Council of Allende: Meeting Pepe, the 94-Year-Old Skeptic, in Flying I’m Going

Council of Allende has been the place we have visited in this program of ‘Flying I’m goingwhere Jesus Calleja has been able to meet many people who live in the town, among whom is Pepe, a 94-year-old man who is not easily convinced.

Calleja assured that It is not easy to “disseminate science” because suddenly you can run into someone who doesn’t quite understand you, something that I verified in one of the bars in Allende when I met Pepe.

This resident of Allende who has worked in the fields, in wood, among others, even dares to give our presenter a fight and beat him! and he leaves her with her mouth open when he tells her that the only pills he takes are the blue ones: “You leave me cold, what strength, this is a medical case to study”.

But disagreements arise when Jesús tells him that we have gone to Allende to meet Lucía who is an astrophysicist. Pepe does not believe anything about this: “I don’t believe that we have reached the moon, no one believes it. “Only what we see here is true.”. Calleja assures him that we have reached the moon, but he still does not believe it and asks him for real information: “Where did you enter? What is it like?”

Although he does believe that the earth “may be round” because it is not known where it ends. And to explain this, Jesús Calleja uses an orange, an olive and a lemon to, with the help of another of the neighbors who is in the bar, explain the rotation of the earth and how the moon was reached. “It goes in one ear and out the other,” is Pepe’s response and he says something very emphatic: “Don’t fool me, there is neither moon nor h*, there is nothing up there.” Thus leaving a great moment of ‘Volando Voy’ in Concello de Allende, in which the neighbors could not help but burst out laughing when they saw it.

Furthermore, Jesús Calleja wanted to give Pepe a ride in the helicopter, where he told us about his life: how he met his wife until she died of one of his four children, a very difficult moment for him.

Jesús Calleja’s ride with Pepe in the helicopter

And they also had a fun time. Pepe insisted that the town where he was born was on one side and the route to Jesús Calleja told him that it was on the other. But we have been able to realize that it is not easy to change this neighbor’s mind, until he realized that they could reach Galicia and that the presenter was right in this case.