Villagers from a tribe in rural Peru were terrorized for weeks by what one news report called “7ft Armoured Aliens [r]esembling Green Goblin from Spider-Man.”
But a recent investigation by the local prosecutor’s office revealed that the men were actually illegal miners seeking to sow terror among the tribe while they committed “illicit activities.”
The group launched nightly attacks on the villagers in Alto Nanay, a district in an Amazonian region northeast of Lima, Peru’s capital.
Z News Service reported that the “extraterrestrial beings” had “large heads and yellowish eyes,” and had been attacking the village at night since July 11.
A video on TikTok showed villagers giving testimony to police about the attacks on them by the purported extraterrestrials.
The village is a 10-hour trip by river from the closest authorities, who visited after the villagers asked for a military presence to help fight the invaders after one “alarming incident” where a 15-year-old girl was grabbed from behind and had her neck cut when she resisted, according to a news report.
Some Twitter users expressed skepticism about the story before the prosecutor’s report came out.
“If it is genuinely true that a small indigenous Peruvian village is being terrorized by large armored humanoids with advanced weaponry” wrote user @BoltzmannBooty, “I suggest checking whether their presence happens to be holding up any mining or logging rights in the area.”
Users also pointed to stories from 2019 and 2020 documenting illegal gold mining activity in Alto Nanay, the region where the alien attacks allegedly happened.
In one, authorities reported illegal gold mining involving the use of child labor.
In the recent reports of alien attacks, the villagers claimed that the aliens wore “protective armor” and had “unique floating abilities, using round-shapes shoes with a red light.”
After the attacks began, reported La República, a Peruvian newspaper, the villagers took to patroling at night to repel attacks from the armed men.
“I shot one of them twice and he wasn’t injured; he rose and disappeared,” Jairo Reátegui Ávila said to Z News Service.
According to prosecutor Carlos Castro Quintanilla, the men used “high tech equipment like jetpacks, which let them rise and descend in the sky.”
He identified the group as illegal gold miners from Brazil and Colombia, which border the Amazonian region to the North and the East.
La República reports the miners search for gold in the Peruvian jungle by using harsh chemicals to dredge the waters, leaving them polluted in their wake.
