BOUDINANDBOURBON.COM - Virginia Billeaud Anderson: Notes on the Urubamba River - Machu Picchu

Maggie Marbry, Photo of Urubamba River,
Top of the Peruvian Andes, 2000

"My friend Maggie Marbry took this photograph of the Urubamba River from the top of the Peruvian Andes. On that trip I learned that the Urubamba’s name in the Quechua language is 'Willkamayu,'..."

Notes on the Urubamba River - Machu Picchu - Extraterrestrials

My friend Maggie Marbry took this photograph of the Urubamba River from the top of the Peruvian Andes. On that trip I learned that the Urubamba’s name in the Quechua language is “Willkamayu,” which translates to “sacred river,” a designation which perhaps sheds light on the reason Inca architects located the citadel of Machu Picchu 2000 feet directly above the river.

Maggie’s image brings to mind Pablo Neruda’s 1945 poem “The Heights of Machu Picchu” in which descriptions of ascent to the ruins are conflated with allusions to an interior search. Among the poem’s disparate associations are the site’s astronomically aligned stone-architecture, its human builders, and the vultures that circle its craggy peaks, my translation by Nathaniel Tarn: “Mother of stone and sperm of condors, High reef of the human dawn.”

Come up with me, American love
Kiss these secret stones with me
The torrential silver of the Urubamba
makes the pollen fly to its golden cup.

Though there for archaeological interests, I spent a great deal of time talking to Peruvians about extraterrestrial sightings. Peruvians are warm and friendly people, and Peruvian beer, especially Pilsen Callao, is very fine, so I invited many to be my guest for beer and discuss the flying discs, a topic that caused no discomfort. Some told me the ships come out of the lake, and go up in the sky, a narrative aligned with the ancient Andean mythology surrounding the creator-god Viracocha who made the earth, sky, and stars, and pulled the sun and moon out of an island in Lake Titicaca. In a local market I bought a beer-top opener with the image of Viracocha.

One memorable story came from a Peruvian archaeologist who had an abduction-type experience when he camped overnight near an archaeological site. He saw a ship with lights, he told me, and woke the next morning to find himself quite a distance from the spot in which he had fallen asleep. “Why did the extraterrestrials come, and why did they move him,” I asked. He was unsure, but believed, “they wanted to teach me certain things, and they did not want me to remember they had come.”

If extraterrestrial occurrences are real, and it's very likely they are, it is decidedly the most important thing happening on the planet. Some believe answers will ultimately be found in the subatomic dark matter that occupies most of the universe, and the multiple dimensions of reality that physicists believe wind through ours. Others regard this as a solely psychic and mythical phenomenon.

There is room in fact for both viewpoints, because if parallel dimensions unrestricted by time-space properties do indeed fold through ours, to encounter them would be so foreign to human understanding, we would naturally perceive them as mythical. These distinctions don’t really matter, if the UFO experience expands our understanding of who we are and where we fit into the immense cosmos, it will be profound and transformative.

I have no conscious recollection of encountering them, but they do come in my dreams. I am alone in a street watching an enormous light-emitting UFO rotate above. "Come out," I scream in frustration at the people who hide afraid in their houses. "Come out. You need to know them. This is as important as the mythology in your churches." The craft becomes smaller and smaller as it descends, and is the size of a pin head by the time it lands on the tip of my finger and causes slight pressure, leaving a tiny drop of blood which indicates it is within me.

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