The Night Visitor

Close Encounters of the Weirdest Kind

Are we on the verge of a major UFO disclosure?

If you spend any time among true believers, the answer is an emphatic yes! But it’s not just the diehards who have sensed something in the water. UFO sightings have been on the rise for nearly a decade now. In 2017, the New York Times exposed the Pentagon’s secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. You can read the full article at the link. Multiple videos of UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) were declassified and released by the Department of Defense alongside the report. Inducing the now infamous “Gimbal” UFO footage, which you can watch for yourself below.

In 2022, Congress held its first official UFO hearing in over 50 years. Not since the end of Project Blue Book in 1970 had so much public discourse occurred on the matter. A year later, Congress passed H.R. 101111, or, the UAP Whistleblower Protection Act, designed to protect anyone who came forward with information on these sightings. What followed was a rash of reports detailing everything from the U.S. military capturing UAPs, to “non human biologics” recovered from crash sites — and much, much more. All of this disclosure sworn under oath in the halls of Congress. And of course 2024 has delivered even more high strangeness. Drone sightings, glowing orbs, and strange lights in the sky. We are in the midst of one of the greatest UFO ‘flaps’ since the 1940s, but unlike our grandparents, we have social media spreading the fervor like wildfire.

The headline that launched a thousand conspiracy theories— Credit: The Smithsonian

I remain skeptical about, well, basically all of it. It’s not that I don’t believe in aliens. I am firmly in the “we are not special” camp. I just don’t trust the DoD, Congress, or any other body of authority to ever tell the truth if it doesn’t benefit them in some way. Where some see the specter of a major disclosure, I see a smokescreen designed to distract people from all of the very real, very tangible problems our government is currently mired in.

People I can believe, structural power systems I distrust.

Which is why I won’t be doing any kind of deep dive on the drones or any of the recent disclosures in Congress. But, reading about the current spate of sightings did send me down a rabbit hole of old ufological lore. One that eventually led me to this week’s monster! Guys, gals, and all my non-binary pals, allow me to introduce a bizarre, intriguing, and genuinely weird close encounter of the third kind. Straight from your intergalactic glam rock fantasies, this is the story of The Night Visitor.

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Red Lights on the Highway

On a cold June night in 1968, Pedro Pretzel was driving back to the Motel La Cuesta, which he ran with his daughter, Maria, in Villa Carlos Paz, Argentina. It was a little after 1 a.m. along National Highway 20, when the tired father spotted two bright red lights ahead of him. At first he thought them nothing more than tail lights in the distance. But as he crept close he realized they were around 18 - 20 feet apart — much too wide for a single vehicle. And they seemed to be hovering several feet above the highway, too. As he turned down a side road and into the motel’s parking lot he pushed the thought of the lights out of his mind. Thinking, one can imagine, of nothing more than sleep. But the night would soon take an even stranger turn.

A mock up of Pedro’s encounter with the red lights that night — Credit: Flying Saucer Review

Inside, Pedro found that most of the overhead lights were off with the odd exception of the laundry room. Meanwhile Maria was nowhere to be seen. He called out to her but there was no response. Unnerved, he went into the lit laundry room where he discovered his distraught daughter on her knees in the throes of a nervous breakdown. According to Pedro, Maria was beside herself, unable to answer any of his questions. After a few minutes passed and he had reassured her that she was okay, maria managed to get a few words out…

“A man! A man!” she said.

Pedro got the gist. Someone had been in the motel. Someone that had left his 19-year-old daughter in a fit of fear. He set out to find the intruder, searching room by room. After turning up nothing he went outside and searched the area around the motel. Again, he found no signs of an intruder. As for the red lights? Gone without a trace. When he returned to Maria had calmed down enough to tell him her story.

The Night Visitor

At roughly the same time her father had first noticed the red lights on the highway, Maria was seeing off the last of the motel’s guests through a side door. After waving goodbye, she turned off all but the dim overhead lights in the lobby before heading through the kitchen into the laundry room to lock the back door for the evening. The lights in both the kitchen and the laundry were still on, but as she prepared to lock the door she noticed a bright blue light from the dining room. She thought perhaps the guests had forgotten something and come back inside.

She quickly made her way back through the kitchen. But it wasn’t a guest waiting for her, at least not one with a reservation. As she stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the bar she saw him. An impossibly tall, rail-thin man in a blue-scaled jumpsuit had entered through the same door she’d just closed. His face was gaunt and pale, though plastered with a large smile. His hair was short, slicked-back and almost white. In his left hand he held a glassy sphere emitting a bright blue light.

“He looked like a ballet dancer,” Maria later recalled.

Ziggy Stardust and the Disco Ball of Desire— Credit: Flying Saucer Review

As soon as she saw him, Maria felt her body twist and lengthen as if being squeezed through a sieve. It was like an invisible force was pulling her out lengthwise — making her thinner and flatter. At the same time, she felt as though her brain had been “occupied”. She wanted to scream but her voice was gone. Then she heard three words. The Visitor didn’t open his mouth, but she felt like he was forcing them into her head, as if she had a transistor radio inside her ears.

“No tengas miedo,” the voice said in accent-less Spanish. “Don’t be afraid.”

The next thing she knew she was standing in the bar area, gripping the countertop with her hands. She didn’t recall moving from the doorway, and yet there she was, closer to the Visitor. The voice continued in Spanish. “Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid.” Her legs went numb. The Visitor raised its right hand, thin beams of light radiating from each of its fingers. Across its knuckles it wore what looked like a large, rectangular gauntlet or ring. As he raised his hand, Maria felt the strength drain from her body. She fell backward in what seemed like slow motion, as if she wasn’t falling through air but floating down through water. Just before her head touched the ground she was raised back to her feet. All the while the voiced continued, “Don’t be afraid.”

Now the Visitor began to approach. Taking slow, deliberate strides. He walked, heel to toe, along a straight line only he could see. Maria noticed that his feet, too, were emitting rays of light. His smile never wavered. Nor did the voice in her head. With each deliberate step toward her the message continued — until suddenly the light of the sphere vanished, leaving only a faint blue glow behind. At the same time, the voice in her head ceased. The Visitor stopped, frozen in place for just a moment, before turning clockwise and striding, along the same invisible line, swiftly out the door and into the night.

Maria explains the distortion she felt upon first laying eyes on the Visitor — Credit: Flying Saucer Review

The feeling returned to her legs. She ran backward into the laundry room where she collapsed, only to be found moments later by her father. The shock lasted for several days. Though she did not dream of the Visitor, she could hear it’s voice at night repeating those same words. Stranger still, she recalled that the entire encounter only lasted for about four minutes of “real time,” yet it felt much longer.

A White Light and The Military Gets Involved

It’s hard to say whether there is any connection between the Night Visitor and the red lights on the highway that Pedro spotted. It’s possible that, after hearing his daughter’s story, he made the connection in his mind as he searched about for anything that stood out to him. But there was another witness who spied strange lights near the motel that evening. Donna Ramirez, who lived half-a-mile or so away, had observed a vivid white light in a field between her home and the area where Pedro believed the red lights to be. It was around 1 a.m., roughly three or four minute before Maria encountered the Visitor, when she spotted the bright light from her home. At the time she thought little of it, but after learning about Maria’s encounter (which made the local papers a few days later) she reported the lights. Were they connected? It’s impossible to say. But they were unusual enough to be included in the official recounting of the incident.

Either way, after what can only be assumed to be a sleepless night, Pedro and Maria reported the encounter to the police a few hours later, around 9 a.m. A dossier was created under the header “Unidentified Flying Object”. Inspector Hector Caceres told reporters that Maria was sincere and believable, and that the police ruled out any possibility of a hoax early on in their investigation. However, despite the officers’ sincere belief that Maria had experienced something real, the investigation was called off after only twenty-four hours at the request of the Argentine Air Force. Someone, though it’s unknown who, reached out to the station and requested they compile the report and forward it over. Unfortunately, the trail goes cold there. If the Air Force did continue the investigation, they never revealed their findings.

Do I believe?

What do you think of when you picture an alien? Little green men? A Giger-esque monstrosity? Or maybe the big-eyed Greys? Those are the most commonly represented alien stereotypes these days. But what if I told you that, not too long ago, Maria’s encounter with the Night Visitor was eerily reminiscent of an alien image rarely discussed today outside of hardcore ufological circles? The Nordic Alien, or simply Nordics, were reported frequently throughout the 1950s. Usually, these beings were reported as being tall, with blond hair and pale complexions. They were often described as attempting to communicate a sense of calm or peace with contactees. Reports often attribute a sense of overwhelming benevolence and even “magic” to their presence. Sound familiar? It lines up with several aspects of Maria’s encounter. Some scholars have traced the appearance of this Nordic “type” back to the 1951 classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” A movie about a handsome, friendly alien that comes to Earth to warn us about the dangers of nuclear weapons.

It’s hard to say whether or not Maria was familiar with these types of encounter stories. If she was, it’s not reflected in the primary source. But I’m not the first person to make this connection. S. Corrales, from the Institute of Hispanic Ufology, sums it up nicely.

“This type of humanoid, prevalent in the 1960s and which is rarely seen nowadays, yielded its place to the ubiquitous Greys, which appear to have co-opted most of the entity case histories.”

Importantly, the primary source on this case recounts an interview with the Pretzel family’s doctor, Dr. Hugo V. Vaggione, who examined Maria less than twelve hours after the incident. According to the doctor, Maria was a “normal, sane, and honest” young woman with no history of mental illness. She was described as an “affable” individual “not given to indulgence in science fiction.” For Maria’s part, she never claimed that the Night Visitor was an alien, or even supernatural origin. Only that it was, in her own words, “flesh and blood.”

So who, or what, was the Night Visitor? Some bizarre Ziggy Stardust wannabe from beyond the stars? A prankster with an advanced degree in electric engineering? A wayward drag queen?

Truthfully, it’s impossible to say. But regardless of the Visitor’s provenance, Maria’s story is a fascinating glimpse into a side of ufology that has been mostly lost to time. It’s a story from a weirder, more interesting era of UFO research. Does it shed any light on the situation we find ourselves in today? No, not really. But, if nothing else, perhaps we can all take a small comfort in the Visitors words…Don’t be afraid.

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So what do you think? Was the Night Visitor an alien? Let me know in the comments!

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