THE SPECIMEN
In 1979 or 1980, a creature resembling some of those sighted in Puerto Rico, though smaller, was allegedly killed by a youth, José Luis ‘Chino’ Zayas, in a cave near a mountain behind the National Guard’s Santiago Camp. ‘We don’t really know if it’s alien-related,’ Jorge Martin emphasized to me. ‘We only know that it came from the cave system up there, where there has been a lot of strange activity.’
‘I first heard about the case when [Chino] told us about it,’ explained Sergeant Benjamin Morales of the Salinas Police, in an interview with Jorge Martin. He went on:
He said that he’d been way up there by the Tetas de Cayey [twin mountain peaks] with a friend and that they’d seen a group of little animals, creatures that looked like small humans, going into a crevice within a cave. Allegedly, one of the tiny creatures attacked Chino or grabbed his leg, and he got scared. He picked up a stick, clobbered it and killed it. Later, I got to see the little man or creature myself when [Officer] Osvald Santiago [who had confiscated it from Chino] brought it to the police station . . . Chino was afraid it would decompose and took it over to Wito Morales, the owner of Monserrate Funeral Parlor, who placed it in a glass jar with formaldehyde to preserve it.
That thing belonged to an unknown species, not a human or an animal [see colour plates]. I’ve been working for the Puerto Rico Police for 24 years . . . and I wouldn’t say what I’m telling you unless I was sure about it . . . I’m a licensed emergency medical technician [and] those who say it was a fabrication or an ape or a fetus don’t know what they’re talking about, or they’re lying . . . The thing had a head too large for its body and pointy little ears. Its skin was a greyish-green and [its eyes were] large and slanted. It had no nose, only two little holes, and a mouth without lips or teeth — at least, I don’t recall seeing any teeth . . . The bone structure was different . . . They were already formed and hard; its crown wasn’t soft, its bones weren’t brittle.
Elizabeth Zayas, Chino’s sister, provided further details: It had some kind of white or blondish hair on the sides of its head, but was otherwise bald . . . It had large eyes and its pupils were like those of a cat.
The eyes were strange, because they had no colour; they appeared transparent, whitish, crystalline. I don’t know if it was because the little man was dead or because that’s how they were. The arms were very long and thin, and its hands reached its knees or further. The hands were like forks. They had only four, clawed fingers, like the claws of a cat, and a sort of webbing in between them, like thin membranes . . .
It was real skinny, and its feet were really weird . . . They looked more like the flippers people use to swim and to skin-dive.
Regarding the ‘flippers’, there is an interesting correlation here with Jan Wolski’s aliens
At no time did the creature bleed from its fatal injury, though it was covered in ‘a clear goo, something resembling egg whites’, said Elizabeth Zayas. The creature also had a well-developed male organ and testicles. ‘It was definitely neither a baby nor a monkey,’ she asserted.
Sr Calixto Pérez, a professor of chemistry at the University of Puerto Rico, was another who examined the creature. ‘In my opinion it was something extraterrestrial,’ he told Jorge. ‘Its cranium was too big for the body, which was small and skinny, and its eyes were too big . . .’
Eventually, the police informed the US military authorities. Not long afterwards, some men turned up at the Zayas household. ‘My husband was there when the men came,’ said Elizabeth, ‘and told me that they had in fact shown papers, something like an order to collect the thing, along with federal identification. They said they were from NASA. They searched the house, found the [jar with the creature] and took it. Chino told me the men said they were taking the corpse to a museum in Ponce, where they had a laboratory, and then they would take it to NASA in the United States . . .’
Whatever the origin of these creatures, it is unlikely they fly the saucers!