took a while to respond.

—Well, we don’t want to demoralize you, but for us this unbridled love, so to speak, for old stones, for lifeless, inanimate things, even if they are History, seems a serious contradiction if compared, above all, to the little zeal displayed towards things that breathe life through every pore. The mere fact that you have to call a few individuals “great” is already a rather humiliating fact. That means that there are many others who are “small.” Isn’t that so? In reality, that is another aspect of the great slowdown in the evolution of the human race on Earth. What is known as Fine Arts is something that is reserved, in practice, in its enjoyment, to tiny minorities. This gives the exact dimension of the failure. And why “fine arts”? Are there “ugly arts”? And why have the artistic range been so restricted?

“Well, of all the limitations established in your civilization, that is one of the cruelest, because it cuts off the sensitivity and the creative capacity of the vast majority. Do you understand?

Of course I understood it. I was not going to understand it! What astonished me and outraged me at the same time was the realization of my own limitations, since I should have measured the full extent of such injustice by myself, without them having to help me at all. The silence that followed prompted me to reflect again: let's see, why should a painting or a sculpture be given more merit - merit and value - than a piece of furniture, a toy or a basket of fruit or vegetables? If the painter, the thinker or the sculptor did not have a comfortable bed, and the performer or the composer did not have good food to eat, would their muses be so fertile? Besides, you only have to see where the Fine Arts have ended up: in the hands of a few merchants who dedicate the product - the works - of so many artists - consecrated or not - for the delight, as they say, of the experts. One rather thinks that all this is pure sentimentality. But let's continue: a few hundred privileged families, residing in the most powerful countries - with wealth almost always obtained through "bad arts" - currently possess much more than half of the "art" produced over several centuries. There are museums, that's true, but how many inhabitants of the Earth know about them? And, taking that as a starting point,
What is the point of this “artistic revelation” of museum visitors—that is, only when artists become recognized by experts? How many admirers of their “art” have been able to devote themselves to the practice of one of the “fine arts”? Do “artists” not realize that their sowing only yields meager harvests? What do these artists do to ensure that visitors truly enjoy visiting the halls of a museum and to facilitate their access to any of these arts? They assume—which is a lot to assume—that the mere sight of so-called “works of art” will awaken some artistic curiosity in visitors. This is without taking into account when “civilized” nations have devoted themselves—are devoted—to stealing the artistic treasures of defenseless countries, to take them to their museums or sell them to private collectors. We ask: in the name of what art can such outrages be committed?

Therefore, in any "artist" we take as a sample, from whatever branch, we will see that he is not only in the hands of the merchants on duty, but that these, and their wealthy clientele, condition, mediate, if not adulterate, his work and castrate the creator, who is enslaved by money and fame - basic food for his arrogance - that can give him the price of his "art". This pseudo artistic sensitivity is used as a mask and, at the same time, to devalue sensitivity as such, which is something natural to the human race - which should be - and by adding the tag "artistic" a shameful and humiliating discrimination is established, since this contributes - it is one of the many faces of social and economic inequality - to negatively influencing many people. They are made to feel self-conscious and almost to beg forgiveness from the "chosen ones" for not having - according to the canons pre-established by experts - "artistic sensitivity".

Therefore, when someone goes alone towards one of these Arts, he is either forced to turn around and escape to his "troglodyte cave", thereby doing nothing more than returning to his roots, and keeping a healthy distance from "civilization" and from what is dictated by the standards imposed by the artists in vogue and their followers, or he has to let himself be swallowed by the enormous octopus of materialism. Or die of disgust, of drunkenness, like the great Modigliani, or commit suicide, like the tormented Van Gogh. We could not cite a single case of an artist who died peacefully in bed - after having "succeeded" in one of these Fine Arts - who can show, to his credit, a positive contribution to the only possible artistic revolution: that of having stayed away from commercialism and having dedicated his life to creating in the most absolute freedom. Understanding "creation" as the permanent resurgence of young artists stimulated by it. Our brilliant Picasso, let it be clear, must be fed separately.

Visiting the Picasso Exhibition at the Grand and Petit Palais in Paris, the then Minister of Culture, André Malraux, answering a question from General De Gaulle, President of the French Republic, about what the Spanish painter had represented in Art, said to him: "In two or three thousand years Picasso will be considered a contemporary. and we will be proud of having discovered him two or three thousand years earlier, when he was still alive."

I mean that we do not only consider our great painter to be outstanding in the artistic field, but we are referring to his human side, to the acute sense of solidarity and camaraderie that he practiced and cultivated like few others. The Republican exiles of 1939 and the children who lost their parents between 1939 and 1944 in France, had good proof of the inexhaustible concern of Pablo Ruiz Picasso. And we have thought it fair to insist on this because this type of behavior is very unusual in people who have reached, thanks to their art, the highest peaks of fame.

We must recognize, naturally, that we have a voluminous artistic capital stored in "documents" of all kinds, with which they try to demonstrate that the Arts have progressed, which is a pure mirage, since, to begin with, immense layers of humans have not even heard of the existence of this "fabulous capital of Art." What is more, many of them would not even have the strength to stand up and open their eyes wide in a museum or library to admire a painting or an incunabulum, nor the ear to listen to a piece of music, if that possibility were given to them, which of course it is not, at least in the free Western world 19.

So. where is Beauty? And where is Art? Or what some earthlings want to make those words represent. What can we, the inhabitants of the Earth – especially the chosen ones – be proud of in this area?

Remember these realities
It will certainly make certain people's eyes open wide. In particular, those who hang around, vegetate and seem to enjoy themselves around these rigmaroles of the Fine Arts. Pride often secretes inexhaustible doses of self-satisfaction in the form of "indignation", "sarcasm", "indifference" and, in some cases, uncontrollable aggression. What's more, it is in this field - that of the "fine arts" - that, if we aim carefully, we will perhaps see that the deceit of the merchants has reached its highest levels. Not always by the hand of artists, of course - although no one can deny that the vast majority of them let themselves be loved, often without too many scruples - but by those who have judged it prudent, many times, to adorn their misdeeds with ostentatious philanthropic displays. And, at times, they have not even kept up appearances, because they also take off their masks from time to time and make a clean slate, if it is profitable, of that which the day before seemed to venerate or adore, and vice versa: praising today what they abhorred yesterday, especially if, in the meantime, the artist has disappeared from the world of the living.

So things being as they are, now it is up to all of us, without exception - but above all the so-called intellectuals and artists - to retrace a large part of the path taken; We must make a great cure for humility, returning to our human origins, doing our bit in the fight against the heartless people – and against their schemes of all kinds – that condemn us to “living without our lives.” Let each one of us take stock of our own life and reflect on what we once dreamed, as a child, that we wanted to be and what we have been forced to be.



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A FEW NOTES ON THE WISE.

Then we also talked, at length, about research.

For example, what can we say about our wise men, our scientific researchers?

“Consider carefully,” the voice told me, “what has been achieved with such scarce means in this last century on Earth and ask yourself what you could have achieved with infinitely more important resources. Think, earthlings, of all the resources that you have devoted and devote to manufacturing harmful products and destructive artefacts. And if, as is natural in our communities, every human being on Earth were also a born researcher in something.

I reflected: it is clear that all research will always be mediated by practically insurmountable imperatives without a radical change in the direction of our society, which is not possible without a profound remodelling of our way of life. Research is conditioned by the lack of resources, in most cases, and, partly because of this lack of means, there is a serious lack of coordination between the various research bodies. It is the classic division of labour of capitalism. Isolating people – at work and outside of it – is the best seedbed for increasing and maintaining a lack of solidarity. For example: on Spanish television, on 18 September 1981, a meteorologist, about 45 years old, appeared who confessed to not having the slightest notion of biology or any relationship with biologists; This was said when he was informed by the interviewer of what a young Spanish biologist had just declared: "Let's see if by causing artificial rain (that is, the intensification of precipitation), we will not end up creating a tropical climate where there never was one and will not trigger, with it, not just simple rainfall, but real climatic catastrophes, such as tropical cyclones" [appendices 20 and 21.

Let us emphasize, in passing, that there is something more serious than this lack of coordination and it is the lack of plans and programs of concerted action, at all levels: national and international. Because research, if it is not projected as a global and common task, and not as a sniper - although there is some sporadic contact between the different research bodies - is an enterprise whose results will always remain far below its possibilities. This is as far as the nations are concerned individually. Now calculate the damage that comes from each nation, besides not being internally cohesive, acting on its own account and risk, with hardly any contact or communication with the outside world. That is why the advances of terrestrial science have been so modest, and note that we do not value them by comparison to the levels reached by other extraterrestrial civilizations, but by contrast with the waste of resources in essentially destructive or intrinsically commercial programs[40.

The scientist who, in relation to the State, should be characterized by his rebellion, because that is his fate —dissatisfaction with traditional science and, therefore, with those who, in one way or another, support and protect it— turns out to be a submissive servant. Either of the State or of industrial interests, it makes no difference. Today It is not difficult to see that in this field, as in almost all those in which the so-called "wise men" are involved, the most irresponsible and numbing conformism reigns, and that their consciences - to put it in some way - are as dull as those of any pedestrian in history who is marginalized from historical activity. And this is a hindrance that the world of scientists has dragged along from far away in the mists of time. Because researchers of the human stature of the Curies or of our Santiago Ramón y Cajal, alas, are very few. There has never been the case of a researcher, or a group of them, setting fire to their facilities or laboratories, or deserting them - leaving to cultivate a vegetable garden or raise chickens - proclaiming to the four winds: "We do not do more research because we are only given 0.03 percent of the budget, while two steps away there are arms factories to which fabulous sums are allocated." And leave every living person without aspirin or sleeping pills. At least for a while. But no, in general, they prefer to continue begging and playing the victim and the misunderstood.

Emblem that the crew of the extraterrestrial spaceship “Light of the Cosmos” wore on their chest, at the level of their heart. Drawing made by the author a few hours after meeting “them”. The drop of water represents Life. The wings of the bird represent Freedom. And the central eye is the Sun, another vital source. The interior of the eye, multi-prism and multicoloured, brilliantly alive and changing, represents the unlimited capacity of perception and observation of the human and animal gaze.

The ship was disc-shaped, 50x75 metres wide, 10-12 metres high, and of a metallic-leaden colour. The central disc was “perforated” with panoramic windows. At the top and bottom of the central disk were two lines of "eyes" from which the sea of ​​multicoloured light emerged. The mechanical ramp - which appeared in the "underbelly" of the ship - was about 4-5 metres long. The ship was placed on four tubular legs.

This was the sad end of the Reverend Father Oribacio, at the hands of the small and peaceful inhabitants of the planet Urtama, victims of the terror he instilled in them by explaining the martyrology of the saints of his Church. (See the chapter "Once upon a time in the future").



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WITCHES AND PRIESTS.
And, naturally, the time came to talk about religions, even if we ran the risk of seeming superficial. This was perhaps the only time when the voice hardened somewhat.

—It is known that, since ancient times, the life and coexistence of men and women were mediated and conditioned by the demands and threats of the witch or sorcerer of the tribe. and by the taboos based on superstition and the fear of being punished by the Supreme Being. It is the legends practiced by them - later the priests will come - that first generate the taboos and then the dogmas. That is to say: to the anguish of an inevitable death is added, through the work and art of "the saviors of souls", the danger of eternal punishment. In a word: the human being is promised an "afterlife", full of blessings in exchange for resignation; that is: the renunciation of making his life, in the "here and now", a dignified, happy and full existence.

I thought: it is true that, with the passage of time, when taboos and religious dogmas could not completely stupefy and frighten people, philosophy was invented, and in the modern era, politics and sociology. The latest discoveries have been bureaucracy and technocracy. In the most "advanced" countries, the real areas of domination are occupied by psychoanalysts and psychiatrists. These people - and others of equivalent human meanness - have managed, with their laws, traditions and fashions, almost like the sorcerers and priests of old, to make what is immoral be considered moral, what is abnormal normal, what is unjust just and even what has not the slightest trace of logic logical; their theories are nothing more than a vulgar jumble of formulas and sentences of a tremendously opaque scientism. One day, perhaps not far off, we may easily entertain ourselves by putting together a manual based on “nice words”, “set phrases” and “rounded paragraphs”. from antiquity to modernity. Because the truth is – and there are, if not, the consequences of so much inauthenticity: the confusion, the bewilderment and the fear that dominates, that oppresses the vast majority of human beings – that on Earth, from Aristotle to our days, we have been getting drunk on words and concepts., which have been the trees that prevented us from seeing the forest. That which, according to the “thinkers”, should nourish our understanding of the world day by day, forgetting the life projects that they had the moral obligation to propose – and to contribute to the elaboration of – the projects of life .

ar—, also on a daily basis, so that these words and concepts would go from being empty terms to representative and enlightening signs, full of life, with a full irradiation and projection, so that the evolution of the world towards well-being and happiness would be the result of this collective understanding and elaboration. That is, to put forward the only words that, in my opinion, are valid: those that unleash the revolutionary action that is the only one that airs and heals History.

As an eloquent point of reference —close as can be— we will remember the case of Germany. Of the «cultured Germania». Here is a nation made up of extremely religious people – Catholic and Protestant, with a slight preponderance of the latter –, filled to the brim with philosophers, thinkers, writers, poets, scientists, composers, illustrious doctors, great festivals and artistic events, renowned orchestras and famous soloists, who not only gave birth to and supported the Nazi regime, but also collaborated in the invasion, subjugation and genocide against other peoples of Europe, leading to something that is the greatest disgrace – in the modern era – for a world that boasts of being civilized: the German extermination camps. We ask: what was the use, then, of 95 percent of Germans having received a religious education and civic instruction, apparently exemplary? And with the same religious background: let us not speak of the genocide of peculiar Francoist coinage in our parts!

It is not necessary to go back to the times of Copernicus, Galileo or the Holy Inquisition; Here is what Professor Pedro Laín Entralgo recently said in Madrid, at the opening of a course on Science: «The vicissitudes suffered by Spanish botany are countless and continue into this very twentieth century. The incipient blossoming of this science, with illustrious names such as Fernández de Oviedo and Francisco Hernández, was halted by the publication of the indexes of prohibited books, which included the classics of Renaissance Natural Science, without which progress was not possible. Thus Spain was left behind, while in Europe science itself was being established, moving from descriptive knowledge to explanatory and causal knowledge».

ANDALUSIANS AND EXTREMEÑANS ON OTHER PLANETS

I don't know why, suddenly, remembering the farmers in the rice fields, I asked them another question:

—And that was the only time you rescued earthlings and took them to your planets?

This time it was my tablemate who answered:

“Now, please, we ask you to pay close attention, because what we are going to show you is something that concerns you very closely.”

The light slowly dimmed and on the screen appeared, filmed from very close up, a kind of building, immaculate white —well, like all the white ones I saw on the ship— with the lintels of the doors and windows —which were just holes with nothing to close them— two stories high. The projection developed somewhat slowly, no doubt so that I could better notice the details. That building was made up of a kind of modules coupled and superimposed. Later I learned that it was the most appropriate form of construction, on the Scarlet planet, to deal with earthquakes. In case of danger, as they told me, the modules were coupled to recovery space ships in charge of transporting them, with their respective tenants and all their belongings, to safer places.

—And why allow people to live in such unsafe places?

The explanation came quickly:

—Well, you see, this planet has excellent conditions for “cosmic rest.” That is why we use it as a habitable area, although we must point out that all the arrangements have been made to quickly evacuate the dangerous areas. We insist that this planet has very appropriate climatic conditions and natural resources for the “cosmic rest” of locals and foreigners.

I must confess that, when I heard the word “foreigners,” without knowing why I was on guard. I don’t know the reason, I repeat, but the fact is that it gave me a very bad feeling.

—Because of all the tantrums that Nature has on some of our planets —the woman continued— we are obtaining unsuspected resources. Hence our stubborn insistence on recommending that earthlings make an effort to thoroughly understand the planet on which they live before setting out to decipher the mysteries of space. In the bowels of the Earth you will not only find many keys to understanding the Universe, but in them earthlings will also discover the sources of infinite life.

I could not help but recall the "facilities" that are given on Earth to serious explorers-researchers, in order to tame and take advantage of the tantrums of our Nature. For example, in the person of the first volcanologist



Slowly—through the film that was being projected to me—we entered a large module attached to the building. First we crossed something that looked like a reception room. But, as if to make the situation even more mysterious, there was no one there. We continued along a long corridor with a glass roof and through which a lush vegetation in which bright green with chocolate and yellowish hues predominated was transparent, until we reached a large room whose whiteness was cut by an infinity of fine threads that started from the walls—they must have been connected to some device, which was on the other side of the wall—and were distributed among rectangular tables that looked like marble, which were situated a few palms from the floor, and on which rested some lifeless human bodies.

As we got closer to them, I could see that they were dressed like peasants or shepherds. There were men and women and some boys and girls. Their faces reflected an unmistakable placidity. They were undoubtedly from Earth. They could be from Greece or from some province in the south of Yugoslavia, or Albania perhaps, from the south of Italy or Sicily, or from one of the colonies of people of Latin extraction who live in the Americas. Or Spanish, specifically from the south of Spain. I don't know what happened to me, so as not to suspect immediately that they could be my compatriots. Suddenly, as if I had seen them cooking in Pedro Botero's legendary cauldrons, I exclaimed:

—They're not Spanish, are they?

—Yes, my dear friend, they are Spanish.

I must admit that that was the worst moment I spent there, on the ship Light of the Cosmos. And I couldn't say the reason for my sudden and profound uneasiness. Afterwards I thought about it and I think that I didn't know how to control my reactions and a great shiver ran through my body. Seeing that swarm of wires stretched from the walls to different parts of the body of each of those Spaniards in "cosmic rest" - as they would soon tell me - and thinking that they were being used as guinea pigs was all one. Suddenly I had the sensation that all the wonderful sensations and fantastic impressions that had been accumulated in my insides since I perceived the indescribable sea of ​​light that revealed their presence on that Catalan mountain had suddenly been erased from my mind. Luckily, the sweet voice of one of the women pulled me out of my tortuous thoughts.

The woman, handing me one of the glasses and a pill, said to me:

-Take this, it will calm you down. —And after a brief silence he added—: We suppose you want to know under what conditions they were rescued. from certain death, just like the Hindus.

For the first time no words came out of me. I nodded and slightly bowed my head. The truth is that I immediately felt ashamed, inside, of the distrust that had taken hold of me. I told myself: “If they really read my thoughts, they will have said: what a cretin we have as a guest!” And to my great surprise, they informed me that those two dozen sleeping people were part of a group of half a thousand earthlings—the rest were in other nearby facilities—from Western Andalusia and Lower Extremadura, who had been rescued, in the middle of the countryside, during the civil war. And they told me more: they assured me that I had spoken of them in one of my books 23.

According to what I was told, during our war their ships flew over Spain several times, and during one of their incursions into Iberian lands, one day, at nightfall, the crew of one of their spaceships perceived a large group of people who were preparing to spend the night near a river 24. But they also discovered that, on the other side of the river, a short distance away, African soldiers were camping, who were hunting for fugitives. To avoid that massacre, and at the same time to be able to continue their investigations into the adaptation of the people of Earth to life on other planets, the crew consulted with their space base and decided to rescue the half thousand people who, with all certainty, were condemned to be barbarously sacrificed.

—And since then you have had them like this. asleep?

—That's right. They have been in "cosmic rest" since we rescued them. But, according to the latest reports we have received, we can tell you that they will soon be brought back to active life.

—And do we already know which planet they will go to live on?

—Yes, of course. For the first time they will be members of the Yerba Fina community, and then it will be checked if they can live, also, in other places.

—That is the planet of the Hindus!

—The same one, yes.

—And what will they do?

—For the moment, nothing in particular. First they will have a period of adaptation, during which, to avoid accidents, they will be subject to strict observation.
n. Meanwhile, they will study and become familiar with our language and the different rhythms of life on the planet Yerba Fina. Then they will decide what they want to do and will adapt to the work for which they show the greatest aptitude, through our training courses. But the most important thing - and they will be fully aware of this - is their contribution to the study of the adaptation of Earthlings on other planets in the Cosmos. Do you understand?

—That means that they will also be able to dedicate themselves to research, to pilot ships and even to work on one of your computer-coordinators.

—Naturally! Why shouldn't it be that way?

The memory of the rescue of the Andalusians and the Extremadurans would revive in me the endless monstrosities that I had heard about, precisely during my travels —between 1975 and 1977—, while I was collecting data and information for the aforementioned book of mine.

And I also remembered that those events had already occurred almost half a century ago. My heart saddened, although without reason, really, because it was unquestionable that, if they had not intervened, those Moorish troops, as happened in so many other cases, would have put them all to the sword. I suppose it must have been fatigue that pushed me to see things, suddenly, from their saddest side. Or so it seemed to me.

In the end, following my inveterate habit of downplaying everything, I let my imagination fly and imagined that one day, perhaps closer than some people think, a ship will arrive on Earth – Al-Andalus or Conquistadors, you could call it – manned by extraterrestrial earthlings, to look for some guitars, some country suits and frilly dresses, castanets and a few cane chairs, to organize, “in style” – and never so accurate and precise a phrase – the first Cante Jondo del Cosmos festival.

And perhaps, who knows!, that music could be the best bridge to establish, at last, the definitive contact between them and us.

We found ourselves immersed once again in one of those long cosmic silences; the last of my stay among them. Perhaps that is why I had the impression that it reflected greater grandeur than any other. A silence that I may never know another like in my entire life. Like the previous ones, it did me a great deal of good.

I thought that, despite everything, I, however much I tried, could not do more to try to mentally encompass all those situations that were unfolding before my eyes, let's say in their "cosmic dimension." That is to say: in a dimension unknown to me and, I suppose, to any inhabitant of the Earth. So, despite the "compliment" that the extraterrestrials had given us - that some of us on Earth possessed "cosmic fluid" - it was evident that, even with that fluid, we could not free ourselves from our immeasurable limitations and contradictions.

Please note that the message entrusted to me by the crew of the extraterrestrial spaceship "Light of the Cosmos" is dated August 31, 1981. Although the superpower is not named directly in it - and is accused of transporting highly destructive artifacts through the cosmos - it was obvious to anyone moderately informed about international affairs that the power in question was the United States of America. To reach this conclusion, it is enough to recall the "planning" of innovations in the field of weapons.

For almost forty years - since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - it has always been the Americans who have set the pace for "progress in warfare." And the Soviets' "discovery" of new weapons has sometimes come about as late as seven or eight years later. This, of course, concerns the known highly destructive means. Well, in less than half a year, with these two press reports («Diario-16» of Madrid, dated 16 November 1901, and «La Vanguardia» of Barcelona, ​​dated 5 March 1982), the statements contained in the message of the members of the Harmonious Universal Brotherhood were fully confirmed: that the superpower that endangered the peace of the Cosmos was the United States of America and that the «other superpower» —the Soviet Union— would not take long to react, thus contributing to the increase of the danger already indicated, without forgetting those that the planet Earth has already been facing for quite a few years.


next headline, 
FINAL SECTION.
Later, already on the road that would take me to Barcelona, ​​at the dawn of September 1, 1981, I told myself that that trance, logically, had to alter me deeply and that, although they had prepared my mind to receive such a quantity of references, impressions and sensations, what they perhaps still ignored regarding us, the earthlings, is that our organism, beyond the pure physical coordinates - vital, to better understand ourselves - continued to be conditioned by natural atavisms.

These are easy to identify and therefore difficult to control or to annul. On the other hand, in many people on Earth - without excluding many of those who, in one way or another, contribute so much to ruining it - there is, more or less underlying, a longing, a desire, a yearning for improvement, for perfection, to progressively reach successive states of perfection. The serious thing is that the channels, the paths by which they often try to reach them, make them end up in goals opposite to those pursued or dreamed of. It is in this area that there is the longest road to travel if one day these foreseen extraterrestrial communities were to establish formal contact with the inhabitants of Earth. Man has been, and is, the main victim of his own and periodic contradictions. He has not known how to harmonize them, and even less, overcome them. And the fundamental thing—we return to the beginning of everything—has been not realizing, or pretending to ignore, that their incessant offerings to Death have been silencing, in their daily reality, the immense repertoire of songs to Life that many primitive tribes, alas!, already possessed[41.

Naturally, one of the first conditions for airing and healing our insides would be to be capable of making our own balance sheet—personal and collective—without detours, without tricks, without subterfuges, with which, through our coexistence, solidarity, fraternity, and companionship with our fellow men would inevitably spring forth, in order to prepare, together, our future.47 In this area, perhaps, more than in that of “scientific” and “technological” advances, the inhabitants of this harmonious cosmic order could lend us a helping hand. Because, as has been widely demonstrated, no progress is authentic if it is not balanced with a profound respect for the environment and a constant harmonious relationship between Man's experiences and it[42.

Personally, I believe that their help - that of the extraterrestrial communities - has already been very appreciable for the mere fact of having forced us to question our supremacy, as masters in so many "arts" (how far we are from that truly wise confession of Socrates: "I only know that I know nothing"!), among which stands out "the art of living". One is doubly grateful to them for having allowed one to see to what extent, throughout my life, I have been helped by what I always called "out of the ordinary people", starting with my parents and continuing with my teachers and my friends, with whom I shared, intimately and amicably, bread and salt, in peace and in war, in exile and in Franco's prisons. And to those who, in some way, although the vast majority of them are no longer with us, I would like to continue showing my gratitude, striving to preach, by example, that generosity and loyalty, learned at their side, as the best launching pads towards them, towards the other inhabitants of the Cosmos. Hoping, as they ask us fraternally, to make peace and happiness reign on this planet called Earth.

And that our spaceships, instead of nuclear heads, carry sincere messages of peaceful cooperation.

"Well," I said, "I think the time has come for us to part ways."

I said these words after another long silence, during which I had been looking at those seven beings who, despite the intense and fantastic stretch of life spent among them, still seemed like strangers to me. They were all there, the three as always, sitting, and the others standing, behind their companions.

What impressed me most in those moments was their gaze. The colour of their eyes was not the same. Some were dark and others light, but as they shone with the same brilliance and gave off a strong magnetism, it was not easy to tell them apart. Through their eyes one could penetrate them and see them as if they were transparent. They were looks that seemed to come from very far away, from very deep, while at the same time one felt them very close, deep within oneself. Now I no longer had the slightest doubt: these beings were good people, in the broadest and deepest sense of the word. This sensation was not sudden, of course, but had been taking root progressively throughout the night.

—If you wish, you can continue asking us questions.

Without taking my eyes off them for a single moment, because I was afraid that I would probably never see them again, and I wanted to stamp their images strongly in my memory, I smiled and, as if my voice did not want to leave my chest, I murmured:

—I know, dear companions, that I leave hundreds, thousands of questions to ask. and that I may never have the opportunity to ask you again.

—For example —the one who welcomed me when I boarded the ship, and who I don't know why I took for the leader of the expedition, interrupted me—, you have not asked us the smallest technical detail about our ships, or the trips we make, or about the..



“I've never gotten along very well with maths or sciences.” And, after a very brief pause, I added: “The thing is that I feel a bit tired.”

“We understand perfectly.”

Then, as soon as I made a move to get up, they were already on their feet and, with their slow and harmonious walk (it seemed to me that I was attending the first steps of a ballet) they advanced towards the exit.

Once there, in front of the ramp, they lined up, held hands and stood still, like statues, staring at me.

As I passed by them, I also looked into their eyes one by one, and I'm sure that they realized that, with my gaze, I was thanking them from the depths of my being. I noticed that in their gazes, as never before, an immense, untranslatable kindness was reflected. It made such an impression on me that I was on the verge of turning around, sitting down again and continuing to chat with them until the end of my days. And if, at that very moment, they ask me to go with them, I accept their word. Not so much to flee from this Earth, so beautiful and hateful at the same time, but to get drunk as never before on wonderful discoveries, wandering through that Universe of which, paradoxically, we are part and know so little—at least the average person—. And our children, unfortunately, perhaps less than anyone else.

All of these were ideas, fleeting sensations, provoked by the imminence of our separation. That is why, when I reached the height of my introducer on the ship, my last words were again tinged, despite myself, with sadness:

—Will we see each other again.?

—It is very possible.

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ANNEXED DOCUMENTS.

Barcelona, ​​I/IX/1981.

Dear Juan (Garcia Atienza, from Madrid):

I don't think it would be wise to tell you more things by letter. I am deeply moved by "something" that happened to me, in the middle of the Pyrenees, last night, when I was returning to Spain from France by road. I am typing up my impressions. I have the feeling that I have lived more in a few hours than in my almost 61 years of earthly life. And I think that I am going to end up with thousands of pages, which I will give you to read one day. Please, don't say anything to anyone until we meet.

But, in the meantime, tell me what "cosmic fluid" and the drawing I am enclosing tell you. It is an emblem that was worn (about that size) by what I will always call "the knights of space." It was something fantastic and I experienced an indescribable happiness, never experienced before and which I only believed I could feel if I knew one day that man had definitively defeated death and that life is dedicated to the infinite wonders that the Universe contains. Thank you and. a fraternal hug, Eduardo. (Note: Please, don't say a word to anyone.)

LETTER FROM JUAN GARCÍA ATIENZA.

Madrid, 19/IX/1981.

Dear Eduardo:

Your letter arrived today after several days of silence during which, by the way, I was also away, doing a little program with the people from Television in Cantabria. Now, just arrived, your letter also arrives in which you tell me that you have returned to the place, that you have taken photos—for your memory, not for proof—and I gather that you are writing the message that was transmitted to you and that you do not want to delay its publication.

Look, Eduardo, I have been trying to get a trip to Barcelona next week, but things have gotten tangled up with the magazine and I will have to stay here to sort them out. I am as eager to talk to you about all this that has happened to you as you are. or even more, if possible. But I think that, given the impossibility of coming right now, it is better to write to you to at least let you know a little of what I also have here inside. I have all your last letters - and the drawings and the information - separated from the rest of the correspondence, because I think that at this moment you are a priority matter. A matter that occupies me even more than it worries me. Because, in addition to being my friend, you are the first person close to me to whom something like this happens and I, who have known you for years now, have many more reasons to trust what you tell me than what anyone else tells me.

Note, however, that I have said trust. And do not take it the wrong way, trust does not mean believing. But be careful, I will clarify it immediately. It is not about not believing in yourself, but not believing in the appearance of what has happened to you. That is, you tell me - you tell me and write - what they want you to have seen, heard, felt and assimilated. I know it's hard to take this in, but I'm telling you this from experience, because I've been reading reports and talking to people for a long time who apparently have had the same experience as you, with very few variations and often parallel results. It's very curious how the details, the circumstances, the ends, the means, and even the words, constantly coincide. Reading your letters and hearing you on the phone was like reliving other experiences — ah


English:enas, of course—that I have already gone through before. But with the difference that, if with others I could allow myself the luxury of thinking of a simulation (in the last instance), with you I cannot think of it, because I know perfectly well what you are like and what you have always been like. It is the last thing that would have occurred to you to invent.

Now I know, thanks to you, that what I have put in other cases for the benefit of inventory I have to recover, because it would be too much of a coincidence if others had invented, before you, what you have then really lived.

That is why I am interested in asking you things, looking for more coincidences or finding some divergence (which always exists, even in the most apparently parallel cases). The questions will come, if it is relevant. And the time will also come when I tell you what I myself think all this apparent mishmash of things that have been happening to you means.

I would like to give you some warnings, although they may seem obscure or convoluted to you now. First of all, that you continue not to tell anyone what happened, even though they are eager for you to tell them. And I recommend that you do so, because I think it is essential to have first assimilated the reason for the unreasonableness of all these things before rushing to proclaim them. When you told me that you were the first to tell them to, I calmed down. Now I am beginning to worry about the need you feel to proclaim the message. I am not telling you not to do it, but just to wait a little longer. Remember that things have come to you without eating or drinking. That now you have to assimilate them. And really assimilate them, because it is not enough for you to believe that you have assimilated them.

I know that it is tremendously difficult to listen to me in your immediate life circumstances. I know that you only feel the need to proclaim that you have been told that you must proclaim. And that what you have been told seems good, optimal: the best thing that could have happened to you in your entire life. Then —you will say—, why keep quiet about it?

A letter is not the most appropriate place to give you the reasons in detail, because it would be necessary – it is necessary – to sit down in front of each other and tell each other everything and ask each other everything and weigh up the pros and cons and weigh up each move, each word, each apparent meaning of things. But, as a clarification, I will give you an example. You tell me in one of the letters that, in the message, they talk to you about how the Americans are about to organize the end of the world and how, in a certain way, you have been chosen precisely because of your closeness to the people and your lifelong political ideas. I know that it is not exactly like that, but that is where things are going, right? Well, pay attention: I know of other cases – which I now know are as credible or as true as yours may be – in which they have proclaimed exactly the opposite. with the same or almost the same words, only turning the tables towards the more or less veiled proclamation of an authoritarian state that would put an end to the dangers of democracy and all that nonsense. Messages that, with almost the same words, turned the tables on fascism. in people who, when they received them, were of an ideology much more in line with that tendency than, logically, you could be. I even know of messages in which it has been recommended to publicly congratulate the Americans for their latest space “victories.”

And in which the alleged knights of space —very similar to how you describe them, even speaking with a musicality like the one you tell me— have proclaimed the need to establish a new order that will once and for all put an end to the chaos to which freedom (libertinage) that man suffers can lead.

I know very well, Eduardo, that you are not in a position now to understand what I mean, because you are logically influenced by a very strong shock that has put its importance before any possibility of calibrating things. Precisely for that reason I am not going to go into more details now that would only make you go against what I want to tell you with the best will in the world. I fully understand that a psychic trauma like the one you have suffered, no matter how much of a fabulous cosmic message it carries with it and no matter how much of an appearance of clarity and tranquility it has produced, leaves its mark. I mean, it traumatises. It definitely influences our attitude – your attitude – to life. Anything I were to add to you would have to be like a shock to you that, logically, you would have to reject, since what is positive for you, what is important for you, what is fundamental for you at this moment is precisely what has come from there.

So, for the moment, I will only tell you that what has happened to you is actually happening. That it is actually important. Very important, I should add. That it is also true. But, be careful! That certainty must be calibrated with all the calm, with all the serenity and with all the reserve (at all levels) that we are capable of. That is it.

What I would like from you: serenity and reserve. Write everything that comes to mind, everything that they want you to write, spend all the time you need doing it. But think twice —or, if you want, think twice with me— before you rush to proclaim it to the four winds looking for a publisher. It doesn't work for me, although I understand it, what you say to me that "you don't give a damn about anything else." You also say that you would like your management to be positive and that is important. Well: if you really want it to be, I ask you please to wait a little longer.

We have to talk. We have a lot to talk about, Eduardo. To tell you now what I thought would be to tell you the plot of the book that Martínez Roca has just put me in the press to be published at the end of October: The Manipulated Man, I call it. And I talk in it about the manipulation that we are being subjected to from all sides and, of course, about that cosmic manipulation that comes from the alleged extraterrestrials who have already —not only you, but many, many— been almost deified as a source of goodness and solutions for the future of humanity.

Would it be. would it be too much to ask you to continue telling me things, everything you feel like telling? I promise to be with you as soon as the magazine leaves me a little free. This is for a long and extensive chat.

What does Antonina say? A big hug, friend.

Juan.


next headline, 
CERTIFICATE FROM DOCTOR JOSEP M. REGUANT I GILÍ.

Psychiatrist — Psychotherapy in psychosis.

Social psychiatrist — Family and adolescent psychotherapy.

Barcelona, ​​October 6, 1981.

I declare:

That on September 1, 1981, at four in the afternoon, I was asked for a consultation by Mr. Eduardo Pons Prades, announcing to me that the subject in question was of the utmost importance. The consultation took place at nine o'clock on the same day[56, telling me about a meeting he had had in the Catalan Pyrenees, not far from Prats de Molló, with the crew of a spaceship arriving from a distant galaxy. He also told me the contents of the conversations he had with some of the aforementioned crew members, who entrusted him with the transmission of a message for the inhabitants of the Earth.

His accounts were coherent, logical and detailed, and one could see in the aforementioned gentleman a vital attitude consistent with a very special event and with the consequent emotional reaction, typical of a strong impact.

According to the interview, the undersigned was the first person to have contact with the writer Pons Prades after the events, that is, after his contact with the extraterrestrials.

After about twenty hours of the relationship described, the gentleman did not present any psychopathological symptoms or syndromes that could be classified as nosological entities, in the universally accepted order. His attitude, behavior, self-psychic and halopsychic orientation, time-space and interpersonal relationship were normal in a situation of strong emotion. No sign suggested a pathological origin of his experiences. I indicated to him the possibility of a daytime impregnation of dream content, which he did not accept, reasoning it coherently.



next headline, 
DIRECT SPANISH WITNESSES.

Unidentified flying objects (UFOs) constitute the greatest scientific and international problem of our time and, despite this, for more than thirty years it has not been taken seriously by official scientists. Why? What is hidden behind this silence?

James E. McDonald, dean of the Faculty of Physics at the University of Arizona, USA.

The controversy between those who believe in the existence of inhabited planets - taking as a point of reference the incursions of their spaceships into ours - and those who do not believe, has been open, in truth, for centuries. Those who admit the existence of extraterrestrial worlds seem to be recruited above all among astronomers and physicists (Sagan, Drake, Morrison.), while the majority of the most prominent experts in evolutionary biology (Simpson, François, Mayr.) affirm that the Earth is "probably" the only planet on which there is intelligent life; at least - emphasize the reticent ones - among those in our galaxy. Naturally, the latter support all their arguments on data referring to the current knowledge of terrestrial science. And they do not hesitate to entrench themselves obstinately behind that kind of Great Wall of China of formulas and equations, which, when push comes to shove, do not hold up in the least against the avalanche of UFO testimonies from people - direct witnesses - of the most varied social condition, of different cultural levels and originating from countries very far from each other, and not only geographically speaking. There are, if not, the cases that we review here, among hundreds, chosen in the course of my recent and quick readings, limiting myself to encounters carried out by our compatriots, in the European-Latin area.

First we give the floor to a great scholar of the UFO subject, the
Antonio Ribera, from Barcelona, ​​has done us the honour of writing the prologue to this book, and who, in one of his most recent works, tells us about the case of Jaime Bordas Bley, a former meteorologist, whom Ribera himself describes as "an extraordinary character in many ways".


next headline, 
INTERVIEW BY ANTONIO RIBERA WITH JAIME BORDAS BLEY.

J. B. B.'s encounter with an extraterrestrial took place in June 1951 in the village of Casteil, on the western slope of the Canigó massif, in the lands of Roussillon. It is a convincing testimony. We reproduce it in full because it not only offers "curious" coincidences with my own experience but, in addition, I must emphasise that that encounter took place a little more than thirty years before mine and that barely 18 km separate, as the crow flies, both places.

The enigmatic character of Canigó.

»My friend Bordas is an extraordinary character in many ways: a former meteorologist, he became one of the leading figures in Andorra; at the time when the incident takes place (June 1951) he ran a small hotel located at the foot of Canigó, in the village of Casteil or Casteil and a little above the seaside resort of Vemet-les-Bains. The name of the hotel was Hostal de l'Isard; (Hostel of the Chamois).

»At the beginning of the summer of 1951, Jaime was resting in the courtyard of the Hostal de l'Isard, under the shade of some pear trees. Through the door of the terrace that looked out onto the side of the mountain and the valley of Cady, an individual appeared and stopped at the entrance.

»—Bonjour —he said, standing to attention, while bowing slightly with his whole body.

»Jaime returned the greeting mechanically, examining him carefully. The individual in question was tall, two metres. His walk was slow and his voice had sounded in a low tone but with a clear timbre, which without being excessively masculine did not correspond to his physique.

»What most attracted his attention, besides his strange voice and his peculiar manners, was his appearance and his way of dressing. He was wearing very tight trousers, like tights where all the muscles of his thighs stood out, under that indefinable colour, of blue, petroleum and greyish tones. His long and perfect legs recalled those of a Greek statue, perhaps too long in proportion to the rest of his body. He wore mid-calf boots, one piece, without eyelets, tight, very black, made of a kind of extraordinarily matte leather. His torso was pressed by a blouse in which a one-finger-thick border stood out around the neck. The blouse was a little loose, not as tight as the trousers, but showing off her figure. It reached to her waist, finished with a strap - like a narrow belt - closed by contact, like the central opening.

»(It should be noted that contact closures, such as «Velcro», for example, had not yet been invented.)

»The blouse was also closed by two cords around her wrists. This detail made Jaime notice the hands of the “stranger”: they were hands with thin, elongated fingers, beautiful, very effeminate, smooth, white, without hair or prominent veins. Despite his narrow waist, he had an athletic body and was quite broad-shouldered. His overalls were rather fine, with a notable slenderness and he did not appear to have a single gram of fat. As for his complexion, it was white, slightly pink. Beardless. Her hair was light blond, falling to her shoulders—in a manner similar to that of Adamski's famous Venusian—with wide waves and turned slightly inwards at the bottom.

»Her face was elongated, with a perfectly drawn mouth, more sensual than cold, with slightly full and well-formed lips. When she spoke, she showed normal, healthy teeth. Her nose was straight without being classic, somewhat flattened at the nostrils, but above them it continued to be pointed. She had very large, almond-shaped eyes, a clear blue, so clear that her gaze gave the impression of being somewhat faded, but full of vitality. They were the eyes of a very beautiful woman, disturbing, almost unfathomable and with a kind of magnetic penetration.

»When the “stranger” cast her enigmatic gaze on him, Jaime experienced the sensation of being pierced through and through. He could not hold her gaze or fix his pupils on those eyes. Every time he tried, he felt intimidated, even though the “stranger” looked at him attentively and respectfully. His eyebrows were very fine, forming a blond line under an enormously spacious forehead.

He spoke without gesturing. His face and hands did not move. His arms rested on the table, still as well. He gave the impression that his whole body was pure voice, emerging with the same pitch: very pleasant, without inflections, without highs or lows, soft, but at the same time penetrating and clear.

»He spoke in a
“Chemically pure” nces without any particular regional accent standing out. He used a highly technical vocabulary; however, he expressed everything with simplicity and clarity. He appeared to be between 30 and 35 years old.

»“I would like to ask you a favor.”

»“Sit down,” Jaime invited him kindly.

»The “stranger” sat down in a chair next to him. Being so close to him, he noticed that the fabric of his dress had a special texture, smooth, apparently without fibers, like foam.

»“I have come to see you to ask you a favor,” the “stranger” continued.

»“If it is in my power.

»“I expect from your kindness that you will provide me every day, at this time, a couple of bottles of milk and bread.”

»“I am not dedicated to selling what you ask for,” Jaime replied. “This is a restaurant.”

»“I know,” admitted the “stranger,” “but I cannot speak to anyone else in this town. If you do not sell me what I ask, you will cause extortion.

»“And why extortion?”

»“I have no documents or money,” he explained. “Besides, I must make sure that I am seen walking around your house as little as possible.”

»Jaime thought that his mysterious interlocutor could be a persecuted person or a political fugitive.

»Meanwhile, the “stranger” looked at him fixedly with a face that lit up, but without actually smiling. In reality he never saw him smile, only at certain moments his whole face cleared up. It seemed that he smiled internally, without any external sign, as if physical life gave way to internal, spiritual life.

»Jaime agreed to the request.

»“Thank you very much,” said his strange visitor with that indefinable expression.

»—Tomorrow you can come and pick up the bread and milk, I will go to the village to get it.

»The Hostal de l'Isard was located at the very entrance to the town.

»Suddenly, Jaime asked him:

»—Where are you coming from?

»—From above.

»—Are you in Marialles or near Coll de Jou?

»—From above, repeated the “stranger”.

»Jaime did not want to insist. He would have liked to know the identity of this strange character, but he restrained himself. A quarter of an hour before he left, he made him promise that he would be very discreet and would not reveal his presence to anyone, agreeing to return the next day at the same time.

»Indeed, at the agreed time he appeared again, made the same kind of greeting as the day before and went to sit directly next to Jaime.

»“I would like to know what you are doing for this region,” said Jaime, trying not to give too much importance to his words.

»“I have come with a scientific mission,” he replied. “I will tell you later what it is about.”

»“Are you a scientist?”

»The “stranger” nodded his head.

»“What branch of science are you interested in?”

»“Many,” he replied, asking in turn. “Are you also interested in science?”

»“Yes, quite a lot.”

»“Well, you should know that this massif is very interesting for science. The Canigó massif is very rich in minerals, but it also has other things that you would never be able to understand.”

»He spoke to him kindly, as if he were dealing with a child of ten or twelve years old. He explained things clearly and without the slightest hint of pride or arrogance. He limited himself to talking to him about Canigó. Among other things, he told him that it was a mountain of iron, magnetic. Perhaps this unexpected information explained the frequent plane crashes that have been recorded and whose history, since 1945, includes a tragic list of eleven catastrophes, with a total of 229 deaths. Possibly the compasses of the planes were deviated by the magnetic force of the mountain.

»On the third day, surprised by the few needs that the individual showed to have, he asked him:

»—Don't you want me to bring you something else from the village?

»—I have enough already —he replied in his usual tone of voice.

»—I like you —he insisted, trying to break the kind of ice that separated them—. If you need anything else, just tell me.

»—I don't need anything at all —the visitor interrupted. After a short pause he continued—: I only eat bread and milk.

»This statement did not surprise him too much. Jaime had been a vegetarian for many years, so he attributed this rather sober diet to a purely dietary issue. “Maybe he’s sick,” he thought to himself.

»With singular naturalness, the “stranger” began to develop deeper themes, of a curious social nature.

»“The French regime is retrograde,” he told him among other things, adding: Of course, the planet we are on is made up of a dislocated society. Everything is on the way to being fixed, but nothing is yet sustainable.

»From his words and from the concepts he expressed—which he sometimes only understood in a confused way—he seemed to her to be a true communist. This ideological concept that she had formed of the “stranger” was reaffirmed when she heard him say:

»“There is a country that is only an embryo of what the world of the future will be. But it is only an embryo.

»Jaime listened to him

more and more interested.

»—It is necessary to eradicate egoism from man, completely. You think it is something congenital, but no, it is not at all. Although the task of expelling it will be very hard.

»He paused. It seemed that his words were surging through all parts of his body, provoking a kind of fascination that he could not escape.

»—Man considers himself alone on Earth and does not know that he is only one of the elements of evolution. With all his excessive pride, with all his pretended wisdom, he does not know that on planet Earth there is an animal, now in the process of evolution, that in time will replace him. At present he cannot suspect that something is already being prepared that will surpass him.

»—I would like to know what kind of animals.

»The intense and fixed gaze of the “stranger” cut off the question. More and more embarrassed, he was forced to look away from him.

»And again, without knowing how, the conversation began. One of the subjects he insisted on was that of the hidden forces that man now believes he can control.

»Man has been given many powers to control a great number of extraordinary forces, but he does not know it. And if he misuses them, he will only achieve the precipitation of his own holocaust and the appearance of that thing that will come later. Man must wait. He must know how to wait, to give time time, without futilely burning the stages. Only then will it be possible for the present man to connect with this future thing.

»He was increasingly convinced that the mysterious visitor was a Russian. This opinion was shared by the few inhabitants of Casteil, who had seen this être bizarre (strange being), as they classified him in their Roussillon patois. Especially when they heard him say:

»We can avoid the cataclysm that the capitalist powers can provoke.

»In another snippet of their conversations he said:

»—Your children will see the end of religions. At least as they are structured today.

»Speaking of the post-war generation and the rebellion of the children, he said:

»—Revolutions will only come from the youth.

»With his thoughts plainly expressed he seemed to foresee a real mutation of the youth. The “unknown” had already been in Casteil for four or five days, and despite his precautions, he had become the talk of the town.

»One morning, while they were both sitting in the courtyard, Jaime's son came out, called by him and carrying a camera in his hands.

»—Dad will take a photo of you.

»But the “unknown” stared at him and refused, saying in a sharp tone:

»—No. No, thank you.

»At the boy's insistence, his face changed for the first time, taking on a very strange expression. Finally he agreed, saying:

»-Well, do it. It's useless anyway. It's not worth it.

»Jaime took not one, but two photographs.

»When developing the film, a few days later, when the "stranger" had already said goodbye to Jaime, the two frames corresponding to that pair of exposures appeared blank. The film appeared completely transparent, with no signs of emulsion. The other six frames of the same film, 6X9 size, came out well, showing familiar scenes. The event remains as inexplicable now as when it took place.

»On the day of the photographs, the "stranger" insisted on a subject that, without a doubt, was very dear to him: that of the perversity of man who, according to him, was already coming to an end.

»After a few days, Jaime, unable to control his growing curiosity any longer, decided to follow the steps of the "stranger" without him noticing. When he left the Hostal de l’Isard he began to follow him as discreetly as possible. After crossing the bridge over the Cady River he went up again towards the Coll de Jou. With no small surprise he saw that the “stranger” was climbing without any effort, as if the slope was descending gently instead of ascending rapidly. His step was so regular and elastic: “He was climbing like a feather.”

»Always keeping the same distance he saw him reach the top of the slope. There, in the thick forest, a being was waiting for him, looking and dressed the same as the “stranger”, although a little shorter in stature. He had the impression that it was a woman. The two beings, without greeting each other, continued up the mountain, entering a small wood. Jaime was forced to follow them on the heights, hiding among the bushes, trying not to lose sight of them for a single moment.

»The “stranger” and his identical companion stopped in a small clearing in the forest. In the center of it, in a kind of clearing, he saw something that looked like a low tent, not square but oval or circular, with the central part raised higher. Its color was like "metallic gray." No matter how hard he tried, he could not see the entire surface of the tent.

The man was standing in front of the tent, which was about 200 metres away.

»A seasoned mountaineer, he was stupefied by this type of tent. If it was, it was a very rare type of tent at the time, used only by Himalayan expeditions and on Paul-Émile Victor's polar missions.

»The two mysterious characters began to walk around the tent. Jaime did not want to be inconvenient and indiscreet and decided to leave. But his curiosity was not satisfied. The first thing he did when the "stranger" returned to the hostel, with his usual punctuality, was to suddenly ask him the following question:

»"But what exactly are you doing here?"

»The "stranger" adopted his usual posture, looking at him without taking his lips off.

»"What is your name?" he insisted with the same result.

»Agreed, but not satisfied by the imperturbable attitude of the “stranger”, he gave up asking him more questions for the moment. It was almost certain that he was there clandestinely.

»Slowly the conversation began again, revolving as always on social issues. Suddenly the “stranger” asked the question:

»—And you, what do you do socially?

»—Well, I don't belong to any political party —replied Jaime—, but I am very socially advanced.

»—You have the obligation to develop more social activity. You don't do enough in this field, because you, with the aptitudes that you have, are obliged to a social activity in accordance with your inner impulses.

»For a few moments, Jaime remained as if in suspense. How could the “stranger” know the conditions that concurred in him? What did he know about his life, both mental and physical?

»Reacting belatedly, he replied:

»—I don't have your capacity. Don't you realize that sometimes I can't follow the thread of your thoughts or understand them?

»From that moment on, the "stranger" tried to make himself understood, explaining things until he understood them. The comment then was very unusual. He simply said:

»-Bon, enregistré. (Good, registered).

»He often used very technical language, just like a physics teacher would, using mathematical symbols that escaped his understanding.

»As expected, the curiosity of the inhabitants of the village could not remain unexpressed.

»Jean Pi, apple grower, questioned him as soon as he had the chance.

»-Who is this strange being who is going to visit you?

»In the face of Jaime's silence, a little annoyed, Pi continued:

»-The other day I was in the apple orchard and when I saw him I shouted: "Hey! Where are you going?". As he didn't pay attention to me, I insisted: "Hey! Can't you hear me? Then he turned around and looked at me in such a way that I was intimidated. You must know, my friend, that he is a very strange being. The fact is that I could not say another word to him.

»A few days later, when he was in the village, M. Nou's father, who held the position of mayor of the place, asked him:

»Who is this strange being who visits you? The other day I greeted him but he did not even answer me. Thinking he was a foreigner and did not understand me, I said to him with gestures: "And the papers?" (the documentation). He looked at me so fixedly, with such intensity, that I thought I had offended him and I felt very intimidated. For a moment I had the feeling that my mouth was being covered with a gag. I could not say a word. Who is this individual? Do you know him?

»"You can rest easy," Jaime replied. "He is a good friend and an excellent person. He is certainly a foreigner and has come from very far away to visit me. I'll answer for him. But please don't say anything to the Gendarmerie. It's not that anything could happen, but it would be annoying.

»—Ah, well, that's fine!

»Jaime Bordas was becoming more and more intrigued every day. Ten days had passed since the first visit of the stranger, who invariably showed up at the same time, to make a brief bow and then sit down to chat, sometimes in the shade of the trees, in the courtyard or in the dining room of the Inn. Not once did he want to go into the bar. Then he would pick up his bread and milk and leave with his characteristic walk.

»That being represented an enigma. He had often formed different hypotheses, which he quickly discarded, becoming plunged into a chaos of agitated confusion. An infinite number of questions remained in his mind to which he could give no logical answer.

»Where had he come from? What was his origin? Was he an extraordinary man, born in some Nordic place? Was he a member of the underground Resistance movement or a Soviet spy? What mission or purpose did he have to carry out in those lonely outskirts?

»As soon as she saw him appear, she went to meet him. Unable to control her impulses, she asked him almost point-blank:

»—Hey, what are you doing up there?

»He gave her one of his strange glances without parting his lips to say
No sound. Jaime insisted:

“Keep in mind that I have answered for you. My prestige and perhaps my safety depend on your actions.”

“The face of the “unknown” seemed to light up with a strange clarity and his cold pupils shone for a few seconds, but he remained silent.

“I suppose you will not spend the day doing nothing,” Jaime continued. “Can you not tell me what kind of mission has brought you here?”

“The lips of the “unknown” barely gave the sensation of moving. And for the first time he answered concisely to his insistent questions.

“I am making the topographic map of Canigó.”

“It is an unnecessary job,” Jaime replied. “There is already a direct plan of the General Staff chart. I could easily get it for you. Any bookstore in Perpignan has it.”

“I have already seen it. It is of no use to me.”

»Suddenly, without knowing why, Jaime was struck by the clear tone of the “stranger”’s face. He thought, logically, that it was impossible that, after ten days climbing those cliffs, he could keep his complexion as fresh and rosy as that of a maiden. The high mountain sun burns intensely. It was enough to climb Canigó (2,785 m), Barbet peak (2,750 m), Tres Vents peak (2,700 m), Roja peak (2,600 m) to show the effects of sunstroke.

»“How is it possible that he keeps his face so white if he spends all day on the highest peaks?” he objected. “Does he wear a veil or a gauze?”

Jaime waited in vain for an answer. The “stranger” once again adopted his typical silent attitude, while seeming to envelop him with the sharp look that emerged from the depths of his eyes. He came to think that the word no, which he had never used, did not exist in his vocabulary.

»“Will you finish this. work soon?”

»“Yes, in two or three days I will have it finished.”

»“Will you show it to me? I would like to see it.”

»The shadow of a smile seemed to appear fleetingly. He turned around and started up the path to the heights.

»One day before his departure the “unknown” made his usual appearance. This time he was carrying something in his hand: a metallic-looking tube from which he took out a map which he spread out on the table. It was a cartographic plan, neatly made, with the heights and contour lines perfectly drawn, reproducing with unusual fidelity the entire Canigó massif. The type of paper used gave the sensation of a very smooth parchment, without folds and did not creak when handled. He recognized with great ease the layout that appeared before his eyes without any kind of letters or numbers; Only a few indecipherable symbols could be distinguished. One of them was a kind of half moon on the contour lines. The ink used was black and the altitudes were not marked with Arabic numerals. The topography was perfect.

»When Jaime had satisfied his curiosity, the “unknown” folded the surprising map and put it back, not in the tube, but in a kind of folder with metal covers, which he had supposedly brought with him, but which had suddenly gone unnoticed by Jaime. Inside the folder there were other documents, as well as the tube.

»The topographical work to draw up that map with its detailed contour lines would have required the continued effort of a team of Army topographers for at least two months. However, that mysterious being had carried it out – alone or with the help of his no less enigmatic companion – in just fifteen days. And apparently with no more food than bread and milk. The fact itself was something disconcerting and incomprehensible. One more mystery to add to those surrounding the “stranger.” Although Jaime’s surprises had not ended.

»The fantastic surveyor told him:

»—Don’t bring me any more milk tomorrow. I won’t be able to pay you.

»—It doesn’t matter —he replied, understanding that this meant a farewell—. What I have learned from you during these fifteen days is worth more, much more than the bread and milk that I have provided you.

»—I won’t be able to pay you with money —continued the “stranger”— because I don’t have it, but I will give you something that is much more valuable to you.

»And he handed him a small package that he was carrying in his hand.

»Jaime had never noticed that the “stranger’s” suit had pockets. Another detail that suddenly struck him was that, although he had always treated him like a man, he could not really be sure, because his shape from the waist down did not give signs of masculine attributes, but rather had a smooth, soft surface.

»When he opened the package he saw that it contained a few stones.

»“Take them,” the “stranger” told him. “They are gold nuggets.”

»“Where did you get them?”

“From the Cady River. It is gold-bearing,” he answered. “I can find as many as I want.”

»Jaime did not doubt his statement for a moment. He was used to trusting his word completely. He had always had the impression that this “stranger”
“Unknown” could not lie.

»“Thank you. Have a good trip. Where will you go? Will you go through Vemet? I ask you with the intention of accompanying you with my car to Vilafranca del Conflent, where you can take the train. Bear in mind that you have no documents to prove your identity.”

»The “unknown” simply said:

»“Uphill.”

»As he walked away towards where he had set up camp, Jaime thought that he would go up the high mountains. There was no other explanation. Only now, after many years, does he believe that “uphill” could mean something more.

»Although at the moment, under the influence of the powerful personality of the “unknown”, he believed him when he told him that those rounded stones that looked like ordinary pebbles or cobblestones were gold nuggets, later he began to doubt. Until finally he decided to take them to Perpignan in order to show them to his friends, the Ducommun brothers. Imagine his surprise at the overwhelming enthusiasm shown by the jewellers when they assured him that it was the purest gold!

“Where did you find it?” they asked him eagerly. “Do you want us to join forces to exploit this vein?”

“Jaime did not want to reveal its origin, which greatly annoyed the jewellers. The “unknown” had paid with the magnificence of a king for the food he had provided. The value of the nuggets was much higher than the modest provisions he had consumed: more than 50,000 francs.

“With this coup de grace ended the hitherto inexplicable episode of Casteil, at the foot of the Canigou. The confirmation of the encounter with an extraterrestrial character would be the best document in existence and the longest lasting.

»The alleged contacts of Adamski, Cedric Allingham, Truman Bethurum, Siragusa, Daniel Fry and some others do not have as corroborative evidence as that of Casteil, since everything in them depends on what the contact says. In the case of Canigou, the presence of a «spacecraft», a «disc» or any other type of space vehicle is not recorded. The presence of the tent gives rise to many suppositions. Was it a disc-shaped, flattened, metallic-grey means of transport, which Jaime took for the latest model tent?

The observation made by the eminent and scholarly Frenchman Jacques Vallée, a doctor in Mathematics, NASA advisor on the map of Mars, specialist in IBM calculating machines and one of the world's leading experts on «unidentified flying objects», a subject on which he has published several works in English, is very significant. In his list of two hundred UFO landing cases, numbered 55 and dated 4 October 1954, he says that a ten-year-old boy named Bartiaux saw a "tent-shaped" object that had landed near Villers-le-Tilleul (Ardennes, France). An unknown individual was standing next to him.

But in this case - that of Canigou - there is testimony from almost all the inhabitants of a town. In May 1967, in Casteil, there were several people who had known Jaime, when he was running the Hostal de l'Isard. Among them, Michel Cases, owner of the hotel-restaurant Le Catalan.

The Canigou massif is perfectly known from a geological point of view, but the truth is that the planes that fly over it suffer strange magnetic disturbances in their navigation devices. Something or someone is disturbing the compasses and direction finders of aircraft in the vicinity of the mysterious and poetic massif, which on a map of Europe occupies a space smaller than an old five-cent coin. However, this small circle constitutes the largest aircraft graveyard in Europe.

The conclusion of each of the surveys carried out was always the same: navigation error. But what is the natural, known and proven reason that makes so many experienced pilots, guided by a comprehensive network of radio beacons from the ground, always make the same mistake and in the same place? The technicians respond that it is an unfortunate coincidence. The most basic calculation of probabilities tells us that we can no longer speak of "coincidences" in the case of Canigou. A case that recalls the "deadly Bermuda Triangle", a mysterious triangular area that exists in the sea, off the Florida peninsula, where dozens of ships and planes have mysteriously "disappeared" in broad daylight and in dead calm.

Could there be magnetic disturbance centers on our planet capable of "driving air and sea navigation instruments crazy"? If so, what is the cause? Could the top-secret Project Magnet of the American Air Force, consisting of several flying superfortresses equipped with perfect magnetometers, be related to this? And finally, what relationship - if any - does the "unknown" from Casteil have with these tragic and mournful events?

Be that as it may, it is worth noting that, for a truly incomprehensible reason, the stranger

The Casteil episode was soon erased from Jaime's mind, and he suffered a total-temporary amnesia that lasted about ten years. Was it a psychological block imposed from "above"? The enigma remains and we are possibly still very far from its solution.

However, the "unknown" predicted to Jaime that his life would change and that he would be subject to very violent shocks.

Subsequent events seem to confirm this prediction. Indeed, in the summer of 1971, Jaime was in his magnificent chalet in Andorra and in the company of Odile, his Parisian wife whom he met shortly after the events described above, when he received a mysterious call from Paris. The voice was the same one he had heard in Casteil in 1951, that of the "unknown character", who told him: "I am speaking to you from a car in the Bois de Vincennes. You will experience a new mutation. You will stop aging, and your mind will open to broader truths."

In 1967, Rafael Farriols and I went to Casteil to carry out a detailed investigation on site. We interviewed several people who still remembered Jaime Bordas and the être bizarre who went to fetch bread and milk; that is, the "strange being" of our story. Among these witnesses were the aforementioned Michel Cases, M. Nou, former mayor of the town, Jean Pi, a fruit tree grower, and a few others.

Bordas had confided to me, as you will remember, the names of the jewelers who acquired the gold nuggets given to him by the "unknown": the Ducommun brothers. By a fortunate coincidence, one of them, Henri, was then vice-president of the French Federation of Underwater Studies and Sports. Being one of the pioneers of scuba diving in Spain, the author of several works on the subject, a personal friend of Commander Cousteau and other personalities in the underwater world, I was already guaranteed a good reception from the jeweller who, as I later found out, did indeed know my name.

The Ducommun Frères jewellery shop is located in one of the most central locations in Perpignan: in the same square that opens up at the foot of the Castillet. Henri Ducommun received me kindly, I introduced him to Farriols and then explained the reason for our visit, after making a few brief comments about diving and telling me about a compressor for loading bottles that he had installed in Rosas.

“Indeed, I remember Jacques Bordas perfectly,” he told me. “He was a mountain guide who then ran a mountain hotel in Casteil. He was a strong, friendly man and very pleasant to deal with.”

“Do you remember if he ever brought you gold nuggets to sell?”

—Yes —answered Henri Ducommun—, I think it was around the year 50 or 51, I don't remember exactly. As you know —he added—, the river basin is gold-bearing, but no one had ever brought back nuggets of that quality.

Once this last point was confirmed, which seemed to corroborate the veracity of the strange story, Farriols and I resumed our return to Barcelona, ​​in my friend's Morris 1100, while inside us this question arose: Could the "unknown" from Canigó be one of the first men from UMMO to arrive on Earth? The dates matched: March 1950, June 1951. A little more than a year later. The question remains[43.



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OTHER SPANISH CASES.

These cases are offered to us by Juan José Benítez, the Spanish journalist-writer most specialized in the UFO subject. All of them involved inhabitants of the Canary Islands.

First case.

On June 23, 1976, the Diario de Avisos of the island of Tenerife published this news, boxed and on the front page: «Last night, spectacular phenomenon in Canary waters. Thousands of people saw it. Four hypotheses: an underwater volcano, a meteorite that fell into the sea, another atmospheric marine phenomenon or something related to UFOs».

Testimonies: that of Mr. Guillermo Rodríguez Rodríguez, who worked at the Izaña observatory, and who is now a professor at the Los Llanos de Aridane Institute: «From what I have seen, I deduce that there was a great atmospheric ionization. during most of the time that this phenomenon lasted, unknown for now. The television was seen with difficulty: the image was erased from the screen, as if there was interference from electromagnetic waves, or something had passed over the area.».

That of Mr. Fernando Molino, from the Izaña astronomical observatory: «I saw it as a large spiral in the shape of a snail, very bright. It produced a 40-degree circular halo, with a bluish-white luminosity. What is clear is that it was something of external origin to the islands.». The previous night (June 22-23, 1976), the following news was transmitted from San Sebastián de la Gomera: «The crew of a fishing boat, impressed by the UFO that stopped next to the mast. The crew of the fishing boat Madre Bitarte, which was fishing off the coast of Alajeró, are deeply impressed, since they claim that a craft

The large object, shaped like two fishing boats on top of each other, emitted very intense flashes of light. It stopped at the height of the boat's mast, where it remained for a few seconds until it disappeared, when, alarmed, they turned off the boat's lights. The phenomenon has been observed by many people who have been impressed by its magnitude."

Now Ernesto Ferrer Galán, the janitor of the aforementioned Izaña Emitting Centre, located 2,300 metres above sea level, speaks: "At first, the sea turned red, that emerged between the island of La Palma and Teide. Suddenly, from that reddened sea something emerged that looked like a spiral, also red. and at the same time that the spiral was forming, a tremendous white luminosity was filling that place. I remember that we received more than fifteen calls from many places and especially from the city of Puerto de la Cruz. Apparently, thousands of people saw it."

Second case.

On June 22, 1976, at ten o'clock at night, Dr. Francisco Padrón Hernández experienced an exciting adventure:

». It (the sphere) had a light-orange-blueish color at first. They were shades that I have never seen in Nature. It was an orange with a special blue tint. None of the three occupants of the taxi spoke. But I realized that the taxi driver's hands were shaking. And the car, very slowly, very slowly, left it there. Anyway, since no one was speaking, I commented:

»—But what's going on here?

»The taxi driver answered me:

»—Can't you see it?. This is a flying saucer! It even has two guys inside.!

»I had indeed seen those two beings too. But I wanted to make sure that I wasn't suffering from a hallucination or something like that. I saw and perceived the two beings. And it was already beginning to blur. Yes, at first it was not transparent. Then, slowly, the large sphere became transparent. In the central part (of the alien spaceship), as if in relief, there were two platforms, all round. There were no rivets or angles of any kind! The disk was like a compass-shaped pattern. Perfect. And, suddenly, we see how from the central part of this inner platform - through a strange tube - a gas or smoke began to emerge, of a much denser or thicker blue. And it began to travel around the inner circumference of the sphere and "that" began to increase in size and grow and grow. And it reached the diameter of a 20-story house. Like the Don Juan hotel in Las Palmas!

»From the waist down (the two figures in the ship) seemed short to me. But from there up, enormous. Their shoulders were considerably wide. And so was their skull. I was struck by their disproportionate occipitals. At least (they measured that). 2.70 meters Their hands were like pointed ones. They had no fingers. And, if they did have them, they were kept or sheathed in something pointed or conical. (The witnesses were about 50 or 60 meters from the sphere.)

»Yes, the uniforms were red. It wasn't exactly red either (wine red). I've never seen it in Nature! Those suits were perfect. I was struck by the perfection of those uniforms. There were no wrinkles.

"Were they clearly human figures?" the journalist asked him.

The doctor did not hesitate for a moment.

"Yes."

At that moment, the journalist continued, "I asked the doctor to draw the scene for me. While he was drawing the sphere, the panels and two beings, he commented:

"I will do it just like the commander who interrogated me recently." The two beings, as I was saying, were between these two panels. And above them there was a series of levers and devices that shone extraordinarily. They flashed. But I noticed a very special kind of whistling, like when I have the X-ray machine on, at 90,000 volts. Something like that. But today, calm now, with that image stuck in my mind and crystal clear, look, I am sure that I will go back there and see them again. Many of those experiences (during 18 years of practicing medicine) must have left a great mark on me. Well, the mark that this object left in my brain was completely different.

—How would you define that mark? —asked the journalist.

—I would do it in a few words —answered the rural doctor from Guía—. It is an image that has displaced loads of images, to become a primordial one.

—Did you feel afraid at that moment?

The doctor's answer was blunt:

—Not at all! Quite the opposite! I liked seeing that! I liked it. And I don't know exactly why. Maybe because of its great perfection in the layout. It was something far superior to anything I had seen before. I myself am now recalling images of airplanes – even the Concorde – and they are just rubbish compared to “that”. And that object (pay close attention to what I am going to tell you) was accompanied, I don’t know if psychically, by a strange phenomenon of joy. It’s curious. You observe things on Earth;

You see, for example, a commercial jet in flight, and it doesn't matter. But it wasn't the same with that object.

—Well, and after all this time, in a cool head and after having made a detailed analysis of everything that happened in your mind, what do you suppose it was that you saw?

—First: a ship (I call it that) that was not material. Second: occupied by beings far superior to us, in every sense. Third: from what I could observe, they were beings who carry, in their way of being, a great spiritual perfection. It gave me the impression that there was no evil there.

—But on what do you base this last conclusion?

—Simply by looking at the Earth. —answered the doctor.

We all remained silent for a few moments.

—If you observe a man, here in our world, that man is not surrounded by anything. He does not produce any strange sensation. And much less of greatness or majesty. It's just matter that moves. You see a big car and some people who get into it and nothing else. You don't see anything else. Just matter. The car may be more or less pretty, yes, but it doesn't give off spirituality.

And what I saw did give off that spirituality. I don't know if you understood me. They were flashes of spirituality! And it's not that that spirituality was dependent on its physical perfection, no. A series of perfect things were associated with that set.

—Had you read any book about UFOs before?

—No, never. I had heard about them, yes. But it never worried me. As you can understand, one has enough problems with medicine.

—Did you notice an abnormal silence in the area?

—Yes.

—And how would you describe it?

—It was, I don't know. Maybe like an empty silence. There are full silences. The silences of the night or of the wind, for example.

—And the movements prior to the displacement, what were they like?

—I tell you: very soft. Harmonious. Imagine a sphere of that size! That had nothing to do with the movements of our planes. It seemed like a game. You can't even imagine it! Everything in our world, compared to "that" seems arid.

—Did the brightness of the sphere bother the eyes?

—No, quite the opposite. It was pleasant to look at.

—Of the whole UFO, what impressed you the most?

—Everything. You couldn't separate it. Everything was majestic. It was a harmonious whole!

—And what else surprised you?

—Well, perhaps the roundness. Everything there was rounded. I didn't see any corners or angles anywhere.

The journalist J. J. Benítez emphasizes: "It was really curious. That reminded me, almost unintentionally, of the statements of the members of the Peruvian Institute of Interplanetary Relations, who in 1974 had already specified to me that inside the ships of the beings from space who visit us, they had not observed any angle or corner.

—After the sighting, have you noticed any reaction or secondary effect on yourself?

—Yes, I have noticed something very specific and surprising. As a result of that, I have found that my memory is much more consistent. I have a much more lucid memory, even if it seems untrue. In addition, when I study, I grasp things and concepts in less time than before and with more depth. And, finally, diagnoses or reasoning in general are almost effortless for me.

And I assure you that it has not been a product of my imagination. I have been practicing medicine for 18 years and there have been many diagnoses that have required a great effort, numerous studies and time. Some, I even left for another day. Today, however, I reason them with great ease. I also notice a great deal of self-confidence.

When asked to what extent the meeting had meant a change in my life, Dr. Francisco Padrón replied:

—I'll tell you something. As I said, I've been a doctor for 18 years, here in Guía. At the beginning, I devoted myself entirely to my career. In agreement with my wife, I devoted hours and hours to my work and she looked after the children. I went two or even three days without sleeping. Until one day—this was about five or six years ago—I realised that this was not life. And I made a decision: what was the life of a doctor? What was my role in this world working 24 or 48 hours straight? What was I and what did I represent?

»And I tried to put my life in order. I started by not prescribing once a week. In short, making sure that my profession did not enslave me. And I dedicated more time to my wife and children. Because I thought: if I am a doctor who dedicates my life, entirely, to the profession, before I know it I will have a cane, a hat and a frock coat and I will not be able to stand up. And I promised myself that this would not happen. How? By practicing my profession as dignifiedly as possible and devoting the rest of the time to my home. Well, those two things I told you I have seen much more clearly now.

»For the soldier who came to question me, for example, only the ship, his instruments and his words counted. their propulsion system, etc. The military man is cold. And perhaps he cannot understand that that “spirituality” was inseparable from the rest of the ship. the military man does not understand this point.

—Suppose that based on that spirituality, those beings invited you to enter their ships. What would you do?

—Honestly, today, I think I am not ready for that.

—Did you not think then about the consequences that that declaration (the encounter with them and their sphere) would bring you?

—No. That does not concern me. I believed I had the obligation to say what I had seen. And that is all. What ignorant or ill-intentioned people think leaves me absolutely cold. I am above all those people who do not understand or who mock. As you will understand, I cannot value the comment of a corner or a square. Those are the ones who “fix” the world by talking. The person who is formed has to be above all that. You cannot hide something that was real or stop expressing your thoughts because of "what will people say."

"Now, do you believe that UFOs exist?"

"Of course. You would have to be blind not to believe. Although I will also tell you something: there are many people who pretend to be blind, so as not to have to revise their outdated and comfortable principles. And those are the worst.

And the journalist concludes the interview, which lasted several hours, with these clarifications: "The aforementioned doctor - as I was able to find out and confirm for myself in the hard-working town of Guía, as well as in the wide area surrounding said town - is one of the most beloved and respected professionals in those parts. He is a deeply serious and hard-working man, who had never worried about anything other than medicine, his home and his patients."

"It was obvious: on that unforgettable date when we went to his office to interview him, it was necessary to wait until late at night, to be able to talk with a minimum of tranquility. Patients were constantly filling the waiting room. His medical history, moreover, is brilliant[44.

In this last case —as J. J. Benítez already did when he included this testimony in his book—, I have been forced to extract this statement. The length of these testimonies (that of Joaquín Bordas and that of Dr. Francisco Padrón) has allowed me, on the other hand, to shorten mine somewhat, due to the large number of coincidences between our respective experiences. Very notable in the case of Dr. Padrón, who did not go up in any extraterrestrial spaceship, at least physically. I agree with him in almost one hundred percent of his assessments.

AT THE FOOT OF THE SIERRA DE GERENA

One Sunday in January 1982, the presenter-commentator of Revista de Toros, the Valencian Manolo Molés, interviewed the couple Pedro and Pepa Vidal, field workers on a farm-livestock farm located at the foot of the Sierra de Gerena, NW of Seville. In this property, at the beginning of December 1981, a flying saucer landed. It was eleven o'clock at night and the first to see it was the Vidal couple's son, Diego, aged fifteen, who called his mother who came out of the house to see that strange device, which emitted an intense light. Mrs. Pepa described it as a "very pretty light". The son, overcome with fear, went into the house and did not come out again until the following day. What's more, when he went to the village he did not dare to speak about "it" to anyone, for fear of being taken for a madman.

And when Manolo Molés went to interview the family, he refused to appear on "television". What a youthful adventurous mentality these days!

When he came back into the house, after having spent a few minutes outside, looking at the UFO, the mother told Diego not to wake his father. No doubt for fear that he would take up the shotgun and confront the intruders. The woman went out a couple of times to see the UFO, until she saw it take flight around midnight, with many red lights that turned on and off. According to the Vidal couple, the apparition had been observed that same night by several farmers in the area.

Both there, at the foot of the Gerena mountain range, and in other Andalusian farms, where Manolo Molés decided to spend Christmas among those who raise fighting bulls, when he asked country people of different ages what they appreciated most about their lives, they all answered unanimously: tranquility. Some of those people had lived in Madrid and Barcelona[45.

I remember that a few years ago, the second channel of French television offered, once a week, a program entitled "Les conteurs", in which peasants from all regions of France appeared on the small screen, delicately led and guided by the visitor-commentator - whose name I regret not to remember, because he was a true goldsmith in the field - to tell their lives, their experiences and sometimes the legends and customs of the place. It is curious: I remember perfectly that, when I was a visitor, I was very interested in the story of the peasants from all regions of France, who were .

When I asked them what they appreciated most about their life in the countryside, they all responded with the same answer: the peace and the silence. I emphasize this because the reader will have been able to see, in the chapter “A long conversation and its long silences,” the affinity that exists between the thinking of the peasants on Earth and the crew of the spaceship with whom I spoke. and also that on our planet there are people who could teach many other people how to live – those who go from trauma to depression, with “stress” as the launching pad for all the abnormal alterations of their existence – who have not been able to preserve even the slightest notion of what a normal and peaceful life is.

These days, the press reproduced reflections by Spanish executives from various branches (banking, arms, public administration, politics.), victims of “stress.” They pointed out that the solution might be to apply “the sabbatical year.” That is to say: every seven years take one year off, receiving, naturally, your usual emoluments. But if such a revolutionary innovation were to be applied, it would only be suitable, according to indications, for "stressed executives". The working class, apparently, does not know "stress", nor does it deserve to benefit from "sabbatical holidays".



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A BRIEF PROFILE. AND SOME CLARIFICATIONS.

The people we starve and torture have an antisocial tendency to steal and kill. And we believe that they act in this way because of a prominent eyebrow.

Ann Druyan, sociologist and researcher.

But the truth is that there is no way to distinguish between the brains of murderers and those of scientists. It is undoubtedly the case that it is not heredity but society that makes criminals.

Carl Sagan, astronomer, researcher and writer.

A BRIEF PROFILE.

In broad strokes: this is the adventurous and exciting life, in many ways, of a good friend of mine, an old militant of the National Confederation of Labour and, at the turn of the 20s and 30s, an active member of the Iberian Anarchist Federation. It is also, at the same time, my most sincere tribute to all those men and women who, against all odds, gave everything to make Universal Brotherhood the purest ambition of the human race.

Manuel Huet Piera is a son of the Barcelona neighbourhood of Pueblo Nuevo and although from a very young age he had his life sorted out – he drove his own taxi from the age of 23 – he was always at the service of the ideas he professed. And so he risked his peace of mind, his well-being and his life – and that of his loved ones – countless times, first in Spain and later in France, until the age of sixty. His life as a fighter for freedom and human dignity is one of the most intense I have ever known. And I know many. Until one day he said enough! And he left it all behind.

But, as the younger generations of libertarians entered the fray – particularly between 1944 and 1960 – there were those who approached the old militant. Some in search of advice, others asking for guidance and some trying to get him involved in the fight again. Then he, bluntly, to free himself definitively from the siege of one and the other, replied: “What do you want, that I go back into the mountains to save Humanity? Well, if that is what it is for, don’t count on me for anything! I am tired of acting as a savior. Humanity did not deserve so many sacrifices and so much blood shed.” And, after a brief pause, because his bellows were no longer working very well, he added: "When you want to exterminate humanity, then you can come for me, and I will give you a good hand."

It is not difficult to imagine the expressions on the faces of his interlocutors, the young fighters in the background. Some of them, even with a touch of indignation, would repeat to me at home those unexpected words of the old anarcho-syndicalist militant, recently returned from the Andorran retirement of the former Barcelona taxi driver.

.AND SOME CLARIFICATIONS

Well, at the dawn of 1981, and in view of the political panorama of the world in general, and of our country in particular, one who has been quietly around four and a half decades of active militancy, has also come to the conclusion —now sixty— that Humanity, allowing itself to be eaten up by so many hucksters and so many pragmatists —ingredients with which technocrats prepare themselves—, finds itself submerged in an alarming dehumanization and, consequently, two steps away from a humiliating and cruel robotization. Unless.

That is why, for some time now, I have been repeating to my companion the need I feel for a long rest and pointing out to her the convenience of thinking about retreating to a village in the Alpujarras of Granada or a small town in the Pyrenees. Lately, when she saw that my proposals were becoming formal, my companion would reply: "Well, if anything, you go ahead and I'll come later." "Yes, that's it," I would add, "while you arrive, I'll come later."

I will fix up the house. A house that, by the way, is still to be found, since, by not knowing it, we do not even know the Pyrenean village or the Alpujarra hamlet of my dreams. With this he means: first, that, despite being quite discouraged, I have not yet, not even once, thought of wishing for the extermination of humanity, and, secondly, that I was preparing to get away from the madding crowd with the greatest possible discretion. So it is very likely that, on our planet, there is no person less predisposed than me to return to any kind of adventure. And even less the one that awaited me on the night of August 31 to September 1, 1981, in the heart of the Catalan Pyrenees. But, as is well known, "where one least expects it, the hare jumps," which, this time, took the fantastic and enormous form of a spaceship surrounded by a sea of ​​light immeasurable in its grandeur and indescribable in its beauty.

On the other hand, the reader must consider the story of these cosmic experiences of mine above all with a healthy curiosity. Imagine that I was explaining something practically unknown to him. For example: the customs of one of the many tribes of New Zealand where sexual initiation rites are still practiced with astonishing naturalness and spontaneity, within the family itself: where the mother initiates the sons and the father the daughters. It is not difficult to guess the face of most of those who were unaware of the existence of such sexual training practices. And no less than in tribes considered primitive and savage! Well, judging by the results (in those jungles suicide, traumas, depressions, and of course psychoanalysts and psychiatrists are unknown) we must admit that, at least in this respect, compared to civilized societies, they are not backward, but quite the opposite[46.

The reader should note how, now, in 1981-1982, incest is being demystified in Europe. After having insulted and defamed one of our best contemporary writers, Henry Miller, for having dared to approach and deal with incest, with the greatest naturalness in the world, in his novels; Now, in our latitudes, several television broadcasts have already been devoted to this subject.

Imagine, also, the reader, that I have been discovering to you, through this Auca tribe, of which Joaquín Grau speaks to us in his magnificent book, the number of senses that we civilized people have lost, as an intimate resource for approaching and understanding with others, such as that of touch and even that of sight or that of silence.

Well, instead of speaking to you about those things, among thousands of others, some so close, that we ignore and that continue to live and flutter on our planet, that are led by beings as terrestrial as we can be, I have spoken to you about what is popularly known as "extraterrestrials", without pretending, as in the case of the tribes cited (the Aucas and the Zuñí), that, not being able to verify it for themselves, they believe everything I told them. But, of course, without ceasing to ask the questions that I asked myself in the spring of 1950: What if it were true that they exist? What if it were true that they are more civilized than we are? And, in that case, what would it be up to us earthlings to do to broaden the area of ​​our positive activities in the Cosmos, in pursuit of our full and harmonious integration in it?




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THE TERROR THAT COMES FROM THE SKY. INVENTED BY EARTHLINGS.

Reason will tire before imagining that we marvel at the Universe.

Blaise Pascal.

We are currently witnessing an unbridled and unhealthy pursuit of enjoyment, of pleasure without frustration. It is like a kind of evacuation of death.

Claude Lévy-Strauss.

This is a title that comes to us directly from one of the many magazines specialized in "fantastic" subjects. It is at times like this that one congratulates oneself for not having kept to oneself—and to some close friend or relative who is interested, in a healthy way, in these matters—the testimony of my meeting with the seven crew members of the spaceship Luz del Cosmos. And, when reading these texts and observing, attentively, very attentively, the illustrations that accompany them, then one feels more obliged than ever to divulge this ultimatum message from other worlds.

Does the reader friend know that André Malraux called us Spanish Republicans who fought for twenty-odd countries on four continents—in the Allied ranks—after having done so in our last civil war, “planetary Quixotes”? Well, that is still where we are, apparently. But anyway, back to what we were saying.

Let me clarify first: the materials I have chosen to support what we could call basic texts (“Why they chose me as a messenger”, “A long conversation with its prolonged silences”)

s.») have fallen into my hands in a very short period of time. With them, however, we could weave an essay on the extensions of the UFO theme —and everything that the earthlings make revolve around it— and check, in passing, in which direction the shots go. and who is firing them.

Here, we do not have time or place for any essay —in the strict sense of the term—, but what we do is outline all the notes that we have deemed appropriate to launch to the four winds, with the hope that others use them as a platform to start what we could call the «Demystification and Detechnification operation of the UFO theme». This as a modest counterattack to those attempts to present it to us at all times under the sign of terror.

There are several fields of dissemination —in most cases it would be more appropriate to speak of exploitation—, which are: television, cinema and literature. These fields are often confused. The reason is simple: the strings of this industry that exploits the extensive business of "the fantastic" are pulled by multinational puppeteers who work in unison. I am referring, to be precise, to the free Western world. Although sometimes in such latitudes there are some exceptions, such as France. This country, with the production of The Extraterrestrials and the Gendarmes and Cabbage Soup - whose main protagonist is, in both cases, the inimitable French comedian of Iberian descent, Louis de Funes - has come to demonstrate that the Latin vein - at least in the field of cinema - is inclined to the humorous treatment of the UFO theme. Although, moving on to the television field, in the French animated series, Once Upon a Time in Space, the distribution of roles also revolves around the "good guys" and the "bad guys." That is to say: they follow the example of the Japanese, whose first animated series - at least in Spain - opened with the terrifying "Mazinger-Z" [47. Japanese production, in this specific field of the treatment of space fantasy, more than lives up to the nickname given to them long ago, "Teutons of the East." Now, with The Battle of the Planets, already brought to the literary field, the feat is rounded off, always with the children in the spotlight.

Because the crux of the matter is the new generations, as usual. In addition to stupefying them, subjecting them to overwhelming school programs - quantitatively - and stupefying - qualitatively -, now they are trying to sensitize them, negatively, in relation to the so-called "UFO phenomenon." With all the connotations that derive from it, as is natural. As an example, see the time spent at school - and outside school - in raising awareness and stimulating, and even inciting, children to study something as wonderful as our Nature and in a subject as fantastic - the most fantastic imaginable - as the observation, admiration and study of the Universe.

Recently, on February 5, 1982, the topic of the Universe was discussed on the Spanish television program La Clave. Well, every time I see that program I ask myself the same question: how many people will have found out what it was all about? And, therefore, how many people will feel encouraged, from now on, to delve - even if not very deeply - into the subject discussed? One, who has a clear mind, can assure the director of La Clave that, if I had not been somewhat informed about the subject - having been involved in it for a few months - I would not have understood anything of what was said in that broadcast, between so much "Zero Hour" of the Universe and so much talk of the "Big Bang" (the great explosion).

So, without fear of being wrong, we could say that 95 percent of non-specialists did not understand anything. And the worst thing, if possible, is that most people would go to the other channel, which offered a mediocre work. And let's not even talk about - regarding La Clave - when historical subjects are addressed. So, if you really want to enlighten the public, we suggest that you create a broadcast entitled "The Anteclave", in which you inform the public - you give them clues, that is, for their correct understanding - of what they are going to see in La Clave. Or be inspired by the television work signed and endorsed by the late Professor Rodríguez de la Fuente. Unless what is being pursued is precisely that: to tire viewers when cultural issues are dealt with on the small screen[48.

But let us return to the terror that comes to us from Heaven. If we turn to Anglo-Saxon inspired cinema —and especially North American— there we have Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Alien and. as many films as necessary to fill the cultural void of the human mind with psychological “data” that, who knows!, may one day be useful to set the earthlings in motion against a hypothetical extraterrestrial danger. Films that, in addition, gobble up "astronomical" budgets. With these films, in addition, the victims' nights are filled with insomnia or nightmares, which means that they become clients of drugs that not only do not cure anything but aggravate the patient's condition, while deteriorating the family environment and, by extension, that of those closest to him[49.

Because, returning to the printed word - profusely illustrated with terrifying drawings - a small survey carried out by me in bookstores and kiosks gave alarming results. For example: I was assured that those who buy more specialized magazines, or paperback books, are the fathers and now, for some time now, also the mothers[50. Then these publications are consumed by the whole family and in particular by the children and sometimes even by the grandchildren. If children are of school or university age, when they find these literary pastimes at home - without spending a single cent of their personal capital - they usually spend their money on tobacco, drink or drugs. It is shocking and frightening to discover the statistical figures that indicate the percentages of boys and girls - sometimes still children - who take to tobacco, alcohol or drugs. Let us therefore consider the mental state in which these boys and girls approach fantasy literature. And the kind of mark it can leave on them. Not forgetting the frustrated: those who do not have the means for such vices and who must prostitute themselves or become robbers, if not murderers, to satisfy them[51. Because no one, in the world of children as in the adult, can live completely oblivious to the uses, customs and vices that predominate in their environment.

It remains to be addressed what is known as "science fiction." It is curious to marry science with fiction. The proliferation and success—why deny it?—of this literary genre is already edifying in itself. But what one does not quite understand is why authors are taking the monstrosity of their narratives to an ever greater extreme. Arguing that “that is what the public wants” is not valid. Each author is free to let his imagination and fantasy fly and invent all the stories or legends that occur to him. But why should they not invent happy worlds—which there may be., which there are—instead of intimidating, frightening and terrifying their readers? Why this malignant obsession with wanting to transfer these degrading terrestrial schemes to possible inhabited planets? In the end, by inventing worlds of terror - that terror that they say comes from the sky -, taking the levels of alarmism and human unrest to the extreme, they only show that they have very little imagination and inventiveness, because, after all, the seed, the inspiration for these tormented worlds, is at hand: it is on our own planet. They are, literary speaking, plagiarists through and through, who try to infect as many earthlings as possible with their sick tendency to distance us from Life and bring us closer to Death.



«I arrived at a family pension at dusk. While waiting for dinner, I asked the landlady to turn on the television, so I could watch the broadcast of Iberian Fauna. I was accompanied, sitting around the table, by her children: a 13-year-old girl, a 10-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl. I tried to interest them in the natural history lessons that were being given on television. Seeing how little attention they paid me, I insisted and then the little girl said to me: “What we like is Mazinger-Z.” I replied: “What I don’t know is how you can like adventures in which you already know who will be the winner.” The little girl then spoke up: “Well, what interests us most is to see what kind of lightning Dr. Hell (the “bad guy” in the Japanese style) will invent to destroy Mazinger.” Immediately afterward, the boy showed me his reading book—published in Plasencia (Cáceres), in 1962. and it was 1976—and a sketchbook on whose pages I discovered, astonished and alarmed, four portraits, outlined with confused strokes. Jesus Christ and Mazinger-Z were paired together. And Dr. Hell with the Devil. When I acted surprised, the eldest of the brothers taught me: “Some represent Good and others Evil. And as Our Lord did before, now it is Mazinger-Z that comes to save us.” (Eduardo Pons Prades: Frente de Somosierra. Mundo Diario, Barcelona, ​​September 12, 1976.)

Do I need to add any comments, dear reader.?


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SPACE CITIES. “MADE oN EARTH”.

Western science is a political instrument of domination.

Robert Garaudy.

True scientists are poets and imaginative. Without them, science would not exist. The rest are accountants or shopkeepers.

Paul-Emile Victor.

In truth, a large part of scientific literature is dedicated to theorizing and incredibly violent attacks on the theories of other theorists.

John A. Keel.

I was about to finish this book when Gerard K. O'Neill's work[52 came into my hands, dedicated to a subject that «cosmic specialists» have been covering with paper —with printed letters, sketches and drawings— for several years now: that of cities in space, conceived and built on Earth. On the back cover we read: «Colonies —of earthlings, it is understood— in orbit before the year 2000. New hope for humanity. This is not a science-fiction book. The study by G. K. O'Neill, an American physicist, born in 1927, tells us about the construction of real cities —as well as agricultural and industrial complexes— in orbit around the Earth».

Utopia? Not at all. Never has the marvelous been so plausible, and O'Neill's book proves, point by point, that this fascinating adventure - as well as a "providential" solution to the double problem of the energy crisis, as the author points out - is perfectly feasible within the framework of our current technology and resources. And another writer - famous for his tabulations on the future of the Universe - Isaac Asimov, adds: "Never before has the possibility of creating artificial colonies of human beings been presented in such careful detail."

Well. In view of such "wonderful" projects, any person with a clear mind - from Earth, of course - must immediately ask himself a series of questions: What will we bring to these space colonies? Perhaps our shameful and humiliating social status, prevailing today in our "civilizations"? Or the racial discriminations so fashionable in overdeveloped and highly civilized countries? Or would an order of priorities be established, so that only the “new chosen ones” would have access to these colonies?

Because, naturally, as long as the threat of apocalyptic destruction continues to weigh on the planet Earth, the “flight” to these colonies would represent the survival of the fugitives or “those sent on a mission.” Then it would become evident—are you realizing, dear reader, where this is going?—that this order of priorities would be established, indisputably, according to the financial possibilities of the earthlings or certain influences. political or of any other kind. These colonies in space would be something like “secondary anti-atomic residences” of those who on Earth held, at the time of their inauguration, economic, religious, military or political power. Because, once we get down to it, no one will miss - and the Spanish, with their recent historical experiences, least of all - that the installation of these space islands could be given a predominantly religious character. Something like that of outposts or bases of a Great Cosmic Crusade[53

From all this - and note that we could continue to unravel, ad libitum, more hypotheses of this kind - it can be deduced, with little risk of error, that these colonies or space cities would end up being a faithful reflection of current life on planet Earth. Because, who would create the agricultural complexes there? The same ones who are ruining agriculture on Earth, forcing their children to abandon their land and emigrate to the big cities? Or those who have imposed the use of fertilizers, or other chemical products, or of "new" seeds, just to obtain quick and juicy benefits, even knowing that in this way they impoverished the land in the medium or long term? Or those who, in order to make paper pulp very cheap, hire and pay arsonists who burn our forests? Or would the leaders of these future islands - from any branch or guild - be chosen from among the Earth's elites, forming legions of subordinates with subjects - of both sexes - previously dehumanized and appropriately robotized? And let's not talk about the creation of "industrial complexes" in space, since, taught by Earth's experience, it is possible to predict that trade in the areas of sidereal competitiveness would end up leading, as on Earth, to a real picnic for blacks.

Therefore, if before going on adventures in the Universe - in the noblest sense of the word - the men and women of the Earth do not succeed in making freedom and justice - irreplaceable seats of human dignity - fully prevail on our planet, any human excursion into space will inevitably be marked by the scourges that - some more, some less - we earthlings suffer from.

And it is not unreasonable to predict - if the radical change of mentality does not occur in time in our countries, giving our life an unmistakably fraternal sense - that, as has occurred since the dawn of time at the level of nations, in the future - once these cities are installed in orbit - confrontations will occur, in the form of wars of "persuasion", "preventive" or of extermination.

erminio, would develop, foreseeably, on an extraterrestrial scale. With which, those fears that the Harmonious Universal Brotherhood points out in its ultimatum message would materialize with greater danger than at present, at the dawn of the decade of the 80s.



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ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE FUTURE.

(Warning to applicants for Galactic Missions).

The spectacle of what religions were, and what some of them continue to be, is the most humiliating for human intelligence.

Henri Bergson.

We have come into the world to be happy and the worst crime we have committed is to blind the paths that lead to freedom.

Antonio Gala.

The Church is not interested in deep-rooted convictions, nor in the rise of the last and most incorruptible conscience.

Camilo José Cela.

(In 1980, one of our best comic artists, Carlos Giménez, adapted a story by the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, “The Missionary,” from his book The Star Diaries. The comic is very instructive for everyone, but especially for those who, in the foreseeable future, might give in to the temptation of becoming “galactic missionaries or evangelizers.” Here is what could happen to them):

»The first discoverers of Urtama did not have enough words of praise for its inhabitants, the kindly Memnogos. These beings —they said— are the most helpful, sweet, good and altruistic creatures in the Cosmos.

»In the hope that the seed of Faith would happily sprout among them, the Holy Church sent Father Oribacio to Urtama. The Memnogos received him with hospitality and almost maternal attention. They respected him, obeyed him and seemed to absorb his teachings with eagerness. Taking advantage of this favorable atmosphere, Father Oribacio did not stop preaching, day and night, the principles of the Faith.

"Well, dear parishioners," the preacher told them one day, "now that I have spoken to you about the Old and New Testaments, and the letters of the Apostles, I will go on to explain to you the lives of the martyrs of the Lord. (This last, by the way, was always Father Oribacio's favorite subject.)

»Then, giving his voice thunderous intonations and his gestures a dramatic flutter, the preacher began:

»—Among others. There you have the example of Saint John, who attained Eternal Light by being boiled in oil, and that of Saint Agatha, who let her head be cut off for the Faith, and that of Saint Sebastian who, riddled with arrows, suffered cruel torments and as a reward was received in Paradise by the choirs of angels and cherubs.

»(Seeing the poor little Mennogos frightened, embracing each other, Father Oribacio continued to recount his rosary of martyrologies with increasing eloquence):

»—. ;and the example of the young martyrs who suffered the torment of quartering, strangulation, the wheel and the pyre, enduring it all in ecstasy, thus earning a place in the right hand of the Lord of the Heavenly Hosts.

»And so, day after day, he would recount to them, over and over again, and always with a voice of thunder and apocalyptic gesture, the story of many lives consecrated to martyrdom and worthy of being imitated. Until.

»One day, a group of memnogos approached him and began to ask him questions:

»—Reverend Master, forgive the audacity of your unworthy servant and tell me: Does the soul of every man willing to suffer martyrdom go to Heaven?

»—Undoubtedly, my son.

»—And you, venerated father, do you perhaps wish to be a Saint and go to Heaven?

»—It is my most fervent wish, my son.

»—In that case, we will help you —added the one who seemed the most daring of all.

»Then the memnogos gently but firmly grabbed the missionary and dragged him towards.

»Father Oribacio, somewhat alarmed, exclaimed:

»—Hey! Can you tell me what you're doing.?

»—Dear father, we're going to skin your back and smear it with boiling pitch, just as the executioner of Ireland did to Saint Hyacinth —answered one of the little men.

»Father Oribacio struggled like prey being led to the slaughterhouse, shouting and insulting them, with his powerful voice, no doubt so that, frightened, they would let him go:

»—No! Let me go! You're crazy! Let me go, I told you! Let me go, you damned fools!

»And while they tied him to what would be a stake for the martyrology, the memnogos told him:

»—Now, venerated father, we are going to cut off, among other things, your left leg, as the pagans did to Saint Paphnutius.

»—And then, beloved master, we will open your belly and fill it with straw, just as they did to Blessed Elisabeth of Normandy.

»The missionary continued to struggle like a caged animal and scream like a cornered beast.

»And while they continued to mark his body with the mutilations and wounds that would make him worthy of the title of martyr of the Church and reach the rank of Saint, the memnogos announced to him the other “steps” of the martyrology:

»—Now we are going to impale you as the Emalkites did to Saint Hugo. But

First, dearest Pastor, we will break your ribs as the Tyracusans did to St. Henry of Padua.

»—And now, next, reverent master, we will burn you slowly, as the Burgundians did to the Maid of Orleans.

»After all this, the Mennogos began to cry with tremendous grief for their beloved pastor lost forever. And when anyone approached them, they found them like this, desperate, sobbing bitterly. And they gave them all the same explanation:

»—Father Oribatius always told us that there was nothing that a good Christian would not do for his neighbor! So we desperately renounced our salvation! All so that dearest Father Oribatius would have the crown of “martyr” and “sanctity”!

»—No one can imagine how hard it was for us! Because before Father Oribacio came to Urtama, no one here was able to kill a fly!»[54



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WHY THEY CHOSE ME AS A MESSENGER.

We workers have always lived in shacks and hovels. We will have to adapt to them for some time yet. But let us not forget that we also know how to build. We are the ones who have built the palaces and cities in Spain, America and throughout the world. We, the workers, can build new palaces and cities to replace those destroyed. New and better ones. We are not afraid of ruins. We are destined to inherit the earth, of that there is not the slightest doubt. The bourgeoisie may blow up the world, their world, before leaving the stage of history. But we carry a new world within us and that world grows every moment. It is growing while I speak to you.

Words of Buenaventura Durruti, in the autumn of 1936, on the Aragon Front, addressed to the Dutch journalist Van Paasen.

After having "recorded" the message, and after a brief silence, I said:

"Can I ask you a question?"

"As many as you like," they replied, "and you can ask them without any kind of restrictions."

"Why are you entrusting this message to me and not to some important statesman. or to a high-ranking and responsible military officer from one of the two superpowers?"

They did not respond directly to my question immediately. They told me that, as a result of their observations, they had come to the conclusion that the communities on Earth that still retained a certain amount of humanity were precisely in the Mediterranean basin. They were not unaware that in other parts of the planet there were communities subjected to truly inhuman living conditions, particularly in Africa, the Spanish-speaking Americas and in Asia. But they did not fail to recognize that these communities, not enjoying a reasonably good level of energy, would take a long time to awaken from their lethargy and claim the place that rightfully belongs to them within the great terrestrial community. It was not a question of pointing out countries predestined - they stressed to me - to be a guide or beacon for the others, but of an unquestionable reality: that, due to their recent history, these countries had demonstrated that they had an admirable vitality and a very clear notion of what is just and what is unjust. I confess that I felt proud to belong to that community, which they did not name; it was not difficult to guess that they were referring to Spain. Nevertheless, I stuck to my guns:

-But in any Mediterranean country there are important politicians and military men. or to entrust the message to several of them at the same time, to one from each power.

-It would serve no purpose. They would adulterate or silence our message. In fact, this has happened on several occasions, regarding our visits and also in relation to our contacts on Earth with humble people or people without important positions in their respective countries. On the other hand, this could mean disdain towards other terrestrial communities. Don't you think so?

—In any case, you cannot ignore the limited scope of people like me to transmit this message, and even our great vulnerability in the face of the enormous persuasive resources that certain powers have at their disposal to silence us, or worse things.

—You are free to spread the message or not, to try to spread it publicly or to do so at personal and even confidential levels. We will be very grateful to you in any case. And you must understand that we cannot proceed with you in a different way than we do within our harmonious universal brotherhood. You are completely free before us and you would disappoint us if you did not use that freedom without any restrictions.

Suddenly, my confusion was such that, despite wanting to tell them that I still have enough temerity to send the message to the four winds and stay calm, I didn't say anything. Note that in my life I have met people of infinite kindness. But there, before those beings from other worlds whom very few have ever met, I was faced with a strange and strange feeling.

I had been so bold as to assume that they had genuine "human character" - to use our words - but I was measuring another of the shameful injustices that we earthlings are capable of, blinded as we are by our much-valued superiority, both on the moral and material plane. I was also amazed at the dizzying speed with which my mind coordinated ideas and how the reflections followed one another, coining, as if by lightning, the answer, the reply or the question.

- The message will be publicly disseminated. And I will manage to ensure that it is neither diminished nor confused.

It is not the first time, of course, that I have been entrusted with unexpected missions and sometimes somewhat excessive in relation to my faculties or possibilities. But it was enough for someone to trust me for me to consider myself obliged, morally speaking, to not disappoint him. And then I grew and achieved it. So, when I said, in the past, here I go!, I was the first to be surprised to see the things that the last of the strays on Earth can achieve, if he sets his mind to it. And, in this case, with the help of my editor, who, after nearly two hours of conversation, and despite seeing my firm resolution, said to me:

—Now I am going to talk to you as a friend and not as an editor: do you know the mess you are getting yourself into, kid, by writing this book?

And I answered him:

—The same, or almost, that you are getting yourself into by publishing it.

—Well, go ahead—were his last words.

Now with a certain extraterrestrial parsimony, I dropped another question:

—Well, all that about the Mediterranean as a source of life and regeneration is very good, but now, please, tell me why you have chosen me as your messenger.

Only a few seconds passed before the voice began to give its answer. But I immediately noticed, and with great intensity, as if a more direct communication had been established between us—between them and me—and I felt them closer to me than ever before.

I would almost say that I had the sensation of being one of them.

And memories of my childhood, youth, and different moments of my later life, which I had completely forgotten, paraded through my mind like meteors. It seemed as if “someone” had decided to put me in a trance to better understand what they were going to tell me, by first designing in my memory the picture or the scenario of my past experiences.

—First of all, we will tell you that you have been chosen, after a meticulous study of your personality, for reasons that are both particular and general. The particular ones are these: that you are a free and independent man. That is to say, that you strive to preserve, together with your partner, the widest possible areas of independence. And that neither you nor your partner belong to any party or sect. You enjoy a certain popularity as a serious historian and this because you are one of the few who investigates history on the ground and knows how to hear it from the mouths of humble people. For one of your books, the one dedicated to the Spanish guerrillas, you agreed to take very serious risks, traveling through Spanish lands, to bring to light facts that had been silenced or falsified [.

»The general reasons are condensed in that you belong to one of those Mediterranean communities and you are fully identified with everything it represents.

»Another curious fact is that script of yours for the cinema, in which, intuitively, you hit the mark several times regarding us. Although it is also true that you offered a somewhat special version of the fact of our immortality.

In any case, by giving that treatment to the script you demonstrated understanding towards us and a certain generosity in admitting the possibility of our existence. In the script you also anticipated, although with less dangerous repercussions than now, how harmful the intervention of the people of the Earth in our world could be. We are not saying that you believed in it, but that you somehow admitted that possibility. Is that not so?

—Yes, yes. In those years I asked myself some questions that seemed logical to me. at least for someone who, like me, was never too conditioned by transcendental atavisms.

There was a great silence here. My determination to capture some noise, to reject a silence of dimensions unknown to me – I have never “heard” anything like it – shows to what extent the nervous or emotional tension of earthlings is harmful. In these reflections of mine I could not say, to be honest, what there is of sensation “live” or “after the fact”. But what is certain is that their silence did not satisfy me completely because of me, because I continued to insist on hearing noises. At least at first. Then I got used to it and I seem to remember that it was like an incomparable sedative. I suppose it must be something like the dream cures that are administered on Earth to people who can afford them. I couldn't help asking them:

—And what do those long silences mean?
 Are they usual or are they part of a plan?
I confess that I immediately regretted my insolence. But, as it provoked a slight laugh from them, I said to myself: welcome to insolence!
—Please don't be evil-minded. There is no set plan here. Our conversation is marked by the channels indicated by curiosity and the desire to know. We are free beings, completely free, understand that well. And therefore, we must respect the freedom of others, because without collective freedom individual freedom does not exist. We also never use coercion or blackmail, which, like violence, are feelings and reactions unknown to us. Genuine silence, unknown to earthlings, is a common resource in our communities, as necessary for us as moral or material nourishment. It is part of our vital energy; without it our organism would surely not function so well. And you, look how curious it is, have finally decided to use it as a curative medicine and not as a preventive measure. That is one of our best sources of life: that of foresight. Tonight perhaps the silences have been longer in your honour; thus your brain rests more and better, and assimilates more calmly our exchange of impressions. We observe, however, that you do not seem willing to be completely silent inside. Are we wrong?

—It must be lack of habit. But I promise you that I will apply myself because I understand that this total absence of noise has to be very beneficial for any human organism.

—And animal, dear friend —they interrupted me—, and vegetal. and environmental., silence is a unique and incomparably beneficial medicine for the entire Universe.

That they followed me without letting go for a single instant was demonstrated by the fact that when I began to think, immediately that great silence arose which, today, by natural means, we earthlings would be incapable of reproducing. And I noticed this: they always think and project in “universal terms.” The Universe is, at all times, the stage for the fantastic play that they have been performing for thousands —or millions, who knows!— of years and, as they repeatedly told me, the inexhaustible source of their life. And, at a certain moment, they would insist: “That Universe of which you are also a part, which belongs to you as much as to us!”

—So —I stressed—, on the one hand we have what you call “cosmic rest” and on the other this silence, the slowness of your movements, the acting without the slightest alteration, and this speaking with your eyes, plus other details that surely escape me. Are those the secrets of your youth? That is to say: that you stop at the optimal point of your maturity.

—Exactly, dear companion, this way of behaving avoids all those complications that you know on Earth due to stress. As we have already told you, prevention is one of the keys to our existence and not only the care of our organisms.

—This is the second time you have called me dear comrade. What does that mean to you?

—That we are undertaking a mission together, the dissemination of the message, and that we have complete confidence in you.

—I meant the word “dear,” I clarified.

—We have pronounced that word as a small concession to your language. So that you better understand to what degree we have valued your sincerity from the first moment. With this we also express our profound gratitude for your fraternal collaboration.

FINAL NOTES

It is perfectly possible to admit the existence of life and beings endowed with reason on planets in our system and elsewhere in the Universe. It is possible that, depending on the force of gravity of a given planet, its atmosphere and other specific conditions, these beings endowed with reason perceive the outside world through senses that differ considerably from ours.

Vladimir Ilych Ulianov, Lenin.

The Earth is the cradle of Humanity. But one does not always live in the cradle.

Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, "father" of Soviet rockets.

LATEST NEWS

Just before the book was due to be published, the Barcelona magazine Actual, (issue 1, March 10, 1982) published a report on the measures taken by the Soviet Union to listen to the voices of the Cosmos. We transcribe the most interesting passages with a double objective: to show our readers the scientific interest that it arouses in a power with enormous resources and the desire to arouse curiosity there about the Universe and everything that integrates and composes it.




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HELLO, EARTHLINGS.!

At the end of September 1980, the new radio telescope located near Stavropol, in the south of the USSR, picked up signals from outer space. Press censorship was immediately imposed on this very important event. Not a single word about it appeared in the Soviet media. However, within the narrow

The news not only spread beyond the boundaries of the Soviet scientific community, but it had the effect of a bombshell. Excited astronomers, impressed by the magnitude of the news, exchanged information that filtered down to them from Stavropol.

Astrophysicists at the Sternberg Institute for Cosmic Exploration on the campus of Moscow State University were reluctant to discuss the matter. The information, they said, had to be official. Only Professor Nikolai Semyonovich Kardashov, deputy director of the Institute, was authorized to comment on the matter.

"I can neither confirm nor deny the rumor, although it is not impossible. Our new radio telescope is an incredible instrument. I am sure that it is only a matter of time, five or ten years at the most, before receiving and deciphering messages from other space civilizations becomes routine at RATAN-600."

RATAN-600 is the code name for the gigantic new scientific facility in the North Caucasus, which took nine years to build and has been fully operational since the end of last year. The initials RATAN stand for the Radio Observatory of the Academy of Sciences, and the number 600 refers to the diameter of its gigantic radio telescope. It is two kilometers long, although it has been curved like the perimeter of a large wall.

“RATAN-600 has lived up to our expectations. We believed that once it was completed, it would put us in contact with outside civilizations, and so it has. The signals it picked up emanated from the general area of ​​the center of our galaxy and were equivalent to sounds emitted at regular intervals. They were received at the wavelength of 1.8 cm, which is the lower end of the RATAN-600 field.

“The general opinion is that a huge amount of work is needed to solve the puzzle presented by the captured fragments. This will also require the construction of an expensive additional facility at RATAN and synchronization with radio telescopes in Uzbekistan and Kamchatka to cover the intended wavelength. Both plans are already in the process of being implemented.

»We are certain that we were discovered long ago by supercivilizations whose superior optical telescopes, working unhindered by interstellar dust, have probably catalogued all the planets in our galaxy, including Earth. The messages sent from there outward are addressed to us in particular because they are focused on our Sun.

»Who are they and what do they have to tell us? It is hoped that answers to these two basic questions will be available within the next ten years. Soviet scientists have so far come to the conclusion that a number of planets are inhabited at the very center of the Milky Way, about 30,000 light years from Earth. A section of RATAN-600 is permanently centered on this particular point in our galaxy. That is the direction from which the messages come.

»We do not exclude, however, the existence of civilizations in other areas of our galaxy. These are the youngest, even though they are many thousands of years older than us. We are certain that they are undergoing a gradual transformation from a life very similar to ours to a longer life, with entirely replaceable body parts and immunized against diseases: half humanoid, half robot. As their evolution continues and the planets on which they live wear out, they will want to move to other points. Finally, they will travel to the center of our galaxy, where they will join the supercivilizations that have made the journey before. It is a logical migration to a point where there is unlimited energy and which is free from the deadly radiations that lurk in space, as a constant danger to all living beings. In addition, being in the center, they are in an ideal spot to be able to explore the galaxy. The difficulty for our investigations is that with the most advanced telescopes, we still have very little data at our disposal.

»In order to make progress in research, scientists around the world are faced with a natural barrier that is extremely difficult to overcome: interstellar dust. At Palomar, in the United States, the telescope has been adjusted to include infrared research, thereby partially overcoming the problem.

»We know that radio is the answer if we ever want to solve the mystery of what we believe to be the highly populated area of ​​our galaxy. Work in this direction has begun at RATAN-600, although it is still in its early stages. I am sure that in the next ten years we will know what is happening there. At the moment, we still have to find out how many stars there are and their density. And also the size of the gaseous accumulations and their movements. Where have these people found a haven?



»That they are very advanced in relation to us is certain, as is our conviction that they have found us.

»In any case the question remains as to how curious they are about us. Enough to come and take a look? Quite possibly. Aboard the UFOs picked up by our radars? Why not? They could use laws of physics unknown to us.

»Before we establish contact with them, we need some information. Initially we want to know what kind of life they represent and the level of their development. Surely they can give us advice regarding our future development, they may even suggest that we build a gigantic spaceship and join them where they are, although probably at the present stage of life and technology on Earth that very idea is beyond our comprehension. However, for astrophysicists it is an option that we must consider.

»But what about the planets closer to us. at distances of 11, 20, 40 or 60 light-years? Why should the signals reaching RATAN-600 come from the centre of the galaxy and not from these planets? There was life on some of them, but it no longer exists. They are planets abandoned by their populations who emigrated aboard gigantic “Noah’s Arks” millions of years ago. I am confident that in the next five years American optical telescopes in space will discover dark planets orbiting some of these nearby stars.

»Then, with the help of gigantic telescopes we will be able to explore their surface. We will discover remains of lost civilizations that have emigrated. Since they will have left them at the beginning of our civilization, they will not have been able to know of our future existence. Our astronauts will travel there and bring us proof. When? We will need another fifty years of accelerated progress for that.

Astrophysicist Lev Mironovich Gindilis agrees with Dr. Kardashov's statements:

—I also expect great results from RATAN-600. I am absolutely convinced that these other civilizations are trying to communicate with us and I wish we could officially admit that these signals have been received. Where I differ from Dr. Kardashov is in his statement that most of the civilizations near us have disappeared; I believe that they are also there, waiting to establish a dialogue with us.

(«The largest radio telescope in the world, located in Arecibo —Puerto Rico—, built by the United States, can capture radio signals coming from a distance of 100 light-years. Now, within the radius of 100 light-years of the Earth there are approximately one thousand star systems; and some of these systems could have a planet capable of harboring life». Diario Sur/ Oeste. «Is there life in the Cosmos?». Seville, February 24, 1982. Coprensa Agency).


next headline, 
THE GREAT HOPE.

»If I had to find a certain order in those ideas, conclusions, feelings or deductions that have germinated in me throughout these pages, I would say the following: 1. Of those 300 long cases examined here, only a minimal percentage can be described as fraud. It is not true, therefore, that “the majority of UFO photos existing in the world are false.” Whoever can make such an assertion is just talking. 2. The ships photographed long before the Second World War —as we have been able to verify— are not secret weapons of the great human powers. Before, long before man used the jet plane (on September 30, 1929), UFOs were already flying over the world at speeds that we cannot even dream of today. All the military in the world —I know— know this. 3. These ships, consequently, do not come from Earth. 4. These ships, logically, are directed or manned intelligently. 5. And the study of these thousand graphic documents shows us that UFOs have been and are over any objective: from a volcanic eruption to a military base, next to an experimental plane, near our astronauts or very close to small or large human agglomerations. 6. Their occupants —the UFO “pilots”— know man and planet Earth infinitely better than we do. 7. Only since the invention of photography have they been able to be “caught” by our civilization. But, really, since when have they visited us? 8. It is they who seem to “choose” the place, the moment and the photographer who will be in charge of leaving testimony of their presence. (Of the 300 cases analyzed here, a third meet the necessary requirements to suspect such a conclusion.) 9. We do not know the reasons, but the crew members of these UFOs seem to “have fun” at the expense of scientists and great photography professionals. (The vast majority of UFO photos have been and are taken by.).
10. With rare exceptions, these ships remain before the photographer just long enough to obtain one, two or three images. (Curiously, these few shots are almost always the last on the roll.) 11. It is equally “strange” that more than 33% of the photographers who have captured images of UFOs have had the clear sensation that the object “was allowing itself to be photographed”. 12. Although, as I announced at the time, I am preparing a broad work on the so-called “invisible UFOs”, I must advance that the reality of this phenomenon in the thousand photographs exhibited here is another constant. I would add that a “constant” of the utmost importance, at all levels. 13. The obvious fact that none of these ships —belonging to very different “galactic” or “dimensional” “humanities”— makes public and official contact with the man of Earth forces us to think of one or several “motives” that are strictly respected by all of them. It is very probable that their FREEDOM, their concept of their own and others’ freedom is radically different from ours. 14. Another unquestionable fact emerges from this study: they are watching us closely. 15. It is perfectly plausible that these thousands of graphic documents and films obey a perfect and meticulous “plan” to raise the awareness of the human being, in relation to other “realities.”

»And I end with a feeling that can only fill us with joy and hope: the future of the man of this planet is already being marked by these ships. We are perhaps like the baby who has managed to sit up in his cradle and discovers around him other beings, much older, much more expert and much wiser[55.»



next headline, 
ANTARCTICA: A GREAT FOOD RESERVE.

Remember: they told me that we should not pay attention to the predictions of the serious specialists in the matter, Malthusian or not Malthusian, when they affirmed that the world will not be able to feed the eight billion inhabitants of the planet Earth in the first decades of the year 2000. And they assured me that with the resources known to them of the Earth, forty to fifty billion human beings could live with dignity.

Well, please read these extracts from an article that appeared in the national press:

»Antarctica, a continent of ice that can feed the entire planet. Antarctica, with 98% of its total volume frozen, possibly has the largest reserves of both sea and minerals on the entire planet. Also called the “New Eldorado”, it is dematerialized, and any kind of storage of nuclear materials is prohibited in its ice. Likewise, the flora and fauna of these lands are protected by a treaty, whose signatory members have already established a series of scientific bases for the study and research of the natural resources of Antarctica.

»In the chapter on food, it is estimated that its resources are certainly very valuable. For example: the exploitation of Krill, belonging to the family of crustaceans, which, according to studies, could perfectly feed the entire Earth, since although its exploitation is little recognized, it seems that it could have a production of 100 to 150 million tons per year.

«As for the mineral resources of Antarctica, under a layer of sky of more than 2000 meters, the main raw materials that Humanity needs are concentrated. In the depths of the sea that surround the continent, as well as in its adjacent seas, there is a great quantity of oil and cubic meters of natural gas, methane, etc. With all this, it must be said that one of the main seas that bathe the entire territory, the Weddell, is the one that holds the greatest quantity of living beings. {El Correo Catalán, Barcelona, ​​May 5, 1982, page 18.)



next headline, 
A SMALL TRIBUTE TO MIGUEL DE CERVANTES.

THE «GOLDEN AGE»: DON QUIXOTE'S SPEECH TO THE GOATHERS.

Before giving the floor to Don Miguel de Cervantes, through the mouth of Don Quixote de la Mancha, let us underline a couple of things: the first is that we only know of one country where the famous novel of the illustrious one-handed man is little less than the bedside book of the vast majority of its inhabitants: socialist Cuba. And the second, that it is here, precisely in Spain, the birthplace of the author and his main characters, and the setting of such long and instructive adventures, the place where those incomparable and unsurpassable life lessons signed and signed by the Ingenious Gentleman and his faithful and sagacious squire are least known.

Often, speaking of our times (the modern era, and two steps away from the 21st century, already in the so-called "technological era"), we have come to the conclusion, with friends who share our concern about the incessant dehumanization of our

It is a fact that we are living in a world where the experiences of our children and grandchildren are the same, that of the terrestrial civilization, more specifically that imposed by the overdeveloped countries, must take a break and examine to what extent it should "go back", take a good look at reality, and resume the march towards progress through unmistakably progressive paths. That is to say, those in which man's conscience is above everything, including his stomach. It is not a question of returning to the Stone Age, of course, but it is possible that one day not far away the Man and Woman of the Earth will be forced to take stock of the different Ages known to our civilization and extract from them the positive things that each of those Ages contained and, with the recovered materials and the most useful ones that we now have, compose that "Golden Age", as Don Quixote called it, which could constitute the future goal of Humanity. That in which, to put it in the words of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, there was neither yours nor mine, but rather no one's, which is, in short, everyone's.

Now let us look at the conversation that Don Quixote dedicated to the goatherds and which demonstrates, if it were still necessary, that the "golden ages" have always been - are - within the reach of the human being of the Earth. And that to reach them it is enough to propose it.

"-Happy age and happy centuries those to which the ancients gave the name of gold, and not because in them gold, which in our age of iron is so highly valued, was obtained in that fortunate era without any effort, but because then those who lived in it ignored these two words of yours and mine.

"In that holy age all things were common; No one needed to undertake any other work to obtain his daily sustenance than to reach out and reach for it from the strong oaks, which were generously inviting them with their sweet and ripe fruit. The clear springs and running rivers, in magnificent abundance, offered them tasty and transparent waters. In the cracks of the rocks and in the hollows of the trees, the solicitous and discreet bees formed their republic, offering to any hand, without any interest, the fertile harvest of their sweetest work. The brave cork oaks gave off, without any other artifice than that of their courtesy, their wide and light bark, with which houses began to be covered, supported by rustic stakes, only for protection from the inclemency of the weather.

»All was peace then, all friendship, all concord. The heavy ploughshare had not yet dared to open or visit the pious entrails of our first mother, who, without being forced, offered from all parts of her fertile and spacious bosom everything that could satisfy, sustain, and delight the children who then possessed her. Then, indeed, the simple and beautiful girls went from valley to valley and from hill to hill, braided and braided, with no more clothing than those that were necessary to honestly cover what honesty wants and has always wanted to be covered, and their adornments were not those that are used now, for whom the purple of Tyre and the so-called martyred silk make them expensive, but a few green leaves of burdock and ivy woven together, with which perhaps they went as pompous and composed as our courtesans now go with the strange and strange inventions that idle curiosity has shown them. Then the loving concepts of the soul were decorated (recited by heart) simply and simply in the same way and manner that she conceived them, without seeking artificial detours of words to exalt them.

«There was no fraud, deceit or malice mixed with truth and simplicity. Justice was on its own terms, without daring to disturb or offend those of favor and those of interest, who now so undermine, disturb and persecute it. The law of lace had not yet been established in the understanding of the judge, because then there was no need to judge, nor who was judged. The maidens and honesty went, as I have said, everywhere, alone and mistress, without fear that the foreign looseness and lascivious intention would undermine her and her downfall was born of her own taste and will. And now, in these our detestable centuries, no one is safe, even if another new labyrinth, like that of Crete, hides and closes her; because there, through the cracks or through the air, with the zeal of their cursed concern, the loving pestilence enters them and makes them throw all their contemplation into ruin. For whose safety, as time went on and malice grew, the order of knights-errant was instituted, to defend maidens, protect widows and help orphans and the needy.

(Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, first part. Edition, study and notes by Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce. Editorial Alhambra. Madrid, 1979, pages 153-154-155. «The goatherds and discourse of the golden age.»)


last,  headline, BRIEF EPILOGUE.

Success is a banality. an absolute banality.

Orson Welles.

I confess, dear reader, that at times all this seemed like a dream to me too. But for three specific reasons it is not so: the first is—I know and many should know—that all those blessings that they explained are, have been and continue to be within the reach of the inhabitants of the Earth. All without exception. It would be enough to seriously propose it. The other reason is that most of the data that I provide—only the message is very different from the previous ones, precisely because of its very justified overtones of an ultimatum—had been previously provided by other inhabitants of the Earth who, directly or indirectly, have had contact with them. I have been able to verify this as, in order to document myself on the subject, I read the most serious testimonies endorsed by the most authoritative specialists in the matter.

The other reason —which I have already pointed out, but which I will repeat once more— is that I, since July 19, 1936, have not dreamed again; neither asleep nor awake.

And curiously —and this is no coincidence— those with whom I have coincided most have been two of our compatriots —a Catalan and a Canarian— whose testimonies appear in these pages. I am not trying to coin any predestiny with this regarding the Iberian peoples in the future, and perhaps not so distant, affairs of the Universe. But there is History —our history— to show that if sometimes the children of the bull's skin have been reproached for speaking loudly, we could have answered: "we speak loudly because we can." But no, the one who gave the best answer, in 1942, from his Mexican exile, was the poet León Felipe: "However, the Spaniard does not speak loudly."

I have already said it. I will repeat it again: "The Spanish speak from the exact level of Man and whoever thinks that he speaks loudly is because he listens from the bottom of a well." That is: from the sewers of History.

We sincerely hope, thinking of those of our compatriots who cover their ears - or close their mouths, it makes no difference - so as not to hear the signals that reach us from the Cosmos, that their attitude is not due to the fact that they live, that they are diving, and even reveling, in the most pestilent sewers of the planet Earth.


Corrections.

In this adaptation of the book by Eduardo Pons Prades, various modifications have been made to the structure of the book, as well as the updating of words accepted today by the R.A.E.

The appendices have been unified into three parts that are found at the end of the digital edition, being noted in the book for immediate access through hyperlinks. The same structure has been used for the appendices.

Certain pages with photographs and notes have been moved to the end of their respective chapters to make reading more pleasant.

The index of names has been added as in the printed edition, but omitting the page number. In the digital format it is completely dispensable.

Words replaced:

Igloo for Iglú.

Septiembre for Septiembre.

The letter «m» in relation to the unit of measurement has been replaced by «meters».



end of book extracts, as google-translated - from
Mensaje de otros mundos, el - Tapa blanda
Eduardo Pons Prades
remark this translation attempt is
non- profeesional - only for personal use.