Roy Bragg, Staff Writer | March 29, 2013 | Updated: March 30, 2013 9:07am
LAREDO — America's southern border has been a security nightmare for a century or more, creating tension over immigration and national security. But now a group of Laredo residents, aiming high-tech gadgets at the South Texas skies, says the Rio Grande isn't the only border being violated.
While no one from outer space has been taken to anyone's leader, Ishmael Cuellar and members of the Laredo Paranormal Research Society claim they have documented on video or in photos more than two dozen incidents of UFOs in the outskirts of this border town.
“A lot of this stuff is hard to explain,” says member Victoria Garcia. “I'm always asking (fellow members) for explanations. I don't think we have any.”
The Laredo organization's members aren't like members of other UFO or paranormal groups. They don't respond to reports and draw conclusions, preferring to rely on their own first-hand observations. None of them were “believers” who joined the group to support their personal theories; rather, they prefer the intellectual exercise of the hunt. They don't claim the UFOs are “extraterrestrial.” Instead, they rule out other options and leave questions unanswered.
The Laredo sightings have provided more fuel for the fireball of speculation about strange sightings in the skies south of San Antonio.
Last fall, roughnecks working a drilling site near Artesia Wells reported seeing orange disks in the skies that formed shapes as they floated over the horizon.
Within weeks of that event, a rancher nearby also reported similar mysteries over his ranch.
Landowners in Nixon and Cotulla claim motion-sensor wildlife cameras have taken photographs of disks floating over their ranches last fall.
Those reports dovetail nicely with a video Cuellar took, using a cellphone camera, of three disks flying over the brushland north of here in December from his street. His neighbors can be heard in background “oohhing” and “aahhing.”
That video went viral, picked up by the cable news networks. Other videos and images are just as compelling.
In one video, Cuellar says, a glowing object appears to take off from the ground and hover above the city. Then, it appears that two military aircraft approach the object, which abruptly disappears from sight.
Then there are the objects, says member Trinidad Soliz, similar to the Marfa Lights, that appear on the northern horizon just outside of town. The lights flicker, alternating among three, five and seven at various times. And the lights are always located in the same place and visible only in the infrared spectrum.
In another instance, several of the group's members watched a low-hanging cloud move over a stretch of mesquite brushland they were monitoring. It stopped. Then they saw two shafts of light stretching upward from it into the higher clouds. Like the Laredo Lights, they were visible only in the infrared spectrum.
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Unofficially, Cuellar believes their videos have captured different types of military stealth technology that's being tested in the area. He suspects the government-sponsored craft are being used in South Texas because of the sparse population and desert terrain and may eventually roll out on the Mexican border.
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Read more here: http://www.chron.com/life/article/UFO-sightings-spike-in-Laredo-4395098.php
