It was my first job after college, and it turned out to be a real plum.

My qualifications were a degree in science and fluency in Spanish, and my assignment was to conduct a science education project in Puerto Rico, sponsored by the local electrical utility company and the US Government. My task was to visit every high school on the island, give a science presentation to the entire student body in assembly, and conduct labs and classes for selected groups of students. I was provided with excellent training, a van full of audio-visual and laboratory equipment, and full cooperation from the local authorities and educational officials. I found the students eager to learn and their teachers delighted to have me. For an entire school year I prowled around the back roads of the interior of a tropical paradise, and had the time of my life. These events occurred almost thirty years ago, but they are still clear in my memory.

Puerto Rico is a small island, but rugged and mountainous. Automobile travel is slow, and the traffic is a nightmare, so I found it convenient to divide the island into separate zones, move into a hotel in one of the larger towns in each region, and schedule my appointments for schools within easy driving range of my home base. During my weekends and the very frequent school holidays, there was always the night life of San Juan. However, I was particularly looking forward to visiting one particular school, in the isolated little country town of Utuado, for a variety of reasons. For starters, Utuado is situated in Puerto Rico's Karst region, a fantastic complex of steep hills and sinkholes caused by a vast layer of highly eroded limestone lying on the surface. Of course, the whole area receives abundant rain from the trade winds, so it is covered in lush tropical vegetation. Because of the nature of the terrain, and its relative isolation, the famous Arecibo radio observatory is sited here, although Arecibo proper is on the northern coast, where I made my base while working the northwest part of the island. This whole corner of the island is difficult to farm and relatively under-populated, and is known primarily for its caves and its suitability for hydroelectric power generation. There are several large dams and reservoirs located there, and the low selva is crossed with big steel towers and high tension lines

But there was one other characteristic of this area that had captured my attention. I had read several times in the San Juan papers that Utuado was having a UFO flap, and several stories had made it to the big city dailies concerning mysterious lights in the skies over the little town of Utuado. As soon as my schedule allowed, I moved my headquarters to Arecibo and made my appointment with the school authorities by telephone. My show and tell went smoothly at the high school, and the staff invited the students from the local junior high school as well. I felt that the whole town had turned out to welcome me and that they were genuinely happy to have me there. I got a chance to ask several of the kids about the UFOs and, sure enough, they all had seen them. None seemed particularly awed or afraid of them, and they eagerly recounted their tales of daylight discs and nocturnal lights as if it they were the most normal thing in the world. They told me that if I stayed in their town for a few days I would probably see one myself! Some were convinced the UFOs were of extra-terrestrial origin, the rest suspected that they were secret aircraft being tested by the Americanos.

After the afternoon classes, I accepted the kind hospitality of my hosts,the high school science faculty, for a delicious dinner and the obligatory coffee and smokes with conversation after. The teachers were mostly local, and although they had gotten their degrees in San Juan or even on the mainland, they had all come back to their hometown alma mater to carry out their teaching careers. Sitting under a canopy of trees and surrounded by glorious mountains, I could see why they had chosen to come home. It was inevitable that I would eventually steer the conversation to the UFO stories I had read in the San Juan Star and when I brought up the subject they were not shy about responding.

"The papers left out all the good parts..." said one, " we had to stop classes because we couldn't teach over the noise of the F-104's of the PR Air National Guard chasing these lights up and down the valleys."

"These things have been haunting these parts for as long as any one here can remember." spoke another. "The old timers think that they're ghosts, but we don't believe in ghosts any more, they're UFOs."

The others did nothing to contradict their stories, although one suggested that the unusual geology of the region might produce piezo-electrical phenomena. All had experienced sightings, and swore that so had eveyone else in town. One mentioned that he had heard stories that during Utuado's frequent power outages strange objects had been seen hovering over the power lines, but that the crews at the hydro plants insisted that their generators were turning against a load. But only one of the teachers present claimed to have actually experienced a close encounter. The others had obviously heard his story before, and remained silent while he repeated it to me.

"I was driving back from town with my brother one night, when we saw an incredibly bright light off in the bush.
We knew it had to be one of them, so we stopped the car and took off on foot towards the light. It was about a hundred yards from the road, sitting in a clearing, about the size of a small house. It was a flattened disk shape, like two soup bowls on top of one another, lip to lip; and it was perfectly featureless except for a set of small dark rectangles evenly spaced around the edge. The craft was almost too bright to look at, and it was changing color, going through all the colors of the spectrum, from violet to red and back. But it somehow didn't seem real. It seemed to be glowing from within, and although I could not actually see through it, it seemed translucent somehow, like a Disney animation." (These last words are verbatim, as close as I can translate them from memory..."como un munequito dibujado por Disney").

He continued his story, how he and his brother had watched the object for a few minutes, and then it simply vanished, instantly, like "someone turning off a light". Suddenly afraid, they ran to their car and drove home. If the others present did not believe his story, they betrayed no evidence of it. They had all talked to the man's brother, who had confirmed the tale. If they were all in it together, just having a little fun at the Yank's expense, they didn't give me a hint of it, and they had pulled off a fine piece of acting without once giving it away. We talked for about an hour longer, and I heard them recount their own and their friends' sightings, mostly far encounters with little detail, not particularly unusual except for the large number in a small area. If they had been deliberately trying to pull my leg, surely they could have come up with more elaborate sightings. I drove back that night to my hotel on the coast, and although I did drive through the area a few more times later on that year, while on business or visits to the telescope and the reservoirs, I never went back to Utuado.

Well to sum up, I didn't see anything myself, and my account of those events is only hearsay twice repeated, from the same folks who brought us the chupacabra. But the experience is still in my memory, and perhaps someone reading this has visited that beautiful little mountain town, or even hails from there, and might want to add to my story. Do the jets still chase ghosts through the blue skies over Utuado?