UFO. Colombia

Orfanda Soto opens her arms and spins her body as though wanting to take flight. Her eyes are closed. The stiff March wind that shakes the dust in the Tatacoa does not even cause her to stumble. She is awaiting an unprecedented event: the sighting of an extraterrestrial craft.

The ground remains silent. The rocks of the so called "spaceport" that lie beneath the woman's feet are boiling. The site is a diameter measuring 52 meters in diameter located in the center of the desert, easily visible from the sky. Its total surface area is four times greater than that of a regular heliport and is comparable to half the size of a regulation soccer pitch.

The origin of this mysterious location at the heart of the Tatacoa goes back to 2008. According to Orfanda, it was Alfredo Agudelo Ospina from Antioquia, knowns as "Caminante del Cielo Lunar Rojo” (Red Lunar Moon Skywalker) and founder of the Kaphiro Brotherhood who suggested building the spaceport at that location.

Agudelo says that eleven years ago "cosmic beings of light" asked her to install a symbol in the heart of the Tatacoa Desert 'as a sign that their message had been received'. They told her that a spaceship from another planet would soon land in that location. 

But Orfanda states that the sighting of extraterrestrial vehicles is something they have been living with for a very long time, even predating the creation of the "ufoport". "The first spaceship landed 16 years ago. I was in my bathroom and I headed out for the desert the moment I saw it. It was an immense thing. Later, from one minute to the next, a ball of blue flame landed on my shoulder. My husband and children ran out when they heard me screaming, but the spaceship had already gone by then," says the woman as she raises her eyes to the sky.

The mysteries concealed behind the desert mountains are not a source of fear for this Catholic matron, who grew up under the cold nights of the Tatacoa. Her parents, two peasants who farmed the arid soil inherited from their forebears, told her tales of other alleged UFO sightings in the area belonging to the municipality of Villavieja, Huila.

It was a night in 1960 when - according to Orfanda - she saw 'an immense fireball' while in the company of her parents. "They had sent me to cut cane for the horses. When I left the house, I saw the flame and screamed. At that time they admitted that so many things were seen in the Tatacoa Desert that it was best not to pay them any mind." She later adds, with a certain air of stoicism, "It has never scared me to live in this area, because we were taught to be brave, to face things."

This short matron with the pronounced Huilan accent is one of the largest landowners in the entire Tatacoa desert. Her family owns a vast tourist complex that welcomes thousands of visitors who come to the area looking for adventure. Many others arrive interested in learning the mysteries that surround Colombia's only 'ufoport'.

In fact, several tourists remarked that the night they camped in the heart of the alien spacecraft landing platform, they had seen "strange looking humanoids". Others claimed having heard the inconsolable weeping of an entity that has yet to be identified.

Nestor Gutierrez was eleven years old when he saw an alleged UFO for the first time. Orfanda's son says it was around eight o'clock at night, while stargazing, that a light moving in the sky turned into two objects with flashing lights, forming a sort of rainbow. "The lights of the craft began turning on and off for approximately fifteen minutes. I ran to the house, called my mother, and the object's lights began to dim. Everything went dark and a chunk of the sky was left completely black. However, he notes that unlike his brothers, he has never seen a spaceship land in the desert.

According to statements by several members of the Gutierrez Soto family, less than ten years ago "a three-legged spaceship landed at the ufoport and then descended into the ground without leaving any trace whatsoever." The event caused dozens of local residents to show up at the site with shovels, looking for the treasure allegedly left behind by the putative extraterrestrial beings.

"This fact shows that we are on top of another world. There could be a spaceship below us or even more people. There's something there," says Orfanda as she points to the pile of rocks on the ground that trace the circles of Nicholas Roerich's Banner of Peace, for the benefit of the sky.