In 2014, a dentist named Vinicio Montoya gained national fame when he announced that he would travel to space in 2015 as the first NASA-trained Guatemalan astronaut. He became a media darling, gave talks at universities, and President Otto Pérez Molina even formally asked the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs to include him on a Russian space mission. The only problem with this diplomatic request was that Montoya was not an astronaut and had never been trained by NASA.

This is the story of a dentist who was tired of feeling like a failure in life. So he convinced the Guatemalan government that he was a NASA-certified astronaut. He submitted a resume and photos as proof that he had climed to the summit of the Himalayas, visited the South Pole, the North Pole, the Amazon and the Sahara, and completed a two-day course on commercial space flight.

Without checking the authenticity of a single document, Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina asked Russian diplomats to consider Montoya as a candidate for a space mission. Montoya became a hero, the pride of his country.

Here is how it all began...

This is the story of a dentist who was tired of feeling like a failure in life.

The avatar from another dimension

Vinicio Montoya felt he had failed many times in his life. “There was no area of my life in which I had not failed,” he recalls. Until the night of 3 December, 1998 that is. The night that God blessed him. That fateful day in December, a car crashed into him while he was driving through Guatemala City. When he expressed his extreme displeasure, the other driver shot him.

After “years of substance abuse” and a divorce in 1994, Montoya turned to religion. On that day in December, he realized God had knocked on his door twice. The accident was the first wake-up call, the shots the second. “I am the avatar of something that may be in the third, fifth, tenth, or eleventh dimension,” explains the orthodontist, maxillofacial orthopedist and lay preacher for the parish of St. Martin de Porres in Guatemala City.