IT’S DEFINITELY one of the strangest stories of 2023: Villagers in a remote region of the Amazon rainforest in Peru have been defending themselves against attackers called pelecaras, which translates into English as “face-peelers.”

Timothy Alberino, who lived in that region for a time as a younger man, returned recently to investigate the accounts of seven-foot-tall levitating “aliens,” and he tells us what he found.