In recent months, the province of Salta in Argentina has been the source of a host of bizarre phenomena, most notably the “gnome” said to have terrorized the area beginning in March of this year. Now, a “glowing little man” has been seen stirring up trouble in the area, as reported by Scott Corrales at the Inexplicata website:

Residents of the town of San Carlos now claim seeing a strange being, standing some 40 cm tall, with a magnetic field that kept people from approaching it.

Two people, mechanics Walter Lopez and Omar Ferlatti, informed police about the sighting of the diminutibve creature whom they described in detail: the being was small, glowing and wore pants. It appeared it be protected by a magnetic field.

The magnetic field described by those who have come into close proximity with this new “being” reminded me of another offensive tactic reported in encounters with other humanoid oddities; specifically Bigfoot-type creatures. At a conference back in 2004, I discussed the subject of pheromones with Tim Cassidy, a naturalist and cryptozoologist from Maine. Tim shared with me a bizarre encounter he had with what he believed was a Bigfoot several years ago, while leading a scout troop on a camping trip out west.

First, Cassidy said that “a pungent odor” became prevalent among those at the camp site, followed by sounds from the nearby forests, then small objects being tossed at them. Following the source of the sounds with their flashlights, Tim described how he and others leading the troop that weekend were startled to see a large, humanoid creature standing several yards away, partially obscured by underbrush, whose eyes became illuminated in the reflection of the lights he and the other rangers held. “I had waited to see one of these things for years,” he told me, “and my first instinct was to run directly toward this thing.” As Tim did so, he was suddenly struck by this powerful odor again, which he presumed to be emanating from the creature. His next memory was of being overcome with a sudden, overwhelming fear, which prevented him from moving any further toward the animal. In retrospect, Cassidy believed that pheromones emitted by the creature might actually have been the cause of his fear, since other animals have been known to emit this infamous “smell of fear” to warn those like them to keep their distance.

Wired Magazine’s blog page featured an interesting article dealing with this subject in January, titled Pentagon Explores ‘Human Fear’ Chemicals; Scare-Sensors, ‘Contagious’ Stress in the Works? The article described pheromones as “chemicals released by animals as signals to their own kind: for sex, for territorial marking, and more,” going on to say that “They’re often detected in the olfactory membranes. But there’s more to pheromones than attraction. Many animals have an alarm pheromone which is used to signal danger; aphids, for example, use it to cause their fellow lice to flee.”

“Now, the US Army is trying to track down and harness people’s smell of fear. Citing a US Military-backed study, “Identification and Isolation of Human Alarm Pheromones focused on the Preliminary Identification of Steroids of Interest in Human Fear Sweat,” referred to as the so-called “skydiving protocol” was the researchers’ method of choice. As supposed at the popular Blogsquatcher website, could it be that Bigfoot and other creatures might already have “discovered” this, but rather than doing so in a laboratory, have done so by way of natural selection?

Similarly, could this “magnetic field” emanated by the new “glowing dwarf” of Salta Provence, Argentina, actually be something more akin to a pheromone emitted by the strange little critter; or is there indeed something more advanced at work here?