The alien abduction case of Argentine truck driver Dionisio Llanca has left a remarkable impression in UFO history. Almost 50 years ago, he experienced a life-changing event that involved a flying saucer and three Nordic-looking aliens who talked in a high-pitched sound and took his blood sample. After the incident, he calmly arrived at a hospital in Bahía Blanca but could not recognize many things due to partial memory loss.
Day of EncounterOn October 27, 1973, Dionisio Llanca rested in his uncle Enrique Ruiz’s house on Chubut Street, just a few minutes from the center of Bahía Blanca, Argentina. As he had to drive for long at night, he took an afternoon nap. He woke up in the evening at 6 pm local time and spent his time watching television until 10 pm.
He left the house at half past midnight on Sunday, October 28, 1973, saying goodbye to his uncle, and got into his truck, a Dodge 600, loaded with construction materials that needed to be transported to the city of Río Gallegos. For Dionisio, this was a routine two-day trip to the country’s south. He had 12 years of driving experience which made him observe conditions even in the dark.
After 45 minutes of driving, he stopped at an Esso gas station on Don Bosco street to refuel. There, he noticed that one of the tires had a little low gas, but he ignored it and decided to check it when he reached the town of Médanos in order to buy himself some time.
While driving along route #3, about 11 miles (19 kilometers) from the city of Bahía Blanca, he realized that the tire was losing air fast, so he urgently had to stop to change it. He regretted not changing it at the Esso gas station where he had stopped 15 minutes earlier to buy some gas.
At approximately 1:15 am, he stopped on a dark and desolate roadside in the cold night. He started getting out the tools, wrenches, jack and changing the tire all by himself with no one around to help him. The road was completely deserted in a wooded area surrounded by complete darkness.While changing the tire, he noticed the road lit up with an intense yellowish glow about a mile (2 kilometers) away. Due to the color, he thought it might be the headlights of some car (“Peugeot” he stated) and continued working without paying more attention. As he knelt down changing the tire, suddenly the light was placed behind him, over the tops of the trees, becoming so bright that it illuminated the entire area and changed to a bluish color similar to electric arc welding.
“[Improvised English Translation]A few seconds passed, and I had my shoulder to the light but it became so bright that it covered the whole area. Now the light changed to a bluish color similar to an electric arc welder. I tried to get up but could not rise, I had no strength, and a strange thing – my legs would not respond. I was on my knees. I wanted to get up and look towards the woods that grew along one side of the road,” Dionisio said.
Looking back over his right shoulder, he realized something unexpected, behind him was a huge disk-shaped object, suspended some seven meters (23 ft) above the ground, and three standing humanoid beings looking at him. He was totally paralyzed and could not even speak.
According to Dionisio, they stood there looking at him for about five minutes. Then one of the humanoids grabbed him from behind, holding his collar and lifted him up firmly, but not aggressively. He tried to speak, but his voice would not come out. While he was stopped by that humanoid, the other one placed a device, similar to a razor, at the base of Dionisio’s left index finger and drew his blood. He believed that he lost consciousness shortly after seeing the drops of blood on his finger.
Aliens DescriptionThe aliens were described as being of the Nordic type. They were two men and one woman, whom he identified because of the shape of her breasts and the long blond hair that reached to mid-shoulders. The men were also blond, but with shorter hair. They had about the same height, 4 to 5 feet (1.70 to 75 centimeters), and wore a very tight one-piece gray uniform, orange boots, and long orange gloves that reached halfway down their arms. They did not have any belts, weapons, or helmets, or anything else. Their facial features were like human beings, except for their high foreheads and elongated eyes. They spoke to each other in a strange language, which sounded like a badly tuned radio with screeches and buzzes.
Dionisio could not remember when he woke up, but it is believed that it was between two or three on the same Sunday morning. When he opened his eyes, he found himself between the cars in the courtyard of the Sociedad Rural de Bahía Blanca, about 9 kilometers from where the encounter with the aliens had happened. He was in a state of amnesia, as he could not even remember his name, the episode, the truck, or his house. He started walking down the road and passed out.
When he woke up again, he continued walking along Route 3, and upon reaching the intersection of Route 35. One driver noticed him and took him to a police station where he was later transferred to a hospital in Bahía Blanca.
It is still a mystery of what happened between the time of the encounter and the time when he woke up in the “Rural Society of Bahía Blanca,” some 9 kilometers away, and when Doctor Ricardo Smirnoff treated him at the Spanish Hospital. Dr. Altoperro declared that it was a curious case since Llanca, a young man of about 25 or 26 years of age, was in a state of total amnesia.
In the hospital, he still could not remember anything about his past. He did not know who he was, where he was born or even who his parents were. He had absolutely no recollection of his past. He constantly cried and asked what city he was in. When his head or his hands were touched, he recoiled instinctively, as if it caused him pain. He had a severe headache in the area of the right parietal-temporal lobe. The police were notified and he was later transferred to the Municipal Hospital.
Doctor Ricardo Smirnoff treated him at the Hospital Español. He said: “The subject has no visible injuries, but refuses to be touched his head as if he is having a profound ailment located there. There is also a barely unnoticed abrasion on his left eyelid.”
On October 30, at 10:00 pm, when he woke up in his bed in the Hospital Municipal of Bahía Blanca, he regained his memory and recalled the experience in detail up to when he fainted. His clothes were intact. He felt the urge to smoke and to know what time it was. His watch, cigarette lighter and cigarettes were missing, but he still had his 150,000 pesos. He asked for his truck, he was more concerned about his truck than the UFO and its occupants. He was told that the police had found it parked on a roadside in Villa Bordeu, about 18 kilometers from the city of Bahía Blanca.
Hypnotic RegressionFabio Zerp, an Uruguayan UFO researcher who resided in Argentina investigated the Dionisio case and published on his book “El Reino Subterráneo.” After several days and intense investigations, there was some information but not much, so they decided to also carry out hypnosis sessions.Dionisio underwent three hypnosis sessions which were done with the use of pentothal. Except for the first one, in each of the sessions, Dionisio seemed to repeat exactly the same.
On November 5, 1973, Dionisio was hypnotized, which allowed him to relate the events he could not remember when he was onboard the spacecraft for more than an hour. He explained during hypnosis that when they approached the truck, they did a biopsy. A small piece of skin tissue was removed from his left index finger with a razor-like device. Then a kind of yellowish ray of light came out of the ship, which took him to the oval interior of the ship.
Once inside, he watched as the woman handled a series of instruments that he identified as medical and surgical equipment, perhaps preparing to examine him. One of the men, who Dionisio believed was the pilot, appeared to be sitting at the controls of the craft, holding a kind of joystick in his right hand. The other humanoid was watching the starry sky through a similar large pane of glass, an image that was repeated on a series of color monitors to Dionisio’s left.
In addition, he explained that the aliens used some kind of translating device to communicate with him in Spanish. At a certain moment, several hoses and cables were thrown out of the ship. The hoses sank into a small stream and the cables made contact with a high-voltage tower located nearby.
He saw a woman, probably a nurse, who made an incision in his right parietal bone. Then inadvertently, she hit his left brow ridge causing a hematoma (or bruise) which the human doctors later examined and treated.
When they finished examining his head, the aliens proceeded to anesthetize his wound. At this point, he was released from the spaceship completely unconscious, and later found wandering the streets in a state of amnesia, and his next memory of the incident was when he woke up in the Bahía Blanca Municipal Hospital.
On the other hand, the truck was found in the place where Dionisio claimed to have parked it. A few meters away, it was found that a high-voltage tower was damaged. After consulting with the company that supplies electricity to the city, the team led by Fabio Zerpa confirmed that on Sunday, October 28, 1973, between 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning, there was an unusual increase in electricity consumption, coinciding with Dionisio Llanca’s report.
As the days passed, the case became widely popular in the area. The people and media started to irritate Dionisio to know more about the incident. Subsequently, he disappeared from the media and also moved away from his family, and lived an incognito life.
It was only in 2013 when the local journalist Sergio Prieta was able to contact him and remember much better what happened some time ago. He managed to contact Dionisio and titled his note with a rather shocking statement, “”Si me volviera a pasar, no se lo contaría a nadie(If it happened to me again, I would not tell anyone).” With these simple words, Dionisio expressed himself in the face of what had happened and everything he had to live through when recounting his traumatic experience years ago, which back then was not so common to hear.
In addition, in the interview, the trucker commented that he was defamed and used. Despite the fact that many anecdotes, told in a state of total sincerity, have coincided with what happened that morning, Dionisio’s story was dismissed ten years after the event. For his part, Prieta, who heard again the surprising story that today continues to impact the world of ufology, commented that “today people are more predisposed to recognize it as a possibility since governments began to open declassified files.”
The story was finally published in La Nueva Provincia newspaper on December 8, 2013. It was translated into several languages because the impact and repercussions were so great that international media began to compare the versions that occurred in Argentina with very similar events from other countries.