The San Bernardino Bedroom Intruder and Parked Disc (Pedro Riera)

August 1967. San Bernardino, a residential parish of Caracas, Venezuela. On Avenida Ávila stood a residence called "Eduviges". Later English accounts would call it the "Eduvigio Building". Pedro Riera, 20 years old and a trade student, slept in a dormitory bedroom there.

Monday 7 August. About 2:00 a.m. Riera was torn from a sound sleep. His bed was shaking. Beside it stood a creature about 1 metre tall, a "dwarf", as the newspaper La Tarde put it. It had a disproportionately large head and wore a tight rubber suit.

The creature rushed away. Riera went after it. In the version catalogued by Albert Rosales, he jumped out of bed and grabbed the little man, but it wriggled free and went out the second floor window. Jacques Vallée wrote that it "flew" out. La Tarde said it fled into a set of lights coming from what might be a flying saucer.

Riera reached the window. Multicoloured beams of light struck him from ground level, so bright he had to look away. He never saw their source. He dressed and went to search. A light rain began, and he gave up.

That morning, Riera searched again with friends and neighbours. On the street below they found a semi-circular scuff mark and little footprints of reddish dust leading from it to the balcony behind his window. He was not alone in his story. Four people reported a strange disc-shaped ship said to have stayed parked in front of the building for several hours. A La Tarde photograph showed a group of children who said they had seen the "martian".

Journalist Guillermo José Schael filed the first report in El Universal on 8 August. La Tarde followed the next day under the headline "Un Marciano". Its reporters could not find Riera at home, so their story came from relatives and friends. Neighbour Betty Ruff said she had known him since his boyhood and vouched for his serious and reliable nature. His uncle, Gregorio Armando, a civil aviation captain, questioned him and was convinced he had seen exactly what he claimed.

Coral and Jim Lorenzen of APRO told the story in UFOs Over the Americas in 1968. Flying Saucer Review carried it the same year. Vallée placed it in his landing catalogue and in Passport to Magonia. David Webb and Ted Bloecher listed it in HUMCAT.

No police or air force inquiry is on record. No hoax claim has surfaced, and no conventional explanation has been published. Patrick Gross, who compiled the case as URECAT-000049, classed it as a visit by extraterrestrial visitors. He added a caveat. The missing primary newspaper article and "the apparent absence of investigation by ufologists" weaken a case that might otherwise rate highly. The footprints were never sampled or measured.

The case lives on in catalogues of small humanoids and in Jacques Scorneaux's 1988 survey of ufonaut footprints. It also belongs to a strange week in Caracas. The same day, a doctor reported a visit from a small being calling itself "Astrum". Two evenings later, witnesses watched a yellow to orange ovoid object climb into the clouds above the Ávila.