Salvador Villanueva Medina and the Trip to Venus

Salvador Villanueva Medina drove a taxi in Mexico City. In the second ten days of August 1953, he took a long fare north toward Laredo. Two American passengers, a man and a woman. A magnificent Buick, model 52. After 484 kilometres a noise in the transmission stopped the car. The Americans went for help. Villanueva stayed behind, alone.

Evening. He was under the car when he heard footsteps in the sand. A small man in a strange uniform stood there. About 1.20 metres tall. A face as white as ivory. Platinum hair, slightly wavy. Bright green eyes that recalled a wild animal's.

He wore a grey one-piece uniform, a thick perforated belt and a helmet bulging at the back. He spoke perfect Spanish in a resonant, musical voice. He came from Venus, he said. When he left, Villanueva watched the glow of his belt move off into the dark, like a large swarm of fireflies.

The next morning he returned with an identical companion. They led Villanueva over the hills to a majestic flattened sphere resting on three buoys that formed a triangle, ringed with portholes. He agreed to board. The ascent was smooth, slow and vertical. Above waited a gigantic black disc. A hatch opened, and the small craft slid inside.

He said he spent five days on Venus, among cities, hotels and a planetary government of wise advisers. Then he was set down where he had left the car. The craft hung at about 500 metres, as if saying goodbye. Then it was gone.

For about two years he told only his wife and two eldest children. On 30 December 1954 he contacted journalist Manuel Gutiérrez Balcázar of Novedades. On 7 January 1955 he told the story in public for the first time, at a UFO lecture Bryant Reeve gave in Mexico City.

A party including the Reeves and Gutiérrez soon visited the site near Ciudad Valles. Gutiérrez reported a roughly circular area about fifteen metres across, with crushed plants and saline soil. The Reeves took samples and concluded he had told the truth. George Adamski and Desmond Leslie met him in 1955. Samael Aun Weor wrote: "Beyond any doubt, Salvador was on Venus". His book, Yo estuve en el planeta Venus, followed in 1958.

Critics in the 1950s said he was cashing in on the interest in space travel. The story surfaced only after Adamski's Flying Saucers Have Landed, and short Venusians with long blond hair were an Adamski trademark. From the 1960s, Soviet Venera probes showed Venus to be scorching and unable to support life. Villanueva later said the trip had been implanted in his mind. His son, Salvador Villanueva Larios, says his father came to call the experiences products of imagination.

Luis Ruiz Noguez argues that Gutiérrez Balcázar wrote the story himself, with the driver's name on the cover. Patrick Gross rates it a contactee tall tale, certainty high.

He became known as "the Mexican Adamski", often called Mexico's first major contactee. The book was translated into German, Japanese and Portuguese. Jacques Vallée listed the case in Passport to Magonia, and Jerome Clark covered it in Extraordinary Encounters. Villanueva left a letter saying he wished to go and live on Venus.