BÉLMEZ FACES

Opening

On 23 August 1971, María Gómez Cámara said a stain shaped like a human face had appeared on the cement floor by the hearth of her kitchen at Calle Real 5, Bélmez de la Moraleda, in Jaén province. The family had it broken up and re-laid. By their account the face came back, and others followed on the floor, across the kitchen and down the passage.

Within weeks pilgrims were queuing to see the face, and the family was selling photographs of it. The house became La Casa de las Caras, the House of the Faces. For 30 years parapsychologists called it one of the century's great mysteries, while skeptics and some parapsychologists said the faces were painted. Nobody has confessed, and the chemical tests disagree with each other.

Timeline

23 August 1971María sees the face while cooking and calls her neighbours. About five days later it is scraped away and the floor is resurfaced. The family's son Miguel is usually credited with breaking it up. One Spanish account names a mason, Sebastián Fuentes León. A new face appears, apparently male, with open eyes and mouth.

16 September 1971The first press report, in Ideal of Granada, prints the face beside a photograph of María holding a batch of the face photographs she sold to visitors for ten pesetas. Locals call the face the Christ.

1971The mayor forbids destroying the new face, and it is cut out of the floor. Known as La Pava, it ends up set into the kitchen wall behind glass. Soon after the first appearance, excavation under the kitchen reportedly reaches nearly 3 metres and turns up human bones.

1971 to 1972The Madrid daily Pueblo promotes the case. By José Luis Jordán Peña's later account, the Ministry of the Interior asks him to lead a commission of concrete chemists to study it. On 25 February 1972 Pueblo changes position and reports that the faces were painted with silver salts.

Early 1970sHans Bender and Germán de Argumosa have areas of floor sealed under transparent plastic, before a notary, while faces are forming.

1975J. J. Alonso of Spain's national research council analyses the face called La Pelona.

1980sFaces of Franco and the socialite Isabel Preysler are claimed. Skeptics note the new faces look simpler after the death of the village photographer.

1990 to 1992Samples taken by the Jesuit parapsychologist José María Pilón are analysed by the Institute of Ceramics and Glass.

Early 2004María dies, aged about 85. New faces are announced that autumn in her childhood home, and El Mundo reports they were faked.

2007Journalist Javier Cavanilles and investigator Francisco Máñez publish Los Caras de Bélmez, arguing the faces were painted from the start, and name María's son Diego Pereira.

2014The television programme Cuarto Milenio has a chemist test a face, reporting no paint, and a forensic examiner fails to reproduce one.

Key figures

María Gómez Cámara (1919 to 2004) and her husband, Juan Pereira, owned the house. Some parapsychologists credited María with producing the faces unconsciously. An earlier version of this report's summary called her María Gómez Pereira. Her own surname was Gómez Cámara, and Pereira was her husband's.

Miguel Pereira, her son, lived in the house throughout. He later said he dug under the hearth and found some human bones, though fewer than claimed.

Hans Bender, of the Freiburg Institute for Border Areas of Psychology, and Germán de Argumosa, a Spanish parapsychologist, were the case's main scientific backers. Neither published a full report.

José Luis Jordán Peña, a Spanish parapsychologist, judged the faces fraudulent. He is the same man who confessed in 1993 to inventing the UMMO letters.

Javier Cavanilles and Francisco Máñez wrote the main skeptical book and published the case's analysis reports.

Physical and documentary trail

The faces are physical objects, so this case has more chemistry than most. In 1972 Pueblo reported silver nitrate and silver chloride. These darken in light, which would explain faces that seemed to appear slowly. Jordán Peña said he could make out the size of the brush bristles on La Pava. Alonso's 1975 report found zinc and dark minerals and read La Pelona as a shoe print improved by dark material. The 1990 to 1992 samples showed zinc, lead, chromium, copper and barium, which a skeptical reading attributes to paint. The research council's chemists said they did not know how the samples had been collected. Supporters cite the same analysis as finding no paint.

The 2014 Cuarto Milenio tests found no paint or outside manipulation, and the examiner could not reproduce a face with concrete solvent, hydrochloric acid or silver nitrate. That was a television production, and the faces had been fading for years by then. Bender's notarised plastic seals are the strongest point for the paranormal side. He wrote in a December 1973 newsletter that slight changes in the faces while under seal pointed to a paranormal origin, but he never published a detailed report on them.

The house is often said to stand on a medieval burial ground. Human bones were reported in the excavation, but I found no published dating of them, so the burial ground stays unconfirmed.

The faces were shown to have been painted on the concrete floor, the first with paint and later with acid, and the woman living in the house found to be perpetrating a hoax on the public for financial gain.

That is the hoax claim in its strongest English form. Dunning adds that the town government found fraud and banned tourism at the house. The Spanish record does not support a formal finding: the town hall has consistently backed the faces, and the official commission is known mainly from Jordán Peña's own later book. The paint case is strong, but nobody has proved it to the standard the quotation implies.

Things you might not know

• The money was in the first photograph. The first press picture in September 1971 already showed María holding photographs of the face she sold to visitors.
• The name is a trademark. Since July 2005 "Las caras de Bélmez" has been a registered Spanish trademark, held by Carmen Gómez Hervás.
• The new faces were a demonstration gone public. Máñez says that on 25 September 2004 he showed the parapsychologist Pedro Amorós how damp patches on wet cement can be brushed into faces. Days later Amorós announced new faces.
• The new-faces row went to court. Amorós took legal action against Cavanilles over his report that the 2004 faces were faked. Cavanilles came through it unscathed.
• The skeptics' book title is a pun. Los Caras de Bélmez puts "caras", faces, in the masculine, where "un cara" is slang for a brazen chancer. It is usually rendered as The Scoundrels of Bélmez.

Competing explanations

Paint or chemicals applied by someone in or close to the family. This fits the commercial start, the 1972 silver salts report, the brush-mark observation, paint-associated metals in the samples, and faces that changed at visitors' request. Suspects named over the years include a painter relative, the village photographer, who knew how silver salts behave, and Diego Pereira. Nobody has confessed, and no analysis is accepted by both sides.

Damp and pareidolia. Some faces, especially later and fainter ones, could be moisture patterns read as faces. This does not explain La Pava, which is clearly drawn.

A paranormal origin, by "thoughtography" from María or by connection with the bones. This depends on Bender's seals and the 2014 tests. Bender published no detailed record, and the 2014 examination came decades after the first faces were made.

Later life of the case

The faces faded after María's death. Bélmez's town hall has continued to back the paranormal reading, and the town has promoted the case for tourism. The 2004 "new faces" episode damaged the case's standing in the Spanish press. Television still revisits it, with Cuarto Milenio as its main defender.

Finding

Faces appeared on the floor of a family house in 1971 and were sold to visitors from the first weeks. The weight of evidence points to human manufacture by paint or chemicals: the press analysis of 1972, the brushwork, the metals and the commercial motive. That is not proof. There is no confession, the family never admitted anything, and the analyses contradict each other on paint, so the case does not reach a hoax finding.

What still will not resolve: who made the first face, and with what. A controlled analysis of La Pava with documented sampling would go a long way. Nobody has published one.