In the early nineties, Playa del Muerto, or Dead Man’s Beach, was little more than a strip of greyish sand located in Boca del Río, a city in the municipality of the same name, just south of Veracruz. Its scorching dunes were covered in thorny shrubs, which were littered with rotten branches and plastic bottles that the river dragged down from the mountains when the waters were high. It wasn’t a busy or particularly pretty beach (if any of the beaches in this part of the Gulf of Mexico can be said to be truly pretty) and there were times—especially during high tide or storms—when the sand would disappear entirely and not even the breakwaters could prevent the waves from crashing onto the highway connecting the two cities.
The locals avoided Dead Man’s Beach. Every year dozens of intrepid bathers, most of them visiting from Mexico City, met their death in those treacherous waters. “No swimming”, read a sign a few feet from the water. “Beware off deep pools” warned a crudely painted red skull. The powerful undertow that dragged the estuary waters towards the headland in Antón Lizardo left Playa del Muerto dotted with inshore holes, depressions on the seafloor that caused unpredictable underwater currents where it was easy to drown.
I was nine years old when I spotted the lights, as bright as fireflies against the black canvas of the beach. My fellow witness was my brother Julio, who was six months shy of his seventh birthday. We were busy demolishing the home of a blue crab, poking around in the sand with a stick, when a sudden flash in the sky caught our attention. Five bright lights appeared to rise up out of the sea before floating for a few seconds above our heads and then shooting off inland, in the direction of the estuary.
“Did you see that?” Julio said, pointing at the horizon.
“Obviously. I’m not blind,” I replied.
“What was it?”
“It was a spaceship,” I told him, awestruck.
But when we ran back to the bonfire to tell the adults, none of them took any notice, not even our parents. Set back slightly from the fire and the rest of the group, they were arguing so heatedly they didn’t even want to hear us.
Some weeks earlier, on Thursday, 11 July 1991, an incredible event had taken place, one that would come to be known as “the longest solar eclipse of the twentieth century”. That afternoon, all eyes were on the skies as Mexico impatiently awaited the miraculous transformation of the sun into a ring of fire and the moon into a great black blotch. The eclipse wouldn’t be visible from Veracruz, but what did we care: we had the TV, which was repeating on loop one static image of the sky and several scenes of people in cities around the world where the phenomenon would be visible to the naked eye: thousands gathered in town squares and on beaches, crammed onto rooftops and central reservations, all looking up at the sky with cardboard periscopes and special glasses. The newsreaders were continuously reminding viewers how dangerous it was to look directly at the eclipse: you could burn your retinas and be blinded for life. I kept thinking how lucky it was that Veracruz was outside of the path of totality, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from looking at that perturbing black sun, and that its intense glare would probably melt my eyes like wax, or at least that’s what I imagined.
I had no idea at the time, but while my family and I were glued to the TV in my grandmother’s room watching the eclipse, a man named Guillermo Arreguín had got himself set up with his video camera on the balcony of his home, south of the Periférico beltway in Mexico City. Guillermo Arreguín wasn’t as interested in the ecliptic climax as in the planets, stars and other celestial bodies, which, according to an astronomy magazine he’d read, would shine especially brightly thanks to the forced twilight. When darkness fell, Arreguín panned his camera lens back and forth several times from one end of the balcony to the other. During one of these shots he’d captured a strange object that appeared to be floating above the surrounding buildings.
Arreguín’s video made the 24 Horas news broadcast that night. A couple of days later, an article in La Prensa described the object in the footage as “solid”, “metallic” and surrounded by “silver rings”. But the word “extraterrestrial” wouldn’t make its triumphant appearance until Friday, 19 July, on the TV debate show Y Usted… ¿Qué Opina?, which dedicated an entire episode to the supposed presence of aliens on planet Earth and the recent wave of sightings of UFOs in several Mexican cities. At one point during the live transmission—which lasted a record eleven hours and ten minutes—the presenter Nino Canún gave the floor to a bearded man called Jaime Maussan, a self-described “ufologist” who claimed to be in possession of fifteen videos of the same “shiny object” that Arreguín had recorded. Maussan assured viewers that the recordings had been made by different people in various Mexican cities, and had even been subjected to “tests” that proved the object was indeed an alien spacecraft. Maussan made the most of the studio audience’s stunned reaction to promote his forthcoming documentary The Sixth Sun, in which he would reveal the truth behind those mysterious sightings.
And so began Mexico’s wave of UFOs.
That summer I learned everything there was to know on the subject: little grey men, “abductions”, conspiracy theories around the men in black, the link between extraterrestrials and the construction of Egypt’s Great Pyramid, crop circles discovered in England. I had two main sources of information: first, the TV (to be precise, Mr Maussan’s documentary Lights in the Sky II, which Julio and I had begged our grandma to buy for us, despite our father and engineer uncle’s vocal disapproval); and second, the stacks of comics I devoured every week. I basically spent every afternoon lying on my stomach with my eyes darting back and forth between the idiot box and the colourful pages of my comics.
And when it came to comics, I was a complete wimp: at the time I was obsessed with Archie, Little Lulu and The Adventures of Donald Duck, and didn’t really deviate from those “stories”. But there was one publication on display at the newsstand that caught my eye and drew me in like a moth to a flame: Unusual Weekly, a veritable encyclopaedia of shock and horror, a prayer book devoted to monstrous humans and full of blatantly doctored photos. To this day I can still remember a few awe-inspiring examples of the magazine’s “reportage”: the giant, man-eating, flying manta rays of Fiji; the primary school teacher with a third eye at the back of her head to spy on any misbehaving students; the miraculous apparition of the Virgin Mary—the figure of a hanged Judas inside one of her eyes—woven into the cloak of Marian visionary “El Indio” Juan Diego; and, of course, the autopsy of an alien in Roswell, New Mexico, among other gems.
All those edifying reads over the course of that summer when I was nine led to my conviction that the strange light Julio and I saw from Dead Man’s Beach had to be an interplanetary spaceship, led by a crew of small, intelligent beings who’d somehow found a way to defy the laws of time and matter. Maybe they’d come to warn us about an imminent apocalyptic event—after all, we were on the cusp of a new millennium and the human race was still getting mixed up in stupid wars that murdered children and pumped oil all over the poor pelicans in the Persian Gulf. Or maybe they were looking for someone who could understand them, someone with whom to share their knowledge and secrets. Maybe they were just lonely, I thought—perhaps because I felt lonely and removed from the world, even within my own family—drifting through the cosmos in their silicon spaceships, searching, always searching, for a more hospitable planet, for other worlds, a new home, new friends in distant galaxies.
After the sighting on the beach, Julio and I made it our mission to continue monitoring the skies. And, as Maussan had shown us, it was more likely that we’d be taken seriously if we could get some kind of proof on tape.
Our problem was that Dad refused to lend us his video camera.
“How can you believe all that crap? How can you be so stupid?” he’d yell whenever he caught us with our noses pressed against the TV screen, trying to decipher the Nazca Lines in Peru.
Dad couldn’t stand Maussan. Our prophet’s greying beard and puppy dog eyes irritated him. The sound of his voice was enough to make Dad lose it, and once he even threatened to confiscate the VHS player.
“For Christ’s sake, look at his face! The guy’s as high as a kite!”
Poor Dad, he just didn’t get it. We couldn’t bring ourselves to get angry at him; more than anything, we pitied him. But Mum was different. Mum would listen to our theories and fantasies about the flying saucer on the beach and she’d laugh and ruffle our hair. Then one night, she and a group of her friends took us back to Dead Man’s Beach to look for our alien spaceship.
The moon was full and the water, bathed in the stars’ silvery reflection, was so still it looked like an enormous mirror. But everything had changed since the last time we were there: now the place was crowded with cars and people. Groups of teenagers were sprawled across the breakwater rocks or huddled around bonfires of dry brushwood. In the sandy plaza dozens of cars were parked so close to the shore the saltwater splashed their tyres. Belching, hooting and Soda Stereo songs drowned out the murmuring wind. Couples canoodling on car roofs shielded their faces from all the flashing cameras. I looked on in horror as a TV crew set up tripods to film the festivities. I saw fat women tramping across the sand dunes and destroying them. I saw little brats pointing up to the sky with their sticky ice-cream fingers, asking: “Mami, when is the UFO coming?”
“This sucks,” Julio said after a while, and with no further explanation, he ran off to play I Declare War with the other kids there. I couldn’t imagine a more cowardly way to give up on a cause.
After what felt like hours spent fruitlessly scanning the darkness, I started to feel sleepy. I went back to where my mother was sitting and curled up in her lap. Her breath smelled of wine, her fingers of tobacco. She was talking to a friend about the UFO, about some red and white lights they could both see in the distance, but I could no longer keep my eyes open.
“All this fuss over a narco plane,” my mother said.
“Ah, leave them be. It’s a good excuse for a party, anyway,” her friend replied, raising her glass.