The Villares del Saz Landing (Máximo Muñoz Hernaiz), 1953

Villares del Saz is a village in Cuenca province, in Castilla-La Mancha. In July 1953 Máximo Muñoz Hernaiz, a young cowherd described as illiterate, was grazing cattle in a field nearby. Sources give his age as 12, 13 or 14. They place the date on 1 or 2 July and the hour between about ten in the morning and about two in the afternoon.

It came down behind him with a strong whistle. José Antonio Caravaca compares the sound to "a large deflating balloon". The boy first took the thing for a fairground balloon. It was shaped like a tinaja, a large earthenware jar about 1.30 m tall, and one account calls it "yellow and brilliant like polished steel". Caravaca gives it four legs and a door on the upper part.

Three little men came out of the top hatch and dropped to the ground "con un saltete". With a little hop. Máximo called them tietes, a rural word for little men.

They stood about 60 cm tall. Squat and stocky, with yellow skin and slanted, oriental eyes. Their shiny bluish suits were "very smart", with flat peaked caps and a metal badge on the shoulder or sleeve. They gathered round the boy.

The leader spoke to him in a language he could not understand. Máximo looked baffled. One of them slapped his face. Caravaca says the hand felt "cold and shiny". Then they hopped back in through the small door. The craft grew brighter and left "muy deprisa por el aire, como un cohete", very fast through the air, like a rocket.

The same day, officers at the Guardia Civil post in Honrubia saw a spherical, greyish-white object with no trail over the Villares del Saz area. It disappeared shortly afterward toward the east. Officers from Honrubia also examined the field. They found many footprints and four holes, about 5 cm deep and 2.5 cm wide, forming a perfect square 36 cm on each side.

The press followed. Lanza ran the story on 9 July, and Ofensiva of Cuenca published an interview by Jesús Sotos with drawings by Luis Roibal. On 14 October 1983, General Andrés Cassinello sent Andreas Faber Kaiser, editor of Mundo Desconocido, a table of 25 UFO incidents recorded by the Guardia Civil. Villares del Saz was the first entry. It describes "un artefacto en forma de plato, grande y muy brillante" and "unos seres amarillos".

No hoax finding or confession has surfaced. In 2012 Caravaca read the case as folklore, comparing the small, cheerful, hopping figures in colourful clothes to duendes. In his view the witness decoded an anomalous experience through his own rural culture, and he contrasts its simplicity with the Rosa Lotti case in Italy. Other points remain to weigh: a single child witness, a craft that changes from jar to plate, and dates, hours and ages that do not agree. According to one account, Máximo never spoke of the incident again.

Antonio Ribera told the story in "The Landing at Villares del Saz", a chapter of The Humanoids, edited by Charles Bowen. Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos covered it in OVNIS: el fenómeno aterrizaje, and Albert Rosales lists it in his humanoid catalogue. A regional blog calls it the first humanoid encounter reported in Castilla-La Mancha. It is not the Los Villares case in Jaén, where a 1996 report also described three oriental beings and four marks in a square.