UFOport in Beachfront Ruins

Two months in-country and I hadn’t yet left my comfort zone in Manta, Ecuador, shuttling between our beachfront apartment, the Tennis Club, and our favorite 20 or so of Manta’s thousands of restaurants. I was hankering to go someplace I’d never been before, not so easy in an area I’d visited over 50 times over 44 years. Then I found the article in the Telegraph, a government mouthpiece that hits the flagstone outside my door at 5:30 every morning.

Welcome to Chirije, an almost unknown but significant archeological site first brought to light by Ecuadorian archeologist Emilio Estrada in the 50's. Chirije was a major seaport for the Bahia culture, which had its millenial day from 500 BC to 500 AD. Trade items show that the sailors and merchants of Chirije visited ports as far south as Chile and as far north as Mexico. And I, a reformed Anthropologist kicking around the zone for over 40 years, had never heard of it.

Not only was this incredible archeological site of a mysterious seafaring race open to the public and in an almost virgin state, it was surrounded by the Cerro Seco (Dry Hill) Biological Reserve, a small 300 acre protected area home to over 100 species of bird, and multitudinous reptiles, butterflies and some astounding number of plant species per square meter.

I was already convinced that this was a place I needed to see when I got to the part about the ruins of Chirije being one of the hotspots being studied and monitored by the Ecuadorian OMNIologos Association. That the UFO-ologists to us. It is quite renowned a center of extraterrestial activity and UFO sightings. There is even a mysterious mandala-like carving in the rocky floor of the area believed by some to be a UFO-port, just waiting for the next cruise ship to drop on. Of course, it is well-known that UFOs like to hang out over the equator, the only spot it is possible to maintain a geo-stationary orbit without expending energy. Whether the ETs like to park here because it saves gas or because of the view is unclear to me, but the twisted pseudo-logic has me convinced.

A final note of danger was added by the revelation that there were no roads, tracks or paths leading to the ruins or the small museum in a hostal recently constructed on the site. The only way to get there was to drive or walk 10 miles down the beach, which can only be done during the two hours before and the two hours after low tide. If you stay too long the window closes, riptides make swimming inadvisable, and you will be forced to stay in the overpriced hostal, which is in addition known to be haunted. Armed with that knowledge, I was determined to get there by hook or by crook.

The most stunning part of the revelation was that the mysterious precolumbian seaport of Chirije was less than 20 miles up the coast from Manta, as the crow flies. Unfortunately, I am not a crow, and humans without cars have to take a torturous route inland through Montecristi to the Provincial capital of Portoviejo, and then back out to the coast further north Rocafuerte and Charapotó to our base camp in San Clemente. One of Norma’s six sisters has a house in almost every town in Ecuador, including that one. It was a basic middle class beach house used as a vacation home by one branch of Norma’s enormous extended family.

We were warmly welcomed by Judith the mother-in-law of Norma’s sister Fresia, and her daughter, and who were using the house for a short vacation from Quito. We hauled out the article that had started it all, and Fatima, the sister-in-law, was fascinated. Here was a significant site a mere 2 or 3 miles from the spot she had vacationed in all her life, and she had never heard of its existence. Her eldest son Hugo was arriving the next day, Saturday, yesterday as I write these words, and he had a new front-wheel drive SUV. Suddenly we had a car and a driver. Unfortunately, none of us had any idea where it was, or how to get there, or had in fact ever heard of the place, the ruins or the civilization until a few days previous.

A further wrinkle was provided by La Punta (The Point), a rocky outcropping several hundred feet high and a hundred yards wide that stuck out into the waves like a slice of granite cheesecake. There was no way to walk down the beach from San Clemente to the OVNI-port (OVNI = Objetos Voladores No Identificados, or unidentified flying objects), so we had to drove out to Highway 15 and head north, now within half a degree of the equator, and look for a poorly marked turn-off towards a place called El Pajonal. Follow a dirt “road” down to the ocean, turn south, and drive a couple of miles down the beach to the ruins. Can’t miss’em.

We could, as it turned out, miss the turnoff from the highway, three times. First we drove all the way north to the modern city of Bahia, one of many Latin mini-Miami’s, with million dollar mansions and private clubs, where we went to the Capitanía del Puerto (Captain of the Port), an imposing official-looking building, to verify the exact hour of the low tide. These guys provide this essential information to vessels from fishing boats to luxury yachts to Navy ships, so it needs to be accurate. 4:15 afternoon low tide was the verdict. It was still just 11:15, so we had a couple of hours to kill.

We drove north on highway 15, playing hide and seek with the Pacific as the contour of the coastline drew closer and further away from the highway. I’d been there before, about 20 years ago, and it was very different. Around each previously sleepy fishing village walled expat estates, tasteful retirement and vacation complexes, hippie hotels and surfer shacks had sprung up. We stopped at San Vicente, Bahia’s poor relation, where Norma’s family had kept a vacation home a while ago, a beach called Briceño, which was almost all locals, lots of beer on the beach and seafood shack restaurants, and Canoa, almost all foreigners, surfers, hipsters and fugitives, hanging out in upscale but laid-back restaurants and hostals like the Bambu, and Canoa Wonderland. So exclusive, Hugo reported, that they would let Ecuadorians eat in the hostel restaurant or drink in the bar, but if they ask for a room the place is always full, even when it obviously wasn’t.

A little afternoon we turned south again, and headed back to look for the highway turnoff toward Chirije, at someplace called Pajonal. The landscape slid by the two-lane highway in a bright green blur. Recent rains had painted the farms and fields with a fresh palette of different greens, roadside stands sold coconuts, watermelon, badea and mangos, shrimp pools and salterns shimmering in the midday sun, rice paddies with wading white flamingos, bamboo and reed shacks, and everywhere, on both sides of the road, the magnificent, Saint-Exupéryesque Ceibo trees flew by. As did, apparently, the turnoff to Pajonal. We were almost back to San Clemente before we realized we must have passed the turn-off. We went over the terrain again — slower and without all the distracting conversation. Still nothing. So we started asking random individuals we passed on the roadside.

A smiling rotund barefoot gentleman at a watermelon stand informed us the road to Pajonal was just a kilometer further, on the left. After turning around and returning 5 kilometers without results a greasy front-yard mechanic working on a truck which would clearly never start up again told us it was right on the other side of the hill we had just driven over. Back again, with similar results. Finally, after creeping along and inspecting every path, driveway, and break in the bush, we noted a tiny sign, paint faded and chipped, barely visible from the road, and then only from one direction, we found a sign with the words “El Pajonal” and a dirt track winding through the vegetation in the general direction of the beach.

A couple of hundred yards down the muddy, rutted road, pocketed with puddles from a mid-morning downpour, we came to the broad, virgin beach. Our information from the Capitanía had been correct; there was 30 or 40 yards of unobstructed sand between the gentle waves and the cliffs and hills that bordered the beach. We turned south and Hugo piloted his Blazer between clumps of seaweed and driftwood. About a mile down the beach we came to the only human construction as far as the eye could see (by night you can see the lights of Manta in the distance, but during the day it is all sea, sand and sky). It was a large complex behind a bamboo and wire fence, clearly a dilapidated and apparently abandoned hostal perched on a slight rise above the beach.

There were various signs posted near the padlocked gate: “Chirije Partner Forest” “Entrance Prohibited Without Authorization” “Astro Tourism” “Camping”. It was clearly closed, abandoned, empty and locked up. We wandered around the perimeter for a while, looking for a way in, when a sleepy, barefoot watchman informed us that the Hostal was closed, the museum was closed, and the dig itself was off-limits and “temporarily” shut down by the government. He did not have any idea when they would be reopening — it was being “renovated” although we could see no evidence of recent work or building supplies. I began to realize that even though we were here, there was no “here” here. We would have to content ourselves with having found and reached the location, no mean feat itself, and some photos of the signs.

However, this being Ecuador, Hugo had soon negotiated a “Private viewing” of the museum and the alien landing strip, for a sizable bribe of $2.50 for the five of us. The lock was opened, the chain unwound, and in we filed. Overall, the complex was underwhelming. The hostal consisted of split-bamboo huts and communal buildings on cement platforms. There was a restaurant that looked like it hadn’t seen a meal since the colonial period. The “museum” was a one room building with artifacts piled on tables and in cardboard boxes, without any organization, let alone labels or explanatory placards. There were two glass display cases with similarly agglomerated items, without any identifying information, and a half-hearted diorama with a few cracked clay gods and demons and a human skull. Some of the items were interesting, even significant, but the overall impression was of a dirty, dusty collection of random items by a long-vanished hoarder.

The UFO-port was the biggest disappointment. In the photos in the newspaper article that had piqued my interest it appeared to be about the size of a bull-ring, etched in deep ridges and dotted with boulders and bizarre stone statues. In reality it was about the size of an inflatable kiddie pool, a few grooves forming concentric circles carved into a flat granite surface poking from the sandy dirt. The “boulders” were cantaloupe-sized rocks and someone had placed a small tree stump in the center with a few rocks piled on top. If any flying saucers had ever landed there they couldn’t have been any bigger that a Carvel ice cream “Flying Saucer” novelty treat.

After about 45 minutes wandering the site and inside the museum we abandoned the area, worried by the now-rising tides and our ability to navigate the trackless beach. Sure enough, trying to power through the dry, drifting sand between the packed damp sand and the muddy track back to the highway, we got stuck, and had to ask for help from a disheveled local watching us from his nearby shack with a shovel suspiciously already in his hands. The subsequent bribe cost us considerably more than the one that got us into the museum.

All in all, it was a satisfying adventure; reaching an unknown, historically significant archaeological site and navigating the tricky and time-limited access successfully. It’s remote, limited access location was obviously responsible for the lack of visitors and the failure of the hostal, but I would definitely go back. For one, we never got to explore the nature trails through the Biological Reserve. For another, I am convinced that camping on the site overnight will be the only way to make contact with the extraterrestrial forces which are clearly hiding out in this cosmic crossroads.