Honestly, it's a lot easier to believe that it's aliens and not "illegal miners with jetpacks". Seems like an even more ridiculous explanation.

They have seen these beings in villages near Iquitos too. They call them pelacaras, face peelers. Someone I know saw 4 beings flying about one meter above the ground outside her house last week.

Would illegal miners even have access to jetpacks?

Back in the 80’s this is the sort of news I was promised would happen in the 2000’s! Finally! Now if only the LLM controlling the jet pack found an ethical dilemma in its new life of crime and decided to cut power mid flight and avenge the villagers we’d be fully in a William Gibson novel!

Are jetpacks that easy to manufacture?

I wonder if there's a word in English to describe this. A headline/sentence like this would be so absolutely ridiculous in a work of fiction, but there's no such bar, so to speak, for real life!

Seems like there's a lot of easier and more lucrative ways to make money off of being the first folks to create and operate useful jet packs than illegal mining