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Not even well-trained and armed soldiers are immune to whatever force is behind the disappearances. In March 1976, two Marines stationed at the Roosevelt Roads naval facility vanished in El Yunque. Ten years later, a man named Angel Bernard and his son had vanished from the same spot, and also in the month of July. The Bernards, father and son, were lost for 4 days after wandering off one of the area’s many trails, coming across strange features such as bottomless pits, not normally a feature of the rainforest, pools of quicksand, and the most distressing feature – the skeleton of a hapless, unknown person who never made it out of El Yunque’s shroud of mystery. Angel Bernard added another interesting note – while the moment they became lost in the rainforest was four o’clock in the afternoon, “there was a sudden, abnormal nightfall” at that time – a feature that has been observed in high-strangeness experiences associated with alien abductions. The elder Bernard encountered a red-eyed, human-looking being surrounded by what he first thought were children, only to see them vanish a lightning speed. Their peals of laughter made him realize that some paranormal force was a work; it prompted him to tell his son that amid their precarious situation, they were also facing forces against which only the deity could ward them. Four days later, they found themselves on another trail on the far side of El Yunque rainforest, having no idea of how their wandering could have led them to that location.
Were these individuals possible victims of alien abduction? Unwilling guests of the elemental forces that traditionally occupy such places? There is no shortage of speculation in this regard.
When the Dutch sensitive Gerard Croiset was employed by the Puerto Rican police in the mid-1970's to find two children belonging to a local millionaire, he concluded, chillingly, that the children were nowhere to be found on this physical plane. Unwilling to be blinded by what they perceived as mysticism, the police thanked Croiset and resumed their investigations with conventional means: the children remain missing to this very day.
Certain locations on the planet have acquired the reputation as places where human disappearances are quite common. Some of them, like the Bermuda Triangle and the Devil's Triangle of Japan, have formed part of "pop" paranormal study for decades. Nonetheless, mountains play a greater role as locales for mysterious disappearances than any other site. In ancient tradition, travelers straying too close to Greece's Mt. Parnassus or Mt. Olympus would often be lost for good. Puerto Rico's El Yunque, Vermont's Mt. Glastenbury, and Eastern Zimbabwe's Mt. Inyangani never quite managed to acquire the name recognition of the better-known ones, despite the vast number of unexplained cases which have occurred in and around them.
Author Salvador Freixedo, who looked into the subject of these bizarre disappearances as part of his book La Granja Humana, cites the curious case of a vehicular accident in Burgos, Spain which caused the deaths of a number of people and the disappearance of a 10 year-old from one of the trucks involved in the accident. He was not found among the victims of the crash, and has never been seen again. The police initially believed that the boy had wandered away from the crash scene in an amnesic state, and a thorough search of the area was mounted by both civilians and police officials, yet nothing was turned up. In order to bring the case to a close, the authorities suggested that the boy had been disintegrated, in fact, by a cargo of sulfuric acid being hauled by the tanker truck in which he was a passenger.
Jose María Carnero, a 26 year old medical student, vanished off the face of the earth in April 1987 while on maneuvers with the military unit to which he belonged on the Montelareina Military Base in Zamora, Spain. Reports indicate that José María wandered away from his squad in the midst of a light rainfall, while the other soldiers tried to find shelter under the trees. The young man was never seen again, even after a massive search by the Spanish army, which to this day lists him as a deserter.
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