Flat Tire, Lonely Road

Hey, true weirdos, at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. Your life is just as it's always been. You wake up, you eat, you go to work, you drive a road you've navigated 100 or 1000 times, tire blowing out to hassle, but it's part of the job for a professional trucker. You pull over, unpack the tire jack heave the spare needle to make the switch 1520 minute job at the most. That's the last thing you remember. Well, until the doctors and the drugs and the questions. And all you really know now is that you'd give anything to live that night over to be anywhere, anywhere, except for they're kneeling on the ground. Beside that truck.

And they got a small beam of light again. True. Weird. Stuff. The road never got that much traffic that late at night. It was after 2 a.m. There were no homes and few businesses along that stretch of highway between Bahia Blanca and Buenos Aires. There was the meatpacking plant silent now waiting for dawn and the start of another workday.

There was the fuel depot, but the two regular night shift guards seldom had reason to leave the warmth of their post. When police officers cruising the highway on routine patrol saw a big truck pulled over onto the shoulder, they immediately slowed down and pulled in behind the vehicle in the beam of their headlights.

They saw the flat tire immediately saw that the tire jack was already in place. The spare lying on the ground a few feet away. What they didn't see was the driver. The officer circled the vehicle, the beams of their flashlights flickering and dancing in the darkness. The moon a waxing Crescent offered little light and was no help trying the truck store.

They found it unlocked inside. Everything was neat and in order. All the vehicle's documents were stacked in the glove box returning to the rear of the truck. They studied the flat tire examine the spare looked like a simple repair something a professional driver would easily and quickly be able to manage on their own.

Where was the driver? The police called out made as thorough a search of the surrounding area as they could. They found no one and no sign of any struggle or anything else. It was though the driver had simply vanished. It was strange and was about to get stranger than those police officers could have ever imagined. Dionisio Llanca was 25 years old unmarried and living in his parents house in the province of Rio Negro.

He'd spent one year serving in the Argentine military without either distinction or drama upon discharge. You found work as a trucker a job that appeared to suit him on October 28th 1973. He spent the night at the home of his uncle who lived just outside the center of Bahia Blanca. Llanca ate a meal of salad and steak while watching the American TV show.

It takes a thief starring Robert Wagner. He was scheduled to run a load of building materials to Patagonia and intended to get on the road around midnight on the 28th to begin the two-day drive before climbing into the cab of his truck. He gave the vehicle a quick once over noting that one of the rear tires looked like it might be a bit low deciding that the tire could wait to be dealt with Llanca pulled out 45 minutes later turned into a gas station to fill his tank.

He should have dealt with the tire. The decision to let it ride is one. He'd later come to regret deeply and profoundly regret. But you know how it is. You've made me done the very same thing yourself a time or two weighed the odds of trouble against the hassle of effort and ended up taking the gamble. You can see it.

You can put yourself there in that gas station parking lot. It's pushing 1 a.m. You have hours of driving ahead of you and the tires just a little bit low. It'll be fine and you promise yourself to take care of it. Once you deliver this load to its destination. And so Dionisio Llanca climbed back into the cab of the truck.

It wasn't even 30 minutes later as he rolled along Highway 3. The anchor realized his mistake. The tire was losing air much faster than he thought and he had no choice now but to swap it out for the spare instead of the brightly lit service station parking lot. He'd have to make do with the hard shoulder of the road and only scant moonlight to illuminate the task.

He eased the truck off the road at a spot called Villa Bordeu just about 11 miles outside by your Blanca later much later. He was able to recall that the road was deserted. He'd seen no other traffic that night on Highway 3. As Llanca knelt on the ground and began cranking the tire jack the darkness all around him was suddenly illuminated by what he described as an intense yellow light.

Assuming the golden brightness to be coming from the headlights of an approaching vehicle. He continued to work on the tire. It was only when that light abruptly turned to a bluish shade that he glanced up. He tried to stand but he found that he couldn't his legs oddly refused to cooperate twisting his body. He saw the source of the light.

Listen Llanca had to be completely freaked out by the abrupt and bizarre paralysis in his legs. What he saw is he turned he could hardly believe it was enormous motionless hovering about 20 feet off the ground. The thing glowed. It was huge and luminous the shape. He said was something like a plate. Then he saw the people somehow very close behind him though.

He'd heard nothing like the sound of footsteps and had detected no movement at all. There were three figures gazing at him not speaking. And when Llanca himself tried to speak he found that he couldn't his voice was frozen as his legs. Trauma specialist. Dr. Ricardo Smirnoff was on call the weekend of October 28th, 1973 at Bahia Blanca Municipal Hospital.

This case was an unusual one for sure. A young male admitted name unknown highly distressed and suffering from complete retrograde amnesia. The admitting physician reported that the patient did not know his own name or the names of his parents. He could not give an address nor even say the place where he'd been born. He was weeping and confused and clearly very, very frightened.

He'd been brought to the hospital by a good Samaritan who'd spotted him wandering in the center of town asking repeatedly for the police station. When Dr. Smirnoff examined the man, he found no signs of injury, no bumps, bruises or burns, no outward indication of any kind of trauma. Yet the patient insisted he was suffering extreme pain from forehead to And when the doctor reached out a hand to touch the area, the patient flung himself backward in what Smirnoff described as a state of panic or fear.

Dr. Smirnoff puzzled over the man's condition. He made the decision to treat the patient for a possible fracture of the skull, a diagnosis that could potentially account for the amnesia. Though Dr. Smirnoff could not fathom how a blow to the head severe enough to cause complete retrograde amnesia would leave no mark at all.

It was very peculiar. What happened to Dionisio Llanca? How did he go from changing a flat tire on the side of Highway 3 to lying in a hospital bed, sobbing and unable to recall his own name? Yank at first knew only that he found himself lying on the ground roughly six miles from where his truck had been discovered by police.

He said that he opened his eyes and instantly felt both very cold and very queasy. He had no idea where he was or why he was on the ground. He had no memory of his truck and no notion of what to do or where to go. He saw headlights and taillights moving in the distance and tried to make his way to what he hoped might be a main road leading somewhere.

And the next thing he knew, he was waking up in a hospital bed, surrounded by staring strangers, concern etched on their faces. Llanca later described this as the moment the memories overwhelmed him. He was shaking as he asked for his watch and his cigarettes and lighter. Little sidebar, in the 1970s, hospital patients were apparently allowed to enjoy a ciggy from the comfort of their beds.

What? Yes. And on airplanes, too. Those were the good old days for big tobacco. Now, unfortunately for Dionisio, he'd arrived at the hospital with neither watch nor smokes. There was cash in the pocket of his trousers, though, which immediately threw into doubt any theory that he'd been the victim of a When he asked about his truck, it was explained that the police had come upon it parked on the side of Highway 3.

One rear wheel propped up on the tire jack and otherwise untouched. The story Dionisio Llanca told was nearly impossible for anyone who heard it to believe. And yet he never wavered, never altered or added a single detail and offered the same version of events over the course of an investigation, lasting more than 10 weeks for psychiatrists, two psychologists, at least one surgeon and one trauma expert were on the team.

Hypnosis was used. And along with that, a drug called sodium pentothal. Though you might know that one better by its pop culture nickname, truth serum. Sodium pentothal is a barbiturate. That's a class of drugs that's both addictive and dangerous. It got the nickname truth serum based on discovery made about 113 years ago by an obstetrician named Dr. Robert House.

Back then, women in labor were often sedated, which sounds crazy to us today. Knock a woman out cold. Then when she wakes up, hand her a newborn, what could possibly go wrong? Dr. House, no relation to the brilliant and acerbic TV doctor played by the actor Hugh Dr. House observed that his patients seem to easily volunteer information while under the effects of scopolamine.

This got him thinking might the influence of a drug like this help a person accused of a crime prove their innocence? Because as he reasoned, the drug would make it almost impossible to lie. What a more innocent time that was. Dr. House didn't even consider using a drug to gain a confession of any criminal act. He thought instead that the drug could help support the alibi of the accused that the drug could help confirm the innocent, not convict the guilty.

Of course, that's not at all how drugs like scopolamine and later sodium pentothal were used. We're a species that does struggle to have nice things, but let's save that shady tale for another time and jump ahead to world war two, where physicians made a fascinating discovery. Soldiers with memory loss appeared to benefit from treatment with certain kinds of anesthesia medication.

And at that time, sodium pentothal was used primarily as a surgical anesthetic. It was only after psychiatrists began incorporating it into their treatment of traumatized soldiers that sodium pentothal came to be seen as having other potentially darker uses. Now, the problem with your so-called truth serum is that while it may encourage a person to speak freely, it also leaves that person in a highly suggestible state.

It would be relatively easy for a skilled interrogator to lead an individual under the influence of sodium pentothal in whatever direction he or she chose. This is why a confession made under that influence is not admissible in any American court of law. By 1973, when Dionisio Llanca was administered sodium pentothal, use of the drug for criminal interrogation had long been condemned.

The American Journal of Psychiatry spanked it hard in 1954, warning psychiatrists that its use in aiding any criminal investigation was both of doubtful value and unethical. And you better not even think about trying it, buddy. Of course, that wasn't the end of drug assisted interrogations. But like I said, that's a whole nother story that we'll have to tell a whole nother time because poor Dionisio deserves for you to hear his story now.

That night, October 28th, 1973, as Dionisio knelt on the ground beside his truck, unable to rise, unable to speak, he turned his head and took in the three people suddenly standing right behind him. He estimated that they'd gazed at him impassively for about five minutes, though it had to feel like an eternity for the truck driver, frozen there, unable to move or talk.

He said there were two males and one female, all with fair hair, high, wide foreheads and large, slightly protruding eyes. Elongated, he said. A little bit, he said, like those of the Japanese. The trio were all equal height, between five foot six and five foot eight. They were all dressed alike and a very snug sort of jumpsuit in a dull gray color.

They wore no headgear of any kind, he said, and he saw nothing that resembled a weapon or even a tool. Their hands and arms were covered to the elbow by gloves and a color that reminded him of a shammy shoe polishing cloth. Their boots appeared to be made of the same material as their gloves. As if all that wasn't weird enough.

The odd trio was communicating verbally, just not in any language. Dionisio had ever heard before. It didn't even sound like words. He described it as more like the buzzing of bees or the choppy sounds of a static radio station. It was both sharp and squeaky at the same time. And when pressed, Dionisio said it was like there were no vowels at all.

Nothing he could comprehend. Not one familiar word or sound. Nothing that made any sense to him. And then Dionisio described being suddenly yanked to his feet by his collar. Though he said there was no violence to the act. It was oddly impersonal. He was just pulled to his feet, still unable to move or speak. As one of the men held him by the collar, the other took his hand and pressed a small device of some sort to the base of his index finger.

There was no pain, but when the device was removed, Dionisio saw a few blood droplets and then immediately lost consciousness. This is where his waking memory of the encounter ends. Abruptly and in terror. It was only under hypnosis and then additional sessions of hypnosis, this time incorporating sodium pentothal, that more of the story emerged.

These hypnosis sessions began on November 6th, 1973, eight days after he was found wandering and disoriented in the center of His distress under hypnosis was no less than when he was awake. Again and again, he told the same story, the flat tire, the blinding light, the three beings, the strange language, the sudden paralysis, the utter fear that consumed him in the hypnotic state.

He also recalled being led by one of the men to the object hovering above the tree line. He described seeing highway three as he was transported via a beam of light to the craft or vessel or whatever it was that was hanging motionless in the night sky. While under hypnotic trance, Dionisio Llanca described what he called the ship in precise, painstaking, minute detail from the outside.

The ship glowed with intense light yellow on the upper part, more purple underneath the interior. He explained, had a floor that seemed metallic to him. The color of lead. He described seeing what he thought were a kind of television screens saying that he could see the stars on one given pen and paper. It's alleged he was able to make sketches of what he'd observed.

Those drawing talents were said to be so limited as to make the drawings useless. Still, his descriptions of what he'd seen remained consistent from session to session with and without the help of sodium pentothal. There were four sessions of hypnosis in total and Dionisio's story never changed. We know that the combination of hypnosis and sodium pentothal left him in a highly suggestible state, yet no amount of questioning or challenging his story.

No amount of coaxing for additional details made any difference in each session. He not only told the same tale, but he also used the same words and even the same gestures. There was no deviation. And now it gets even weirder. Under hypnosis, Dionisio Llanca revealed that these beings told him why they were there. He described some sort of device, some sort of technological object aboard the ship, which translated their speech to the Spanish he could understand.

Yet, like others who have reported similar encounters, he also described communication with who or whatever these beings are as something closer to what we might call telepathy. Llanca said that the beings explained to him that they had come from a distance he would find nearly unimaginable and that they'd been visiting this planet for a very, very long time.

They had first been tasked with collecting material samples. And here's a revelation to give you the willies. The beings told Llanca that their fundamental goal was to help create a record for posterity, you know, as in documenting life on planet earth so that future generations might study its successes and failures. On the one hand, yay, I guess if the inevitable outcome is the annihilation of our world and everything on it, at least we'll be remembered.

Somehow by someone or something. On the other hand, thinking of our world as a failing terrarium, as a whole existential nightmare, nothing to be cheerful about. And if you're thinking, wow, that went dark fast. It's because I haven't told you this part yet. These beings explained to Danny seal Llanca, that one focus of their research was establishing whether homo sapiens possess the biological adaptability necessary to be moved off planet, you know, should the need arise.

And according to Llanca, the need will arise. Llanca was told that earth was facing a future of grave catastrophe and cataclysm. If humans would not or could not correct their behavior. Llanca didn't share specifics about which behaviors that meant, presumably because he himself didn't know. And then there was this detail revealed under hypnosis.

Dionisio described seeing something like a cable that stretched from the ship to the high tension power line that paralleled highway three, a kind of refueling. He said, no brace, because as fantastical as that sounds, there's some very provocative data to back it up on the night of October 27th into the early morning hours of October 28th, 1973, there was a spike in local power consumption, 10 amperes to be exact.

That's the sort of spike that would typically be attributed to a significant rise in temperature in the area. Something that can be and is routinely measured and recorded something that did not happen on those dates. So not proof, but definitely something to make you go. Hmm. And one more compelling data point, the commandant task for a naval air base is located on the outskirts of by a Blanca on the night of October 27th, 1973 air traffic controllers reported a sighting of an unidentified flying object.

And then just one week later on November 3rd, 1973, six Navy personnel on the base reported tracking another unidentified flying object for more than 20 minutes. The object was visible on radar. All six of the men concurred that there was no other aircraft or satellites in the airspace at the time. And the sightings were noted in the official log.

If you follow UFO UAP news, the name of this space might sound kind of familiar. There was a very controversial incident reported there just a few months ago in September, 2023, multiple unidentified flying objects were seen in the skies above the base. Civilians in the surrounding community insisted that they witnessed military aircraft engaging the objects insisted that they heard gunfire in the sky for more than an hour.

People came forward with video and audio recordings personnel on the base declared that they had seen a UFO in a stationary holding pattern over the base munitions area and more that when shots were fired at the object, it responded with what they called a beam. Several soldiers were injured in the encounter, but surprise surprise base commander denied everything calling the event a quote standard training exercise, which may be true.

Problem is that explanation did nothing to calm the fears of the people living in the area. They knew what they'd seen and heard and the official version of events didn't match their experience. Not at all. And one final tasty tidbit back in 1995, then president Bill Clinton made the decision to declassify a number of CIA records, including a whole pile of once top secret UFO files.

And looky here, the events in Bahia Blanca in the 1970s were right there just waiting to be Now, isn't that interesting? Now think about what Dionisio Llanca went through. He's had this experience that landed him in the hospital. He's been studied and questioned by a team of doctors. He's been placed in a hypnotic trance, been administered sodium pentothal.

And when not under trance, he has no conscious recollection of anything past the moment when he was yanked to his feet by an odd stranger right there on the side of highway three. And even under hypnosis with and without the drug, there always comes the point in Llanca story where it all goes black. Each session ended the same way.

Llanca describes the experience again with no deviation until it comes to the point where one of the beings placed a hand under his left eye, then over both eyes. After that, Llanca could retrieve no more memories, not awake, not in hypnotic trance, and not under the influence of sodium pentothal. The team of experts that led this investigation, that treated Dionisio Llanca, what did they think?

To begin, there was a puzzle on the timeline of events on that October night that could not be resolved. It was a chunk of missing time, about 90 minutes to as much as two hours in total. This frustrated investigators. They'd been able to thoroughly reconstruct Llanca's movements, backed up by witnesses from the service station employees to the police to bystanders who saw Llanca wandering and confused to the good Samaritan who led him to the hospital.

Yet every effort to recover any information from Llanca that would fill this gap was a total failure. One member of the team, the hypnotist Dr. Eladio Santos admitted that whoever, whatever those beings were, the possibility that they had intentionally wiped clean. This portion of Llanca's memory could not be ruled out.

Dr. Santos in an interview about the Llanca case was asked if Dionisio was telling the truth. Santos explained that he had his own profound skepticism to wrestle with, but soon came to believe that Llanca was telling his truth, what he believed he had experienced. He went on to explain that Llanca had been subjected to an exhaustive psychiatric evaluation and zero evidence was found to suggest the man was He was convinced that whatever this was, it was no hoax.

Psychiatrist Dr. Eduardo Matta agreed. It was his assessment that Dionisio demonstrated no knowledge of the UFO phenomenon and no interest in it either. Dr. Matta said that Llanca was consumed by his everyday obligations, his job, his truck, his schedule. Matta used words like primitive and simplistic to describe the man.

Matta didn't see Llanca's capable of spinning such a wild tale, much less of sticking to a story with such consistency and precision of detail. And he pointed out Dionisio had no conscious memory of the events. He described and could recount the details only under hypnosis. Dr. Matta did suggest the possibility that Llanca suffered from a condition called Korsakoff syndrome, though it was a real stretch to land on that diagnosis.

Symptoms of Korsakoff syndrome include amnesia and confabulation. That's the creation of false memory to fill the gaps in real memory gaps caused by blackouts, for example, which makes sense when you consider that chronic alcoholism can cause Korsakoff syndrome. You've heard the phrase blackout drunk, but there are other causes as well.

Thiamin deficiency, malnutrition, mercury poisoning, a brain lesion, none of which fit Dionisio Llanca. Dr. Matta basically threw up his hands and said that it was clear that something had happened to the man, something inexplicable and fantastic and terrifying. An event like that, he said, if the psychological shock was severe enough, could trigger Korsakoff syndrome, but it was just a theory and one that didn't seem all that convincing to anyone involved.

So it was all very mysterious and confusing and difficult to believe. But even as the medical team observed, Dionisio Llanca did not strike anyone as a liar. The man was clearly frightened, sought no attention from the media or anyone else, and never tried to profit in any way from the experience. If you remember from the moment he was found wandering and bewildered in the early morning hours on October 28th, 1973, he asked repeatedly for directions to the police station.

Llanca not only didn't become rich or famous as a result of this encounter with the three beings, it pretty much wrecked his life. He changed jobs. You can imagine that long nights driving a truck on empty highways had lost its appeal. The girlfriend he planned to marry in January, 1974 found herself ghosted and alone.

When she reached out to his parents, they informed her that they no longer wanted anything to do with their son and had banished him from the family home. That last bit is a real heartbreaker. According to doctors, all Dionisio wanted was to be released from the hospital so that he could return home to his mother and father.

People who report encounters like this one suffer mockery and harassment and accusations that they're making it all up for fame and fortune. Dionisio Llanca never asked for money for his story, and he never received any. He didn't become famous. You never saw him perched on the couch on the tonight show. He didn't write a book or hit the paid speaking circuit.

He tried hard to disappear back into his former life, but you know now how hard, how nearly impossible that was. The handful of hours in October, 1973 changed everything for Dionisio and not for the better. Decades later, when Dionisio was in his seventies, he agreed to an interview. His story, as ever, was the same. When asked, he stated simply that he wished none of it had ever happened to him.

Then he said that if he had to do it all over again, he wouldn't have told a soul. That was his regret, that his own words, that terrible morning in that hospital room had placed him on the path to He was emphatic and saying that he wishes he had never told anyone that if it ever happened again, he would never tell anyone.

Which leads us to one more revelation. While under hypnosis and consistently in each session with and without sodium penicillin, Dionisio reported that the beings told him that they found him to be a good, simple person, and that it was possible that they would return to him, return for him. No one knows if they did. And true to his word, Dionisio Llanca never told, but maybe they didn't need to come back.

Maybe they never left. The final weird and wild revelation from Llanca's hypnosis sessions is this. Another of these pale blonde beings was already living among humans and successfully passing as one of us. If Llanca's encounter sounds eerily familiar to you, even if you've never before heard his name, that's not surprising.

His story has a lot in common with the stories reported by many other experiencers and abductees. The lost time, the sudden paralysis, the warnings of a pending cataclysm, the amnesia, the cynic in you hollers. Yeah. Cause they're all a bunch of attention seeking kooks, copycat, whatever crazy story they think the media will bite on.

Fair enough. That's a real indefinite possibility. It's not unthinkable that people in every corner of the world could report surprisingly similar experiences, even pre-internet. Newspapers, and the TV news have been cheerfully making fun of UFO experiencers for about 80 years now. And thanks to that relentless mockery, don't we all know the basic ingredients of a good abducted by alien story?

Couldn't we all whip one up if we had to, there's another possibility though. And it goes like this. These people are telling the truth as hard as it is to believe as insane as it Even Dionisio Llanca's doctors were forced to admit that they couldn't dismiss his story. However much they struggled to accept it. What does this all mean for you?

I don't know. I can't tell you what's true. I sure can't tell you what to believe, but I think, you know, we all know deep, deep down that whatever the truth is, it's way stranger, way more complicated than flying saucers and beings from other worlds. Something real is happening and it's happening to people just like you and me all over the world.

And it's been happening for a very, very long time. Is it one giant shared hallucination? A collective fairy tale spun by we very small creatures who gaze into the vast night sky and wonder just who and what and how we are. One thing I do know, you should probably go ahead and get that tire fixed. Now, before you head out on that long, lonely drive, better safe than sorry, right?

Next time on true weird stuff. Listen up. New Jersey is a tough place. Long before Jimmy Hoffa, long before the Sopranos, there was a little town in New Jersey where they had a trial and the town's people were so angry at this criminal that they turned him into walnuts on the next true weird stuff. So Max, I think it's important to mention right up front that 1973, especially the fall of 1973 was a huge period for UFO sightings or what us UFO noughts call a UFO flap all over the world.

And let's have a little bit of historical context because very often you'll find heavy UFO activity around military bases and installations, especially during times of conflict. And many of the people who have these experiences, who report, who report these encounters and abduction type experiences there's a similar thing that they share and that is that they were warned that, you know, humanity was approaching a cataclysm, catastrophe and apocalypse.

And there has been considerable talk and reports coming out of military bases, both in America and elsewhere, of nuclear weapons being deactivated beyond the control of the personnel assigned to monitor them. I'm sure you've heard some of that, right? I have heard. We've had like Randleman, the Randleman base, a couple of other nuclear missile silo bases in the United States, NORAD facilities, personnel have reported like weird, strange sightings and activities and intercontinental ballistic missiles being taken offline, which is really terrifying.

You know, the idea that that particular technology would be in any way not tamper proof blows your mind. So let's look at 1973, which was a period of intense UFO activity all around the world, including Argentina, where our story takes place. What was happening in 1973? Well, of course, you know, America was creeping out of the Vietnam War, but we had something happening in the Middle East that that was teetering on the verge of a nuclear conflict.

It's called the Yom Kippur War, and it was fought between Israel and Egypt. These Arab oil producing countries announced an embargo against the United States for its support of Israel. Gas prices soared. And as a result of this conflict in the Middle East, the already frosty cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union really heated up.

And in 1973, and you may not know this because, you know, we're also blissfully if you were even alive back then, right? We're also blissfully engaged in the minutia of our daily lives that we sometimes don't realize how close we are to the brink of disaster. Nope, I'm good. Love you. And so during the October 1973 period, when our story takes place, the United States and the Soviet Union were on the brink of nuclear confrontation and the U.S. military went on DEFCON three level alert for the very first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So that the reason I want you to know this is so that you understand like the historical backdrop against which Dionisio story happened and the historical backdrop against which these massive waves of UFO sightings around the world happened. If, as the experiencers report pretty consistently in every language everywhere, they were told by who or whatever these beings are, that humanity was on the verge of destroying itself.

It's interesting that we would have this increase in sightings and activity at the exact same moment that the world's two superpowers are on the brink of annihilating each other and all of us thoughts. Um, yes, I think that that is very interesting because there were, there was an awful lot going on in the world at that time.

It's kind of like the way things are right now. I thought it was most interesting that when the Clinton administration decided to have those declassified UFO files, that this story was a part of that because this didn't happen in this country that happened in Argentina. So what I'm wondering is how did the Argentina information become part of us, us files that to me spoke volumes about the fact that they knew that there was really something to this because of what was happening all over the place.

Well, that, um, that military base, uh, just outside by here, Blanca, where Dionisio's incident happened, that military blaze, uh, base has been the site of many, many, uh, fascinating, um, encounters with unexplained aerial phenomenon going back decades. And as we pointed out in this story, just a couple of months ago in September, 2023, a wild tail came out of Argentina around UFO UAP activity around that, um, UFO air station.

So all of this, Dionisio's life, um, and his trucking route and all of that, it intersected with this moment in history at a place at a military installation in his country, which was known to have a lot of strange activity in the skies. The thing about Dionisio, he was, I don't love the words that the doctors use to describe him, but of course the early 1970s were very different time, you know, than 40 years later today.

And people were even more insensitive then. And we didn't use person first language and, and you would, you know, a lot of even medical stuff reads as very judgmental today. But the, the team of doctors that worked with Dionisio described him as being a simplistic and primitive man with no real interest in, in UFOs or science or science fiction or fiction or pretty much anything outside of his job, his parents, his family, his girlfriend, and, and, um, you know, soccer.

Like he was just a regular, he was a young guy and he was just a regular dude and had never expressed even the slightest passing interest with this subject matter, which leads you to believe that he didn't make this up as a play for attention. I think it was, it was shocking that all of this led to him having a break in his relationship with his parents.

That's kind of crazy. I don't, um, I did, they do it just because they thought you, you brought us dishonor or, uh, they thought it was a lie and couldn't abide it or what they thought about it. Because I think this guy was telling the truth. I really do. His doctors believed that his, they were very skeptical and remember there was an entire team of medical experts tasked with investigating this and they put the guy through it.

Okay. They put them through it. Um, multiple medical and mental health evaluations, multiple sessions of, of hypnosis with them without, you know, quote unquote truth serum. Um, and they, they could not explain if the guy was lying or confabulating, you know, making up a memory to fill a hole. Why every session awake and under hypnosis, the story never changed.

Not a single detail ever changed, which was pretty compelling even for the most skeptical physicians on this team. Right. And, and then there was that very interesting point where no amount of hypnosis or drugs or anything, they could not move past this one place in his memory. It was just all blank after that. And there was, he talked about, um, how after he, one of the beings put a hand on his, under his left eye and then on his forehead, that's it.

That's where all the memories end. He did have some superficial, very slight, uh, wound, um, both at the base of his index finger where he said they press the device and under his left eye. But, you know, we're going to take that with a grain of salt because here's a guy who somehow got from his truck on the side of the road on highway three to six miles down the road and wandering in the middle of town.

So he could have, been scratched by a branch, you know, that part, that part, you go, that's interesting. That's compelling. That's some pretty good circumstantial. It's not proof of anything, but it's, again, it's one of those little artifacts where you go, huh? Wow. You know, one of the things that to me, uh, lent credibility to this story is if you were going to make up a story, this is not the situation you would create in order to be abducted by aliens and have it as a story.

Do you know what I mean? It's just, it seems the most unlikely of things. It seems like the most ordinary of circumstances that he's there by the side of the road changing a tire. And that's when this happens. And the idea that he's there and these people come upon him, how spooky would that be? I mean, it's that idea that you can't move and you're paralyzed during that time.

I mean, that had to have been very freaky, which again, is a common thing in these abductee experience or accounts. The fascinating thing about Dionisio's story for me, and it was a tricky one to ferret out because, um, most of like almost all of the news coverage is in Spanish. So you got to run it through. I don't read Spanish.

You have to run it through a translator app. And the coverage that did make it into the U.S. Um, is, is like a news wire. So all the papers that covered Dionisio's abduction had the same story. And I saw it, I was working on something else and I was reading a newspaper from Honolulu of all things. And I'm scanning through the paper and there's this headline, trucker taken by UFO.

And girl, you know, that's the bait I'm going to bite on every single time. So I jumped over to have a look and was like, wait a minute, 1973. There were a bunch of things that happened in 1973. And so the more I dug into Dionisio's story, the more it kind of broke my heart because this guy got nothing good out of this experience.

And to your point, Max, if you're going to make up an abduction story, I'm where you're going to, you're going to build something into it. That's going to be a dramatic hook that you can maybe, you know, go to the bank with. Right. That isn't here. There, there's nothing there. The guy is like, I don't know. Uh, the floor was made out of metal.

I saw the stars on a TV screen. I, I, they touched my face and that's it. That's all I got. Like what? You're not even going to get onto an episode of ancient aliens with that. Right. And then he was, he was engaged and, and they broke up because of this or she, she goes, he goes to her. He goes to her. So I think, and this is, I'm just going to take a wild guess.

Didn't Dionisio's parents were pretty devout, um, people of religious faith. And in 1973, as in today, there are a lot of people that, um, think that a belief in God, um, cancels out any potential belief in aliens. And it's an affront to their religious beliefs. You and I know people like this who say, I can't believe in aliens.

I believe in Jesus. Well, here I got, Hey Skip, I got a newsflash for you. You may have to figure out a way to believe in both because clearly, clearly something is real and true and happening. we're watching in real time, the U S government wrestling with disclosure. And yeah, the Schumer amendment got pretty well gutted.

But the fact that the language in that amendment still refers to non-human intelligence is an off world vehicles. Come on. It's really time. It's really time to put your grown up clothes on and face the fact that there's some things happening that we don't understand and don't really have all the information on. And a guy like Dean, you see Oyanka where I think his story is really compelling.

Not only did he have nothing to gain, he just lost everything. He lost everything. And he, um, has lived his life in obscurity. No one knows his name. Um, even in his country, you know, the 1970s were a long time ago and he was interviewed as a much older man and he was on the point of tears. Oh God, to go back and do it again.

He would have lied to the doctors. He would have done anything he could to avoid having the life that he's had. So tell me again about how the guy is just a kook who wants attention and money. You know, anytime I hear, uh, not anytime, but many times when I hear some people talk about the experiences that they've had that have been similar to what he had, there is a believability about it.

You know, I'm thinking about the episode of unsolved mysteries. I think it was the first season that now this is the version that's on Netflix where these people talked about what had happened with them. There are experiences with UFOs, people who didn't know each other who had very similar experiences. And there is a believability with that.

And can you imagine if you've had something like this happen, what is it that you're going to say? That's going to make people believe, because some people are going to be skeptical, no matter what, no matter what you say about it. But there is something about this guy, especially since he is such a simple guy who was not prone to any sort of dramatics.

When he comes forth with this story that you say, yeah, this is exactly what happened to this guy. And to your point, Dionisio's descriptions under hypnosis, which again, we're consistent every session, you can overlay the sessions and everything in the right place, in the right order. Every time. He was a truck driver.

So he had some familiarity with engines and mechanics and vehicles, but he was at a loss to explain the environment that he found himself in. You know, he did what he could, these lead colored floors, these things that were kind of like TVs, but not really TVs, but he could see things on the screens. That's interesting, right?

He was so simple in his description, so plain and clear in the way he described. And he frequently would try to describe something that he himself didn't understand. The language was a fascinating part of that. So he said it sounded like bees buzzing or a radio station with static on it, but he couldn't recognize any vowel sounds.

There wasn't a single word that he could pick out. And, you know, from your own experience, you may not speak Swedish, but if you're around Swedish speaking people, you may not know the words, but a lot of the sounds are kind of familiar, right? Fair, right? This was unlike anything this man had ever fathomed, that ever experienced.

And it was interesting because he talked about like a device, kind of like an app, really, that translated that language into something he could understand. But he also talked about how he could hear it in his head. So that's the telepathy thing. Very common in the experience or literature, that, that form of communication, very common.

His story lines up with that of a lot of other people all over the world, that Dionisio Llanca would have no way, no way of knowing, or knowing about. Isn't it interesting that, so some people who have these experiences don't have any sort of, their communication with them is limited. It's like, this is what happened. I had interaction with them, but they, these aliens said something to him that he understood in whatever way they did, where they said that they thought he was a good, simple person and that it was possible they would return to him or return for him.

So, first of all, I'm thinking to myself, the aliens like me, they think I'm good, but then the aliens sort of gave me a little bit of an insult that I'm a simple person, simple man, simple man. But then can you imagine, what is it like to live the rest of your life wondering at what point along the line are they going to come back for me?

he lived, according to him, he has lived his life in a state of apprehension and fear, even though there's nothing in his account under hypnosis or awake that talks about being tortured. I mean, there are people with pretty horrific tales to tell, right? But he was terrified and confused. And I think it was enough for him to be told, we're taking samples.

We're trying to figure out if we can move any of you people out of here. I think that was enough for the guy to never want another encounter. And you, as fascinating as this is, I wouldn't. So you and I have known each other forever. We've known each other for such a long time. And until a couple of years ago, I had never shared my weird experience with you.

Right. And I have a radio show that's heard literally all around the world. Like if I wanted to get some attention for having a UFO experience, gosh, don't you think I had a platform for it? Yeah. Why don't I talk about it? Why did I never talk about it? Because it fills me with sick, queasy terror to even go there. So I don't think about it or talk about it.

Well, I think about it. That's not true. But that's why I've never like made it like, oh, here's a fun party story. Because even now I'm starting to feel shaky inside. Because when things that are inexplicable happen to you, it turns out that the fact that you can't explain it or understand it, and worse, you can't remember all of it.

That's vertigo, man. That's free fall. Who the hell does that? Only to be called a kook. And for this conversation, hate your weirdos. Here's a newsflash. We lost a major advertiser on the radio show side of our life because, quote, unquote, Sherry talks about aliens. They didn't even want to be an advertiser on our show because I talk about aliens.

So in what universe am I out there getting rich and famous for having had a UFO experience? None. Folks, it has done nothing but frighten me, turn me into a weirdo, cause issues with my family members who are like, stop. We don't want to remember this. We don't want to go back there because I wasn't alone when it happened.

I was with my family and all of them experienced it and none of them want to revisit it. So I have such empathy and love and compassion for somebody like Danny Silenko because here's what he got out of it. Nothing good. Nothing good. No. And you say he's still alive, correct? at my, when I was working on this episode, but of course he would be, oh my gosh, he would be in his late eighties now.

He may be gone now. Danny Silenko is such a not notable celebrity person in his country that you can't find him without a really big search. He's not making the rounds like, the United States is looking at the Schumer amendment. Let me tell you what happened to me back in October 73. No, he refuses and resists. He doesn't want to talk about it.

He doesn't want to relive it. I think there's a part of him and this is just my guess, but tell me what you think. I think there's a part of him that feels like if he talks about it, that throws up an antenna for whoever got him. The first time and then they will come back for him. If I was not interested in ever seeing them again.

Yeah, I would say so a couple of things about let's go to the side of the road. It's like one o'clock in the morning on the morning of October 28th, 1973. And Dionisio is cursing himself for not fixing the, swapping out the flat for the spare back at the service station because now it's the tires flat and he pulls over and that stretch of highway three back then, like we said in the story, extremely unpopulated, literally a fuel depot and a meat processing plant that wasn't working 24 hours a day.

There's no residential, there's no seven 11. They ain't nothing. And he's changing the tire, sees the light, doesn't think anything of it. Light changes color. He looks up and there are these three beings. Well, the shoulder that he pulled off of was loose rock and dirt. He didn't hear anything. He didn't detect any movement in his peripheral vision.

Three people between five foot six and five foot eight inches tall, silently materialized behind him on a gravel and dirt highway shoulder. I mean, I guess maybe, doesn't that give you a whole black eyed kids hair on the back of your neck vibe? Hmm. And they came in an EV probably. I mean, do you think Max, do you think that it's plausible that you could silently approach this truck three of you?

Here's the thing. If you have the technology to go through space that way, certainly you'd have the technology for being able to approach somebody silently. Well, that's look at you just automatically assuming that these people came from somewhere else. What if these are just teenage hooligans looking to mess with the guy?

Can they approach silently on a rocky, dirty highway, shoulder gravel? No, I don't think so. And they can't inexplicably make him paralyzed either unless they've shot him with a dart gun or some craziness like that. But that. Oh, there were no drugs, by the way, nothing was found in the system. Yeah. So there are certain aspects of his story where you want to be a skeptic and a debunker and you want to pick it apart for your own sanity.

And then you kind of hit a wall where you go, yeah, but okay, well, yeah, but, um, so DVCO coming to cold and queasy six miles away, lying flat on his back. Very interesting. No recollection of how he got from the side of the road to this little park in the center of by a Blanca six miles away. He's got no drugs or alcohol in his system.

What's your debunk that for me? What's your theory there? Yeah. Uber hadn't been invented yet. So that's out, right? Yeah. This story seems so plausible for lots of reasons to me. I mean, it really does. And that's why, um, that's why it's so fascinating. So, and I'll say it again, the U.S. government had this in their top secret files that were just classified declassified.

I mean, what was, how did the U.S. get involved with this thing that happened in Argentina in some sort of a top secret way? That to me is like the thousand dollar question. The fact that this story in this place was in these declassified reports, like what? Although we know now, um, that the government, all branches of the military have been covertly compiling data.

For decades on whatever this is, we know that now and that the public facing version of it, something like project blue book was designed to be, um, a disinfo campaign. But behind project blue book, the work continued in a very different way. And the CIA has its hands all over this, all over it. The army, the Navy, all of our military branches, um, have their own data collection operations.

And so it was fascinating that, um, Clinton in his effort to push some disclosure brought the Yankee Yankee case and this naval air station in Argentina, the light. So something I want y'all to think about, um, before we wrap up here is, um, I want you to entertain an idea that many people, including Albert Einstein, uh, considered as a real possibility that it's not so much that these vehicles or these beings or whatever are visiting us from outer space.

Okay. As it is that we don't understand the nature of our own reality and that we are so limited by our very simplistic and primitive senses to quote the doctor that we literally can't perceive it. Albert Einstein said, it is entirely possible that behind the perception of our senses, worlds are hidden of which we are unaware.

And in 1972, one year before the big UFO flap and the Yom Kippur war and Dionisio Llanca's experience on the side of highway three, Jacques Valet said, quote, there exists a parallel reality to which some individuals have access, whether such access is accidental, or by invitation only our world is influenced by a higher force acting from that other reality.

Very interesting. And one more for you. And this from a CIA, um, operative named Jim Semivan, who said, quote, I think they mentioned that the phenomenon is a natural part of our universe and we're living in it, but we don't recognize it the same way that insects and animals don't recognize the human universe. A cat and a dog could be running through a library, but they don't have a faintest idea of what the books are all about or what libraries are all about.

We might be walking through our existence and there's a whole other reality that surrounds us that we just simply don't have the ability to see or interact with. And that's from a retired CIA operative. So this, this is why at the end of the episode I said, and I'll, I'll remind you that of the way that I said it, I said, um, we all know deep down that whatever the truth is, it's way stranger and more complicated than flying saucers and beings from other worlds.

Something real is happening and it's happening to people just like you and me all over the world. And it's been happening for a very, very long time. I think that most people, if they were given the choice, would jump at the chance to have a flying saucer from, you know, another planet in another solar system, land on the white house lawn and say, take me to your leader.

If the alternative to that was, holy shit, Batman, we are living in a complex reality that we are incapable of perceiving and everything is one strange fever dream. What do you think? Do you think they'd take the aliens or the fever dream? You know, I'll tell you, I'll tell you why I think they'd take the aliens because if the aliens come to us from another planet and galaxy far, far away and they land on the white house lawn and they say, take me to your leader.

It's weird. It's wild. It's a little scary, but it in no way disrupts the very fabric of existence as I understand it. However, if you were to tell me and it was true that we are insects in a giant mind blowing terrarium that we are incapable of perceiving that throws everything I've ever been taught or believe into question.

And that is what we call ontological shock. That is falling down a bottomless black existential elevator shaft and nothing to reach out and grab hold of. That's why I think people would rather it was aliens in a flying saucer. Sherry, why do I feel like this is the conversation I have with my college buddies when we were smoking dope?

My friend, as a child experiencer, I have never left the dorm room. I have never left. and, and you know, I don't even care. Like I don't care what anybody thinks about anything. Y'all have to live inside your own skulls. Um, but yeah, there's something, there's something real strange afoot and it would be better. I think it will be better for most people if the flying saucer could land and then everything else they believe could still be believable.

I think that people will not do well and, we'll close by and I cannot believe I'm about to, um, cite Tucker Carlson of all people in this whole world. But Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News, uh, personality, and I use personality advisedly because Fox News is entertainment. Um, as all of our news is now, it's all entertainment.

It is. Tucker Carlson is doing his thing on the platform formerly known as Twitter. And he recently did a Twitter spaces, kind of a long form interview with, um, the former, um, top secret intelligence agent who testified to the United States Congress in summer 2023, David Grush. And after that interview, Tucker Carlson was quoted as saying, I'm going to paraphrase this because I don't have it right in front of me.

Some of this stuff is so dark. I can't even tell my wife. So it seems that people who gain access to knowledge or have had their own experience, those people are fervently on their knees wishing for a flying saucer from another planet as an explanation for whatever the hell it is that we're seeing in our skies and our oceans.

And I don't know. Max, how about you? What do you got? Well, you know, the thing is, is when any of this information comes out, it never threatens what I think from a spiritual standpoint, it just doesn't. And I just feel it all works in concert together. And so that's why that, that the information that comes from this never, never bothers me, never threatens me with that.

Other things that are dark, the things that I can't control. Yeah. But I, I, I can't, I can't sit around and worry about it. I just can't. Well, I'm with you and two things to think about. a lot of what's coming out now is this idea that, uh, whatever these non-human intelligences are, uh, parallel dimension, whatever, whatever it is, I don't know, whatever it is.

Um, they refer to human beings as, um, containers. And we, we believe that they mean like the humans have this soul, this sort of ineffable, immortal, eternal life force, and that we are soul containers. Hey, I can live with that. How about you? In fact, I went to Catholic school. They didn't use the phrase soul container.

That's kind of where they were headed with a lot of that, right? Fair. Okay. So there's that. And I think that that's relatively easy to deal with. Um, all right, we're soul containers. That doesn't cancel God. That doesn't cancel, um, redemption. That doesn't cancel out any of that. And the other thing that I think about is there's a book called Sea of Tranquility by Emily Mandel.

Um, she's the author of Station 11, which was turned into a really interesting TV show on, I think, Hulu, maybe. Anyway, um, Sea of Tranquility, human beings have colonized the moon and how we've done that. It's a novel. And how we've done that is we've built this enormous dome over the moon so that we could give the moon a breathable atmosphere.

And, you know, people live on the moon and they live on the moon the way you live on earth. You know, they go to work, they fall in love, they have to figure out what's for dinner. I mean, they're just living their human lives just happens to be on the moon. And there are some people who struggle with that and struggle with what it means to, um, live in such an artificial environment.

And there's a line in the book that really applies to kind of this idea of ontological shock. Um, whatever the truth is, whatever the truth is in the book, the line goes like this. Whatever it is, a life lived under a dome is still a life. Meaning whatever is true, we're soul containers. We're not soul containers. They're aliens.

There aren't aliens. There, there are multiple universes and parallel universes or there aren't. We evolved from primordial ooze. And when we die, we blink out of existence. We are divine beings created in God's image and our souls live on for eternity. Whichever of those are true, the life that you're living right now is still a life.

And that's a beautiful, precious thing. And something to be lived and fully lived. No matter what the truth of it is, you still have to live this life under the dome with the reptilians in a parallel universe as a soul container. It's still a life. And be nice to people. as we often say, as we wrap up an episode of True Word Stuff, don't be a dick.

See, I'm not even asking you to be a saint. I'm not asking you to be a hero. I'm over here saying, Hey, Chad, Susie, maybe don't be a dick. Thank you all for listening to this episode. And Dionisio Llanca, wherever and whatever you are. I don't know what happened to you, my friend, but I know you didn't lie about it. Not one word.

Yeah, absolutely believe you. All right, you dickless people. Well, you know what I mean? You're not being dicks. We'll see you on the next True Word Stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it.

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Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash.

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