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The year was 1972. Millions of Mexicans were riveted to their television sets. A Mexico City talk show host was interviewing a woman known only as “Marla.” She described herself as a housewife and mother of 10 children who worked part time at a publishing house. This seemingly ordinary woman, whose real name was María de Socorro Pérez, claimed to have been in contact with extraterrestrial beings. Marla told the host that the beings began contact with her four years before, in 1968, a year of tumultuous events in Mexico and throughout the world. The host of the show asked questions with a mix of disbelief and fear. Nothing like this had ever been broadcast on Mexican television before and the show was in uncharted territory. After the airing of this talk show, Marla became somewhat of a celebrity in the small Mexican UFO and paranormal communities. Her interviews appeared in the fringe pulp magazines, and many Mexicans were intrigued by Marla’s stories of supposed alien contact. One of these magazines was called Contacto OVNI or “UFO Contact,” in English, published and edited by Mexico’s pioneering female UFO researcher, Vecita Rodriguez. Rodriguez featured the contactee in many of her magazines, as Marla had many encounters and many messages that the visitors wanted to relay to humanity. Marla’s story is an interesting one.
In 1968 a casual acquaintance of Marla’s had just returned from a trip through Tibet and northern India. This friend had been in contact with Tibetan lamas in exile in India who asked him if he knew anyone who would help in a great cause: the elevation of the consciousness of humanity to a higher level. Marla listened to her friend and was curious. She told him she would like to participate in some capacity. The friend told her that someone would contact her soon about her being a part of this, but she would not know when and would not know how. Marla went about her daily life and just expected the unexpected. One day in a supermarket parking lot a man appeared at the side of her car while she was loading her groceries. In an article in Contacto OVNI Marla described the man as being well-dressed in contemporary clothing. He was of medium height and had a muscular build. He was Caucasian in appearance, having short-cropped blond hair and grayish-blue eyes. When he spoke to her, his Spanish was flawless, and his accent was pure Mexican. She knew at once that this was the meeting she was destined to have. She asked the strange blond man where he was from, because even though he looked like a gringo his Spanish was perfect. The man avoided the question somewhat at first but then told Marla that he wasn’t from planet earth. In subsequent interviews Marla would say that she thought the man was from 
either Mars or Venus. That might seem strange today, but back in the 1950s and 1960s many people believed that these planets had human-like civilizations on them and routinely sent visitors to earth. The man’s name was Amriz. He told Marla that she was one of 8 contactees selected throughout the world, part of the “first wave” of intense, thoroughly planned contact between extraterrestrials and common humans. Throughout the 1970s this number would grow in excess of 15,000. In that supermarket parking lot, Amriz got into Marla’s car and started talking to her about highly advanced scientific subjects like genetics and astrophysics. In his discussion of astronomy, Amriz told Marla that there were 12 and not 9 planets in the solar system. He explained to her that this would be the first of many meetings and he would be the first of many visitors. Before leaving Marla, Amriz gave her a homework assignment of sorts: She was to visit sites of religious and spiritual significance throughout Mexico to unlock her mind and to prepare herself to be on a more energetic spiritual level. These sites included not only important Catholic shrines, but sacred places that were holy to modern indigenous people and those of the pre-Hispanic civilizations. When Amriz exited Marla’s car, she felt a bit overwhelmed, but went home and wrote down everything her contact told her. It all filled several notebooks.
According to the Mexican UFO press in the 1970s, Marla also met with three other beings by the names of Ramkar, Kutumí and Kardem. She told of an encounter with the one named Ramkar in great detail in an article for an obscure Mexican magazine called Otros Planetas, or “Other Planets,” in English. Here, she described her visitor, Ramkar, as looking very Eastern European, like someone from Poland or Russia. He had very pale skin, green eyes, a roundish face, blond hair and a lean, muscular body, looking about 35 years old. He was wearing a one-piece body suit when he appeared outside her home. Again, this person spoke perfect Mexican Spanish. Ramkar wanted to impart to Marla medical knowledge and gave her some sort of device in the shape of a short metal rod. He told her that the best description he could give her for this metallic stick was that it was a tool for healing; it could diagnose and treat any illness. Marla would keep this piece of technology until the late 1970s when she would give it to one of her followers who would eventually take it to the United States.
By the mid-1970s Marla had many hundreds of followers who were onboard with her to help humanity get to its next level of consciousness. In the back pages of those pulp Mexican UFO and paranormal magazines Marla sold cassette tapes and pamphlets to those who were interested in helping in her grand mission. The cassettes and chap books instructed the prospective pupil in the techniques of automatic writing, meditation and channeling. Marla would also give workshops in private homes in some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Mexico City. Outside the small paranormal community no one knew her except for her 1972 television interview, but within the community of UFO buffs and fringe researchers, Marla was a star.
Over the course of the 1970s Marla had many contacts and the 4 main beings – Kardem, Ramkar, Kutumí and Amriz – were often accompanied by others. Marla claimed that these visitors were not necessarily all from off world, but some were interdimensional beings. According to her many interviews, she never flew in a spacecraft and never went through an interdimensional portal. Through her hundreds of meetings Marla relayed the messages of the visitors to her followers, the press and anyone who would listen. The main message of Marla’s contacts had to do with the need for humanity to better itself. The visitors were worried that not only would humans destroy their own world, but they would spread their destruction to other parts of the galaxy. The off-world beings who spoke to Marla told her that they had had experiences with races like humans in their own recent past and they were greatly harmed. They did not want to face the same threat from a future human race, so they thought it prudent to intervene at this time. The contact phenomenon was to “soften up” humans and to elevate the consciousness of humanity away from things like war, poverty and environmental degradation. Marla also maintained that Mexico was specially chosen as a site for initial contact because the country has a very long history of complex civilizations that were in touch with various supernatural forces and experienced higher levels of consciousness for thousands of years. It was in Mexico’s ancestral memory, and the fact that the very DNA of Mexicans was more “plugged in” or receptive to other realms or multi-dimensional realities that Mexico was one of the first places chosen. Mexico is also a place with many interdimensional portals and “thin spots” where dimensions and realities can be somewhat porous. There were other contactees in Mexico in the ‘70s who did not make themselves known publicly and did the work needed to be done, but in secret. Marla became the most famous of all those chosen and served as a repository of vast amounts of knowledge. In one article in a magazine from 1978, the author described a scene in which Marla attended a conference of university physicists and gave a presentation on quantum physics that was levels above what this ordinary woman could have learned on her own. The same thing happened when she spoke to doctors about what she had learned from her contacts about what she called “electro-magnetic healing.” The medical device given to Marla by Ramkar supposedly has several patents that were eventually developed from it. She gave this piece of advanced technology to one of her followers. This person eventually got a job with NASA and that is how the device made it to the United States. After 1980 nothing more was mentioned about this short metal rod that had special medical powers.
Marla stopped giving interviews in the 1980s and made few public appearances in that decade. Many Mexican podcasters and UFO bloggers have tried to get her to do interviews here in the internet age, but Marla is now in her late 80s and lives a private and quiet life in either Guadalajara or Mexico City. Information is conflicting.
What is Marla’s legacy? Is her story even believable? Is there some truth to what she experienced with the rest filled in and exaggerated by the sensational Mexican UFO press? Many critics call Marla an outright fraud, a flim-flam artist who made money from selling tapes and conducting elite workshops in the homes of wealthy believers. These critics contend that she never produced a shred of physical evidence for any of her contacts, not a photograph, not even a simple artifact from another planet or dimension. Defenders would counter that the message is what’s important and there is no need to present any physical evidence as long as the talking points are true. Other critics see Marla as the object of an elaborate hoax rather than playing the role of the hoaxer. The description of the visitors seems strange and has been seen before in Mexico. In the UFO case at the Santa Lucia Air Force Base, the supposed aliens fit Marla’s description to a tee: light-haired, physically fit, young, male Caucasians. For more information about that UFO incident please see Mexico Unexplained episode number 171: https://mexicounexplained.com//ufo-incident-at-the-santa-lucia-air-force-base/ . Some allege that Marla’s encounters, along with the entire UFO contact or abduction phenomenon, are elaborate hoaxes put on by the intelligence agencies of the main world powers. At the time of Marla’s experiences, in the midst of the Cold War, those main powers would have been the United States and the Soviet Union. The perfect Mexican Spanish aside, the visitors were very “gringo” and even the supposed alien named Ramkar was described as looking very Eastern European. Was he really an operative from behind the Iron Curtain participating in an elaborate psychological operation? If this were the case, Marla herself may not have even been aware of such an elaborate trick being played on her and the thousands of others. If Marla does know the truth, she isn’t talking.
REFERENCES (all magazines in Spanish)
Contacto Extraterrestre
Contacto OVNI
Otros Planetas