Anyone who has been following the UFO/paranormal press with certain regularity should be aware of the wealth of paranormal events coming out of the southernmost country in the Americas. However, unexplained cases of teleportation are perhaps Argentina’s greatest claim to fame. Despite the controversy surrounding the now legendary disappearance of the Vidal family from an Argentinean highway and their sudden reappearance in the Mexican countryside thousands of miles away, there are other cases involving mysterious roadside disappearances that cause even the most prudent researcher to wonder. Many of these unusual vanishings take place in a curious location that local investigators of the unusual have come to know as the Triángulo Interprovincial (the interprovincial triangle, in reference to the Bermuda Triangle) between the towns of Victoria (Entre Rios), Pueblo Esther (Santa Fe province) and San Nicolás (Buenos Aires province). Juan Carlos Gauna, a private pilot who has dedicated himself to reporting about this strangeness-prone region of his country, suggests that this arbitrary triangular area “activates” every forty-five to sixty days and either unusual aerial phenomena or disappearances occur. He takes his conclusion a step further by noting that these disappearances take place in a straight line running from the city of Victoria (UFO and cattle mutilation hot spot) to the banks of the Paraná River. “The disappearances of human beings from the southern reaches of the Triángulo Interprovincial,” he writes, “are much more alarming than those occurring elsewhere in the world, since people here have vanished before the eyes of friends and relatives, as though gobbled up by space itself.”

Gauna is a first-hand witness to one such disappearance. One day in June 1996, while at the headquarters of the Pueblo Ester Aero Club, accompanied only by the airfield’s staff, a distress called was received at 19:00 hours from a Cessna 172 Skymaster belonging to a club member. The pilot anxiously reported that he was lost and that his VOR was inoperative. He had taken off from Junín for the 40 minute flight back to Pueblo Ester, but now, after 90 minutes aloft, had completely lost his bearings. Gauna took the microphone headset and asked the frightened pilot to give him some visual reference in order to steer him back to the airfield, asking if any large communities such as Arroyo Seco or San Nicolás were in view, as should have been the case from a small aircraft flying at 1000 feet. The answer was negative – the pilot could see only darkness.

An effort was made to guide the pilot verbally toward the air field, but the answer was still the same – nothing at all except inky darkness could be seen from the small cockpit. At one point, Gauna and the staff could hear the Cessna flying over head, but could not see it nor its lights (and the pilot couldn’t see the runway lights either). Suddenly, a wild cheer of joy came over Gauna’s headset: the pilot’s VOR had suddenly come back to life as mysteriously as it had died, and the runway lights were now perfectly visible. An uneventful and very welcome landing followed.

In January 1997 it would be Gauna’s turn to face the unknown. He was a passenger aboard a Piper PA-11 toward San Nicolás and was suddenly awakened from a nap by the plane’s pilot, who worriedly told him that “he didn’t know where he was”. Thinking it was a joke, Gauna looked out the window and saw a landscape he had never seen before. He inquired if the pilot had at any point crossed the Paraná River, to which the flyer said no, but the landscape below was filled with unknown islands similar to the ones in that river’s estuary. This alarming situation went on for thirty minutes until “there was a sudden change in the landscape below” and both men were able to recognize the town of Zarate, which meant that in 50 minutes of flying time they had covered a distance that usually requires 90 minutes.

Others were affected by whatever space/time distortion was taking place over Argentina at that time. Gauna reports that a phone call was received from the Casilda Aero Club requesting emergency search assistance in finding a missing Cessna that ultimately appeared after nine hours aloft over utterly unknown territory – an event made all the more mysterious by the fact that the small plane’s endurance was a little over four hours.

At this point we can only wonder what would have happened if the pilot had ditched his plane in this bizarre new landscape – would he have found an uninhabited wilderness, a parallel Earth? Or had Gauna and his fellow pilots flown into that world that appears to exist side by side with our own, and whose denizens have often come into our reality?

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