Puerto Rico Looked Up in November 1973, and Dozens Reported Strange Lights

SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO — A month of reported aerial visitors over Puerto Rico in November 1973 has been revisited by the blog Inexplicata, which this week published an excerpt from the casebook of ufologist Noel E. Rigau. The editor's introduction notes that activity began in October, with a humanoid incident at El Yunque and a photograph taken in Mayagüez, and that such events in the region ran into 1974 and 1975.

The entries begin early in the month, when, according to the casebook, a 55-year-old woman and her neighbors, praying in a backyard, watched a round object with green and yellow lights spin about 30 feet overhead for fifteen minutes. On November 2, witnesses in Toa Alta described an oval craft flying low and nearly silent. Its pilot, they said, wore a helmet and goggles and waved. The casebook adds that witnesses reported a warm, ash-like dust on the ground, though the compiler could not obtain a sample.

The busiest evening was November 11, when sightings clustered around San Juan. Young people at El Morro reported six round objects with red lights moving toward Cataño. One family in the Sagrado Corazón area described an oval craft ringed with spinning lights, followed by a second, three-layered reddish-orange object. According to the account, the two hovered over Río Piedras for ten minutes before departing when a commercial airliner passed near.

Reports continued in the west. On November 22, a Social Security employee in Mayagüez and several others reportedly saw a bright, tilted saucer cross the sky in perhaps fifteen seconds. Two days later, local radio stations were said to have received numerous calls. In Cabo Rojo, a schoolteacher described as highly respected locally told of an eye-shaped object about ten meters above the ground, accompanied by a vacuum-cleaner sound and a dip in local power.

The casebook closes with an undated late-November report from a Ponce lawyer, who saw luminous objects in a V formation heading toward the mountains of Adjuntas. The source offers no conventional explanations for any of the cases.