Description

~Preface~

I’ve been meaning to make a post about this for a while and when I saw yesterday’s post about Gabriel García Márquez’s interview (https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1e7w5kb/winner_of_the_nobel_pr…), along with some interactions I had in the comments, I thought it was about time to do it. In this post, I’ll be talking about the mentions of UFO’s in *100 Years of Solitude*, interpreting them as best as I can (keep in mind I read this novel a couple years ago, so I won’t be able to do a full-blown literary analysis, nor do I have the time for that), and at the end, I will also be sharing some stories that my family and I have experienced in Mexico. Just to set expectations right, I’m coming at this as an exploration and sharing of a curious detail in a historic novel that would be of interest to this community. My knowledge of the subject is surface level, but my curiosity comes from my experiences and stories I’ve heard from my family in Mexico.  


~An Introduction to 100 Years of Solitude~

*100 Years of Solitude* was written by Gabriel García Márquez and published (in Spanish) in 1967. It’s considered the author’s masterpiece, winning him a Nobel Prize in Literature and bringing Latin American literature to international readers. The novel follows Macondo, a fictional Colombian town, through the perspective of the Buendía family, chronicling their rise and fall across several generations set in a sort of parallel or alternate history. Macondo acts as a microcosm of Latin America in the early 20^(th) century, presented through fantastical and surreal elements that have come to define the magical realism genre. It’s a tapestry of love, family, sensuality, and political and social allegory that expands and folds into itself through synchronicities and the incredible.


~UFO’s in 100 Years of Solitude~

One of the novel’s defining features is its surrealism, straddling the line between realism and magical impossibilities. Beautiful women disappear into the sky, blood trails snake across a town in search of a specific person, traveling merchants sell flying carpets, thousands of striking workers are massacred with no trace, and so on. Most pertinent here is the inclusion of the UFO phenomenon, of which I found three separate mentions.

Using the free online copy found at Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/OneHundredYearsOfSolitude_201710/page/n89…), I located the passages by searching for the word ‘disks.’ I included the lines preceding and succeeding the mention of the UFO’s to give context and to demonstrate how fleeting they are in the text. As far as my fleeting memory goes, there are no other mentions of UFO’s, spaceships, extra-terrestrials, or other adjacent topics in the novel. They bear no relevance to the book beyond that of another curious, fantastical symbol. Here are the passages:

Pg. 89: *“They shot him in the back,” Ursula said more precisely, “and no one was charitable enough to close his eyes.” At dusk through her tears she saw the swift and luminous disks that crossed the sky like an exhalation and she thought that it was a signal of death. She was still under the chestnut tree, sobbing at her husband’s knees, when they brought in Colonel Aureliano Buendia, wrapped in a blanket that was stiff with dry blood and with his eyes open in rage.*

Pg. 166: *Santa Sofia de la Piedad had the certainty that they would find her dead from one moment to the next, because she noticed during those days a certain confusion in nature: the roses smelled like goosefoot, a pod of chick peas fell down and the beans lay on the ground in a perfect geometrical pattern in the shape of a starfish and one night she saw a row of luminous orange disks pass across the sky. They found her dead on the morning of Good Friday.*

Pg. 198: *He wept, leaning his brow against the door of the wise Catalonian’s former bookstore, conscious that he was paying with his tardy sobs for a death that he had refused to weep for on time so as not to break the spell of love. He smashed his fists against the cement wall of The Golden Child, calling for Pilar Ternera, indifferent to the luminous orange disks that were crossing the sky and that so many times on holiday nights he had contemplated with childish fascination from the courtyard of the curlews. In the last open salon of the tumbledown red-light district an accordion group was playing the songs of Rafael Escalona, the bishop’s nephew, heir to the secrets of Francisco the Man.*

~Interpretation and Analysis~

In the first passage, the text explicitly labels the UFO’s as “signals of death.” All three passages center around the death of a character. There are many deaths throughout the novel and only these are marked by the mention of the UFO’s. The question now becomes, why these characters specifically? Is there a throughline here? I couldn’t tell you. That would require a deeper dive I can’t afford right now.

I understand that there seems to be a fine line between UFO lore and the spiritual, the unknown, and death. Simply put, death, whatever comes after it, is an unknown to our species, as are UFO’s. The passages in this novel seem to draw a line connecting these two subjects. We can only ‘contemplate them with childish fascination’ as the character is said to have done in the third passage. This, I believe, is the most substantial interpretation I can provide without a closer look.

Other notable details include the language used to describe the UFO’s. They are described as ‘disks’ in all three passages, invoking the traditional flying saucer imagery. ‘Luminous’ is used to describe them in all three passages as well, with the last two passages specifically mentioning them as ‘luminous orange disks.’ All three passages present the UFO’s as flying in groups, with the second passage specifying their flying formation as a ‘row’.

The second passage correlates the appearance of the UFO’s with strange natural phenomena, specifically roses smelling like goosefoot and the peas falling into the shape of a starfish. Goosefoot, according to google, smells like rotting fish or decaying meat. In other words, it’s an unpleasant and strong smell that could somewhat be likened to the sulfur and ammonia odors said to be given off by ET’s. A more curious detail is the mention of the starfish. In the novel, the sea also seems to symbolize death or the next plane. Before Macondo is created, its founders set out towards the sea in search of a place to create their town and they struggle to ever get there, going in impossible circles. Most notably, when the strike workers are massacred later in the book, their corpses are dumped into the sea. These are only some the details supporting the link between the ocean and death in the novel. More general interpretations of the ocean in literature span life, chaos, and the unconscious. There are also the theories connecting UFO’s and the oceans, with the most notable being the underwater base popularized by the 4Chan whistleblower (https://www.reddit.com/r/aliens/comments/13gjlo4/4chan_whistleblowers…). I am unsure of the significance of the starfish beyond its link to the ocean.

In the grander scope of the text, the first mention of the UFO’s is located about halfway through the book on pg.89. The second mention is about 3 quarters of the way through on pg. 166. The final mention happens only a couple pages before the end of the book on pg. 199.

There might be some correlation between the emotions of the characters and the UFO’s. There is the idea of people being able to manifest these sort of encounters. I am not too sure about the finer details regarding those ideas, but the deaths in the passages elicit strong emotions from the characters. The first and third passage deal with more tragic ends while the second passage describes a premonition of death born from the character noticing ‘nature’s confusion’ that’s implied to have been caused by the UFO’s.

~Closing Thoughts~

It was fun giving this a close look. I hope you found it interesting. If the book interests you, I highly recommend it, it’s one of my favorites and it’s a classic for a reason. Another book recommendation in the same surrealist vein with more explicit UFO/ET imagery and symbolism would be *Solenoid* by Mircea Cărtărescu. That one’s a trip.

~Personal Stories and Whatnot~

I’m gonna have to make this a separate post, if people are interested. There’s too many details and stories and threads to keep it concise and this post long enough as is and I’ve already spent most of my day writing this. I’ll just give some background on myself and talk about my most interesting experience.

I used to be much more closed off to this kind of thing, but as I’ve grown older, through literature (and art in general-- I like to think of myself as an artist), psychedelics, and introspection, my aperture has widened and I’m more willing to give these things the time of day. My family is Mexican and they have had various supernatural encounters in the past, mostly in Mexico and some things in the States.

There’s lots of stories of witches, goblins, lights in the skies, shadow beings, temporal and spatial impossibilities, among other things. They mostly come from my mother and her father, my grandfather. They have always been conduits for this sort of thing. Myself, not so much, but my mother believes my brother is sensitive to that kind of thing as well. To keep it moving along, at one point, my grandfather was not well and it seemed like his time was coming. This was over a decade ago. I was a child at the time. My mother, always having been interested in alternative medicine and all that, found out about a place in Mexico called Foco Tonal (https://en.focotonal.mx/). Google has it listed as a tourist attraction. It’s a property with a church-like building, surrounded by some gardens and what not.

I remember my grandfather pointing out that the church-like building looked like a spaceship. I don't really see it now, but it made sense when I was standing in front of it. (https://preview.redd.it/x2pmx86sgydd1.jpg?width=842&format=pjpg&auto=…)

The place is said to be a center of energy, specifically focused in one spot marked by pillars seen in the picture. (https://preview.redd.it/eaypqgshgydd1.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto…)

I remember standing in the circle and within it, sound becomes distorted, as if you were inside a large glass container. I can't remember if it was an echoing or muffling of sound, but I distinctly recall how sound was distorted when standing within the circle, even though there was no apparent reason for it.

The purpose of our visit was to get help for my grandfather. Healing. It was my mother, my grandfather, and my brother as part of a group of about 15 people. We stayed there overnight and were hosted by a couple named Claudia and Hector (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBfzy22qVFc). They were pleasant to be around. I don’t know, they looked and acted like humans, but there's this idea or understanding that’s stayed with me all this time telling me that they weren’t normal people. Anyways, the night comes and one by one, Claudia and Hector start taking people into the church-like building to heal them. It was a slow process, I remember having to fight the sleep. They took my grandfather and did their thing and the guy is still around to this day. It's probably the closest thing to a miracle I've ever experienced. Then, they took me. No one ever told them I needed healing. It's not why I was there. My mom didn’t know I needed healing, but Claudia and Hector somehow knew. They were going to cure my knees, which had always bothered and given me great pain as a young child. And they did. They stopped bothering me after that night. I remember they took me into the church-like building and it was just me and Hector at that point and I was told to lay down on a sort of massage table in the middle of the cavernous building and to close my eyes and to imagine a green healing light. As I did, I felt Hector running his fingernails around my knees until I started feeling multiple hands doing the same thing, but I knew it was just Hector and I there. I don't know where those other hands came from. I didn’t feel uneasy. I didn’t open my eyes although I wish I had just to see where those extra hands were coming from. And then it was over. They bandaged my knees and walked me to my family. That night I had the clearest, most restful sleep I’ve ever had.