Local Romanian officials and residents report unexplained lights and bizarre humanoid beings that descended on their village of Certesti. There were other strange effects after the incident.
My Romanian colleague Christinne provided the following translated account:
On the night of July 8 to 9, 1996, police platoon leader Marian Mancu and volunteer guard Maricel Rusu were making their rounds through the village of Certesti, Galati County, Romania.
Around 00:30, getting hungry, platoon leader Mancu wanted to stop at home to eat something. His home was in a block with one floor, located on the other side of the paved road in front of the police station. The entrance to the block was through the back.
The policeman was going to be absent for ten minutes at most; meanwhile, the Russian guard was going to wait for him in the street. The platoon leader barely passed the corner of the block when he heard a strange whine and felt a strong current of air. He turned around and saw something on the road that "sparked blue-reddish colored lights and made a vum-vum."
At first, he thought it was the traffic light from the car of a police crew from Galati, who came to check. Approaching, he saw that the object was a UFO, floating above the road, and next to him was moving a little man with an unusual appearance. He shouted "guard!" In response, Rusu, who, in the meantime, had hidden, out of fear, in the ditch on the side of the road, half buried under a footbridge, two or three meters from the object, raised his head saying: "Mr. Marian, Satan!"
The guard Maricel Rusu declared that as soon as the platoon leader headed towards his house, located around the corner, "a noise from above..." appeared.
He was leaning against the fence, so he did not see the appearance of the object very well. At first, he thought that the neon from the street lighting was defective. He said to himself that maybe "the wind is blowing him."
The object descended slowly, without noise, "fal, fal, fal." When he saw the lights, the guard thought to himself that it was a police crew coming to control or something like that and that he would have "someone to talk to until morning." He only got scared when he saw that the object "didn't come close to the ground." He said to himself that "this is not a good thing" and when three humanoids appeared, he hid in the ditch. According to his own statements "when I saw how they were, when I saw their state of ugliness, I said to myself that these are not ours... then I got scared and went down into the ditch... (to) hide as if somehow... that I have never seen (something like this) in my life..."
The object, according to the concordant descriptions of the two, was discoidal and had a diameter of about 5-6 meters and a height of about 2-2.5 meters. A drawing depicts him as somewhat shaped like a hat.
The UFO was hovering about half a meter above the road and swaying slightly. It had, all around, a "continuous" luminous belt, "like a rainbow" with white, red, blue (or green in other statements) lights that flickered. The lights were not seen rotating, but they were "erased like this..." and passing into each other: "from green started red...". Below the object was a strong, white light. Neither of the two saw that the ship had doors or windows.
Before the pilot left the corner of the block, the UFO took off perpendicularly, "went up once", at which point its lights became much brighter, and then "took off at a very high speed," to the northwest, towards the village of Pochidia.
According to Maricel Rusu, "it disappeared with a big storm," "it went in a direction that I didn't even realize... that it was for a short time..." The neon lantern that provides street lighting went out at the moment of take-off, but recovered by itself, "without anyone's intervention," in about half a minute.
The humanoid creatures were seen better by the Russian guard. Platooner Mancu saw only one, and the one from the back. Their height was estimated at about one meter, maybe less, but possibly even higher ("like a six-year-old child"). The Russian watchman says that the creatures were swirling around the ship, chattering and babbling unintelligibly, "like rain in a downpour." They had, according to the concordant descriptions of the two witnesses, an "unfulfilled" appearance.
They were completely hairless (although in another statement the guard described them as "hairy," but it seems he only wanted to emphasize how ugly they were). They had a big head, elongated towards the back and a kind of "mushroom" bumps on the crest. They had large, flappy ears, not pointed, as big as a man's palm. Their faces were white, their eyes large, but none of the witnesses noticed what their noses or mouth looked like. The body was covered in metallic gray scales; "their clothes, as if they were clothes or whatever, were... like fish scales, so they shone..."
The Russian witness declares that he did not see whether the little men were wearing shoes or not. Their abdomens were relatively large and flabby. The arms were extremely thin "as much as two fingers" according to policeman Mancu, and according to Rusu "the hands were crazy sir, I can't even figure it out... they weren't normal like us..." The witnesses cannot specify whether the facts were walking or floating above the ground, leaning towards this second option, despite the low verisimilitude. As Maricel Rusu says "I can't even figure out how they were walking... they seemed to be drunk..."
There were no traces left on the ground. A huge cherry tree located in that place had withered, dehydrated leaves on about 15% of the crown, on the side where the object is said to have landed and then taken off.
The phenomenon could be the effect of microwaves. It is said that the next morning leaves, branches, and broken fruits were seen on the ground. But there is also a villager who claims that he broke them. It is also said that there were other traces, seen by the villagers, but erased by the torrential rain the next day. No determinations of radioactivity or other measurements of this type were made.
Platooner Mancu stated that, after the disappearance of the object, "I stayed for a few seconds... the man was at the edge of the ditch, I took him, I came here, I didn't know where to take him... he said he was sorry... - I went there on the grass, where is that traffic sign... then he asked me - dom Marian, have you seen Satan?"
Returning after the incident, the two witnesses decided to continue their patrol. The next day, Marian Mancu told the story of some villagers. One of them contacted the media agency Mediafax and from here the case reached the press. At first, Mancu politely refused to give an interview to journalists, until he obtained the approval of his bosses in Galati.
On August 12, 1996, Dan Farcas spoke with the witnesses, being invited to Certesti by TVR, through the filmmaker Mihai Badescu, together with Calin Turcu. He remained convinced, on this occasion, of the credibility of the witnesses.
Police platoon leader Marian Mancu (then 30 years old) was a veterinary technician, then he graduated from the school of non-commissioned officers; he was married with two children. Most of the villagers, including the mayor Gheorghe Nechifor, considered him a serious person, with laudable concerns.
Guard Maricel Rusu (41 years old) had graduated from six classes; he read with difficulty and only the sensational news from the newspapers. He had never heard anything about the UFO phenomenon before. He did not suffer from mental illness; made the army a genius.
The villagers did not remember being lied to. It is unlikely that the witnesses could have invented all the very specific details and presented them in such a natural and convincing manner, nor were they set up by someone else to do so.
Place of appeals
Although not everyone in the village believed the witnesses, we found that most of the appellants were persons, or relatives of persons, to whom the police had previously issued documents for various contraventions. Instead, there were concordant testimonies, such as disturbances in the electrical equipment in the area; unfortunately, we did not have time to verify these statements in detail. Also, in the village of Cotoroaia, located about 4 km northeast of Certesti, on the same night, a "very strong" light was reported above a house.
The incident at Certesti, therefore, has enough elements to be qualified as a third-degree encounter. But we can ask ourselves a justified question - wasn't it even more? For example, a UFO abduction? A first argument could be the fact that in the days following the incident, platoon leader Mancu felt weak and in no mood; he declared that he was afraid of being irradiated.
The Russian guard had a nightmare. He declares that "about two nights ago I dreamed of them... I dreamed as I was standing in the trench", after which he woke up frightened from his sleep. He added, "I wasn't scared if I didn't see them so ugly... yes, in the way I saw them... I was scared...". I tried to find out if the two were aware of any "time gap."
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