Thirty extraterrestrial “species”: a Guatemalan ufologist’s 1994 catalog
In 1994, a Guatemalan UFO researcher classified some thirty alleged extraterrestrial “species” on the model of biological taxonomy, based solely on eyewitness accounts. The Spanish news agency’s report from the time has now been republished by the Inexplicata blog.
Does it have hair, what are its eyes like, how closely does it resemble a human? Oscar Rafael Padilla classified the beings described by eyewitnesses according to criteria like these. According to a 1994 report by the EFE news agency, the Guatemalan attorney, who also held a doctorate, had spent 30 of his 51 years on UFO research. He was president of an association he led with more than 500 members (AINECFOV), and he also headed a world federation of parapsychology.
Padilla and his associates sorted some thirty “varieties” by shape and size into a catalog that was to be published under the title Clasificación Exobiológica de Entidades Extraterrestres (Exobiological Classification of Extraterrestrial Entities), within twenty days, according to the report. One example is a being with a large head, large eyes and a thin body, which was placed in the “Homidia” family because of its resemblance to humans, in the primate order because it walks on two legs, and in the “Euteria” subclass because of its supposed placental nature. The names echo terms from biological taxonomy (Hominidae, Eutheria), but in distorted form.
Padilla’s ideas went beyond the catalog. He believed that extraterrestrials had also aided the development of ancient civilizations. As evidence, he cited a six-meter-tall, twenty-ton sculpture he had discovered in 1950 in southwestern Guatemala, which he said depicts an Egyptian, and a stele on whose figure he saw “antennae”. The report’s figures don’t add up here: if Padilla was 51 in 1994, he would have been roughly seven years old in 1950.
According to the article, the association documented some thirty close encounters of the second and third kinds, based on accounts from people who claimed that beings had abducted and “manipulated” them. In September, Inexplicata, the journal of the Institute of Hispanic Ufology (IHU), republished several similar Spanish-language cases from decades earlier; the Guatemalan report fits into this series.