Over the past week or so, Scott Corrales has been reporting on a teardrop shaped object that crashed in Argentina and witnessed by a large group of residents. There was a previous crash of an unknown object in Bolivia in 1978 that created a bit of a stir since it was thought that the object was retrieved by the U.S. military. Some have referred to this incident as the 'Bolivian Roswell'.
On May 6, 1978, at about 4:15 p.m., an unknown object crashed into a mountain near El Taire on the Bermejo River, the border between the Bolivian province of Tarija and Argentina. Thousands of people saw this happening and later described the object as being cylindrical in shape with a flaming tail. It had caused a supersonic bang that was heard up to 150 miles away. The next day, the papers were speculating on what had come down in that godforsaken place. The explanations ranged from meteorites to UFOs and belated reentry of some Apollo capsule. All of them referred to statements of eye witnesses.
Then it was announced that the Argentinian authorities had sent the 20th unit of the border police to the area in question to look for wreckage on their side of the border. The search in that mountainous country could last for weeks, so swarms of reporters went to the nearest big town, Aguas Blancas, to take up quarters there and await further developments, as well as to interview eyewitnesses in the town. And in fact, there were a number of witnesses who claimed to have seen the object. Most of them described it as oval or cylindrical and metallic. The army, too, seemed to be convinced that it was a UFO. Corporal Natalio Farfan Ruiz, the commandant of a small border police unit at the little village of La Marmora (800 inhabitants), confirmed the crash to Argentinian reporters saying: "It was about 4:30 p.m. when a cylindrical object made the earth tremble. Just imagine what would have happened if the UFO had fallen on the houses!" Policeman Juan Hurtado had also seen what had happened: "It looked like a gigantic wine container emitting a trace of white smoke. I saw it clearly. It flew directly above my head. I was on duty and at that moment was talking with three engineers from the mine in La Paz, when we saw the object crashing into the El Taire mountain. The impact was so strong that it threw me to the ground. The earth trembled at that moment."
Finally, the Bolivian Air Force sent three single-motored AT6 airplanes—a model from World War II—to the area and discovered the crash site on the southern slope of the El Taire mountain. Whereas the pilots found it impossible to land anywhere near it, the newspaper Clarin of Buenos Aires announced on May 14, that the object had been found. As proof, they quoted the police chief of Tarija: "Our men have discovered the object and inspected it, but have received no instructions for further action. It is a dull metallic cylinder twelve feet long with a few dents. No one knows what is inside it, and we are awaiting the arrival of various technical commissions. A NASA expert is also expected to arrive tomorrow morning."
As a matter of fact, no NASA expert came at Tarija. Instead, two U.S. Air Force officers, Col. Robert Simmons and Maj. John Heise arrived. According to a newspaper, although these officers were officially on leave, they had been instructed to take the object to the United States in a Hercules C-130 transport machine, which was waiting for them at La Paz. When other newspapers made inquiries at the American Embassy regarding this secret mission of Simmons and Heise they were met with a denial. Only two years later, 5 relevant documents were released by the U.S. State Department: they revealed that Simmons and Heise had been assigned to the military attache of the U.S. Embassy in La Paz and did, in fact, fly to Tarija accompanied by an officer of the Bolivian Air Force, in connection with Project Moon Dust.
The first of these documents was a telex sent by the U.S. Ambassador in Bolivia, Paul H. Boeker, to the State Department. In that, he quoted newspaper reports and requested the department "to ask the relevant agencies whether they could explain what this object could be," adding "during the last week, more and more UFO reports are coming from this region." The answer was a telex classified "secret" dated May 18 in which the U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance personally declared: "Preliminary information has been checked with appropriate government agencies. No direct correlation with known space objects that may have reentered the earth's atmosphere near May 6 can be made. However we are continuing to examine any possibilities."
He then referred the embassy to "State aerogram A-6343" of July 26, 1973, classified 'Secret,' "which provides background information and guidance for dealing with space objects. In particular any information pertaining to the pre-impact observations, direction of trajectory, number of objects observed, time of impact and detailed description, including any markings would be helpful." The next document was a "Moon Dust Message" of the office of the U.S. military attache, dated May 24, addressed to the Division for Foreign Technologies at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base and the headquarters of the U.S. Air Force at the Pentagon, classified as "confidential NOFORN (No Forwarding To Foreign Nationals)." Under reference Moon Dust, the military attache at La Paz reported that "they had taken pains to verify the press reports. " In addition to that, they had asked the general staff of the Bolivian Air Force and the chiefs of the Bolivian Army who had declared—apparently after a first unsuccessful attempt— "we have sent search troops to the area in question but have found nothing. " The army came to the conclusion that there could have been an object there, or maybe not, but to date they had found nothing. The attache added that he would send two officials to Tarija and promised, "We will keep you informed if anything turns up. " These "two officials," we can assume, were Simmons and Heise.
(NOTE: The explosion on the slope of El-Taire received “confidential” status. After the mountain was cordoned off with the troops, a special commission was established to investigate the causes of incident. An object of cylindrical shape with a deformed body was found on El-Taire. No explanation followed: either one object exploded, or the second one was found on the slope. The object caused this powerful explosion, but somehow survived. The survey and the conclusions about the nature of the explosion have never been published.
People in the mining town at the foot of El-Taire just heard a rumor that the deformed shell of the UFO was delivered by helicopter to the Bolivian airport, and from where it was sent with a military transport aircraft to the U.S. - Margarita Troitsyna - Pravda.Ru)
Regrettably, no further reports concerning the Simmons-Heise expedition were released and, to get a picture of what happened, we are forced to rely on reports in the Argentinian press. Apparently, however, nobody came to the conclusion that a meteorite had hit the earth. At the world-famous Smithsonian Institution there is a data bank of scientific occurrences, or an "alarm network," that keeps track of every volcanic eruption, every earthquake and every meteorite collision since 1973 with painstaking accuracy. The data bank reveals no mention of a meteorite falling during May 1978 at the Bolivian-Argentinian border. The Air Force documents reveal that the 1127th field activities group, which coordinated Project Moon Dust, was interested in another task besides the recoveiy of UFO wrecks and other space objects, represented by the code name HUMINT. This code name, short for Human Intelligence, means the collection of information from human sources through clandestine undercover methods—in contrast to interrogations, reading through files and correspondence, etc. In other words, it meant the collection of information about UFOs from reliable sources through a game of deceit. The method which was chosen to achieve HUMINTs goals was so bizarre that nobody outside the UFO community would believe it. - Michael Hesemann
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Some researchers believe that there are specific areas on Earth where UFOs land on a regular basis. Often these alien “cosmodromes” sit on top of or inside mountains. One of those mysterious places is Mount El-Taire in Bolivia.
“The mountains here in Bolivia, like in neighboring lands, are rich in mineral deposits,” Yuri Suprunenko, Ph.D., told Pravda.Ru. “There are deposits of tin, tungsten, zinc, lead, antimony, silver, and precious metals.
But it so happened that hundreds of miners have witnessed rare metals that have fallen from the sky. Not just rare, but extraordinary and unprecedented alloys! But these were not meteorites. The events took place in the Bolivian village of La Mamoru Tarija, near the foot of Mount El-Taire, in May of 1978."
That day, according to Yuri Suprunenko, local residents saw something unusual. A bright lit object in the form of a cylinder with a cone-shaped front part appeared in the sky. It was approximately 6 meters long and 4 meters in diameter. It had no wings. There was not much on its surface and no hatches or portholes. A bluish flame came out from its tail. It made a whistling sound as it was no more than a hundred meters from the ground to an object, but it descended at a speed of 300-400 km/h.
According to some eyewitnesses, a second similar object came flying right after the first one. Meanwhile, the first one, without reducing its speed, had crashed into a mountainside of El-Taire. At the moment of impact, a bright flash of light appeared, illuminating the area in a radius of 150 km around, there was a terrible roar. The tremors were felt even in the neighboring Argentina. A rpessure wave blew out windows in homes in a radius of 70 km. The blast has formed a crater about 1,500 meters long, 500 meters wide and 400 meters deep.
Local authorities did not provide any explanation and ordered to immediately cordon off the area of Mount El-Taire with troops and declare it a forbidden zone. However, local people, tourists and researchers discussed the theories of a UFO crash.
Incidentally, crashes of alleged unidentified flying objects with “evidence” occurred in the past. For example, in neighboring Brazil, near Sao Paulo in 1957 a shiny disc flying at high speed was observed. In front of a witness, it suddenly began to decline, then stopped, rocked and exploded, scattering thousands of tiny pieces.
On a clear day glowing fireworks soared in the sky. Part of the fallen debris was collected by local residents. The material was light as paper, with a rough surface. Several Brazilian laboratories conducted a spectral analysis of these fragments. It showed the presence of magnesium with special crystal structure impossible to obtain in terrestrial conditions. Metallographic and microscopic analysis, in turn, revealed a significant content of strontium, which is usually not combined with magnesium.
"The Brazilian incident is recorded in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which usually does not dare publish unverified facts. In the postwar years, several dozen of similar cases were recorded in different parts of the world!” says Yuri Suprunenko. “Over 70 thousand UFO photographs were made, and over 120 video clips were recorded.
Today, many of this documentary evidence are available to the public. But until recently the information was classified “Top Secret,” “Restricted,” “Highly Confidential” and “View-Only”... The main reason for this super-secrecy was the rivalry of countries in the area of weapons.
"Maybe with time we will learn more about the incident in the El-Taire," says Yuri Suprunenko. - Margarita Troitsyna - Pravda.Ru
NOTE: the bottomline is that these crashes of 'unknown objects' most likely occur on a regular basis. There is really little evidence of how many of these incidents have happened in remote locations thus making the job of retrieval that much easier...and outside the public eye. Here is a link to a site with lots of information on this incident. Scroll down a bit for the English text...Lon
Project Moon Dust:: Beyond Roswell--exposing The Government's Covert Investigations And Cover-ups
The NASA Conspiracies: The Truth Behind the Moon Landings, Censored Photos , and The Face on Mars
Human Intelligence Collection: A Standard Operating Procedure for Interrogation Operations, Liason Operations, and Military Source Operations
UFOs the Secret History : The Secret History
Beyond Roswell: The Alien Autopsy Film, Area 51, & the U.S. Government Coverup of Ufos
