The Alto Nanay Pelacaras: Floating Silver Beings Attack an Ikitu Community, Loreto, Peru (2023)

San Antonio de Pintuyacu is an Ikitu Indigenous community in the Alto Nanay district of Maynas province, Loreto, about 10 hours by river from Iquitos. The land around it lies within or beside a regional conservation area. It also sits in the Nanay river basin, where, by the count of Loreto's environmental prosecutors, 80% of the illegal gold-mining dredges are found.

It began on July 11, 2023. Figures appeared at night. Community leader Jairo Reátegui Ávila described them to RPP radio. About 2 metres tall, with long heads, long masks and yellowish eyes.

"Their colour is silver," he said. "They look armoured, like the Green Goblin from Spider-Man." Their round shoes carried a red light on the heel, and he said, "They float one meter high." He said he shot one twice. It did not fall, then rose and disappeared.

One man described "figures dressed in silver, bulky; they don't touch the ground; they rise about 60 cm." Another met one face to face. "It hides its face," that witness said. "I saw the whole body floating. It moves its arms, everything; it moves normally."

A girl of about 15 was cut on the neck and treated inside the community. On July 29, teacher Cristian Caleb Pacaya witnessed an attempt to carry off a minor. Residents said the beings were trying to take the young people, and mothers could not sleep. The community formed armed night patrols with shotguns and asked for military protection. The visits came nightly for about a month.

In early August, police, army and navy personnel reached the community and took testimony, drawing up a formal acta de constatación. The regional health directorate had no medical reports of attack victims. Pacaya had his own theory. After searching on Google, he concluded the devices were jetpacks. "They would be using state-of-the-art technology, like thrusters that let people fly," he said.

Provincial prosecutor Carlos Fernando Castro Quintanilla agreed. He called it "highly probable" that illegal gold miners were behind the attacks, said they were Brazilian and Colombian, and suggested that causing alarm could be part of a plan. The Navy exchanged fire with miners at Pucaurco and Alvarenga. Prosecutors reported destroying 110 dredges and 10 mining camps in 2023. No arrests followed. No jetpacks were found.

Sceptics on Metabunk noted that real jetpacks are loud, fuel-hungry and short-range. They traced a viral clip of a "being on a roof" to a sharper Nauta Televisión upload and identified the figure as a tree. Other lights looked like flashlights moving over trees. SYFY suggested drones carrying cloth and masks.

Folklore offers another reading. The pelacara, or face peeler, is an Amazonian version of the Andean pishtaco, a fat-stealing outsider often read as a symbol of foreign exploitation. Ufologist Anthony Choy saw it differently. "Yes, there are non-human beings in the Peruvian Amazon, absolutely," he said, citing earlier cases around Pucallpa and Yarinacochas.

In August 2023 the story raced through the international press, and the beings grew to "7-foot" and "8-foot" along the way. In 2025, The Why Files returned to the case in "Peru's Most Terrifying Mystery." No clear photograph of the beings has surfaced. What remains is the testimony of a frightened community, and a case nobody has closed.