The Alien Abduction of Salvador Villanueva Medina

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It was August, 1953.  Taxi driver Salvador Villanueva Medina’s car had broken down while he was shuttling two Americans to the border at Laredo.  Medina’s passengers opted to take to the road by foot to flag down help or walk to the nearest town while the seasoned driver assessed his car trouble.  While examining the transmission of the 1952 Buick, Medina heard soft footprints on the gravel on the side of the road.  He got up to behold a strange sight:  A blond man with shoulder-length hair and a slight build was standing beside his car.  He was wearing a sort of uniform that appeared to Medina as being made of wool or corduroy fabric.  Medina described the stranger as having a face as white as polished ivory and bright green eyes.  His teeth were very small and when he spoke, asking about Medina’s car, the blond man used flawless Spanish.  Medina assumed that the man was a pilot, as he made references to his craft being parked over a hill nearby.  The two chatted for a while until it began to get dark.  The blond stranger told Medina that he needed to go, and activated a series of lights on his belt.  He walked rather rapidly into the desert wilderness and Medina wanted to follow him, but couldn’t see where he went.  Medina returned to his car and went to sleep for the night.

The next morning the taxi driver awoke to the rapping sound on one of the car’s windows.  Thinking that help had finally arrived from the day before, Medina got up and out of the car only to find the blond man from the previous day along with a very similar-looking companion.  As the temperature outside was cold, Medina invited the two to sit with him in the car.  While in the car he asked the two a little bit about themselves.  Medina thought that their features were too exotic to be European or American and that the two must have been from somewhere else.  One of the strangers began to describe where the two came from.  It was a place with no open space like the deserts of northern Mexico, rather, it was more like a continuous city with a dense population and endless roads.  Public transportation included vehicles with 10 levels.  Farming occurred vertically, as fruits and vegetables were grown inside walls and on top of buildings because of lack of space.  Their place of origin had one ocean, which was three times deeper than any ocean on earth.  Children were entrusted to the care of the State until they reached maturity.  It was at this point when the taxi driver realized that he was speaking with beings from another world.  After a brief discussion about their planet and how it differed from earth, the beings asked Medina if he wanted to see their spacecraft.  He agreed and they led him over the hills and through some scrub forest until they came upon the oval-shaped metallic craft standing on three legs among the bushes like an egg in a nest.  The Mexican taxi driver, so used to shuttling other people around for a living, was then offered a ride, allegedly to the planet Venus.

No exploration of UFOs or extraterrestrial visitation would be complete without examining the abduction phenomenon.  In this phenomenon abductees, or “experiencers,” are taken aboard alien spacecraft and experimented upon, taken for rides or given information or messages for humanity.  The first American case of alleged alien abduction happened in New England in 1961 to Betty and Barney Hill.  The first major abduction case in the entire world, according to most UFO researchers, occurred in Brazil to a farmer named Antônio Vilas Boas in 1957.  However the case of Salvador Villanueva Medina predates the Brazilian case by about 4 years, thus making it probably the first documented alien abduction in modern history.  The Medina case didn’t make it out of Mexico until 1973 when a small book was published called Estuve en el planeta Venus, or, in Enlgish, I was on Planet Venus, which did not generate much international attention.  The case was reexamined and an update to the book was released a few years ago by a group out of San Luís Potosí, Mexico called Gnosis Instituto Cultural Quetzalcoatl which specializes in dream research, meditation, the study of the Kabbalah and a handful of other topics which may be considered “fringe.”   All materials about this alleged abduction case have previously been available only in Spanish.  As an aside, if one would like to be technical about this case, Medina’s experience would not strictly be classified as an abduction as he did board the craft voluntarily and knew exactly where he was going with these mysterious blond beings.

Now let us return to our humble Mexican taxi driver.  Somewhere between earth and Venus, the small craft piloted by the two beings Medina met on the side of the road in Mexico docked with another larger ship that was staffed by 8 people.  There were two “chiefs” aboard the larger ship who were bigger in stature and wore different uniforms.  The larger ship had ample seating and more complicated controls and was made, presumably, to fly longer distances.  Medina was welcomed by the crew, who found humans to be curious creatures, and was invited to what appeared to be a mess hall.  He was offered food, and remarked that it was quite tasty and aggreeable.  After the meal he became sleepy and dozed off.  When he awoke, he was wearing the same uniforms as the crew.  In Medina’s own words, he described his new clothing, specifically his pants, as being, “tight as a bullfighter’s. I felt it materially attached to the body, but without hindrance.”  After he awoke, Medina was led to the bridge of the ship and on the three main screens he watched as they approached Venus.  They descended vertically to the planet’s surface, hovering until the ship extended its “legs” and they landed.  To disembark, the crew and their earthling guest entered a hollow column and put their hands and feet on what seemed to be a ladder and descended through the column to the planet’s surface.  On the slow way down, Medina noticed trees full of fruit.  He reached out to touch one and it felt ripe.  The trees had no leaves and the trunks had gigantic roots.  Medina noticed that the surface of the planet looked wet and somewhat like a sludge.  One of the Venusians explained to him that what he was looking at was a kind of chemical mixture that was used as food for the fruit-bearing trees.  Besides the trees, Medina noticed a massive building that seemed to go on forever.  They explained to him that indeed it did, and it was a continuous structure that ringed the planet and sent out light rays in all directions.  It was because of this building which absorbed light from the sun and emitted light continuously, that Venus never experienced the darkness of night or the dim light from thick cloud cover.  Medina also noticed the various forms of aerial transport flying nearby.  Some ships were cylindrical, others were orb-like.  Some were made of a metal similar to the craft he flew in, some were made of crystal.  There was a lot of air traffic, but it seemed to be comprised mostly of smaller vehicles.  Sometime during this slow descent, Medina became sick.  He had trouble breathing and felt feverish.  He was given a cigar-sized breathing apparatus that helped him.  By the time they got to the main building complex, he was fine.

At the main building complex their first stop was a gigantic cafeteria.  It was here where Medina was among other people who seemed to pay little interest in him.  He noted that everyone dressed the same and most of the people were no more than a meter tall.  All were blond and pale and women were barely distinguishable from men.  After their meal, Medina followed his friends from the spacecraft out to the street.  He noticed that there was light everywhere and it was hard to pinpoint the source, as it was coming from all the buildings.  There were no signs on the buildings and all structures on the planet were identified as to their function by colors.  The buildings had no windows and no doors, but people accessed the buildings through open arched entryways.  The small vehicles they used on Venus for personal transportation were communal and used by everyone.   If someone needed a car, they would grab the closest vehicle, use it, and then leave it for the next person to use.  As mentioned before, they had another type of public transport, a colectivo – in Medina’s Mexican terminology – that was sometimes multiple levels high and traveled to pre-determined destinations.  These colectivos could go up to 70 kilometers per hour.  For those who did not want to take a personal car or a multi-layered public bus, there were sidewalks that moved.   Sometimes boats could be seen in the streets of the city.  All boats had small rollers on the bottoms of their hulls that allowed for ease of movement on land.  Underneath the cities were elaborate networks of pipes that delivered goods to different parts of the city.  There were also underground roads for moving larger items, like construction equipment.

In his book, Estuve en el planeta Venus, Medina painstakingly describes many of the mundane tasks he witnessed during his 5 days on Venus.  One of the rather lengthy explanations had to do with how the people of Venus manufacture tires, which we will not spend time on here.  As a taxi driver back on earth, anything pertaining to transportation interested him, including how the Venusians got so many aerial craft to fly around their cities.  According to what he was told by his hosts, the small aircraft did not use fuel the way we did on earth but harnessed an energy emanating from the planet itself, a kind of magnetism.  The larger ships used for actual space travel were equipped with energy weapons that were capable of destroying everything.  This destructive power, saddened and troubled the Mexican visitor.  Another interesting thing that Medina observed was how the Venusians cultivated and prepared food.  Food came from two sources:  the sea and the gardens found within the walls and on the rooftops of the buildings inside the city.  The bounty of the sea was harvested in massive floating factory-fisheries.  Sea creatures approximating sharks, manta rays and salmon were caught, lightly processed and sent to other factories on land to be ground into a flour.  This flour was used to create different types of food of various flavors, textures and colors.  The fruits and vegetables from the gardens were also processed at the same facilities and made into a similar type of flour.  Fruits and vegetables were picked by hand.  The trees were rather short, much like the people picking the fruit.  All nutrition was balanced in laboratories and food was optimized in such a way that Venus had none of the diseases that earth had that came from having a poor diet.  People did get old and die of natural causes related to advanced age, but no one suffered from ailments or died early because of poor eating habits or bad nutrition.

In his final days on the planet, Medina met other earth people.  His first encounter was with two twins who had a French father and a Spanish mother and were born somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean.  They had been on Venus for 5 years and they had acclimated to the atmosphere just fine but did not fit in well with the culture.    Instead of wearing the skin-tight suits of the Venusians, they wore only what Medina described as a type of underwear.  The Mediterranean twins found work in one of the docks for aerial craft and that is where Medina met them while touring the main part of the city with his hosts.  There was no indication as to why these two were there or whether they went to Venus voluntarily or if they were abducted for whatever reason.  Medina met no other earth people while on Venus.

The aliens eventually returned Medina to his car back on earth and he got the help he needed from a nearby gas station to get on with his life.  In parting, the Venusians encouraged Medina to tell his story to everyone and the humble taxi driver said that it would be difficult because he had very little education.  With some help, Medina eventually got his book out.  After publication, Medina suffered much derision and ostracism from family and friends.  He visited a psychiatrist who did not find him to be delusional.  By anyone’s measure, this seems like a fanciful story.  At the time – the decade of the 1950s – many people believed that Venus was an inhabited world.  Many believed that Medina’s story was just a made up tale to capitalize on the growing interest in other planets and the possibility of space travel.  In any case, the Medina incident is the first documented alien abduction ever to be publicized, although it did not make it very far out of Mexico initially.  We will leave it up to the listener to answer the following question:  Was this story real?

REFERENCES

Estuve en el planeta Venus by Salvador Villanueva Medina (in Spanish)