The Filiberto Cardenas Abduction

Under hypnosis Filiberto Cardenas described a base beneath the sea, reached through a tunnel in the ocean floor. The beings there wore silver suits marked with a winged serpent and gave him a helmet that cycled through languages. He described needle examinations, and 108 small puncture marks were reported on his body. It began on the evening of 3 January 1979 on Okeechobee Road near Hialeah, just north of Miami. His car died. He heard a buzzing like a swarm of bees, a blue light engulfed him, and he rose screaming into the air in front of the people with him. A police officer found him dazed about two hours later and some sixteen miles away.

What is on the record

A single telling on one channel names two claimants, Cardenas and his wife Iris. Her place in the file comes from a later claim that she was taken too, not from the night itself. The published case file names a companion in the car, Fernando Martí, whom our telling does not. A thirteen-year-old daughter was also in the car. She is not named here. Our telling places the event on a deserted road; the record puts it on Okeechobee Road.

Beyond our telling the case is well catalogued. The NICAP case file draws on Bullard's abduction catalogue, the HUMCAT catalogue and the MUFON UFO Journal of March 1979. The investigator was Virgilio Sánchez-Ocejo. The police took a report when the officer found him. Our telling says the police logged it as a close encounter of the third kind; the archive holds no copy of that report. Nobody has put forward an ordinary explanation. The underwater base and the examinations come from hypnotic regression, which is a contested way to recover memory.

Why it sits where it does

The case grades L3 on two claimants, though only one of them is placed on the road that night. The strongest part of the file is the outside record of the night: a stalled car, companions who watched and a police officer who found him far from where he vanished. What lifted Filiberto Cardenas off Okeechobee Road is not resolved here.