The Cabañas Militia Guard Who Fired on a Landed Object (Isidro Puentes Ventura)

Cuba, 1968. Relations with the United States were hostile, and the northwest coast was guarded ground. Near Cabañas, then a municipality of Pinar del Río Province, the militia kept watch through the night. One of the sentries was Isidro Puentes Ventura. He was on guard duty, armed with a machine gun.

June 14, 1968. Shortly after midnight. Several bursts of machine gun fire were heard coming from the place where Puentes was posted.

What he described later was this. A brilliant round object on the ground, with a dome and several antennas on top. He had come to within 150 feet of it. Convinced that the device was an American helicopter, he fired. About forty rounds, by his own account.

The object answered. The craft turned orange and emitted a strong whistling sound. It was his last recollection before losing consciousness. No one saw it arrive or leave. The story stops where his memory does.

At dawn, an Army patrol found Puentes unconscious. He was taken to a hospital in Pinar del Río, where he remained in shock and unable to speak for six days. He was then moved to the neurological ward at the Naval Hospital in Havana. The diagnosis was emotional trauma. He remained in shock for another week.

According to later accounts, Cuban and Soviet intelligence investigators examined the site. They reported forty-eight spent cartridges and fourteen bullets apparently flattened by impact. They found equally spaced indentations in the ground, indicating that a heavy device had landed. Three of them, in one telling, suggesting tripod landing gear. Tests revealed that the soil had been exposed to a high degree of heat.

Puentes himself was questioned at length. Soviet intelligence specialists subjected him to a fifty-hour interrogation and fifteen hypnosis sessions. No contradictions were found in his story. Yet no Cuban or Soviet record of any of this has surfaced. The details reached the outside world only through ufological channels.

The case rests on one witness and one chain of sources. A report credited to Gordon Creighton probably appeared in Flying Saucer Review in 1968, and the case is probably listed in the HUMCAT humanoid catalogue. Jacques Vallée told it in his 1992 book UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union, and Timothy Good repeated it in Beyond Top Secret. Albert Rosales added it to his humanoid compilation. NICAP and Donald A. Johnson carried it forward.

The retellings do not agree on everything. Forty rounds or forty-eight cartridges, round or disc-shaped. Six days and another week, or about two weeks. No beings were reported, though one later commentator suggested it was probably an abduction event that investigators missed or concealed. No hoax claim has been published, and neither has a conventional explanation. Puentes' own first thought, an American helicopter, has never been examined.

The Cabañas case belongs to a strange night. A few hours earlier, the hotel encounter at Villa Carlos Paz unfolded in Argentina. Cuba has other stories too, from the landing at Torriente to a 1967 tale of a MiG-21 said to have disintegrated. But this one stands apart, because a sentry saw something on the ground and opened fire. Whatever stood in that field answered with a whistle and a change of colour, and the night went dark for him.