| Next, the article mentions the exact case presented in Magonia in 1969, that of La Criolla: “The location is the “La Criolla” estate near the city of San Justo in the province of Santa Fe, Argentina. Caretaker of the estate Sr. Juan A. Peirotti recognized a powerful discharge from his TV set, and the whole house was flooded with light. He ran out to the patio to greet a strange luminous object. “He described the object as oval shaped with two bright red domes at the top and at the bottom. In the middle was a luminous white band of light and between this band and the top and bottom dome, the light of the object seemed to be changing constantly with many various colors.” “As soon as Sr. Peirotti reached the patio he saw that the object was rising up from the ground into the air and that it disappeared from sight in a few seconds.” Continuing: “The next morning he went out to examine the location where he had spotted the object and found “a large ring which had been burned into the grass and inside of this ring there were three fairly shallow circular indentations as if made by the landing props of some craft which had settled on the ground.” Also found was an ash-like substance covering the ring and the nearby grass. The distance between these circular “pad” marks were almost equal as can be seen by the sketch of the position of the markings. But the most unusual discovery was the finding of “great mushrooms” growing at a location where they had never been seen before. Sr. Peirotti reported the entire incident to the local police, who went to the site, gathered the mushrooms, some soil samples and some of the burned grass and said these things would be sent to a scientific facility for analysis. There was never any further disclosure on the matter from any of the Argentine authorities involved nor were results of the analysis made public.” The article goes on to report another finding, also in Argentina of the same year, in November: “In that same year another strange site was found at Necochea, Argentina. The report was sketchy and went like this: a gardener who was called to look at a strange luminous object was so astonished by what he had seen, that he went off to summon various members of a local church of UFO investigators who, along with a number of military personnel, returned to the location. It was revealed that there they found the soil totally burned over an area six meters in diameter. Within this circular area there were found eight mushrooms, some of them as much as eighty-one centimeters (32 inches) wide and fifteen centimeters (6 inches) high. These mushrooms were gathered and sent to the University of La Plata for an analysis which was never released.” Another account is then presented in the article: “Two weeks later, on the morning on November 26th of that same year, a number of enormous mushrooms were found on the Beritaco farm, some ten kilometers from the city of Tandil, Argentina by Juan Tami, a member of the staff of that farm. The appearance of these giant mushrooms, within a circle of about ten meters, was sudden and prolific. They were first |
discovered next to a scorched circle of ground and Sr. Tami was the first to find them. The grass inside the burned circle seemed to be singed. Inside the circle, a cow bone about fifty centimeters long showed signs of having been burned as did a branch from a nearby tree. Neighbors told local authorities they had seen strange lights on previous nights without being able to define their nature or origin. Consequently, there was a consensus that the scorched ground and the giant mushrooms were the result of the UFO landing. The description of what was found was best expressed in the newspaper Eco of Tandil which stated, “The characteristics of the area are as follows: (a) there is an outline in the grass of ovoid shape, whose furrow is some ten meters. In this outline the grass will not grow and the earth there has been severely scorched. Around the mentioned outline, the mushrooms have grown and nothing of a similar dimension has ever been seen by the farm’s inhabitants; (b) the mushrooms “sweat” when placed in the sun; (c) the partly burned cow bone and branch lay roughly in the center of the oval; (d) the mushrooms were continuing to grow, even in a few hours’ time.” In another instance: “Moving on to May 26, 1969, in the city of Azul, Argentina, Sr. Adolpho Corengia was in his house when all of the sudden the inside of his house was lit up by a brilliant and powerful light. He leaned out the window and observed a strange object which had landed on his property. He described it as resembling a bright ball of fire emitting multi-colored lights and on the top portion there appeared what he thought was a small yellow turret. Prompted by his curiosity, he ran outside excited to get a better view. He estimated that when he first saw it, it was no more than fifteen meters away from him. As he approached the object, it immediately began ascending and gained great altitude in a matter of seconds, moving away swiftly. “He went to the spot where the UFO had been resting on the ground and was shocked to find a burned circle in the grass with a diameter of two and a half meters (approximately 8 feet). The grass in the circumference of the circle was completely burned. But, the most striking feature of the area was that overnight, giant size mushrooms had sprung up and they were growing within the circumference of this burned circle.” The last event mentioned occurred on April 20, 1975, near the Pachimoco Dam where strange lights had been seen that Sunday night. According to the news story from La Tribuna the witnesses were a group of workers, but it was actually a group of children who observed the craft land at the site. |