The El Verde Entity
A story to leave you starved
What is a story?
The simple answer, which is not wrong, is that stories are recognizable patterns of information. They have beginnings, middles, and ends. They contain characters, and settings, and plots. But you and I both know they are much more than just patterns that make our brains feel good. Stories are how we understand the world. How we communicate ideas, big and small. They’re the frameworks of our cultures. The scaffolding upon which we build art, science, religion — everything.
Salman Rushdie called Man the “storytelling animal” because storytelling is fundamental to our existence. It is, perhaps more than anything else, what makes us human.
Today I’m going to tell you a story. It has characters, a setting, and a plot, yes, but you’ll find no simple answers here.
The Sighting
Puerto Rico
El Yunque National Forest
1973
Located in Puerto Rico's Northeast Region, El Yunque is the only tropical rainforest within the U.S. National Forest system. Situated on the slopes of the Sierra de Luquillo mountains, it is teeming with life. Today, it is a popular tourist attraction. But it wasn’t too long ago that the forest was nearly inaccessible, populated by just a few dirt paths and explored only by experienced hikers.
The village of El Verde sits along the edge of the forest, half in, and half out. Like a teasing toe into the cold dark waters of mystery. It was here, during the height of one of the most notorious UFO flaps since the 50s, that Ana Dominguez and Jose Alemar Sr. visited the forest with their son and daughter.
It was summer, 1973, and the family was on a walk in a relatively popular area near the forest’s edge when their son, Jose Alemar Jr, disappeared. One moment he was behind his mother and father on the trail, and the next he was gone. For weeks the family and authorities searched for the boy, but no trace was ever found. Eventually the official investigation was called off.
But the family didn’t give up hope. Months later, in the fading light of late October, Ana, Jose, and several friends were searching along a dirt road near El Verde when they stopped at a ranch house. Jose Sr. and several others approached the home hoping its occupants had seen his son. Here in the fading light, surrounded by the dense foliage of the El Yunque, Ana was left alone with her young daughter. They sat together in a car parked just off the side of a dirt road. Before long Ana heard what sounded like her husband returning.
“Girl, open the car door, I’m back,” Jose’s voice called out.
Ana reached for the handle as the voice called out again, “I’m back, open the door,” but she stopped when she noticed her daughter’s eyes had gone wide with terror. Tracing her daughter’s pointed finger to the outside of the car she saw what had horrified her. Leaning against the windshield, starring in at the mother and daughter, was a tall, thin creature.
“[It had] an egg shaped head, long pointy ears, and two black, oval-shaped eyes,” Ana later said of the entity.
The creature placed a three-fingered hand on the windshield, resembling a “chicken’s claw.” Ana screamed and slammed the car horn. As Jose and the others rushed from the home to the car, they found Ana and her daughter huddled in the front seat, but there were no signs of the entity.
Tracing the Story
This, or some approximation of it, is how the story of the El Verde entity has been told across the internet. But like most monster stories, it has undergone a game of telephone, with each new iteration adding just enough flair to avoid being outright plagiarism. I don’t begrudge people these low effort reposts. Monsters are fun and easy fodder. But it makes tracing claims back to their original source a steep hill to climb.
My first lead was a man named Albert S. Rosales, who was credited as the “source” under a few of these articles. Albert is a writer and ufologist who has been publishing books of Humanoid Encounters since 1993. Thankfully a digital copy of his collection of encounters from 1970-1974 was available. So I dropped $9.99 in search of the truth and loaded up my Kindle. Unfortunately, after combing through every entry in the book, I did not find mention of the El Verde Entity. I did, however, find other accounts of encounters that took place in El Yunque National Forest, two of which happened on the same day in late October. Accompanied by this image…
It wasn’t the first time I’d come across this rough sketch. It shows up attached to several descriptions of the El Verde Entity. But according to Rosales’ book, this was an eyewitness sketch of one of a group of creatures that had been seen several campers late in the evening of October 20, 1973 about 3,000 feet up El Yunque Mountain within the forest. Notably, a subsequent entry in the book recounts a similar sighting by a separate group of campers earlier in the afternoon that same day.
Rosales’ book came out in 2016. Before any of the sightings I found chronicled online had been written, but well after the event itself. So I kept searching, hoping to uncover a source that actually included the sighting of the El Verde Entity. I had another lead. Rosales cited a different source, David Webb’s 1973 - Year of the Humanoid.
A Brief Aside about 1973
Before we get into what I found in Webb’s book I wanted to include a brief aside about the infamous UFO flap of 1973. Even if you have only a passing interest in the world of high strangeness you’ll likely have heard about “The Flap of ‘73.” I’ve written about one of the stranger cases from this period before with the Enfield Horror. But there were hundreds upon hundreds of reported UFO and alien sightings flooding newspapers and TV stations that year. None as famous as the Pascagoula Incident, which occurred on October 11, 1973 on the Pascagoula River in Mississippi. That night, 42-year-old Charles Hickson and 19-year-old Calvin Parker’s lives were changed forever when they were supposedly taken onboard a UFO by a trio of strange “creatures”. Their story recently gained renewed fame when it was featured on Netflix’s reboot of Unsolved Mysteries.
The Search Continues
I think this is important context for how the world was feeling about UFOs and aliens at the time of the alleged El Verde Entity sighting. Despite Puerto Rico and Mississippi being worlds removed from each other, I have no doubt that the Pascagoula story would have reached the island. With my new lead, I dug up a copy of Webb’s opus 1973 - Year of the Humanoid. Written in 1976, it was the closest I’d come chronologically to the incident.
I found Webb’s record of the other sightings that had taken place in El Yunque in 1973. But the tragic story of Ana Dominguez and Jose Alemar Sr. was noticeably absent, not even a blurb or passing reference.
I had one more lead, and it was slim. Several of the entries I’d found online referenced Evidencia Ovni or UFO Evidence. After some more research I eventually concluded that it had to be a reference to an obscure UFO magazine that was published between 1994 and 1997 by Jorge Martin. It’s not the first time I’ve come across Martin’s name. He is most well-known for his work chronicling sightings of Puerto Rico’s native cryptid, El Chupacabra. Martin’s work tends to linger in the realm of the … hard to believe. At least for me. But I’ve only ever read it in translation, so it’s hard to say if I’m getting the full picture.
Anyway. I found two references in online El Verde Entity articles that specifically mentioned Evidencia Ovni #7, published in 1995. It was the only solid lead I had remaining. But I hit a brick wall. The issue was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t scanned into the Internet Archives. No libraries had copies in their databases. It didn’t exist in digital form anywhere. I was able to find some physical issues for sale through the Archives of the Unexplained, but they didn’t have issue #7.
A Story Unraveling
It was at this point I had to ask myself, am I chasing a narrative ouroboros? A story snake with no true beginning or ending that was simply eating its own tail into oblivion? If this story had any kernel of truth to it, then it had to come from the names of its characters. So, I looked high and low, in news archives and missing persons databases, trying to find any mention of Ana, Jose, or their children.
Nothing ever came up. As far as the public record was concerned, these people never existed. “If I could only get my hands on Issue #7,” I told myself, “Then I’d know for sure.” But if there were any copies left out there, they were probably in private collections unlikely to be lent out to a random dude on the internet. It was here that I accepted the truth. This story would remain frustratingly unresolvable.
A realization like this comes softly, like the gentle unraveling of a thread. It leaves you with a hollowed-out gut, hungry for a conclusion. Jealous of the people who can so happily feed on simple answers. Simple stories.
But just because you’re left hungry, doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it.
Something happened in El Yunque National Forest in 1973. At least twenty-four people witnessed creatures that matched the description from the El Verde Entity story. Maybe, somewhere between then and now, other stories about that day were told. And re-told. And told again. Until they found their way online, in blog posts and podcasts, unburdened by the where, or the why, and concerned only with the wow.
And in the end, it is within that wow that we find the heart of our stories. The beating bright spark of creativity that drives us forward. That makes us human.
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