Witness of Another World: Interviewing Alan Stivelman (Plus A ‘Long-nosed’ Synchronicity!)

Juan & Alan

Last month was my birthday, and the best present I received came in the form of a podcast interview I was able to join thanks to my good friend Greg Bishop, who had scheduled an interview with Argentinian filmmaker Alan Stivelman, the director of the much lauded documentary Testigo de Otro Mundo (Witness of Another World).

Saying I liked this film would be the understatement of the century. Like I wrote in my review for The Daily Grail, this is simply the BEST UFO-related documentary I’ve ever seen. Go ahead and accuse me of hyperbole, but do so after watching the film and then compare it with the other documentaries making the rounds among UFO buffs nowadays.

(Here is the link so you can listen to the Radio Misterioso interview)

I watched the film TWICE and took many notes, and then I proceeded to write a long list of questions for Alan prior to the interview –as did Greg. I haven’t listened to other podcasts that invited him to talk about his movie, and yet I’m confident Greg and I managed to touch upon many points that may have not been mentioned elsewhere.

One of those points was an interesting synchronicity that happened to me the next day after I watched the film. This year I began reading Jacques Vallee’s Forbidden Science journals, which cover more than four decades of his life and delve in both his professional career(s) as an astronomer-turned-computer scientist, who emigrates to America with his wife in the 1960s and ends up becoming a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, as well as his ‘alternative life’ as one of the most prominent UFOlogists of all time. These books are a must-read for everyone interested in making sense of the way the field of UFOlogy has evolved –or rather de-volved— throughout the years, and the role played in it by figures like J. Allen Hynek, Jim McDonald, Hal Puthoff, John Alexander and a long etcetera.

So that morning after watching WoAW I sat with my copy of Forbidden Science 2 with my own sketchbook/journal and a pen next to me so I could take notes, as I often do. When I reached page 404* I was struck by the now-familiar oddness of a synchronicity by the time I began to read about a case in Colusa, California, that Vallee had taken and interest in, which involved a Native American named Amos who had been visited since the Fifties by a small entity wearing a suit and a mask “that gave the appearance of a trunk in front of his face.” Amos also described the being wearing gloves.

I found that little reference interesting, because it immediately reminded me of Juan Pérez, the protagonist of WoAW, who described one of the entities he encountered when he was just a 12-year-old boy as wearing a suit and a helmet with a long hose, as a kind off cumbersome breathing apparatus. The tall being also wore gloves, one which he gave to Juan (as portrayed in the drawing below).

That both of these witnesses happened to be Native Americans was also noteworthy to me.

My career as a designer and graphic artist makes me think of things in visual terms, so when I read this description in Vallee’s books –combined with the images of Juan’s old UFO report that I had googled on the Internet– the first thing that popped into my head was the Hindu god Ganesha, with his human body and elephant head. The fact that Ganesha is a favorite among “Ancient Astronaut” theorists who interpret his trunk as some sort of whimsical interpretation of a breathing gear may have also influenced this association –I’m not a fan of the modern show Ancient Aliens, but I read “Ancient Astronaut” books when I was a kid, like everybody else.

After I had made this seemingly-unrelated association, I decided I wanted to learn more about the cult of Ganesha, to see if I could perhaps find further clues. I grabbed my cell phone and typed “Ganesha” on the Google search bar, and was confused by the first thing that appeared on my phone screen as part of the answer to my query: A date –September 2, 2019 to be exact.

With my curiosity now fully piqued, I clicked on that date and learned that it was the day when the Hindu religion celebrates the “Ganesh Chaturthi,” which is a festival that commemorates the birthday of Lord Ganesha, the god of wisdom and success. It is also known as Vinayaka Chaturthi, “And can last up to 10 days during the Hindu month of Bhadra, which usually falls between mid-August and mid-September” (Source: Wikipedia).

The fact that Bhadra’s exact date can vary in our solar-based calendar means the Hindu calendar must be moon-based (just like the Jewish). So, with a certain feeling that I was definitely on the right track of finding something , I decided to check WHEN the Ganesh Chaturthi festival was celebrated in the year of 1978 –the year Juan Pérez had had his close encounter.

It turned out just like I had expected: September 6th (Wednesday). The EXACT day of Juan’s incredible experience!

The screen capture I took with my phone, after I discovered this “coincidence”

By now, my head was about to EXPLODE. Only people who have experienced these sort of things can relate, when you feel you have stumbled upon a cosmic connection of major relevance–alas, gradually this sensation eventually fades, and you begin to doubt whether your discovery is actually important or not. After I had written down all of this on my own journal, I went on to continue reading Jacques Vallee’s. He kept on describing Amos, the Colusa witness:

“Amos is illiterate. One of the last surviving members of a local tribe, he lives in a wooden cabin with no electricity. He intensely dislikes the little man, who “smells bad and takes away all the meat in the house, the product of Amos’s hunting [emphasis mine].”

So here we have more “coincidences” connecting these two seemingly-unrelated cases:

• Both Juan Pérez and Amos lived on unpopulated areas as hermits, in humble dwellings lacking the modern comforts of electricity.
• They both resorted to hunting to make a living.
• Meat was an integral part in both close encounter experiences –in the film WoAW we see Juan recounting under hypnosis how one of the beings was “cutting meat.” Alan also told Greg and I that Juan’s father had found two dead cows prior to the UFO close encounter, a detail that was omitted in the documentary.

An Indian god, met by two “Indians” on different sides of the Americas –and yes, I know we’re not supposed to use those terms anymore (Vallee did in his journal, tho) but perhaps this phenomenon’s trickstery nature doesn’t care too much about not hurting our modern PC sensibilities!

The only problem with my ‘404’/Ganesha synchronicity is that meat is definitely not something you would associate with a Hindu deity. We all know that cows are considered sacred animals in India, and in fact the selling of meat is strictly forbidden during the duration of Ganesh Chaturthi. But then again, in both of these cases (Amos and Juan’s) we never see the entities consuming the meat, do we? In fact, we can only speculate as why these entities would have a ‘need’ for it. A cursory read about the revering of cows and cattle in India reveals that avoiding consumption of beef is a somewhat modern development, and that in ancient times cows were sacrificed to the gods.

Whatever the case, I decided to share these rare findings with Alan during our interview with him; he was incredibly friendly throughout the whole conversation, and sounded genuinely impressed with my discoveries. I also kept finding more coincidences with other cases Vallee investigated. In Forbidden Science 3 (page 32) he mentions another “gray glove” coincidence involving a case in Redding, California, in which a woman and 3 daughters were engulfed in a “luminous cloud.” Vallee made the association between this case and that of Amos but, strangely enough, he failed to make the connection with the case of Juan Pérez, even though by then he had already traveled to Argentina and interviewed the young boy personally.

I did also write an email to the man himself, you know. Unfortunately, I never got a reply back. Oh well…

---

(*): In computer terms, “404” is often used when a search does not yield the expected result, or when you arrive to an unknown digital address. The fact that Vallee’s early work with laying the foundation for computer networks make this somewhat amusing.