What Happened When the Martians Arrived in Ecuador?

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Maria Luisa remembers that people started taking out like mattresses from their homes, luggage, baskets, and anything they could carry. Other people were knocking on the doors of the church. Out of terror, they were trying to confess their sins before, you know, they died. Lunardo Pia's later wrote that there were car accidents that pregnant women went into labor. There were people wanting to jump out of their windows so they would die before the Martians came.

On a Saturday night, in February 1949, the music programming on one of the most popular radio stations in Quito, Ecuador, was interrupted with an urgent news bulletin: strange objects in the sky that looked like large disks with bright lights were using a powerful ray to destroy a nearby city. And they were heading right for Quito.

Thanks to Lisette Arévalo for sharing her tape and her reporting. In 2020, she reported this story for the Spanish-language podcast Radio Ambulante – it’s called “The Extraterrestrials.” You can listen at https://radioambulante.org/en/audio-en/the-extraterrestrials.

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