The Demon Was an Idea (Part Two)

Scratch mark traced across the surface of your mind
This hour, now upon us: the hour, now arrived - "Unmarked Helicopters"


In 1952 Mrs Margarita Ruiz de Lihory y Resino, who bore the titles of the Marquise of Villasante and the Baroness of Alcatrali, opened her sprawling and ancient estate in the Spanish city of Albacete to two young men described by witnesses as "Scandinavian looking" who presented themselves as "Danish doctors." They stayed for two years, conducting "psycho-physiological experiments with animals," according to several letters received by CIA agents stationed in Madrid prior to 1965. The letters also alleged the doctors weren't Danes at all, but rather Nordic alien "space brothers" from the planet "UMMO."

In the summer of 1953 the Baroness's daughter Margot Shelly fell sick, and the friend with whom she was staying contacted the Marquise, who had Margot examined by her mysterious doctors. One called her illness benign, and the other likely fatal. The latter diagnosis proved accurate, and she died in her mother's house on January 19, 1954. Before Margot was buried her corpse was surgically mutilated. One of her hands, both eyes and her tongue were gone.

The following week one of the Marquise's sons filed a complaint against her, alleging indignities had been performed on his sister's body. Police were dispatched to search the house and Margot's missing parts were found. (No trace, it would seem, of the "Danish doctors.") Her body was exhumed and a criminal suit was launched.

Jacques Vallee writes in Revelations:

The Marquise had many pet animals on her properties. Many of her dogs died in mysterious ways. Some were found with the stomach open; others were mummified. In the yard of her property on Calle Mayor was a dog and cat cemetery, and a witness observed various animal heads that were kept in silver containers in one of the rooms. It is said that she bought many dogs in Albacete, and that dissections took place in her house. She denied participating, saying only that these operations were conducted by a veterinarian. The only veterinarian known to have treated her pets is Jaime Aguedo Trigueros, who said other people had conducted autopsies of the animals.

Vallee goes on to quote Andres Gomes, butler to the Marquise for ten years, from an interview published by the newspaper Levante on February 7, 1954. The estate held an underground chamber called Cuarto del Moro: the Moor's Quarters. It was "a horrible place, where one could only go down through a metal trapdoor that could only take two people." The trapdoor was located in the floor of the Marquise's bathroom, and Gomes believed the mansion held other underground passages. "She would spend many hours there. I don't know what she did there exactly, but she came up as pale as a corpse."

Jim Keith notes in Casebook on the Men in Black that "the Marquise was apparently exonerated of criminality, because there is no record of her being punished for the mutilation of her daughter. Likewise no extraterrestrial connection was ever proven, although the plot thickened when a man believed to be CIA turned up in Madrid, offering a sizable reward for information helping him to locate the Ummites."

"UMMO" is certainly a hoax, likely originated in a tricksterish fashion by parapsychologist Jose Luis Jordan Peña as a "scientific experiment aiming at gauging the level of gullibility among Spanish researchers." But as even Peña admitted, the experiment got away from him, though some researchers contend it was taken way, by one or more intelligence agency conducting a different order of experiment.

In Canuelas, Argentina, from behind a six-foot high wire fence, Carlos Jerez opened the so-called "International Medical Research Facility" in 1973 which bore a plaque with a symbol that resembled two inverted parentheses joined by a cross: the UMMO symbol. The center claimed to pursue alternative cancer research and made extravagant claims of success using gamma radiation treatment, drawing many terminally ill patients with hopes of a cure Jerez said was extraterrestrial in origin. (Evocative of the "Danish doctors" and their "psycho-physiological experiments" on the terminally ill Margot Shelly.) Vallee notes that before Argentine authorities shut down Jerez's facility and he vanished without a trace, Jerez wrote in a letter that "in secret I have created in the world an intelligence service."

And as the Soviet Union stumbled towards dissolution in the Fall of 1989, a series of remarkable UFO events occurred in the city of Voronezh, generating rare mainstream press around the world, including a front page story in the New York Times. Witnesses to the main episode were children, and their sketches of the craft included a symbol on its side. Again, it was the UMMO symbol.

Whatever the nature of the UMMO hoax and its viral propagation, it appropriated to its legend something genuinely mysterious: the obscure and macabre story of Albacete's mutilations. And the mystery, evidently, continues:

From a posting by Loren Coleman Sept 12, 2003:

Albacete-based parapsychologist and ufologist Jose de Zor, one of the main experts in the UMMO case, has been detained by the police and charged with the murder of a young pilot, Manuel Esposito.

It is worth noting that de Zor has focused exclusively on the ties between the UMMO case and the "amputated hand" of Albacete.

Manuel Esposito's corpse was found decapitated on June 24. An investigation was started in which the term "ritual crime" was kept in mind by police investigators at all times.

All clues lead to the small town of Albacete, specifically its gay community.... Jose de Zor achieved a certain measure of popularity last year after performing certain hypnotic regressions on Spanish television last year.

Another report adds:

The date of Esposito's death, June 24, and the method of murder - decapitation - have fueled speculation that the culprits might be linked to Freemasonry. Or they might be enemies of Freemasonry trying to "frame" the Spanish lodges.

June 24 is known as St. John's Day, commemorating John the Baptist. This desert prophet and cousin of Jesus Christ was killed in 28 A.D., beheaded by the troops of King Herod at the request of the princess Salome. The date reportedly has much significance in Masonic and occult lore.

As researcher Eugenia Macer-Story pointed out, "Yes, there is a dangerous ritual sorcery cult 'out there,' as I have often attempted to convey to U.S. researchers mired in atheist, humanist programming."

(I haven't found a follow-up to the de Zor story, though perhaps one exists in Spanish.)

It's hard to say and certainly wrong to presume what is going on here. My conjecture is that science was not being conducted in the Marquise's Cuarto del Moro, but ritual, and that even when her own daughter was the subject she was protected by virtue of her rank in fascist Spain. The "Scandinavian-looking" doctors could easily have been German, who in 1952 found it less problematic to pass themselves off as Danes. And most speculatively, perhaps de Zor, whose research "focused exclusively" upon the mutilations in his hometown, was framed on a date of occult significance by the "ritual sorcery cult" to which the Marquise herself had belonged. And so the story's adoption by the possibly intel-exploited legend of "UMMO," either by accident or design, served as an absurd distraction from the subterranean lives of fascist nobility as well as a discrediting hoax of genuine paranormal phenomena.

But it's difficult to know, and it's difficult to not know.