The lights of Pilán

Piura La Vieja was the second Spanish settlement  in South America that, after missing by centuries , revives with fantastic stories of spaceships and charms.

 

By Nelson Peñaherrera Castillo

 

    NEAR CHULUCANAS CITY, Peru – The second settlement of San Miguel, the first city founded by the Spaniards in Peru, has so many historic blanks as if that was really the second settlement, or the ultimate reason why the people abandoned the zone, once upon a day. Piura La Vieja, like it was known since the Conquest time, is a village settled on the western slope of Pilán Mount, just 330 feet from the 1534’s location  and 1650 feet from a pleasant carob forest that the locals were predating.

 

The people work in rainfed agriculture – corn, beans, papaya, yucca. The water is not enough for introducing more crops into the zone despite its fertility. The Piura-native historian Reynaldo Moya Espinoza said the ineptitude of Spanish settlers displaced the incipient agricultural development that the Tallán people had reached in a time before the Inca empire, and that got its expansion during the Chimú Kingdom (circa 6^th century A.D.).

 

There are no records, neither the chronicles say why the Spaniards chose just that place. Tangarará, the first settlement at Chira Valley, about 50 miles to the northwest, had not been auspicious due to the river floods and the proliferation of malaria. Mr Moya assures the Tallán town of Pirúa was built in the same place. The word is Quechuan and means barn. Pedro Cieza de León made it much justice. On his Chronicle of Peru, he states it is founded” between two very fresh flat valleys, full of groves.”

 

The blizzards using to run every mid-year, the dryness of the terrain, and the warm weather seem not to have satisfied the locals. According to Cieza de León, some claimed eye-illnesses so, handling their stuff, they moved almost 90 miles to the west, in Paita, where they stayed for almost a decade until getting to their actual location in Middle Piura Valley.

 

    Stone basements

Piura La vieja was a Spanish town founded in 1534 which only remains ruins today. Incorporated as part of Monte de los Padres Estate, located about 7 miles to the east of Chulucanas City.

 

The town was missed. Just the stone basements of its buildings have left only, those attracted the interest of researchers of Politechnic University of Madrid and University of Piura since 1995. The project seeked to explain how the people lived by using computer reconstruction techniques. It is not known with precision yet what they found. The locals say they caved and buried again it before leaving out.

 

The habitants are very kind, helpful, and sympathetic. Even the youth, that is usually shy at the countryside, opens its heart to the visitor in a friendly way. “Come back on September 27th, that is the town’s holiday,” one guy says me.

 

    A blinking light

Years went by lazy and disinterested in Monte de los Padres until one night, possibly October 13^th, 2001 (Festivity of Ayabaca’s Señor Cautivo), when Johnny Reyes Escobar was spending the time with his friends at the town’s park. “A buddy looked at a blinking light and flew toward Pilán Mount,” he tells. The scene repeated every night from 20:00 (local time) to overnight.

 

Little town, huge impact. The news started to spread and, in February 2002, hundreds of visitors and fans began to arrive into the town to watch not only one but light squads flying around the mount. The sightings continued and started to record on video. The issue was already serious as much as Peruvian Air Force (FAP as its acronyme in Spanish) took the case and began to do investigations.

 

    Doctor Anthony Choy Montes was assigned by FAP to explain what was happening. Mr Choy was a member of the Office of Aerial Anomalous Phenomena, an Air Force’s division specialized in looking for explanations to this kind of events.

 

The investigator contacted Johnny and the saleswoman Josefa Córdova Ríos, who the town points out as the first eyewitness of the sightings. When Choy and some locals decided to research, they found something more than lights… aside the lights. In the close Loma Larga Hill, a strange White-kind print called their attention, but reaching the top of Pilán Mount, they got in shock.

 

“What we didn’t understand was if the top was green, some places seemed to be toasted,”Mr Reyes tells. The print that Choy found in Loma Larga led him to a historic fact of 1902, when a hot red meteorite crossed over the whole Piura Coast from Talara, and apparently crashed into that place.

 

    A Tallán feng-shui

Pilán is not the only place where those objects have been sighted. Choy commented to FACTORTIERRA that along Piura Region, a large corridor between Talara and Huancabamba (we are talking about 260 miles in a plain line)is continuously visited by 500-to-650-feet-diameter ships. Inclusive around Huaringas Lakes, they are known as the bad lights and the people scare of them.

 

But, is there any explanation to choose the area of Piura La Vieja? “I give you keyfacts – why did the Vicús Culture choose that zone? Have you ever heard talking about feng-shui?,” Choy defends. “It could have an ancient Andean knowledge missed today, an Andean-Northern-Peruvian feng-shui, zones of energy, interdimensional gates, gold and uranium mineral deposits, electromagnetic paths, and, of course, ideal zones for healing,” he continues.

 

    Indeed, the top of Pilán is visited by some shamans who live in Piura La Vieja. “Healers climb up to the mount, do mesa ceremonies,” Teófilo Calle Mena tells me, leaving for a while the making of a fence for giving me a little guidance. He says he once found bottles of Florida Water and Kananga Water used to do different witchcrafts.

 

The mount also has its charm. A Trópico Seco Association’s survey in 2002 found a lady who told that was usual the goats to disappear misteriously and reappear without damages. Choy suggests the Pre-Inca towns knew this perfectly as much as they performed on their handcrafting. The Flying Men of Vicús have not been explained and Vicús Mount rises alone at the west of Pilán.

 

    We have to follow up the clues rather, continuing to investigate because the sightings have not finished. Johnny Reyes assures the last one happened mid-August 2006 and the people of other towns around also have watched lights until 2017. I was wondered by the landscape, but I also felt the sensation of something at the site was not usual.

 

Thanks to Miguel Gamboa, in Chulucanas, for assisting this report.

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