Caught in the Beam

This happened in the early hours of 30 July 1975, at a spot known as the “Fonte da Virgem,” in Alborache, near Valencia, Spain. The witness was Feliciano Vidal Chorent, sixty-nine at the time, married, a farmer retired from the Valencian cement works. He spent most of his days tending a vegetable garden near Buñol. Raised in that rough country life, with little schooling, he was by every account a reliable man, not given to making things up. The case was studied in detail by the physicist Miguel Guasp.

Tuesday the 29th had been an ordinary day. Because of the unbearable heat, Feliciano went to bed around midnight and left the window open. He had barely fallen asleep when the braying of his donkey woke him. The animal, tied to a tree some ten meters from the window, was clearly agitated, ears straight up. Then his dog, under a tree by the door, began to bark hard.

Thinking someone was on his land, Feliciano took a knife and went out. He walked to the tree, where the dog fell quiet the moment it recognized him, and looked around. There was no one there. And then an intense light swallowed the whole place. It came from the top of a hill beside the house, cutting through the branches as if the trees were about to catch fire. It lit the house but not the rest of the hill or anything farther off, which means its source must have been very close. For a moment it blinded him. He said it was like twenty cars aiming their high beams down at him at once. An instant later the light, which had hung to the east-northeast, shot away to the east.

He climbed the steps cut into the hill, to where the light had seemed to come from. Nothing. No trace of anything, everything as quiet as always. So he went back to bed.

Two weeks later, on a clear and starry night, Feliciano looked up at the waning moon and counted four points on it. Other lights at night came apart the same way: stars, even distant electric lamps. A star would show as a central point ringed by tiny ones. By day his sight was fine. He had never had any trouble with his eyes before that night. It was as if the enormous light he took in had damaged them, leaving him with a kind of double vision that only appeared after dark.

But the eyes were not the strangest part. Feliciano had for a long time suffered sharp pain in his left hip, bad enough that he needed a cane to walk. A doctor in Buñol had diagnosed arthrosis, a degeneration of the joint cartilage, a condition that is irreversible. For two months after the encounter the pain was so fierce he could barely move. And then, gradually, it began to fade, until it was gone completely. His arthrosis, the doctors had said could not reverse, had reversed. His general health improved markedly from that night on.

The extraordinary thing is what happened to the two animals that had been with him. While the man got better, both fell ill, in the same strange way, and both died of it.

The dog first. A young animal, four years old, full of life, a good hunter. About six or seven months after the sighting, in February or March of 1976, it began to lose its vitality and its appetite, sinking into a total listlessness, barely eating or drinking. Then hard lumps spread across its body, like glands, large as an egg. By April it was in such a state that its owner had it put down.

The donkey, nineteen years old, started soon after the dog died. It refused to drink as it used to, then stopped wanting food, fell into the same prostration, and grew the same lumps. Its legs went rigid and stretched stiff. Afraid it would die where he could not move it, Feliciano took it to be slaughtered too. The whole illness ran two or three months.

Two animals as different as a donkey and a dog, dying of the same process, is hard to put down to ordinary disease. There were no ulcers on the lumps, no fever, none of what an infection would leave. A tumoral process fits the facts better, and a tumor can be triggered by exposure to radiation. The same idea is supported, oddly, by the man’s recovery: arthrosis pain comes and goes, but Feliciano’s spiked sharply right after the encounter and then receded for good, exactly the pattern seen in patients given radiation treatment to ease pain.

Put it all together and it points one way. That night, on a hill outside a small Spanish town, a farmer and his two animals stood in a strange light, and were never quite the same again.