The Kulaman Plateau Mystery II

(Continued from yesterday’s post, this is the last of two parts.)

The person who spoke for CAAP on television said, “We completely deny [that a plane crashed in the area.]” He added that a “registered” plane has a “flight plan” and the radars of the agency would have detected it if a crash really happened. I don’t know if the rest of the statement was edited out, but what came out on television was rather curt. It irked me. There are simply a lot of loopholes in the statement. But before I go to those loopholes, let me state that I agree that the object could not have been a passenger plane. Had it been an aircraft of Cebu Pacific, Philippine Air Lines, or a similar company, the news would have spread like wildfire. Apparently, only CNN Philippines and none of the major television networks got wind of the news.

The plane, if the object was really a plane, could very well be a private one, despite CAAP’s denial of the same. It’s possible that the owner or pilot of the plane did not have the flight registered with CAAP. We’re in the Philippines, and if there’s an individual or company that doesn’t comply with government requirements, it shouldn’t be shocking. Also, regardless of whether the flight was registered with CAAP or not, I highly doubt that the agency could properly monitor all the activities in our aerial territory. I’ve seen quite a few reports on television about outdated or completely inoperative essential equipment at the country’s main airport. It won’t be surprising if CAAP’s radars are less than serviceable. And of course, there’s plain old indolence and incompetence of government employees. You see that everywhere—in your municipal or city hall, the Department of Health, the Department of Education, the Department of Social Welfare and Development, even in the “elite” Special Action Forces of the Philippine National Police. It won’t be shocking to find out that workers in CAAP, the Department of Transportation and Communication, and related agencies have been sleeping on their desks.

I heard from some people that eyewitnesses claim they saw a plane. Could they be mistaken? While we live in the boondocks, I believe that the people of Kulaman Plateau are civilized enough to be able to identify a plane from a kite, a weather balloon, a flying garbage truck, a manananggal, or a saucer-shaped spaceship. Airplanes to and from General Santos City can be seen in the sky regularly, and scenes with airplanes are fairly common in movies, so they know what a plane looks like near or far even if they have not been on one. If they say it was a plane or something that looked like a plane, then it could only be a plane or something that looked like a plane.

I wonder if the object was a drone. A drone is unmanned, and it could be the reason why no one seems to have publicly sought help from the authorities to rescue any victim or recover any debris. I doubt, though, if a drone would produce the kind of sound that I heard. For the nth time, it was very loud. It was heard all over the municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino and beyond. That’s an area of at least 40,000 hectares. If it’s true that the sound was heard in as far as the municipalities of Lebak and Esperanza, then the area can be as wide as 150,000 hectares. It must be a huge drone and quite low-tech, considering the kuliglig-like sound it made, and that doesn’t make sense. A conspicuous and cranky drone doesn’t make sense. I must admit, though, that the only drone I’m familiar with was the one that Jeremy Renner shot down in The Bourne Legacy. So it might really be a drone. But the question is, What would a drone be doing in Kulaman Plateau? My best conjecture is that it was a U.S. drone looking for the other two terrorists that the PNP-SAF failed to neutralize in Mamasapano. Usman and Amin Baco might have sought shelter in the camp of Moro rebels in the municipality of Palimbang, southwest of Senator Ninoy Aquino. I’m not saying of course that the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is coddling the terrorists. I’m just saying that, just like what happened in Mamasapano, the terrorists might be hiding in an MILF territory without the knowledge or consent of the MILF leadership. Again, let me emphasize that this is merely a conjecture. I think it’s the fictionist in me who wrote the preceding couple of sentences. I’m merely exploring—and hopefully eliminating—the rumored but unlikely explanations for the bizarre incident. I still have more reasons to believe that the object was a private plane.

So if it was a private plane, why has there been no explanation or public call for help from the family or associates of the possible victim or victims? One possible reason is that the plane was doing or carrying something not legal, and the people who arranged the flight didn’t want the authorities to get wind of their activities. (Many people in the plateau have the suspicion that the plane was carrying Yamashita gold bars, and they’re wishing to stumble on the wreckage.) Another possible reason—and the religious may pray that this is really it—is that the plane was able to land safely despite the engine trouble. This isn’t impossible. As I’ve narrated earlier, the last sound coming from the sky was almost similar to that of a normal airplane. The rumbling became faint, but it didn’t end with an explosion, at least as what my ears caught. So if it was a private plane, what could it be doing in Kulaman Plateau? Maybe it was just supposed to pass and it had another destination. Maybe it was carrying an official or owner of the powerful logging company that operates in the area; the plane might have just been hired or might be owned by the company or the owner of the company. Investigators should ask a statement from the company. (And while they’re at it, they may ask the company why it doesn’t seem to have had any corporate social responsibility projects in the decades that it has been operating, stripping Kulaman Plateau of its virgin forests.)

Some people thought that the sound was caused by a bomb or bombs. It wasn’t. It didn’t sound like any of the bombs or missiles that I’ve seen explode in movies and documentaries. It didn’t sound like the improvised explosive device that went off some seventy meters away from our house in Isulan, several years ago. I don’t want to go into so much details about this. It wasn’t a bomb or any form of ordnance. Some people suggested that it might be the debris of the satellite that was expected to fall, but the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration has denied this. The agency said that the satellite was still in orbit when the strange sound was heard. I don’t see any reason why NASA would lie, and as far as I know, a metallic object or a meteor falling from the sky—in the remote chance that it’s not yet burned up—wouldn’t sound like a truck engine.

To sum up, here are the things that I’m sure of about the source of the sound: (1) It was traveling in the sky. (2) It had an engine. (3) Its engine malfunctioned. Here are the things that I heard from other people and that might be true: (1) It looked like a plane. (2) A part of it was burning. I’m also sure that: (1) It was not a passenger plane. (2) It was not a bomb.

And the million-dollar question: Was it a spaceship? Many of the people in the plateau are thinking so, and that’s primarily because the authorities cannot give any reasonable explanation, and if the authorities don’t do anything further, the spaceship theory will surely become the best explanation for it. The Kulaman Plateau Mystery will tickle for sure the balls of UFOlogists, conspiracy theorists, and similar weirdoes. Imagine having at least 50,000 people as witnesses. All of them heard the sound, and dozens of them saw the object, and their descriptions are the same! This must be the biggest verifiable UFO sighting in the history of the world. I don’t mind if the rumor about aliens will spread. It might be the best way for people outside Kulaman Plateau to be interested in the matter. It might be the only way to persuade authorities or concerned organizations to conduct a thorough investigation. Let’s spread the lies and ignorant opinions so that we can solve the real mystery and find the truth.

The Kulaman Plateau Mystery I

(This is the first of two parts.)

While I was inside the house the previous Sunday, June 14, I heard an extremely loud rumbling from the sky. The sound made me so scared that I decided to go out of the house and glance around, expecting something enormous, metallic, and on fire to appear out of the clouds and come crashing down on me. The strange sound went on for about thirty seconds to a minute, and then the air became silent again, as it usually is in most part of Kulaman Plateau. It took me I guess a minute more to calm myself. When I went back inside the house, I forgot rather promptly what had happened. It didn’t occur to me again until lunchtime the next day, when CNN Philippines reported about unconfirmed “reports” about a “plane crash” here in Sultan Kudarat Province.

That could have been the end of it for me. News about plane crashes generally don’t pique my interest. I can’t give a definite reason for it; perhaps it’s because plane crashes get almost everyone excited, and the popularity turns me off, as what I normally feel about things popular. Even if the crash happened in Kulaman Plateau, I wouldn’t give it much attention, much less write about it. I decided to create this post, however, when I found out that the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines denied the occurrence of such an incident, or accident, as though hundreds of people in the plateau merely smoked hemp together and hallucinated the same thing.

The thing did happen, whatever it was. I heard the sound myself, and reportedly there were some people who saw something, specifically an object in the sky that exploded or was on fire. The claims are true, and the appropriate government agencies should investigate them. It is frustrating to think that this incident will likely remain a mystery forever, as what happened to the unsolved medical enigma that struck Sitio Parreño, Barangay Tinalon, last year. The residents of the hamlet butchered and ate a couple of horses that had fallen ill or died within hours of one another, and the meat made the people sick. More than a hundred suffered from headache, diarrhea, and vomiting, and seven people died. I heard that the Department of Health conducted an investigation. The doctors suspected that the affliction was caused by a virus, and this is both interesting and worrisome because horse-to-human viral transmission is very rare. (And I would like to call it SNAV or Senator Ninoy Aquino virus, after the name of our municipality). The results of the tests, however, were inconclusive, probably due to the difficulty of going to the remote area and sheer lack of willpower and incompetence on the part of responsible government workers.

Some people in my village estimate the sound to have lasted five minutes. Some say ten minutes. My own estimate, as mentioned earlier, is merely thirty seconds to a minute. I’m fairly sure of my calculation, even if I didn’t look at any watch or clock during or after the incident. Time seems to stretch ten-fold whenever all you are doing is observe something. This is what I often feel every time I cook instant mami or instant pancit canton and closely observe the boiling time. I don’t like the noodles to be soggy, and there are still remnants in me of my old obsessive-compulsive self, so I always make sure that the time that elapses from putting the noodles into the boiling water to removing the pot from the fire is no more than three minutes, as suggested in most packaging. During such waiting time, I often feel that a minute is as long as five minutes. Furthermore, when the 7.2-magnitude earthquake hit Bohol and Cebu about two years ago, I was in Cebu then on the fifth floor of an eight-story building, crouched between the upper and lower bunks of a double-deck bed, waiting for the whole world to collapse on me. The shaking and rumbling of my dormitory seemed to me to go on forever, but I learned later from the news that the temblor lasted for about forty seconds only. I knew since then that time could indeed be relative or our sense of time may not be synchronized with a mechanical device.

Stories about what people here heard or witnessed that moment will surely be less accurate by the day. I assume I don’t have to explain how our own memory can deceive us. So I’m setting out here today my own account, and I’ll try to be as accurate as I can be.

When I heard the strange sound, I was seated in the couch in our living room, reading Pete Dexter’s Paris Trout. I don’t know what time it was exactly. It must be between 8 a.m. and 12 noon. I’m sure that it was morning because electricity in our town runs for twelve hours only, from noon to midnight, and the lights were not yet on that time. The sound was like a thunder. Let me describe the volume. Imagine yourself inside your house while it is raining, and then you see a flash of lightning outside. I’m sure you’ve experienced that. When a lightning is that near, the thunder that accompanies it is usually so loud that it makes your chest vibrate. The strange sound was as loud as that. So I thought it was just a thunder. I expected it to die out within a few seconds. It went on, however, for a little too long for a thunder. After seven or eight seconds, I decided to check it out. I went out of the house through the backdoor.

The sound was obviously coming from the sky in the west, but I couldn’t see anything. The sky was almost filled with thick white clouds. I don’t believe in aliens, or in humanoid aliens that drive a saucer-like spaceship, but I thought that time that the sound was perfect for such a spaceship. It only seemed fitting for a spaceship to emerge out of the clouds and fly toward our house like a giant Frisbee. I guess I thought of a spaceship because the previous night, I caught on HBO some scenes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, though the scenes I saw didn’t have a spaceship in them. I walked the length of our house toward the front yard. Because the noise was obviously not a thunder and sounded like a cranky engine of a large truck, I told myself that it must just be one of the very few six-wheeler trucks that ply our village. But there was no truck in sight; our house is far from the road. And a truck could only sound that loud if I was very near it, or my ears were pressed against its engine. It then occurred to me that the sound might be coming from a thresher; a harvest had been going on for a few days at the farm lot about fifty meters from our home lot. I looked at the farm and didn’t see any person or mobile machine. I also realized that threshers are for rice, and the crop in the farm is corn.

Twenty or thirty seconds since the sound erupted, it became fainter. It’s a plane, I thought. It’s just a plane, but it still sounds odd. I looked at the sky in the east, where I usually see passing planes to and from General Santos City, but clouds still kept me from seeing anything. After a few seconds more, the noise died down, and I became aware of another noise—a truck running in the road about a hundred meters downhill. I was sure it was a truck because it blew its horn. I was sure that that the earlier sound wasn’t a truck, but because the last thing I heard was something familiar and harmless, I didn’t dwell on the matter. I didn’t want my imagination to get away with me, because that happened a few months ago and I seriously hurt myself physically. (But this is another story.) I went back inside the house and continued reading my book.

(The second part will be posted tomorrow.)

Senator Ninoy Aquino Is Poorest Town in Region 12

For aesthetic reasons, I don’t want two or more posts to appear on the same day. That’s why even if I have finished writing more than one article, I publish only the first one and then schedule each of the rest to appear on another day. But it looks like I’m going to break the self-imposed practice this soon. I just have to insert this piece of news right now.

I admit I wasn’t able to hold back my tears when I came across the news a few minutes ago. The bare facts do not need to be stated in a dramatic language to tug at someone’s heart: The Municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino is the most impoverished in the region. Three out of four people here live below the poverty line. This means they do not eat three full meals every day, they cannot pay for a doctor whenever they are sick, and they cannot send their children to college.

What’s sadder is that the National Statistical Coordination Board gathered the data way back in 2000. Twelve years from then, the situation seems to be the same, and it won’t likely change in the near future. Those who have filed their candidacy for the coming elections are your traditional politicians.

Addendum: I do not yet know how to use this pre-scheduling option, or I've been time disoriented. This post appears alone on this date.