The Filiberto Cárdenas Abduction

January 3, 1979. Hialeah, Florida. Filiberto Cárdenas, a Cuban exile described as a gift shop proprietor, was out with his friend Fernando Marti. They were heading to the outskirts of the city to buy a pig. Marti's wife, Mirta, and their 13-year-old daughter, Isabel, sat in the back seat.

It was about 6:30 in the evening on Okeechobee Road. The car began to lose power. Then the engine died. Both men saw the engine reflecting red and violet light in sequence. At the same time they heard a strange sound, like a swarm of bees. A large luminous object had descended over the vehicle.

Both men were paralysed. Then Cárdenas felt the force holding him begin to lift him. He began to rise. "Don't take me," he shouted. "Don't take me." He could see the car as he left the ground. In the back seat, Mirta Marti panicked and pulled Isabel down across the seat. Fernando looked up and saw "like a bulky object (UFO) that ascended and then moved away."

About two hours later, Cárdenas was found on the Tamiami Trail, on his hands and knees in the middle of the road. Accounts put the spot anywhere from about ten to 16 miles away.

Virgilio Sánchez-Ocejo, a lawyer described as a representative of the Center for UFO Studies and MUFON, led the investigation. Dr. José Yedra ran four regressions. Cárdenas described being held in a seat by suction. Three strange figures. A helmet full of small needles. The tests left 108 marks.

The beings were human-like, of average height, in dark tight-fitting outfits that covered their heads. On their chests was a winged, snake-like emblem. A leader in a cape spoke perfect Spanish. Then the craft plunged into the sea. Cárdenas remembered sitting by a window, watching the water rush by. A tunnel led to a place that was completely dry. He came back with prophecies, later linked to the 1985 earthquake in Mexico, to AIDS and to the assassination of Sadat.

February 21, 1979. Cárdenas and his wife, Iris, said they were taken aboard at the same site, this time fully conscious. Iris drew the craft as mushroom-shaped, ringed with brilliant coloured lights. A third abduction was claimed on December 6, 1985.

The first officer on the scene was named as Patrolman William Christian. The police report is said to list the type of offense as a "close encounter of the third kind." An Air Force team from Homestead Air Force Base reportedly checked Cárdenas for radiation. The tests were negative. J. Allen Hynek kept in contact with the investigators and advised them. No copy of the police report has surfaced. Project Blue Book had closed in 1969.

No hoax finding or confession has emerged. No mundane cause has been proposed. Sceptics point instead to the prophecies, vague and fitted to events after the fact. Memories recovered under hypnosis can be shaped by suggestion. The messages and the second trip with a spouse give the case a contactee flavour that many researchers discount. Critics also note that co-author Wendelle C. Stevens later served prison time for child-molestation offences. That weighs on the book, not on the witnesses.

Sánchez-Ocejo and Stevens published UFO Contact From Undersea in 1982, later reissued as UFO Abduction From Undersea. In 1995 the Miami New Times called it the most famous abduction case in Miami history. It has since featured on Unsealed: Alien Files and in a string of podcasts, often beside the 1967 case of police officer Herbert Schirmer.