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Danger 


Terror and Death 
in Brazil — 
where Next? 




Bob Pratt 


With Foreword by 


Dr. Jacques Vallee 























UFO DANGER ZONE 


Terror and Death in Brazil—Where Next? 

By Bob Pratt 
All rights reserved. 

Copyright 1996 by Bob Pratt 

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic 
or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, 
without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address Floras House Press, Inc. 
P.O. Box 164, Blue River, Wisconsin 53518. 

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-76549 ISBN: 1-881852-14-8 
First Printing August 1996 

Cover design by Bob Pratt. Photos: Left, Januncio De Souza re-enacts encounter when he resisted 
UFO abduction by clinging to a tree. Right, Firmino Souza in a coma in hospital after Crab Island 
incident. 

Published by 

Horus House Press, Inc. 

P.O. Box 164 Blue River, Wisconsin 53518 



To Faith and Cynthia 


Acknowle dgme nts 

None of my research in Brazil would have been possible without the help of many of the 
excellent investigators who live there. All have been generous to a fault, freely sharing their time and 
information, often taking me to the places where encounters happened and introducing me to the 
people who had those experiences. 

Foremost among these researchers is Irene Granchi of Rio de Janeiro. She was my first contact 
in Brazil, and over the years she informed me of numerous UFO happenings. Directly or indirectly, 
she put me in touch with nearly all the other people I've worked with in Brazil. 

Cynthia Luce has also been invaluable to my research. Cynthia is an American who's lived in 
Brazil since the 1970s. She has joined me on several field trips, making many of the arrangements, 
procuring maps and other supplies, interpreting, sharing the driving and enduring the hardships and 
sometimes limited facilities in the interior. 

I am especially grateful to my wife, Faith, who is my best friend and toughest critic. She has 
been very supportive of my research through the years and has been enormously helpful in reviewing 
and critiquing every line in this book. 

I am also deeply indebted to several UFO investigators who have given up a great deal of their 
time to help me. Among them are Hulvio Aleixo, Jose Jean Alencar, Reginaldo Athayde, Alberto Do 
Carmo, Rogerio Freitas and Daniel Rebisso. 

Many other UFO investigators have also been very helpful, especially Vitorio Pacaccini, 
Ubirajara Rodrigues, Thynam Salmeito de Melo, Helio Loyola, Sales Pagannini da Silva, Jackson 
Felix Pereira, Elianildo de Silva Nascimento, Ricardo Lima e Silva, Alberto Rodriques de Quiera, 
Monoel de Freitas, Lourinaldo Souza Queiroz, Ronaldo Rodriques de Farias, Romero Chaves, 
Marcio Miranda Furtado and Pablo Ramires Sales Mascimento. 

Some individuals who are not investigators but who took time to help in my research include 
Pedro Alves, Dr. Auxiliadora da Silva Maia, Jose Marcelo Pereira, Maria Conceicao Pontes, 
Alberto Ferreira da Silva and Jose Humberto dos Santos. 

I also wish to salute three people who I first met as interpreters and who became dear friends: 
Monica Carneiro, Ana Britto Luna and Angela Hadade. 

Finally, I am most grateful to all the Brazilian men, women and children who have shared their 
UFO experiences with me. They are true heroes. 


Foreword 

The book you are about to read is an exceptional account of adventure, a description of a true 
mystery. But it should also be read as something else: a wake-up call to scientists who are seriously 
interested in expanding the frontiers of our knowledge. 



The person who goes into a bookstore in search of information about the UFO phenomenon is 
confronted with entire shelves proposing a bewildering series of volumes claiming to solve the 
enigma. Some offer arguments to support the idea that we are being visited by an advanced 
civilization from outer space; others take the opposite view, claiming that all the witnesses have been 
fooled by mirages and hallucinations, or by yet unrecognized aberrations of the mind. And every 
theory in between has its advocates and its detractors who often launch violent accusations against 
one another. 

Opinions about UFOs are as varied and contusing as the phenomenon itself. Out of that 
contusion emerges this remarkable observation: These books offer a lot of speculation but few hard 
facts. They come from writers who analyze and compare accounts of sightings they have read in other 
books. They quote each other, often without proper attribution, without citing the source. They 
propagate old stories even when they are known to be false, and they speculate endlessly about 
possible causes and probable effects. 

The few books that make a real contribution in terms of original material, coming from an author 
who has actually gone into the field and spoken first-hand to the witnesses in their own environment, 
are very hard to find. The present volume makes such a contribution. For that reason, it stands far 
above most other volumes on that crowded bookstore shelf. 

Bob Pratt's book is unique in describing the experience of decades of very difficult field work 
by a skilled investigator who is equipped with excellent knowledge of the phenomenon, yet has no 
preconceived notion about the origin or nature of the sightings he is collecting. 

Mr. Pratt has gone repeatedly to Brazil, a country he knows well, in search of hard data about 
the effects of UFOs on people. He makes no secret of the fact that his first visits there were performed 
while he worked for a well- known American tabloid. He was so intrigued by what he saw that he 
later went back on his own. This book represents a lucid compilation of the best documented and 
most puzzling of his cases. It must have been quite a challenge for him to select the accounts he is 
describing here out of the thousands of interesting observations he brought back from his many trips to 
that country-one of the richest reservoirs of UFO data in the world. In every case we follow him as he 
carefully explains how he contacted the witnesses, what their environment was, the circumstances of 
their experience and the impact it made on them, on their family, on the social environment around 
them. 

This is field research as it should be done, and we can only deplore the fact that his work has 
not been repeated in other parts of the world. Perhaps Mr. Pratt's book will inspire others to launch 
similar efforts in their own countries, to help convince skeptical scientists that the UFO phenomenon 
is indeed an important, robust, significant, new fact in our physical and social environment, one that 
deserves serious study rather than superficial rejection. 

What picture emerges from this compilation of Brazilian encounters, recounted here in the easy¬ 
going but precise style of an experienced, American journalist? To me, the first impression was a 
confirmation that the phenomenon, whatever it is, is vastly more complex and varied than all the 
speculations and all the theories proposed thus far. You are about to read not only about objects that 
come and go in the sky, and land on the earth, but also craft and occupants that interact with humans, 
occasionally causing harm, and often behaving in ways that appear so absurd, yet so consistent, that 
they bring all our rational interpretations to their knees. 

It would be satisfying to be able to deny these facts. It would be nice to assume that the author 



was simply mistaken, or that he exaggerated the stories he had heard. Perhaps he had a bad 
interpreter? Perhaps the local people got carried away by their local beliefs in sorcery and spiritism? 
Perhaps the witnesses wanted to impress the American journalist with a repertoire of tall tales? Some 
reviewers will undoubtedly be tempted to take that facile approach. 

If they are so tempted, and if they take the trouble of checking the facts, they will quickly realize 
their mistake. Far from exaggerating the widespread nature, the weirdness and the importance of UFO 
encounters in South America, Mr. Pratt has actually understated his case. No critic will get away with 
a superficial examination of his findings. 

As a scientist who has researched the same material in the course of three separate trips to 
Brazil (to the regions of Sao Paulo, of Rio de Janeiro and of the Northeast), I realize that my own data 
is more limited than the rich harvest gathered by Mr. Pratt. But it is extensive enough to offer first¬ 
hand confirmation of its reality. Independently of him, I came across some of the same reports. The 
doctors he interviewed are real. They describe injuries that are well- documented. The military 
experts, some of whom provided their own testimony about UFOs they observed in the course of their 
duties, are real too. Mr. Pratt traveled everywhere with experienced interpreters and with the support 
of dedicated local researchers, themselves technically skilled persons. 

If there is one weakness in this account, it comes from the difficulty in conveying the awesome, 
the massive reality of the impact caused by the UFO phenomenon all over the magnificent land of 
Brazil. One has to stand on the banks of the Amazon at dusk to grasp the enormity of the mystery that 
surrounds us, and the opportunity it offers for new knowledge. The feeling is overwhelming. It is 
almost impossible to convey in a book. We must be satisfied with glimpses of that other reality which 
teases us, plays with us, and occasionally, as this book demonstrates so dramatically, hurts any human 
being who comes into contact with it, as if it was entirely indifferent to our fate on this planet. 

For that enigma of the ultimate nature and purpose of the phenomenon, Mr. Pratt has no answer, 
and neither does modern science. Thanks to his work, however, the day is a little closer when we 
may begin a serious examination of the evidence. 

Dr. Jacques Vallee, 29 January, 1996 


Introduction 

The world is lull of many terrors. This book is about one of them, a terror that comes from some 
place other than Earth. It's a terror that the world's governments ignore or claim doesn't exist, perhaps 
because there's no way they can protect their citizens from it. 

The terror comes fromUFOs-unidentified flying objects—and the aliens that operate them. 

These aliens are not our space brothers coming here to help us, as so many people want to believe. 
These are nonhuman creatures that for years have been tormenting and terrorizing human beings, 
hurting many and killing some. 

In the past fifty years, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have had close 
encounters with these aliens, often face to face. Most of these incidents appear to have been relatively 
harmless, but there is an insensitive, even cruel, side to the aliens that cannot be ignored. Since the 



1970s, and probably much earlier, terrible things have been done to people in Brazil-perhaps more so 
than in all other countries combined-and these cosmic muggings are still occurring. 

This book is about what happened to several dozen victims, most of whom told me their stories 
during more than six months of field investigations in Brazil conducted over ten visits between May 
1978 and July 1993. Some people could not testify because they're incapacitated or dead. 

This book makes no attempt to convince people that UFOs are real. Most of the people in the 
world have long accepted the reality of UFOs, and any objective, open- minded investigator will 
come to the same conclusion. 

Frequently, an encounter of the unhealthy kind peculiar to Brazil begins when a UFO appears 
without warning just above the head of someone at night, revealing itself in a burst of sudden daylight 
and then chasing the terrified man, woman or child as he or she flees in terror. At times, UFOs have 
tried to pull a victim up into their craft with some unseen force, and sometimes they've taken people 
away. They've also used grappling hooks to snag unfortunate souls, and dropped hot liquid on the 
arms and shoulders of others to make them let go of trees and bushes. 

Some hapless victims have been paralyzed during encounters. Others have hidden, horror- 
stricken, as UFOs tried for hours to flush them out of their hiding places. Not even homes have been 
safe, as beams of lights from UFOs have pierced tile roofs like lasers and burned men and women 
inside. 

Even when a person isn't injured, he or she is nearly always traumatized. They are confronted by 
a strange airborne machine with seemingly magical powers and humanoid creatures who try to take 
them away. Even the simple sighting of a fiery ball of light in the sky can be terrifying because almost 
everyone knows of someone who had been chased, hurt or killed by these things. 

UFOs have been particularly grim news for people living in the small towns, farms and forests 
of central and northeastern Brazil, where most of the incidents related in this book took place. To 
these people, this terror is very real and has many names. Among the most common names are chupa} 
chupa-chupa or chupa sanguine, terms that come from the Portuguese verb chupar, meaning to suck. 

Many people believe the Chupa-Chupa sucks blood or energy from humans and animals. There is 
some evidence that this does occur. 

Depending on who you talk to, this alien aggressor is also called the Light, the Fire, the Animal, 
the Worm, the Apparatus, the Machine, the Thing, the Train and the Object. Frequently it's Disco 
Voador (flying saucer) or just Disco. The Portuguese equivalent of UFO is OVNI ( objeto voador nao 
identificado) but few people use that when they tell about their terrifying experiences. For them, this 
is something very real and personal with a definite identity, a terror that comes from the sky without 
warning. 

The fact that these violent experiences appear to be happening mostly in Brazil doesn't mean 
Americans or people in other countries are safe from attack. UFOs are seen throughout the United 
States and in every country in the world, and what is happening in Brazil could happen anywhere. 

Why is an American writing a book about Brazilian UFOs? Because my search for answers to 
this UFO malevolence has taken me across a broader stretch of the country than perhaps any other 
researcher has covered. I've investigated cases from the middle of the Amazon all across northern 
Brazil and down the east coast to the southernmost state on the border with Uruguay, but I've 
concentrated my efforts on the Northeast, where so much of the harmful activity has taken place. 

Brazil is one of the largest nations in the world, with one hundred sixty million people living in 



a land as big as the United States. Yet, there are only three hundred to four hundred active UFO 
investigators, and most of them live in the major cities within a hundred miles of the seacoast. Vast 
regions of many states, and sometimes entire states, have no investigators at all. Much that happens 
never comes to the attention of any researcher. 

There are many excellent researchers in Brazil who have been extraordinarily helpful to me 
over the years and still are. Many of the cases reported in this book were first investigated by them, 
and they have generously shared their data with me and made it possible for me to meet the people 
who've had these terrible UFO experiences. 

When I first began going to Brazil to look into UFO incidents, I had resources beyond the reach 
of most investigators. My first four trips, in 1978, 1979 and 1980, were made as a reporter for a 
magazine that paid all my expenses. This allowed me to do many things that most researchers can't 
afford to do, such as spend weeks at a time on one case, travel wherever I needed to go, and hire 
cars, planes, boats, guides, interpreters and whatever else needed. 

It was during these early visits that I began to hear about people getting hurt and killed by UFOs. 
Until then I had thought UFOs were harmless, and I began to concentrate on this aspect of the 
phenomenon. I left the magazine in 1981 and since then have gone back to Brazil six times on my own, 
looking for new clues as to why UFOs have been on the rampage there. 

This search for answers is part of a deep interest in UFOs that came relatively late in my life. 
Until 1975 any mention of UFOs usually brought a caustic comment from me. For much of my more 
than forty years as a reporter and editor, I viewed the world in what I considered to be a scientific 
way. If common sense said things couldn't possibly be, then they weren't. And common sense said at 
the time UFOs couldn't possibly exist. 

At one time during my career I was managing editor of a daily newspaper in Virginia, and I 
never allowed UFO stories to appear in the newspaper. The same went for ghosts, poltergeists, 
Bigfoot and so on, simply because there was no doubt in my mind that they were all nonsense. I 
"knew" this without having to investigate such reports, and nothing could change my mind. 

Obviously, something did, at least about UFOs. Today, I have no doubt they're real, and although 
I'm still uncertain about ghosts and the other things, I no longer have a closed mind to such 
possibilities. This belief in the reality of UFOs comes not from having seen one but from having 
talked with people who have—so far about seventeen hundred people in Brazil and nine other 
countries. 

UFOs became real to me during the second week of May 1975. At the time I was working as a 
reporter and was sent to northern Wisconsin to look into claims that a UFO had landed on a farm near 
Superior. I had never worked on a UFO story before. I never took UFOs seriously, and I was 
absolutely certain that people were seeing something that could be explained. I believed that if I 
asked the right kinds of questions, I would eventually find the truth. That was what I was thinking as I 
flew to Wisconsin, welcoming the opportunity to finally find out for myself just what was causing 
people to make wild claims about seeing flying saucers. 

I spent a week in northern Wisconsin and neighboring parts of Minnesota and Upper Michigan. I 
talked to not only the family who saw the UFO that landed but more than sixty other people who'd 
seen UFOs in incidents unrelated to the landing. Most of the sightings were at night. Some were in the 
daytime. Many people had seen strange lights moving through the sky in an erratic manner. Others had 
scary close encounters with big, menacing objects that had definite shapes. 



Sixteen of the witnesses were police officers. Among the others were farmers, business people, 
housewives, secretaries, factory workers, a wildlife biologist, a pharmacist, a machinist, a university 
student and several high school students. Most were adults. All seemed to be solid people who had 
no reason to make up such wild stories. 

One very credible person was an elementary school principal who was also an Air National 
Guard lieutenant colonel. He told me that one night some years earlier he had been scrambled to 
intercept a UFO that had been spotted over a radar station seventy-five miles north of Duluth. As soon 
as he and his pilot were airborne in their jet fighter, their radar detected the UFO-and the UFO 
instantly disappeared. The men on duty at the radar station had been standing outside looking up at the 
UFO as it hovered about a thousand feet above the building. The colonel and his pilot were told by 
radio that as soon as the jet's radar locked onto the object, it shot straight up—and the ground radar 
tracked it a hundred miles high into the sky before it disappeared from the scope seconds later. 

In that week in Superior and Duluth, I heard many unbelievable stories. I asked every one of 
those sixty to seventy people who'd had UFO experiences every question I could think of—and I was 
amazed. Stunned, perhaps. I couldn't explain what any of them had seen. It was a sobering experience, 
one that made me begin to realize how little I really knew about our world. I've been chasing UFOs 
ever since. 

They are a genuine mystery, as baffling and fascinating today as they were when I accepted their 
reality in 1975. The one thing I do know for a fact is this: The more you learn about the UFO 
phenomenon, the more complex it becomes and the more you realize how little you really know about 
it. 

Whatever it is, there is a definite dark side to the phenomenon, and the purpose of this book is to 
reveal enough of that side in the hope that we might find out what it is we're dealing with. 

There's no way of knowing yet whether UFOs will have any lasting significance for the people 
of Earth, but by the time we find out, it may be too late. 

1. Say SHOO-puh. 


PART ONE 



UNDER ATTACK 



Chapter One 
ATTACK ON MOISES 


On a warm, Sunday evening in May 1991a mild- mannered farmer in his thirties named Moises 
Campelo left his brother's house near the church and trudged down a hill on his way home. It was 
dark and a light rain was falling, but Moises hadn't opened the umbrella he carried. 1 After some two 
hundred yards, the land leveled out and he began climbing another long, sloping hill toward his own 
home about a mile away. Five to six minutes later he passed a neighbor's house and a hundred yards 
or so beyond that reached the top of the hill. Then a flash caught his eye. 

He glanced to his right and saw a small, bright light on the crest of another mountain two miles 
to the east. It's just a car, he thought, and again looked down on the path barely visible before him. But 
before he'd taken three or four more steps, the light was suddenly right above Moises. It had covered 
that distance with surprising quickness, startling him. 

The light was big and so bright that it hurt his eyes to look at it. It made no noise. It seemed to be 
as large as a house and was slowly spinning around. He was more curious than afraid, but had he 
known what was going to happen to him, he would have run away as fast as he could. 

This was the beginning of a strange, hostile assault on Moises that cannot yet be rationally 
explained. To Moises, it was a UFO, and he survived the attack somehow, but when he told me his 
story sixteen months later, he was still afraid to go outside at night by himself, afraid his attacker 
would come back. 


Sucked Upwards 

As soon as the brightly lit object arrived that night, it had an immediate effect on him. 

"I was paralyzed almost at once, and I thought the UFO was going to take me away," he said 
quietly as he sat in his living room. His left eye was bloodshot. It had been injured by the UFO and 
still had not healed. "It lit up everything around me, and it was very hot. And then I felt like I was 
being sucked upwards." 

He said he began to rise in the air, upright, as if he were still walking. He couldn't feel anything 
touching him or holding him in the air, just the feeling of being pulled upwards by an unseen force. 

"I got really scared," Moises said. "I was raised about one and a half meters. 2 I couldn't speak 
or cry for help, and I couldn't move. The light was very hot. I was terrified." 

His body was so rigid that a package of cookies he was carrying under one arm was crushed. 
Moises doesn't know how long he was suspended under the UFO but thinks it was at least five 
minutes. All that time he was deathly afraid something bad was going to happen to him. 

"But then they let me down very gently, and the light moved off a little ways," he said. 

Moises was so unnerved that he collapsed on the ground. Meanwhile, the UFO sat motionless at 
treetop level not far away, still as bright as ever. 

There are two houses within several hundred yards of where this happened and others a half 
mile away, but apparently no one else saw the light. Most of the homes in the area have wooden 
windows, which are closed and latched from the inside at night for security and to keep the rain and 
mosquitoes out. Glass windows and screens are rare. 



Moises was too dizzy to walk and his eyes were smarting from the light. Slowly he began 
dragging himself on his hands and knees toward his own home, still two to three hundred yards away. 


Attacked Again 

"I was crawling on the ground like a lizard because I couldn't walk," he said. "I got about a 
hundred meters and crawled under a little tree, where I rested for a moment. Then I went on again 
and, just as I started to come out from the other side of the tree, they came back and got me again." 

By now the UFO had moved back over Moises, with only the branches of the tree separating 
them, and suddenly he found himself being pulled upward a second time. He stopped rising about 
three feet off the ground and was in a crouching position, as if he were still crawling. 

"My head hit the branches when I went up," he said. "I was paralyzed again, and this time I felt 
very cold. I couldn't move. I couldn't shout for help, and the light was hurting my eyes again. The thing 
was above me, going around and around and around." 

This time Moises believes he was held in the air for as long as fifteen minutes. He remained 
conscious throughout but terrified. There was nothing he could do but pray. 

Finally, the UFO moved away for good, going out of his range of vision. Until that moment it had 
made no noise at all, but as it drifted off, Moises could hear a low humming sound like a quiet 
turbine. As it left, Moises felt the paralysis quickly end and he fell to the ground like a lead weight. 

"They just dropped me hard," he said. In great pain and terribly afraid the UFO would come 
back a third time, he crawled home as fast as he could. "My left eye began to swell and bulge out of 
my head, and I couldn't see out of it by the time I got home." 

When he reached his house, he banged frantically on the door until his wife let him in. He was 
almost hysterical and couldn't immediately tell her what happened. 

"I sank down in a chair, and for fifteen minutes I couldn't speak," Moises said. "A little later I 
peeked out the front door and saw the light over the church. When all this was happening to me, the 
light was white, but when it was over the church, it looked like a huge red ball. It was rocking back 
and forth like a pendulum." 

Moises is one of hundreds of people in Brazil who have been subjected to bizarre attacks by 
UFOs for at least thirty years and possibly much longer. Most of the victims are terrorized but 
otherwise unharmed but some have been injured and a few were left dead or dying. Thousands of 
people may have been assaulted, but just how many may never be known. Brazil is huge and heavily 
populated, and no person or organization or government agency collects information on all of the 
close encounters that occur throughout the country. 

Too Few Investigators 

For more than fifty years now, UFOs have been seen in virtually every nation in the world at 
some time or other, and sometimes frequently, with sightings or close encounters occurring 
somewhere nearly every day. But to my knowledge it is only in Brazil — not neighboring countries or 
the United States or any other nation in the world — that UFOs have been so overtly hostile. No one 
knows why. 

There are only a few hundred UFO investigators among the one hundred sixty million inhabitants 



of Brazil. All are civilians who work on their own, devoting whatever time and money they can 
afford to look into reports of UFO incidents. The government has shown an occasional interest but is 
not known to be actively investigating the phenomenon, at least on a regular basis. Thus, there are 
large areas of the nation where there are no investigators, and most sightings and close encounters go 
unreported. 

Cynthia Luce, a fellow investigator, and I learned about Moises Campelo by accident. We had 
been looking for a woman who'd had a similar experience on the same mountain a dozen years 
earlier, but we learned she had moved away, and neighbors told us about Moises. 

We found him at his modest home on a small mountain farm called Sitio Timbauba, a few miles 
north of the town of Campo Redondo. 3 This is in the state of Rio Grande do Norte in northeastern 
Brazil, where little rain falls. About a fifth as big as Arizona, Rio Grande do Norte looks much like 
it, with mountains and deserts and semi- arid farmland where people have to survive droughts that 
occur every decade and often last for years. 


A Media Event 

Moises is a wiry man about five-foot-six with curly black hair, intense dark eyes and a heavy, five 
o'clock shadow. He weighs about one-hundred-thirty pounds. His wife and children and half a dozen 
neighbors and relatives crowded into his living room to listen as we talked. Cynthia was 
interpreting. 4 She and I seemed to be as much the center of attention as Moises was as he told us 
what happened to him. Most of these people had never seen Americans before. 

Throughout the years since my first trip to Brazil in 1978, crowds have often gathered whenever 
I visited quiet, little settlements or farm areas where there's not much excitement and few strangers 
are ever seen. 

Several times in 1978, 1979 and 1981,1 hired a small plane and pilot and flew to remote 
villages with friends or interpreters. We'd circle a community trying to find a place to land (on two 
occasions a churchyard and narrow lane just beyond had to do) or as a signal for a taxi to come and 
meet us if there was a landing strip. Once on the ground, we'd be surrounded by a hundred kids and 
adults before we even climbed down from the plane. Many had never seen an American before, and 
the children were greatly amused by the funny way I speak, breaking into peels of laughter every time 
I opened my mouth. 

The novelty would soon wear off and most would leave, but sometimes a dozen or more kids 
and adults would follow us as we walked through the village talking to people who'd had UFO 
experiences. Then our entourage would escort us back to the plane several hours later and wave as 
we took off. 

Even in recent visits it was sometimes difficult to conduct an interview in peace and quiet. Late 
one Sunday afternoon in July 1993,1 talked to a young man just as a soccer game was ending in a 
nearby farm field. Within five minutes we were surrounded by all the spectators from the game, plus 
most of the players. 

The same thing often happens when going to the home of someone like Moises, but on a smaller 
scale. His house is about two miles from the main highway. It is easily accessible by car unless a rare 
rain has turned into mud the lanes that go up and down the hills between the highway and his home. 
Few people in the area own cars, but cars are not uncommon, and they don't attract as much attention 



as a plane swooping down out of the sky. Thus, our "audiences" are smaller. 


Lasting Effects 

As Moises finished telling us his story, he said: "I thought they were going to take me to Europe." 
Everyone laughed, including Moises, but it wasn't funny the night the UFO tormented him or for some 
time after it was over. 

"I was numb on my left side for three to four months," he said. "My left side around my waist 
and hip felt paralyzed." 

He also had trouble with his left eye for a year and a half. "It swelled so much that I couldn't 
sleep at night for a while afterwards because I couldn't close it. I was blind in it for a few days, and I 
still have trouble with it." 

The eye appeared to be irritated. One problem was that it hadn't been properly treated. He said 
a doctor told him he needed an operation, and three times he went to a hospital, and each time the 
electricity failed. He never had the operation. 

The land on this part of the mountain belongs to Moises' mother. He's lived and worked here all 
his life and has no intention of leaving even though he knows UFOs are still in the area. 

"1 don't go out alone at night anymore," he said. "I only go out when somebody else is with me." 

I interviewed Moises in September 1992 and again in July 1993. He is just one of the 
approximately seventeen hundred UFO witnesses I've talked to in ten countries since 1975. His story 
is not an isolated incident. Brazil is full of people who've been victims of appalling UFO encounters. 

In fact, one of the women who was listening to our interview with Moises said that less than a 
week earlier her daughter and son-in-law, both nineteen, and three young girls had to hide If om a 
UFO. The five young people had been walking to the couple's home on a mountain two miles west of 
Moises' home when the incident occurred. 

"ft was about seven o'clock at night," the woman, Moises' sister, Severina Campelo, said, "ft 
was dark and they were walking up the hill when a bright light came on above them and tried to suck 
them up. They all ran under an old cashew tree and hung onto it for two hours until the light finally 
went away." 

Unfortunately, we didn't have time to find the young people to talk to them, and when I went 
back to Sitio Timbauba in 1993, the couple had moved away. 

What Do We Know? 

What could have so frightened Moises that he dreads going outside by himself at night? His 
tormentor suddenly appeared from nowhere, pulled him off the ground twice within thirty minutes, 
subjected him to extreme heat and cold and a paralysis that kept him from moving or speaking, 
dropped him gently the first time and very hard the second. The light was blindingly bright, a brilliant 
white when near him but red when he last saw it in the distance, rocking back and forth in the sky. 

What was this mysterious object? Obviously, it was a machine of some kind with an intelligent 
creature or creatures controlling it. ft sought him out twice, spotting him the first time in the dark from 
a distance of two miles, ft wasn't a plane or helicopter because it was silent during most of the 
incident, it hovered effortlessly above him, and there was no prop wash or downdraft from rotor 



blades. It wasn't a blimp or any other kind of aircraft because later, when it was near the church, it 
was rocking like a pendulum Finally, no government in the world, so far as we know, has any aircraft 
that can lift a person with a beam of light and suspend him in the air, paralyze and injure him and then 
let him down gently or hard as it wishes. 

It was a UFO or unidentified flying object, but that doesn't tell us much because we don't yet 
know what UFOs are. Almost everyone, it seems, believes he or she "knows" what UFOs are, but the 
fact is that no one really knows anything for certain. 

However, we can learn from Moises' experience because it gives us clues that, when added to 
what we learn from other victims, may one day help us find out what UFOs are all about. And there 
are many clues. 

Several other people have told me they were also levitated, although none of them twice as 
Moises was. In this sense, what happened to him is unique. There are other strange elements as well 
that set his incident apart from others: (A) The brilliant light that makes everything as bright as 
daylight; (B) The paralysis; (C) Moises' inability to speak or cry out for help; (D) His feeling very 
cold in the midst of extreme heat when he was picked up the second time. 

Cynthia Luce suggested that Moises might have gone into shock, which could account for the 
coldness in spite of the heat. Other victims who have felt cold have themselves suggested they may 
have suffered shock. On the other hand, some who reported feeling both cold and hot simultaneously 
also said that everything around them was cold as if they were in an air-conditioned room, but that the 
coldness ended just as soon as the UFO moved away. 

Other people besides Moises have been pulled off the ground. Many more have resisted in one 
way or another. Some have even been snatched up by hooks, and a few have actually been taken 
away. Many have been chased by UFOs and still others have been burned, zapped and otherwise hurt. 
Some have died. 

We have much to learn, but one thing we can say for certain is that this is an aggressive 
phenomenon and no man, woman or child, Brazilian or otherwise, is safe from it. 

1. Brazilians speak Portuguese and Moises is the Portuguese equivalent of Moses. Because 
some names in this book may be difficult for readers, footnotes will be used occasionally as 
guides to pronunciation. Referring to someone by his or her first name is a custom in Brazil. 
Even high-ranking officials, including the president of the country, will often be called by their 
first name in newspaper headlines. 

2. About five feet. Brazil uses the metric system A meter is 3.37 inches longer than a yard. 

Since most sizes and distances given in this book are only estimates by the witnesses, readers 
who don’t operate on the metric system can regard a meter as about equal to a yard. A 
kilometer, or a thousand meters, is .62 of a mile; ten kilometers is 6.2 miles. 

3. A sifro is a farm. 

4. Cynthia Luce is an American who has lived in the mountain village of Sao Jose do Vale do Rio 
Preto northwest of Rio de Janeiro since 1975. She speaks Portuguese fluently and together we 
investigated numerous UFO incidents in northeastern and central Brazil in 1991 and 1992. 



Chapter Two 

HORROR IN THE NIGHT 


Moises never got a good look at what or who attacked him. A few years earlier and not far 
away, Januncio De Souza was similarly assaulted, but he did see the UFO and his tormentors — a man 
and a woman sitting inside it. 

Januncio could have walked out of a Marlboro ad or a western movie. 1 He was six feet tall, at 
seventy-eight lean and still rugged looking with white hair and flowing mustache, high cheekbones, a 
prominent nose and a permanent tan from spending most of his life working the land under the blazing, 
equatorial sun. He was a tough, old man of moderate wealth and power, one of the larger landowners 
in the region. Thirteen families lived on his farm and worked for him, growing cotton, beans, corn and 
livestock. 

Januncio had no reason to fear anyone but, like Moises, he was afraid of the dark. Something 
evil lurked in the black, night sky that absolutely terrified him. It almost got him once, and he wasn't 
going to give it another chance. 

Januncio is the nickname that Francisco Henrique De Souza was given as a boy. He was born on 
this thirteen- hundred-acre farm, which has been in the family for more than a century. It is spread 
across rolling, sandy hills twelve miles southeast of Santa Cruz in Rio Grande do Norte, and twenty- 
five miles southeast of where Moises lives. 

Life was relatively peaceful and simple for Januncio until one night in early January 1979, when 
something came down from the sky and tried to snatch him away. That evening, he had visited a 
neighbor. About eight o'clock, he started walking home, nearly two miles away. Halfway home, he lit 
a cigarette, and that's when his nightmare began. 

Less than fifty steps beyond, a huge, dark apparatus suddenly appeared just above his head. It 
was as if the flare of the match had been a beacon that the strange machine spotted from high in the 
sky and had zeroed in on. 

"It was only about three meters above me," Januncio said, still awed by the experience when he 
told me his story four weeks later. "I didn't see it coming, and it didn't make a sound. It was just 
there." 


Like a Magnet 

The apparition badly frightened Januncio. "It was like a big silo," he said. It was at least twenty- 
five feet tall and had a round bottom twelve to fifteen feet in diameter. 

"A door opened on the bottom," he continued, spreading his hands apart to show what it looked 
like. "And I could see a man and a woman sitting in seats like a car. They were sitting still, alive but 
very still and stiff. They never moved. The woman looked like she was wearing a dress. 

"When the door opened, a lot of light came out, and I felt like I was being pulled up into the 
object. It was like a magnet. I grabbed a small palm tree and wrapped my arms and legs around it. 

The light was very hot, and I was terrified." 

Januncio weighed about one-hundred-seventy pounds, and even though he had an iron grip on the 
tree, the pull from the UFO was so great that he was dragged up the trunk until his feet left the ground. 



Then gravity pulled him back down. 

"This happened five times," he said, raising and lowering his arms. "Up and down, again and 
again. My chest was scraped raw." 

Januncio said he began crying and thought he was going to die. "Then when the man and woman 
saw I wasn't going to let go, they dropped something like hot oil on me to make me let go of the tree. I 
felt like I was between two big fires. I couldn't move. It burned my arms and hurt very much, but I 
was too afraid to let go. I almost died I was so scared." 

The light was unbearably hot, he said. "It lasted less than two minutes. If it had lasted any 
longer, I believe I would've died because it was so very hot. When I wouldn't let go, they closed the 
door, the light went out and the thing went away real fast, like lightning." 

The object went straight up into the sky and vanished. Januncio never heard a sound at any time. 
When his eyes became adjusted to the darkness again, he ran home, his clothes soaked with sweat. 

He told me his story as we sat in a large, sparsely furnished room with a high ceiling. Januncio's 
home consists of several adjoining buildings and is one of the largest in the area, with a small chapel 
in the backyard. It was early afternoon and the only light in the room came from an open doorway and 
several windows. It was cool and pleasant. 

Januncio's wife Nina and two other women sat in chairs facing us, listening as they shelled peas 
or beans in their laps. Nina nodded from time to time as Januncio talked. She knew the story by heart. 

"He was very scared when I opened the door," Nina said, telling how Januncio came running 
home after the encounter. "He told me he thought the people in the flying saucer were going to take 
him away because he'd heard that this happens. We didn't believe those stories before, but we do 
now." 


From Another World 

Januncio's burns and scrapes had healed by then and I could see no trace of them. 

"I was sick for two days afterward," he said. "I couldn't eat. I had a bad headache, my chest was 
scratched and red, and my arms had burns on them like cigarette burns." 

Asked what he thought the object was, Januncio said: "I don't know. I thought it was a flying 
saucer because I'd heard about them before. It doesn't make any noise. It's like an invisible object. 

You just see the lights. To my mind, this is not from this world. It's from another world. Everybody 
around here is scared of the object. Everybody has seen the light. Last week they saw it every night. 
One man defecated all over himself he was so scared." 

Januncio sat silent for a minute, staring across the room. Then he sighed and said: "I thought that 
thing was going to take me away. I don't go out at night anymore. I'm afraid it will come back." 

He smiled sadly. As much as any man could be, he was master of the world around him, but he 
was afraid to step outside when it's dark. 

A long time after this happened, Januncio got over much of his fear and occasionally ventured 
out at night, but life was never again the same for him The robust vitality he had enjoyed before the 
incident was gone and his health was poor the rest of his life. 

He died in 1991 at the age of ninety, outliving all but four of the twenty children he and Nina had 
brought into this world. Many of them had succumbed to childhood diseases in an era when Brazil 
had fewer doctors and hospitals. 



Januncio's case has always had a special meaning for me. I have talked to other people who 
have had worse experiences, but for many years his was the one case against which I measured all 
others. Few matched it for sheer horror, brute force and crudeness. Those of us who believe UFOs 
are real almost automatically think of them as being far superior to us technologically. Yet in this case 
— and at least one other, as I was to learn — the occupants resorted to dropping hot oil, apparently in 
an effort to make their victims release their grip. Are these creatures really from an advanced 
civilization? 

Whatever the answer, Januncio's experience gives us additional clues about UFOs. As with 
Moises, the object just suddenly appeared overhead but Januncio did see a shape, something tall and 
cylindrical with a man and woman inside it. He had to endure heat so intense he thought it might burn 
up the tree and kill him. 1 2 


Creatures Aren't Human 

At the same time, the UFO exerted a force so powerful that Januncio was dragged up the tree five 
times, even though he hugged it with a death grip. When that didn't work, hot liquid was dropped on 
him to make him let go. When he still hung on, the object disappeared instantly — all this without 
making a sound. 

The encounter left him sick for two days, unable to eat and with a bad headache, scratches on 
his chest and burns on his arms. The event was so traumatic that it affected his health the rest of his 
life, and he never frilly regained his strength. 

The occupants of the UFOs that attacked Moises and Januncio didn't seem to care that they were 
terrorizing and endangering the lives of these men. But for what purpose? To see Moises' look of 
horror as he hung in the air paralyzed? Or his pain as they pounced on him again as he was trying to 
crawl away? Or to watch old Januncio crying as he hung onto the palm tree for dear life and squirmed 
in agony when they dropped scalding liquid on him? 

But empathy and caring are human emotions, and these UFO creatures are not human — an 
important point to remember. If they have emotions, they may not be ones that we humans can relate 
to. 

For a dozen years I thought Januncio's experience was truly one of a kind. In talking with 
hundreds of other people around the world who'd had strange UFO experiences, I'd never heard 
anything like it. But in 1991 I discovered that Januncio's encounter was not unique at all. An almost 
identical incident occurred right in his own neighborhood just months later — with a bizarre twist. 

1. The letter J in Portuguese is pronounced the same as in English. Thus, Januncio De Souza 
would be called Jah-NOON-see-oh Day SOO-zah. 

2. In another case to be related later, a UFO hovering over a tree radiated such intense heat that 
the tree did burn and break in two, just seconds after a young man who had been hiding under it 
fled because the heat had become so unbearable. 



Chapter Three 
A FAMILY AFFAIR? 

Januncio's experience and some of the other UFO incidents to be related later occurred in the 
1970s and 1980s. They may seem like ancient history to some people, but let's talk about it. 

No one knows what time scale UFOs operate on. Our concept of time is based on the rotation of 
the earth on its axis for defining a day and our circling the sun for what we call a year. Splitting the 
day into hours, minutes and seconds was something some clever people did so long ago that we don't 
know who to credit or blame. 

Our definition of time may be completely meaningless to the crews of UFOs, especially if they 
come from alien worlds with longer or shorter days or years or whatever they have. For all we know, 
our year 1979 may be last week or last night for them. And the guys who tormented Januncio in 1979 
and Moises in 1991 may have just gone off for a coffee break in between. 

In each of my field trips to Brazil since 1978, most of the people I talked to had undergone their 
UFO experiences very recently — just a few days, weeks or months before. This means those 
encounters were fresh events at the time of the interviews. This was particularly true in 1991, 1992, 
and 1993 when over half of the more than one hundred cases I investigated had taken place in the 
twelve months preceding the interviews. Some had occurred just the day or week before. 

This means that UFOs are still around. They've been active in Brazil for many years and appear 
to be as active today as ever 1 So far as I can tell, there's never been any let up, although UFOs tend 
to move from place to place, concentrating on one area for a while and then another. Events much like 
those recounted here can be happening right now or could happen somewhere soon. 

Another Attack 

In this book, cases are being discussed in a particular sequence — generally from "routine" 
encounters to more harmful and deadly ones — to reveal the patterns that run through most of these 
cases, similarities that tie them together, old and new. This is important, because we can't begin to 
deal with these intruders from somewhere else until we have a clear picture of them and what they're 
doing. 

Some incidents don't come to light for many years, yet they're still significant for what they tell 
us about the phenomenon. The following case is an example, and we discovered it only in 1991, long 
after it occurred. 

In one of those curious and amazing coincidences that seem to abound in UFO investigations, the 
next victim of an attack like Januncio's was one of Januncio's own sons. His name is Benedito 
Henrique De Souza, better known as Beato. 2 He had an almost identical encounter just a few months 
after Januncio did and only a mile or so away. 

The father of eight children, Beato lives with his family about two miles from the main house on 
Fazenda Cacaruaba, the ancestral farm. 3 He is built much like his father and has a ruddy complexion, 
dark hair and a graying mustache. 

Beato was thirty nine when a UFO tried to abduct him. Cynthia Luce and I talked to him in 1991 
and again in 1992. He couldn't remember the date of the attack, only that it was during the dry season 



between August and November in 1979. He'd had dinner with friends and between seven and eight 
o'clock in the evening started walking home, only a third of a mile away. There was no moon and it 
was dark. 

About halfway home he lit a cigarette, then continued walking. In a virtual repeat of Januncio's 
incident, the flame of his lighter must have attracted the attention of something in the sky, and without 
warning an object suddenly appeared just above him. 

Hole in the Bottom 

"I didn't see it coming," Beato said. "It was just there. It came right down, seven or eight meters 
above me. The bottom part seemed like a fishing net. When I looked up, there was a hole on the 
bottom and a lot of light was coming from inside it. It was like daylight inside." 

Beato immediately felt himself being pulled up. Badly frightened, he quickly squatted down, 
grabbed the base of a huge desert bush about ten feet tall and hung on with both hands. 

"I thought it was going to take me away," he explained. "It was an incredible light and was like a 
vacuum cleaner that was trying to suck me up. I felt they were trying to suck me up into that hole." 

The light was so bright he couldn't look at it very long, but he did see three people inside the 
craft, two men and a woman. 

"I couldn't stand the light," Beato said. "It hurt my eyes very much. I looked up and saw the 
people but had to turn away because I couldn't stand the light." 

The pull was strong but he never left the ground. And, just as had happened with his father, 
when he wouldn't let go of the bush, tiny drops of scalding liquid fell on his shoulders. "It splattered 
when it hit and was very, very hot. It burned me." 

Despite the pain, he was too terrified to let go, and suddenly the object simply vanished. Beato 
didn't see it go or hear anything. He had his head bent down to avoid looking at the light, and in an 
instant all the light around him disappeared, and he no longer felt anything pulling him up. "When I 
looked up, the thing was gone," he said. 

The entire incident lasted only about three minutes, Beato believes, but it seemed much longer. 
He was momentarily blinded because of the light. "I stayed there for a bit, and then I ran home." 

When he got home, his wife examined him and found about a dozen tiny burns on his shoulders. 
Beato doesn't know what kind of liquid fell on him. 

"It was like a few drops of hot oil," he said. "It passed through my shirt and didn't leave any 
stain. It just evaporated." 

He didn't see the drops falling, and was aware of them only when they hit his shoulders. The 
object was directly above him at the time. 

Hardly Worth Keeping 

There's no way of knowing whether this was the same object that attacked his father. Neither 
man was very precise in describing the objects. Januncio saw something shaped like a silo but with a 
round bottom twelve to fifteen feet wide. What Beato saw was long and round and with a bottom he 
estimated to be about twenty feet wide. Both men could have been seeing bell-shaped objects. 

Beato didn't see anything inside the object other than the people, and then only from the chest up. 



"I think there was one woman and two men," he said. "There was one with long shoulder-length 
red hair, anyway. One of the men looked at me like this." Beato gave a disdainful shrug. "He was 
looking at me as if I wasn't very interesting. I had the impression the other two were looking beyond 
me, elsewhere." 

The three people seemed to be sitting in seats, the woman a bit closer to him than the men. He 
didn't notice what they were wearing. 

Throughout the incident Beato didn't hear any sound. "If there was a sound 1 was so scared I 
don't remember." 

Januncio heard no sound either. The two incidents were remarkably similar in nearly all 
respects except that Januncio saw two people and Beato three. One big difference is that in Beato's 
case one of the occupants appeared to react to him personally, even though it seemed to be just a 
shrug of contempt. All the others in both incidents were like robots or seemed preoccupied. 

One other new element in Beato's case is that his first impression when looking up at the light 
was that it looked like a fishing net falling toward him. This aspect has been reported in several other 
cases and will be discussed later. 

Beato's eyes hurt because of the brilliant light, and for several days he couldn't stand looking at 
anything bright. Unlike Januncio, Beato had no headaches or other physical effects except for the 
burns. But, like Moises and his father, he was afraid to go out at night after that. 

"It was two months before I went out at night again," he said. "And I still don't smoke outside at 
night anymore, unless someone is with me." 

He first told us his story in September 1991, twelve years after the incident. With me were 
Cynthia Luce and Jose Jean Alencar, an investigator from Fortaleza. At that time, I didn't know Beato 
was Januncio's son. Cynthia, Jean and I had driven from Fortaleza to Campina Grande in the state of 
Paraiba to meet with a group of young UFO investigators and look into some cases there. We decided 
to return to Fortaleza by way of Rio Grande do Norte, the state just north of Paraiba. I hadn't planned 
to go to Rio Grande do Norte on this trip and hadn't reviewed any files from my earlier investigations 
there. 

I remembered most of the details of Januncio's case but, regrettably, not his name. All I could 
think of when talking to Beato was "Juscelino" and I was astounded that he'd had an encounter almost 
identical to "Juscelino's" and in the same area. Yet Beato didn't know any "Juscelino." 

Return to Cacaruaba 

When I returned home and dug into my files, I was even more amazed to find the two men had 
almost identical names — Francisco Henrique De Souza and Benedito Henrique De Souza — but was 
chagrined to discover I had called the older man Juscelino instead of Januncio. No wonder Beato nor 
any of his neighbors knew who I was talking about. 

The curious "coincidence" continued to gnaw at me, and I had to find out whether there was any 
connection between the two men. This was one of the reasons why I returned to Brazil in September 
1992.1 also wanted to ask Beato many more questions than occurred to me the first time. A review of 
the first interview revealed a number of details I hadn't inquired about. 

This is always a major problem in investigating cases in another country. If you don't do a great 
job of interviewing the first time, you may have to wait two or three years or more before you can go 



back and correct your mistakes. 

Cynthia Luce and I returned to Fazenda Cacaruaba in 1992 and found Beato with his ten-year- 
old son and a handful of men building a well with cement walls at the bottom of a field on his farm It 
was late in the morning and the sun was broiling hot, so we stepped into the shade of a tree. For more 
than a half hour Beato graciously answered a long list of new questions I had prepared. He also told 
us about his father's final years. 

Everything Beato said was recorded on audio tape, but a stiff breeze was blowing at times and 
some of his responses were obliterated by the wind, a hazard in outdoor interviews. Still, most of the 
important points were covered, and a third interview won't be necessary. 

Beato now owns about a fourth of the old family farm and was very much in charge of the men 
working for him that day without being obvious about it. Lunch time was approaching but he took time 
to answer all of our questions and pose for photographs, squatting beneath a catingueira, a large bush 
similar to the one that he hid under when he was attacked. 

If things like this happened to Moises, Januncio and Beato, how many others were attacked? No 
one knows. I have talked to at least forty other people in Brazil who have had similarly bizarre 
experiences, but there could be ten to a thousand times that many, for reasons that will be explained 
later. Sadly, not all of the forty others were as fortunate as Moises, Januncio and Beato. 

1. In her book UFOs e Abducoes no Brasil (UFOs and Abductions in Brazil ), noted Brazilian 
ufologist Irene Granchi sets 1952 as the beginning of the “modern period” of UFOs in 
Brazil. 

2. Bay-AH-toe. 

3. Fa-ZEN-dah Ka-ka-roo-AH-bah. A fazenda is a large farm, plantation or ranch, as 
contrasted with a sitio, a small farm 



Chapter Four 

UPLIFTING BUT TERRIFYING 

If the encounters described in this book were graded on a scale of one to ten — one being just 
sightings of strange lights in the night sky and ten being the ultimate UFO experience, death — 

Moises' ordeal would probably be a seven. Januncio's and Beato's would be fives or sixes. 

Encounters on the lower end of the scale are reported much more often. Although witnesses to 
lesser incidents are rarely harmed, those events can be nearly as traumatic as the more serious ones. 
Not as much information comes out of them, but they're important because they provide continuing 
evidence that UFOs are still with us after all these years, and they're as active as ever. 

Those encounters on the upper end of the scale — attempted abductions, abductions, levitations, 
injuries and deaths — are reported less frequently but are much more significant because of what they 
reveal about UFOs and the effects they can have on people. They are what this book is about. 

The attacks on Moises, Januncio and Beato were unusual, but other people have had encounters 
just as devastating and no less distressing. Alfredo Marques Soares is an example. He is a farmhand 
who was assaulted by a UFO in July 1977, eighteen months before a UFO tried to pry Januncio loose 
from the palm tree. Although Alfredo's case is relatively old, it is significant because it shows 
another aspect of the unusual powers that UFOs have. 

Then fifty-five and widowed, Alfredo was walking home from a neighbor's house in Cardeiros, 
Ceara shortly after dark one evening when something hit him hard on the back of his left leg. 1 

Hurt All Over 

"When I looked back I saw a big beam of light," he said. "It was yellowish-white and looked like 
a fishing net. I felt like something was trying to suck me up. I grabbed a wooden fence and hung on. It 
was a very strong pull, and I really had to struggle to keep from being pulled away. I hurt all over my 
body." 

He tried to run under a cashew tree but instead found himself going in circles. "I couldn't move 
my leg," he said. "I couldn't straighten it out. It was numb and aching." 

Alfredo never got a good look at the object. "The light blinded me, and I felt like I'd been 
shocked. It was very hot. I felt heat and cold at the same time. I was shaking very hard and I felt sick." 

The UFO lit up a large area around him. It was so bright that he could see insects crawling on 
the ground. The incident lasted for only a few minutes but to him it seemed like a long time. It came to 
an end when the light around him began to grow dim. "I looked up and saw the ray of light 
disappearing," Alfredo said. 

In agony, he dragged himself home and had his daughter examine the back of his leg. She told 
him it was black and blue and had been burned. 

The next day he was still so upset that he began crying and had to lie down, shaking all over. 
When he calmed down, he went to a doctor who treated his burned leg. 

"ft was blistered, and the blisters became infected," said Alfredo. "Also I had to urinate a great 
deal. For two days I had a stomach ache, diarrhea and bad headaches, and my left side hurt." 

For three months, he couldn't walk, and for three months after that, he had to use a crutch. 



Fortaleza UFO researcher Jose Jean Alencar, who first investigated this case, took Cynthia Luce 
and me to meet Alfredo in September 1991. When Alfredo — then seventy, retired and married again - 
- told us his story, he said his leg still bothers him. "I have to take a lot of medicine for it," he said. 

In many ways Alfredo's experience was similar to the others discussed so far. Like Moises, he 
saw only a bright, blinding light and felt himself being pulled upward. Like Januncio and Beato, he 
was able to resist, by hanging onto a fence. As in Beato's encounter, he saw what looked like a falling 
fish net. Like Moises, he felt heat and coldness at the same time. And the nausea, diarrhea and 
headaches that he experienced are frequently reported in close encounters, not only in Brazil but 
throughout the world. 

What was new, to me, was that Alfredo was injured by a UFO that was at least several hundred 
yards away from him. At that distance, it zapped him with a beam of light that burned his leg and left 
him crippled for six months. 


Valley of the Old Women 

Other Brazilians have also been injured in similar abduction attempts, some of them being left 
permanently impaired, and the dual hot-cold feeling has shown up in other cases. However, not 
everyone is injured or tortured when they're exposed to a magnet-like pull. 

Hulvio Brant Aleixo, a veteran researcher in central Brazil, has investigated a number of such 
cases. 2 He is a psychologist and university professor inBelo Horizonte and has spent more than forty 
years investigating UFO incidents in a region known as Vale Das Velhas, or the Valley of the Old 
Women, north of Belo Horizonte. During a discussion in his home in September 1992, he said that 
about fifteen of the more than three hundred close encounters he has investigated involved people 
who were pulled upward. Among them are the following: 

CASE ONE. In the town of Baldim, a woman named Rosalia saw a light overhead. The light 
went out, and in the same instant, she felt herself being pulled up, although nothing was touching her. 
She grabbed a fence pole to save herself. However, she was so terrified that she tried to run, but once 
again felt herself being drawn upward, and again she grabbed the pole. She screamed for her 
husband. When he ran outside, the pull suddenly ended. Seconds later they both saw a light fly up 
from the bushes, pass thirty feet over their heads, circle the field and go away. 

CASE TWO. Also in Baldim, a youth about eighteen was in a public plaza when he saw an 
object overhead and felt himself being pulled upward. He grabbed a tree and hung on until the UFO 
went away. 

CASE THREE. In the town of Mocambo, a fourteen- year-old boy named Julianete saw a 
glowing object and felt himself being pulled up. However, he didn't grab anything and never left the 
ground. The most interesting aspect was that he reported the sensation of being pulled up was 
intermittent, not steady. 

All three encounters took place in October 1978. 

Dancing Points of Light 


Similar incidents occurred elsewhere in Brazil during the 1970s and 1980s, and they're still 
going on. In August 1990, a farm woman had an encounter during which she felt not only heat and cold 



at the same time but also downward pressure while being pulled up. 

Her name is Maria Natividade Cavalcante. She was fifty-six when Cynthia Luce and I 
interviewed her in September 1992. She's an intelligent, stocky woman with alert, dark eyes, a firm 
handshake and a sense of humor. She lives in a mud-walled home with a tile roof— typical among 
poor farm families — four miles south of Lajes in Rio Grande do Norte. Her home is about thirty-five 
miles north of Moises Campelo’s farm and there's a mountain range in between. 

Natividade has no electricity or running water in her home. 3 Oil lamps provide light, and water 
is hauled from a reservoir some distance away in barrels that are stored under a tree in her backyard. 
On the night this happened, she needed water to finish washing the dishes. It was dark, between six 
and seven o'clock. Because rabid foxes had been reported in the area, she asked her nineteen-year- 
old son, Jose, to go with her into the backyard as a precaution. 

As soon as they got water out of the barrel, she sent him back in to finish his homework. He was 
already inside when she started back toward the house with the water. She was within a dozen steps 
of the back door when a bright light suddenly lit up above her. She froze in her tracks. 

"I didn't want to lookup," Natividade said. "I was frightened because it was so bright. I could 
see colored dots of light dancing on the ground all around me, all the colors of the rainbow, and I 
could feel myself being pulled up. At the same time, I felt as if something was pushing me down. It 
was hot but I felt cold. I thought it was going to take me away because it was pulling on me so hard." 

When this happened, Natividade stooped down, cowering in fear, and squeezed her eyes shut. 
Her feet never left the ground even though the pull was strong. At no time did she hear any sound. All 
this happened in seconds, and she began screaming to her son for help. 

The encounter ended as abruptly as it started, and by the time Jose got to the door, the object 
was gone. Natividade was in a state of shock for some time, and it was more than fifteen minutes 
before she was able to tell Jose what happened. 

"My whole body was numb," she said. "I was sick to my stomach, and for about a month I was 
terribly nervous. Little things would make me jump. Almost anything would startle me." 

It was two years later that we interviewed her, and she admitted still being skittish about going 
outside at night. "I go out only if I have to, and I look around to see if anything can possibly come 
down." 

Natividade's encounter reveals once again the hot- cold phenomenon, plus two new elements, 
the myriad dots of colored lights dancing on the ground and the feeling of being pressed downward at 
the same time she felt herself being pulled up. The strange powers of UFOs multiply. 

Victim Paralyzed 

A year later, early in the evening of September 30, 1991, an encounter occurred that revealed 
two more ways in which UFOs can exert unusual powers. The victim this time was Vicente 
Fernandes Filho, who owns an auto parts and repair shop in Santa Cruz 4 

Vicente lives in town but had gone to a small farm he owns three to four miles to the southwest. 
He was sitting in the dark on the veranda of the farmhouse, listening to music on the tape deck in his 
pickup truck when suddenly everything around the house was lit up. 

"I thought it was the headlights of a car, and I looked out toward the highway, but there was no 
car," he said. "Then the tape deck suddenly stopped and ejected the tape. I stepped down off the 



veranda and looked up and saw this flying saucer no more than thirty meters above a tree. It was 
round and as big as a bus." 

The tree is about a hundred feet from the house. There was total silence. As Vicente stepped out 
into the yard, he was hit by a ray of light from the UFO, and he involuntarily froze. 

"I felt like I'd gotten an electrical shock," he said. "I was paralyzed, and I felt like something 
was trying to pull me up. I was terribly afraid. My whole body felt numb, and I thought the world was 
coming to an end." 

Ten seconds later the light turned off. The paralysis and upward pull ceased, and then Vicente 
could see a number of small, colored lights—red, green, yellow and blue —going on and off in 
sequence around the object. 

A few seconds later, the UFO began to move slowly toward the south, passing over cows that 
were standing in a field. The spotlight that had paralyzed Vicente came on again and moved about as 
if searching for something on the ground. It didn't touch the animals, and they showed no reaction to 
the UFO. The light turned off again, and twice more turned on, both times seeming to search in a 
random pattern, as the UFO gradually moved out of sight. 

Vicente, thirty-three, told us his story a year later in his Santa Cruz auto-parts shop and then took 
us to his farm to show us where everything happened. He said his legs were weak for three days after 
the incident but he had no other aftereffects. 

Interestingly, late one Saturday night in 1978 when he was still single, he and a girlfriend had a 
similar experience after they had ridden to a nearby reservoir on his motorcycle. At that time, a UFO 
focused a light on them, he felt paralyzed and the woman fainted. She was unconscious for twenty 
minutes, and it was an hour before they felt well enough to leave. 

In both cases the UFOs exhibited the ability to paralyze a person with a beam of light — as 
happened to Moises — and in Vicente's 1991 experience, it also was able to cause the tape deck in 
his pickup to stop playing and eject the tape. 

A Noiseless "Tornado" 

There is one more case in this "uplifting" category, and it has an unusual twist. It took place about 
eleven o'clock one night in March 1991 as Jorge Fernando De Sousa, forty-two, was guarding a field 
of tall grass to keep animals from eating it. The field is on the edge of Lake Apodi and next to the 
town of Apodi in western Rio Grande do Norte. 5 

"I was sort of nodding off when I noticed this wind whirling around me," Jorge said when we 
visited Apodi six months after this happened. "It was like a tornado, and it was pulling on me. I was 
sitting down, and it was trying to take me away. I began crawling and crouching, hanging onto the 
grass with both hands, trying not to be pulled up and trying to get away. I felt like I was flying but my 
feet never left the ground." 

The grass was swirling, and dirt and debris were blowing around him. Curiously, the wind was 
both hot and cold. 

"I was surprised by the heat," Jorge said. "It was a cold wind but I felt hot, and it made no noise. 
I think it was something very modern because it didn't make any noise." 

Then he got an even bigger surprise as the area around him suddenly lit up. "I looked up and saw 
this big ball of light, sort of bluish-white like a fluorescent light." 



The light was round and in the center of a square object about a hundred feet above him. When 
the light turned on, the wind ceased, and he no longer felt himself being pulled upward. 

"The light reminded me of the cab of a big truck," Jorge said. "It was four to five meters wide 
and round like a drum. The light that came from the center part was brighter than the light around it. 
There was a noise like a cross between bees and a refrigerator, but very quiet, a humming sound. I 
was very scared. I thought the light was going to take me away, and I started running. 

"His home is on the edge of town four hundred yards away, and he ran all the way with the light 
following right behind him 

"The light was chasing me, and when I got to my street, it went away rapidly. I've never been so 
afraid in my life." 

When this incident began, Jorge had no light with him, and he wasn't smoking. The UFO spotted 
him in the dark and created a cold "wind" that felt hot to him and pulled on him as he tried to get away 
from it. The incident lasted perhaps ten minutes, he thinks, and for much of that time Jorge was 
fighting the "wind." 

His eyes hurt for half an hour but he had no other aftereffects. It was nearly a month before he 
dared go back out at night again. I talked to him again in July 1993, and although he's still wary, he 
regularly goes to his field at night. 

Next, people who fought the "wind" — and lost. 

1. Say-ah-RAH. This state, on the northern coast just west of Rio Grande do Norte, has been a 
busy place for UFOs for decades. 

2. OOL-vee-oh Brant Uh-LAY-show. 

3. NA-chee-vee-DAH-gee. 

4. Vee-SEN-chee Fer-NAN-daze FEEL-yo. 

5. Ah-poe-GEE. 




Chapter Five 

THE ‘ANIMAL’ HAS GOT ME! 

A more detailed picture of the strange and unusual powers of UFOs is beginning to emerge. 

First, people feel an unseen force pulling them upward like a magnet. Then a man protecting his grass 
from animals says a "wind" generated by a UFO tried to lift him off the ground. A tornado or 
hurricane is certainly powerful enough to do that but this "wind" wasn't either one. Yet, other people 
say they've also had such a wind pull them into the air. 

The first time I heard of such an incident was, ironically, on the same small mountain where 
Moises was levitated in 1991. In February 1979, on the same day that I interviewed Januncio near 
Santa Cruz, I also talked to a woman who had soared to lofty heights thanks to this "wind." 

Her name is Francisca Bispo De Assis, and she lived at Sitio Timbauba, a few miles north of 
Campo Redondo. The incident had occurred just twelve days earlier on the night of Saturday, January 
27. Her daughter Josefa, then thirteen, was with her at the time. 

Francisca was a small, slender woman of forty-five. On the night this happened, she and Josefa 
had visited some neighbors and were walking home about eleven o'clock. 

"Eight people were with us," Francisca said. "Then they went another way, and my daughter 
Josefa and I came this way." 

The interpreter and I had walked with Francisca and Josefa down to the bottom of the hill near a 
big coconut tree which they had just walked past when their encounter began. Francisca then pointed 
to the top of the hill about three hundred yards away and said: "I saw a big light up there. 'It's the 
animal!' I shouted to Josefa, and I told her to run." 

The path to their home runs diagonally up the hill, and the UFO was about thirty degrees to the 
left of the path. 

"It looked like a star and then it came down toward us," Francisca said. "Then it looked like a 
ball of fire, and it started getting bigger. It was bright and, as it got closer, it looked like an umbrella 
when it opens up. It came down close to the ground and shot a beam of light toward us." 

Carried in the Air 

"Josefa said, 'Mama, let's run!' but by then the animal had caught me in the beam of light. I started 
to rise off the ground, and Josefa grabbed me and pulled me back down. But I said, 'Go, because the 
animal's got me! Run and save yourself!' and she ran off. 

"As soon as she left me, a big wind suddenly hit me. The wind was coming from the animal, and 
it started to pull me toward the light. It was like a tornado, and I got very cold. It pulled my dress up 
around my waist, and my feet were no longer touching the ground." 

As Francisca talked, her voice grew louder and became shrill. 

"I could see my shadow on the ground. My whole body was in the light, and I was terrified. I 
felt like I was in a big tornado. All the time the light and the wind were pulling me up from the 
ground. I was about twenty meters above the ground and moving up the hill toward the animal. My 
whole body was numb. I didn't feel anything. I was crying and scared to death that the animal was 
taking me away and would never bring me back again." 



Francisca became more agitated as she continued talking. 

"I moved about forty meters in the air toward the animal, and then the wind stopped and lowered 
me back down to the ground again. My whole body was tingling. I didn't feel anything else. I was very 
scared and praying to God to help me. 

"The light stayed up there above the hill for a few seconds, just sort of swinging back and forth, 
and then it went away. I was so frightened, I didn't even see where it went." 

Numb for Two Days 

Hysterical and afraid "the animal" would come back, Francisca ran to her darkened house, where 
Josefa and the rest of her family had been watching from a window, afraid to go outside to help her. 

Francisca said her body was numb for two days, and she'd had severe headaches every day 
since the incident. She was nervous and afraid the UFO was going to come back. 

Francisca experienced the hot-cold sensation reported in earlier chapters, but with a curious 
difference. 

"The light was hot even though the wind was blowing all the time," she said. "But I was cold 
from my hips up and hot from the hips down." This was at the time the wind had blown her skirt up 
around her waist. 

The beam of light from the UFO had no effect on her daughter. 

"I didn't feel anything," Josefa said. "I grabbed Mama's arm and pulled her down but I didn't feel 
anything. I thought it was going to take her away." 

Throughout the interview, Francisca referred to the UFO as o bicho, which has several 
interpretations but her meaning was "the Animal." 

A Selective Force 

Francisca and Josefa were not carrying a light of any kind, and the UFO had spotted them in the 
darkness from at least a thousand feet away. The UFO itself started out looking like a small star but 
quickly became a "ball of fire"— probably the most common description of a UFO that I've heard in 
Brazil—that grew in size and moved toward them. As it got closer, its shape became more like an 
open umbrella. At least that was Francisca's perception of it. 

A ray of light shined down at them, and Francisca felt it pulling her off the ground. Curiously, it 
had no effect on Josefa, who pulled her mother back down. But Francisca was still caught in its grip, 
and Josefa fled. 

Francisca was then caught up in a fierce "wind," which drew her into the air toward the UFO, 
with a pull that was even stronger than the light. Francisca likened it to a tornado which blew her 
skirt up around her waist but, oddly, didn't affect anything around her. No twigs, leaves, dirt or debris 
were blown about, just Francisca and her skirt. 

While she was airborne, she felt a tingling sensation throughout her body and was cold from the 
waist up and hot from there down. Then the UFO aliens apparently decided they'd accomplished 
whatever mission they had and lowered her to the ground. 

Fortunately for Francisca, they let her down gently. A fall of sixty-five feet could have killed 
her. Whs this compassion? Moises was let down easily the first time, but the second time, he dropped 



to the ground with a thump. Compassion, though, is a human concept and these aliens are not human 
beings. Besides, if they had any compassion, they would never have bothered Francisca in the first 
place. 

Whenever possible, I go back and talk to people like Januncio and Francisca to see whether 
their encounters had any long-lasting effects. In September 1992,1 returned to Sitio Timbauba, hoping 
to talk to her again, but neighbors said she had moved to Natal, a hundred miles away, some years 
before. However, they said she had never suffered any serious problems because of "the animal." 

When Francisca ran home that night in 1979, she got one last look at the light. It was swinging 
back and forth in an arc at the top of the hill — much as the UFO did after levitating Moises on the 
same hill a dozen years later. 

The beam of light that pulled Francisca off the ground was a selective force that affected only 
her and not Josefa, who was walking just in front of her. Josefa was able to pull her mother back 
down the first time, but Francisca was still in the grip of the unseen force. Josefa still wasn't affected, 
even though she had her hand on her mother's arm Francisca then did what any mother would do — 
she told her daughter to run and save herself. 

Truthful or Excellent Actress? 

Science-fiction writers are fond of force fields, and perhaps that is what this "wind" was, if force 
fields can be created and moved about as we wish. But there are no such things in the world as we 
know it. Certainly such a tool or weapon would have been used by now in warfare, fighting 
criminals, rescuing hostages, kidnapping people, breaking friends out of jail, playing pranks and in 
dozens of other uses. 

Some people would argue that Francisca was highly emotional and made up the story. If so, she 
was also an excellent actress because she was nearly hysterical by the time she finished telling us her 
story. Besides, what did she have to gain? It certainly wasn't for the publicity. No one in her right 
mind runs out and shouts, "I've just been attacked by a UFO" just to get attention. 

So far as we know, no other investigator has ever talked to Francisca about her experience. She 
didn't know we were coming, nor did we until earlier that day, when we first heard about her 
experience. So, it's highly unlikely that she concocted the story hoping that someday a UFO 
investigator would seek her out. 

Francisca was a simple, farm woman, poorly educated and unsophisticated. She was very 
believable. Also, this happened just three weeks after Januncio had his experience and in the same 
area at a time when many people in the region reported seeing UFOs. 

It's difficult to describe the intensity and emotions of people like Januncio, Francisca and so 
many others as they tell what happened to them. You look them in the eye, and they don't look away. 
You go back and forth over their stories, asking them to "clarify" certain points when you're really 
looking for discrepancies. But you don't find any. You ask trick questions, trying to trip them up. But 
they don't trip, and eventually you realize there's no doubt in their minds that they're telling the truth. 

What makes their reports so much more convincing is that other people elsewhere who know 
nothing about the experiences of such people as Francisca say much the same thing has happened to 
them — such as the mother in the next chapter. She was also levitated — along with her daughter and 
their dog, all three at the same time. 




Chapter Six 

IT'S COMING AFTER US! 

Francisca's story puzzled me for years. Hers was the first levitation I'd ever heard of and I had 
trouble visualizing her being carried kicking and screaming through the air toward a UFO. The only 
thing that came to mind was a scene from the movie The Wizard of Oz when the Wicked Witch of the 
West goes flying through the sky on her broomstick. That, of course, was far from the truth. What 
happened to Francisca wasn't fantasy, and it wasn't until I talked to others who'd had similar 
experiences that I began to understand what she had to endure. 

Francisca's encounter was unique to me for about a dozen years. Then in September 1991,1 
talked to a man who also said he'd been carried through the air. Then in 1992, Moises told of having 
been swept off his feet by a UFO, and a few days later, a woman related a similar story. Neither 
incident was known outside of their neighborhoods, and Cynthia Luce and I stumbled on both quite by 
accident. It makes you wonder how many more incidents like these have occurred. 

The second woman was subjected to an assault that was just as bizarre as those involving 
Moises and Francisca. She is a housewife who was lifted off the ground along with a teenage 
daughter and their pet dog (no, he wasn't named Toto). 

Serendipity sometimes seems to play a part in field investigations. More than once I've stopped 
a stranger to ask about someone, and the stranger turned out to be the person I wanted to talk to or was 
a relative. Or a rumored encounter may fizzle out but lead to another strange incident that no one ever 
heard of. That's the way it was with this woman. 

In September 1992, toward the end of a ten-day trip through Rio Grande do Norte, Cynthia and I 
were driving back to the capital city of Natal on the northeastern coast to turn in our rental car and fly 
to Rio de Janeiro. About thirty miles from Natal, we decided to go a little out of our way to visit the 
town of Bom Jesus. 1 A week earlier we'd heard about a man who lived there who supposedly had 
been taken away by a UFO for fifteen days. It was a vague report without much promise but we were 
ahead of schedule, so we detoured to Bom Jesus. 

Like a Rainbow 

At the town's police station, we checked with Detective Alberto Ferreira Da Silva who, we'd 
been told, knew the man. Da Silva said the fellow had moved away but he knew of a woman, Maria 
Dos Dores Lopes, who had been pulled into the air by a UFO along with her daughter and dog. She 
was a neighbor of Da Silva's and he took us to her home. 

Maria is a small, mild-mannered woman of forty- seven. She said what happened to her was the 
most frightening experience of her life. 

"ft was right here, out in front of this house," she said. "My two daughters and I went outside one 
night to take our dog for a walk before putting him in the kennel for the night, ft was about ten 
o'clock." 

The daughters are Marileide, then fifteen, and Maria DaGuia, thirteen. 2 Their dog was a big, 
black mongrel called Doggie. 

"We were out in the front yard, about fifteen meters from the house, and I saw what I thought 



was a light in the sky. I was watching it, and I thought it was very beautiful. It was like a rainbow. 
Then my younger daughter screamed, 'It's coming down! It's coming down! Let's go!' and I said, 'No, 
it's not coming down.' 

"But I was wrong. It WAS coming down, and very quickly. It was a very intense white light 
shaped like a big tub, and when it came down, it looked like a fishing net. The light lit up the ground 
all around us." 


Cold Wind All Around 

The younger daughter, Maria DaGuia, was closer to the house than the others and was able to run 
inside. But her mother and sister and the dog were "captured" by the light coming from the UFO, and 
they found themselves pulled into the air. 

"I felt this cold wind all around me, pulling all three of us up," Maria said. "I couldn't touch the 
ground. I was off the ground. When I tried to lift my leg, I felt a cold wind like when someone opens a 
refrigerator. We were about a meter off the ground. I was wearing a very large skirt, and the wind 
filled it with air, blowing it up around me." 

It was a moment of terror for all three. The mother and daughter were both screaming but the 
dog, almost paralyzed with fright, made no sound, not even a whimper. 

"I was yelling for them to run but they couldn't run," Maria said. "I had one hand on Marileide's 
arm and the dog's leash wrapped around the other. He was close to me. I tried to push Marileide 
away toward the house, but I couldn't. 

"At the same time I was trying to run but my feet weren't touching anything. I was running in the 
air. Marileide couldn't run either, and she was crying. The dog was cowering. I wasn't able to do 
anything. I tried to look up at the thing and could see it was spinning, but I was very afraid. The wind 
was like a hurricane, going in circles." 

The episode ended as abruptly as it began. "The fishing net suddenly went straight up into the 
sky," Maria said. 

As the light moved swiftly away, the cold wind stopped, and all three dropped to the ground 
rather hard. Maria and Marileide landed in a squatting position facing the house, but neither was able 
to stand up or say anything. Shocked and trembling with fright, they began crawling toward the house. 
The dog crawled alongside them with his belly scraping the ground, his ears bent down and his tail 
between his legs. 

In the meantime, Maria DaGuia had told her father Luis, who had been lying down on a sofa, 
what was happening outside. He jumped up, but by the time he got to the front door, the UFO had 
vanished. All he saw was his wife and daughter and the dog crawling toward him. 

Cried for a Long Time 

Once they got inside, neither Maria nor Marileide could speak for a half hour. 

That happened in September 1983 but Maria's memories of it are still vivid. She doesn't know 
whether the cold wind blew any dust or debris around. The light was so bright she couldn't see 
anything very clearly, nor does she remember feeling anything other than cold air swirling around 
them. 



Maria Dos Dores Lopes told us this story in September 1992.1 went back to Bom Jesus in July 
1993, and she repeated the story in virtually identical detail. Only one thing was new this time. 

"After it was over," she said, "I sat in a chair for a long time. I couldn't talk. My husband kept 
asking me questions but I couldn't speak. I heard everything he said, and I could see everything, but I 
couldn't talk. Some time later I began to cry, and I cried for a long time. And then I began to talk." 

It was five months before she got up enough courage to go outside again at night. Marileide also 
was afraid to go outside, but recovered more quickly than her mother. Neither had any other 
aftereffects, nor did the dog. He died several years later when he was hit by a car. 

What is significant about this case is that more than one person was affected. Two human beings 
and an animal were levitated at the same time, and they felt a strong cold wind blowing all around 
them when they were pulled up. 

Also noteworthy is the fact that Maria described the light as it came swiftly down toward them 
as looking like "fishing net." She called it a tarrafa, which is a circular net that fishermen cast in 
shallow waters. 1 2 3 Alfredo Marques Soares used the same term when he was crippled by a beam of 
light from a UFO far to the west in Ceara in 1977, and Beato had seen much the same thing when he 
resisted a UFO's attempt to pull him into the craft near Santa Cruz forty miles southwest of Bom Jesus 
in 1979. Witnesses in several other cases have described the fishing net, and this aspect of the UFO 
phenomenon will be discussed in more detail later. 

Maria said the brilliant light was shaped like a big tub when it first came down. Francisca 
Bispo De Assis, who was pulled into the air at Sitio Timbauba sixty to seventy miles to the west in 
1979, said the light she saw looked like an open umbrella. It's possible the two women were 
describing much the same thing, since a tub and an open umbrella could have similar shapes. 

Both women said the wind was cold and swirling around. Francisca said it was like a tornado; 
Maria said it was like a hurricane. Jorge Fernando De Sousa, who resisted a cold wind trying to pull 
him off the ground in a field near Apodi in 1991, said that what he felt was like a tornado. 

Maria couldn't tell the precise shape of the object because the light was so bright, but she could 
see it was spinning around above her — just as Moises had seen when he was levitated. 

One other interesting note in the Bom Jesus case is that neither Maria nor her daughter suffered 
any aftereffects, other than being unable to speak for half an hour. The whole episode probably lasted 
less than a minute, just long enough for the younger daughter to run inside and arouse her father, and 
the exposure to any emissions from the UFO may have been too brief to have any affect. 

Most of the incidents described so far took place in the Northeast. But UFOs have been active 
throughout Brazil. More than a thousand miles to the south, in the state of Minas Gerais, an incident 
occurred that was quite similar to Maria's and Francisca's. This one involved a young farmer who 
was lucky to have his wife with him at the time. 


1. BAWN Jay-zoo-EES. This means Good Jesus. 

2. Mar-ee-LAY-gee and Ma-REE-uh DA-GHEE-uh, with a hard G. 

3. Tuh-HAF-fuh. 




Chapter Seven 

SOMETHING TOUCHED ME 


Geraldo Gomes might not be around today if his wife Angela hadn't pulled him back down to 
earth when he was snatched off the ground by something mysterious. That's her opinion, anyway, but 
he's not so sure. 

Geraldo was a healthy farmer of thirty at the time, but the experience left him in such ill health 
that it took a year for him to recover. Now, more than a dozen years later, he still suffers from severe 
headaches almost every day. 

He and Angela live on a farm in the Valley of the Old Women in central Brazil. On the night this 
happened, they had visited some friends with his brother and sister-in- law, Jose and Eliana Gomes, 
and at about ten o'clock, the four drove home in Jose's car. Geraldo and Angela got out about a half 
mile from their home to walk the rest of the way, and Jose and Eliana continued on in another 
direction toward their own house. The night was dark. 

When Geraldo and Angela got within two to three hundred yards of home, they discovered they 
weren't alone. 

"We were coming down the hill, and suddenly a big light lit up everything behind us," Geraldo 
said. "I looked over my shoulder and saw a bright light three hundred to four hundred meters away. It 
was bluish-white, like the color from an electric soldering iron. It was bright enough that we could 
see where we were walking. The light was coming out of a hole in something dark but I couldn't tell 
the shape or color of the object itself because the light was so bright. All I saw was a dark form. 

"We continued walking, and I looked back again, and the object was suddenly very close, only 
twenty to thirty meters away. It got to us in no time. It was about the size of a minibus. I heard a sound 
like a refrigerator motor. Angela said later that she heard a sound like a car door being slammed. And 
then it was right on top of us. I was hot. I felt like I was near a fire. It made me sweat and my clothes 
were wet." 


Off the Ground 

"The light went out, and I felt something soft touching my shoulder, but I couldn't see what it was. 
I reached back, and it felt like a soft towel, and suddenly my feet were suspended above the ground. I 
tried to push the thing away, but I was lifted up about seventy centimeters 1 above the ground and was 
carried for about ten meters. Angela saw I was being taken away. She panicked and grabbed me and 
pulled me back down." 

Both of them began screaming for help even though Angela wasn't sure what was happening. "It 
looked like he was dancing in the air," she said. "I was very afraid." 

She grabbed Geraldo and pulled him back down, and the UFO immediately moved back in the 
direction it had come from. A few seconds later the light came on again about a hundred yards away 
and sat motionless just above some dense bushes. It was all too much for Angela. 

"She was screaming her head off, and then she fainted," Geraldo said. He picked her up and 
began carrying her, but she quickly revived and both began running. 



Chest Pains 


"When we got to the bottom of the hill the object came back close to us again," Geraldo said. 

"We were both screaming, and my relatives saw it. My father-in-law came out of the house with a 
light to help us, and then the object went away for good." 

From start to finish, the incident lasted about four minutes. It took Angela, then twenty-nine, two 
hours to recover from her fright. She was hoarse from screaming but had no other physical effects. 
For Geraldo, though, it was a different story. 

"I felt terrible for nearly a year," he said. "I had chest pains and insomnia. I slept very badly. I 
went to see a doctor, but he couldn't find anything wrong. I've had headaches every day since this 
happened. I still can't concentrate my vision on anything too long because I get severe headaches. I 
couldn't drive for a long time because of my eye problems. 

"It was three years before I would go out at night again. Angela is still convinced that if I had 
been alone that night, I would've been taken away, but I don't agree." 

His brother and sister-in-law didn't see what happened nor did they see the light, but they had 
troubles of their own. 

"A few minutes after we let them off, the car suddenly stopped," said Eliana, who stood 
listening as Geraldo and Angela told us their story under a tree near their house. "The car wouldn't 
start. The battery just went dead, and it was a new battery. We pushed the car until it could roll down 
a hill, and then it started." 

Angela had kept a record of the incident, which took place on another farm in the area where 
they lived at the time. She went into the house, came back a minute later and said it happened on the 
night of November 1, 1983. She said that she and Geraldo saw the same UFO or perhaps other UFOs 
a number of times after that. 

"Every time we stuck our noses out the door, it seemed to be waiting for us, and there would be 
a big light over the place," Angela said. "We didn't have electricity at that time. Everybody around 
saw the light a lot both before and after our experience." 

Active UFO Area 

Electricity came to the area in 1989 and fewer sightings have been reported since then. The 
Valley of the Old Women is an area of about four thousand square miles surrounded by low 
mountains. The southern part of it is about an hour's drive north of Belo Horizonte in the state of 
Minas Gerais. It includes all or part of ten municipalities, which in the United States would 
correspond to counties. 

UFOs have been seen in this region for decades, and from the late 1960s into the 1980s, it was 
probably one of the most active UFO areas in the world. Sightings and encounters still occur there, 
but not as frequently as before. 

For more than twenty years, Hulvio Aleixo and members of a Belo Horizonte UFO organization 
spent nearly every other weekend in the valley, investigating hundreds of cases. 2 Since the 1980s, 
they have gone there less frequently. Even with all those years of investigations, Hulvio is still 
discovering incidents, and Geraldo and Angela's encounter was new to him when we accompanied 
him on a field trip to the valley in September 1991. 



Geraldo's experience is significant not only because he was picked up and carried for a 
distance. Although he is able to work, it left him in poorer health, possibly permanently. The damage 
could have been psychological or physical, such as nerve injury, but he still suffers from severe 
headaches, and his vision has been impaired since then. 

He also had chest pains for nearly a year after. The same symptoms were reported by a man in 
another case, to be related later, whose health was so affected that he has never been able to work 
again. 

The four cases involving Geraldo, Moises, Francisca, and Maria with her daughter, Marileide, 
and their pet dog show beyond question that UFOs are able to pull a person into the air, usually with a 
beam of light or in combination with some kind of wind that it creates. Geraldo, however, felt no 
wind nor was he exposed to a ray of light. He was lifted up and carried along in complete darkness. 
He did feel a lot of heat coming from whatever had control of him 

UFOs also apparently target their victims. Geraldo was taken up but Angela wasn't, even though 
they were walking side by side. Francisca was pulled up but her daughter, Josefa, wasn't. On the 
other hand, Maria, Marileide and the dog got the group package. 

It's true that some people, such as Januncio and Beato, are able to resist by grabbing a tree, a 
fence or a lamp post, but sometimes it makes you wonder if the UFOs weren't simply toying with them 
for purposes that we cannot understand. Other cases yet to be reviewed indicate that when the UFO 
aliens are determined to take someone away, they can do so with ease. 

UFOs appear to be advanced craft with a technology that to us seems like magic, appearing 
swiftly, hovering silently, vanishing in an instant, picking people up, carrying them through the air, 
lowering them gently or slamming them down, creating strong swirling "winds" as well as heat and 
cold at the same time, simultaneously pushing and pulling people and, as we will see, taking people 
away to strange lands. 

In spite of all that, however, they can also act in what to us are crude or primitive ways, as we 
will see next. 

1. About two and a third feet. 

2. CICOANI or Centro de Investigacao Civil dos Objetos Aereos Nao Indentificados (Center for 
the Civilian Investigation of Unidentified Aerial Objects), which Hulvio founded and still 
heads. 



Chapter Eight 
UFO BAIT 

One of the problems in trying to come to grips with the UFO phenomenon is that it is 
extraordinarily complex. Every time I thought I had a tiny part of it figured out, something new and 
often contradictory came to light and I found myself as far away from the answers as ever. 

Nearly everybody who accepts the reality of UFOs "knows" or assumes they're technologically 
advanced vehicles manned by aliens from superior civilizations that inhabit other worlds. I believed 
that myself at one time and still do, sort of. This is why I was surprised when I first learned that flying 
saucers crews act in a primitive manner at times. 

Dropping hot liquid on Januncio and Beato to make them let go of the tree or bush was crude. If 
these people have the technology to come here from other worlds, they certainly shouldn't be thwarted 
by humans willing to endure pain and anguish to avoid being captured. 

For crudeness, though, nothing compares with what the aliens did when they snatched them off 
the ground with hooks at the ends of cables suspended from the saucers. This happened to two men, 
one forty and the other seventy- six. Both survived, but the old man's life was ruined, and he never 
strayed far from home the rest of his life, rarely even going outside again. 

The younger man is Hermelindo Da Silva. He is a farmer who owns a small roadside bar just 
outside the village of Vargem Grande in the Valley of the Old Women, the same valley where 
Geraldo and Angela had their uplifting encounter. Hermelindo lived with his wife and six children 
and his wife's brother in a house about seventy yards behind the bar. 1 

Four Cables Come Down 

At two o'clock on the morning of September 9, 1976, Hermelindo was walking home from the 
village with his dog, apparently a rather pugnacious animal. As they got near the bar, which had been 
locked up for the night several hours earlier, the sky suddenly lit up as bright as day. It was unnerving 
for both man and dog, for just above them was an intensely bright object about ten feet in diameter, 
surrounded by yellow and violet hues. It had a dark hole in the bottom. 

"I was really frightened," Hermelindo said. "The dog was fierce but he got some kind of shock, 
and he ran away in terror." 

Then the light went out. Hermelindo thought it had gone away, and he ran around to the back 
door of the bar and tried to unlock it. But he was too nervous and had to stand in the doorway under 
the overhanging roof. He strained to see what was up there but couldn't detect anything. 

"Then the light suddenly flashed on again," he said. "It was up there just above the roof, and it 
blinded me. I grabbed a pole, thrust it up and hit something solid. I got a slight shock. Then the light 
turned off again." 

The UFO had been making a faint buzzing sound, but when the light turned off, the buzzing 
stopped, and Hermelindo then heard a hissing like the noise of a small gaslight. 

Then something hit his shoulder and knocked him to the ground. Now panic-stricken, he jumped 
up and started to race toward his house, but the light suddenly came on again about twenty-five feet 
above him. At this point something even stranger happened. 



"They dropped four steel cables down with hooks on them and tried to catch me with them," he 
said. "I was dodging the hooks, and then a little creature came sliding down one of the cables. He hit 
me on the shoulder and tried to grab me, but I hit him and fought with him" 

The creature moved like a live being and looked like a man. It was about four feet tall and 
completely covered with something gray that was hard and polished. The face was never visible. 
Hermelindo, who is six feet tall and strong, wasn't able to get a grip on the "clothing" but did grab the 
creature in a bear hug. 

"He felt like metal. I tried to throw him to the ground, but when I did, he shuddered. It scared me 
so much that I let go of him, and he fell to the ground." 

Before Hermelindo could move, however, the creature swiftly slipped a hook around 
Hermelindo's left ankle and scurried backup one of the cables into the UFO. Hermelindo fell down 
but was immediately yanked off the ground and began to be reeled up toward the hole in the bottom of 
the UFO, feet first. 

"The ship was the size of this room," he said as we talked in his little bar, which was about 
twelve feet square. "The hole was open, and it was purple. They tried to pull me up through that hole, 
and when I got near the bottom I felt terribly hot." 

The UFO had begun moving at the same time it was hauling Hermelindo up, going in the 
direction of his house. Hermelindo had been screaming for help throughout the ordeal and had 
awakened his brother-in-law, who had come to a window and was watching the struggle. As 
Hermelindo was being pulled upside down, his right leg was swinging wildly and this is what saved 
him. 

"My right foot hit the edge of the hole, jarring the hook loose from my ankle and I fell to the 
ground," he said. 


Cuts and Scratches 

The UFO kept going and disappeared, but Hermelindo's misfortune continued as he fell about 
twenty feet into a large yucca plant, which has tough, razor-sharp leaves like large butcher knives. He 
suffered a number of cuts and scratches. Once he extricated himself from the plant, he ran to the house 
and kicked the door open, breaking the lock. He spent the rest of the night telling and re-telling his 
story to his wife and brother-in-law. 

"He came in all hurt," Hermelindo's wife, Maria, told us in 1991. "He was very upset. He had 
cuts on his knee, arms and body, his wrist, forehead and face. He was complaining a lot about his left 
leg. His left foot was swollen, and his knee was bruised. He complained of a burning sensation in his 
left foot. He went to sleep babbling about what happened." 

The next day Hermelindo went to a pharmacy and was given some ointment for his cuts and 
scrapes. 

In Belo Horizonte, Hulvio Aleixo soon heard about the incident from one of his informants and 
immediately went to Vargem Grande. Hermelindo's case, Hulvio says, is one of the most unusual of 
the more than three hundred close encounters he's investigated in the Valley of the Old Women. 

"When we interviewed the pharmacist, he co nfi rmed that Hermelindo was very nervous and 
shocked but that he had no apparent symptoms of burns, just edema," Hulvio said when he first told us 
about the case in 1986. He took us to Hermelindo's home in September 1991 so we could hear the 



story from Hermelindo himself. 

"When Hermelindo fell from the hook," Hulvio said, "his brother-in-law had opened the 
window and saw the whole object, not just the bottom as Hermelindo had. He said it was conical in 
shape but with a round top, a bell shaped UFO. Hermelindo had seen only the bottom of the UFO." 

The dog may have been a victim of the encounter. He died three months later of unknown causes, 
and Hermelindo believes the UFO in some way caused the dog to die. 

Tearful Experience 

The second hook experience, involving an old man named Antonio Amador De Lima, is only a 
little less dramatic. Antonio didn't fight with anyone, but what one of the UFO crew members said to 
him was so frightening that tears came to his eyes when he told me his story. 

Antonio lived in the small northeastern town of Santo Antonio fifty miles southeast of Santa 
Cruz, where Januncio and Beato had their encounters. Antonio had worked as a farmer every day of 
his life, and although he was seventy- six, he was just finishing a long day at work when this 
happened. It was a Saturday evening in November 1979. He was putting in some plants on a farm a 
half mile west of town and was worried about an infestation of ants. 

"It was seven o'clock, dark, and I saw a light flying toward me," he said when I talked to him in 
January 1980. Rogerio Freitas, then a university student in Natal and the first researcher to investigate 
this case, was interpreting for us. 

"The light frightened me because I had heard about flying saucers, and when I saw it, I began to 
walk toward home," Antonio said. "But after I'd gone a few meters, the object shined a light down on 
me. I had heard that if a flying saucer came near, the best thing to do was to lie down on the ground. 

So I lay down on my left side. 

"The light came down close to me, and suddenly I found myself pulled up off the ground about 
fifty centimeters. 2 I grabbed a plant with my left hand and hung on tight to keep from going up any 
farther, and I raised my right arm above me to protect me from the thing. 

"I twisted around and could see something like a rope had come down from the UFO, and it had 
four hooks at the end. One of the hooks had caught hold of the back of my shirt, and I was hanging 
down from the hook." 


Take Him or Leave Him? 

"I saw a window and could see people sitting down and moving their legs, two women and a 
man. They looked like us but they weren't Brazilians. The faces of the women were strange, kind of 
ugly. Their hair was short and black. At first I could see only the legs of the man, but later I could see 
a beard. The women were wearing blouses with straps and no sleeves. Their arms were yellow. I 
could see them sitting down and moving their legs." 

Tears came to his eyes, and he stopped, unable to talk for a moment. We were in the living room 
of the family home that Antonio, widowed for seven months, shared with his daughter and son-in-law 
and granddaughter. The room was crowded with people who had materialized from nowhere to listen 
to the interview. 

After a moment, Antonio continued. "I heard one of the women say, 'Here is a good old man we 



can take with us to our earth.' I was very frightened." 

From where he hung, the object appeared to be cigar-shaped and fifteen to twenty feet above 
him. Antonio never shouted for help. 

"I was afraid that if I did, the object would take me away," he said. "I was crying, but I didn't 
shout for anybody. I held onto the plant all that time. After about fifteen minutes, my shirt tore and I 
fell down to the ground. "I saw the object spin around three or four times and then go away. It was 
brown, about twice as big as a car, and as it went away, I could see a little red light in the back." 

When the object flew off, Antonio ran home. 

"It was a very strange sensation," he said. "I couldn't feel anything in my legs. I was very afraid. 
Afterwards I was sick for a week. I stopped working after that because I didn't want to get back home 
after dark." 

Antonio wouldn't go outside after dark anymore. "I'm afraid the flying saucer will come back," 
he explained quietly- 

Twelve years later, in August 1992,1 returned to Santo Antonio with Cynthia Luce and learned 
that Antonio had died five years after the incident, in February 1985. 

"He never went back to work again," his granddaughter, Maria Pontes, told us. "He aged quickly 
and became much older looking. He started having heart trouble, his legs were swollen and his hands 
shook. 

"He was a strong man who worked very hard. Before this happened, he'd get up at three in the 
morning, go to work, come back home between seven and eight at night, eat his dinner, watch a little 
bit of television and then go to bed. But after this he didn't work one day more." 

Personality Changed 

Maria, who teaches adults to read and write, was a teenager when Antonio had his encounter. 

"He arrived home at eight-thirty that night," she said. "I wasn't here but came in a little later. I said to 
him, 'The people are saying in the street that a flying saucer came to take you away.' And he told us 
the story. 

"A few days after this happened, he took to his bed. He stayed in his room in his hammock and 
got up only once in a while. He never went out. He always had a good appetite and ate heartily 
before, but after this happened he ate just a little." 

Antonio's personality also changed somewhat, Maria said, explaining: "He was always 
somewhat picky. Things always had to be more or less his way, and he got irritable if they weren't. 
But after this he got very difficult. Everything had to be exactly the way he wanted, and sometimes 
he'd get so angry that he wouldn't speak the rest of the day. 

"He didn't like to talk about what happened to him He had never believed in anything to do with 
flying saucers, but after this he started believing." 

Maria remembers a slightly different version of what happened to him than what he said during 
my interview with him in 1980. 

"He saw four people inside this flying saucer," she said. "Two women and two men. He knew 
their sex by their voices. He said the light was so bright you could find a hair on the ground. He heard 
them say, 'He's very old. He's no use. Let's leave him.' " 

So the tears in Antonio's eyes when he talked with Rogerio Freitas and me may have been tears 



of relief rather than fear of being taken away. Either way, it was a traumatic experience for him. 

Hermelindo got hooked by a UFO near his place of business, called the Bar Santo Antonio, and 
Antonio was hooked near the town of Santo Antonio. Some UFO buffs would see some significance 
in that, but Santo Antonio is a common name in Brazil and the coincidence is most likely only 
accidental. 

What isn't a coincidence is that both men were terrorized, Antonio so much that he was afraid to 
ever leave his house again. Hermelindo recovered nicely and, now in his late fifties, is a healthy and 
vigorous man, no longer worried about UFOs attacking him again. 

Hermelindo was scratched and cut when he fell into the yucca plant, but maybe that saved his 
life. Had he fallen twenty to twenty-five feet directly to the ground, he could have broken his neck. As 
it was, the yucca plant broke his fall. 

For Antonio, though, the encounter virtually ruined his life, turning him into a testy old recluse 
who spent most of the last five years of his life lying in his hammock. 

The odd thing about these two cases is that UFOs don't need to use grappling hooks to snag 
someone. They're able to easily abduct anyone they choose, without hooks. 

One thing seems definite about the UFO phenomenon. It is a very deceptive one, and perhaps 
these two hook incidents were part of some sort of charade, a mean-spirited one. 

Not all victims are as helpless as Hermelindo and Antonio when a UFO picks on them. Some 
people, as we soon see, have been able to thwart their antagonists by doing something as simple as 
running and hiding. 

1. Air-mnh-I EEN-do. 

2. About twenty inches. 




PART TWO 
HIDE AND SEEK 



Chapter Nine 
SUDDEN DAYLIGHT 


Imagine that you're walking across a hill or fishing in the dark of night. Suddenly, without any 
warning, a brilliant light turns above you, menacingly silent, making everything for a large area 
around you as bright as daylight. It's terrifying. What do you do? 

You could click your heels three times and say, "There's no place like home." You could also 
just stand there and admire the light. But you'd probably be better off running and trying to find a 
place to hide. Almost any place will do, a house, a tree, a bush, whatever gives you cover. A great 
many people in Brazil have been confronted by such a light, and most of those that I've talked to tried 
to hide under the nearest tree. Two men even hid under a donkey. 

This sudden, swift light in the night sky— I call it a "Sudden Daylight" experience — is one of 
the most common encounters I've heard of in Brazil. It happened twice to a man named Manoel 
Guilherme, who hid under a tree both times, and his story is typical of what people face in situations 
like this. 1 

Manoel is a small, thin man of fifty who was using a trowel to shape concrete bunks underneath 
a rodeo grandstand in Santo Antonio, Rio Grande do Norte, as he told his story. 

"I was fishing with a friend one night when we saw a light in the sky that was almost red," he 
said. "We looked at it, and my friend yelled, 'Here comes the "fire"! We'd better run. It's going to get 
us!' 

"We jumped out of the boat and ran for the trees. The light came down and chased us. When we 
got under the trees, the light stopped over us and changed color from red to white. It was about five 
meters around and wasn't making any noise. We were very afraid. We waited there a long time, I 
don't know how long. Then the thing went away." 

That occurred in October 1991. It frightened Manoel, but he continued to fish at night, and 
virtually the same thing occurred again two months later. He was fishing with two other men on the 
bank of a reservoir, again at night, but this time he wasn't as lucky. 

"We saw a light in the sky like a star, and I said, 'This happened to me before.' We looked at it a 
few seconds more and I said, 'Yes, that's just like the one that came after me.' We dropped our fishing 
poles and ran under a tree." 


Waiting for Them 

However, the light disappeared, so they started to fish again, but minutes later a red fireball 
suddenly appeared only forty yards above them. 

"ft was a beautiful red," Manoel said. "Then it went out, just blinked out. We were very scared 
and ran to the tree again." 

The UFO quickly reappeared over the tree, and this time he and his two friends had to stay 
under the tree the rest of the night. 

"Every time we started to go out from underneath the tree, the object would circle around and 
shine a red light down on us," Manoel said. "We'd go back under the tree and the light would go out. 
ft was like the thing was playing with us. ft disappeared about four-thirty in the morning." 



That was enough for Manoel. "I don't fish at night anymore now," he said. "I go out at night but I 
don't go fishing." 

His reaction is not uncommon, although most people eventually get over their fears and go back 
outside at night. Not all do, though. Sometimes a man can be so terrorized by a UFO that he's spooked 
for life. 

Such a man is Francisco Da Conceicao, who's known as Chico Gama. 2 The nickname fits him 
He's a thin, little fellow with a fretful look and blinking eyes who lives in Pecem, a small town on the 
Atlantic coast in Ceara. Jose Jean Alencar, a lawyer and veteran UFO researcher from Fortaleza who 
first investigated the case, took me to see Chico Gama in September 1986. Chico Gama was then 
fifty-two. He's a laborer and for years had fished at night to help feed his family. 

At two o'clock one morning in February 1981 he was fishing by himself at an isolated beach 
east of Pecem. 

"Suddenly I felt a strange beam of light on my back," Chico Gama said as Jean interpreted. "I 
looked up and saw a violet-colored object with a red light, and I felt very cold, the way I feel when I 
open an icebox. I was very afraid, and I ran across the beach and hid under some coconut trees. 

The object chased me and stopped over the trees. Then it shined a light down on me, trying to get 
me." 

For the next three hours the UFO played a cruel game with him. Every five minutes or so it 
would shine the red light down at his hiding place. 

"Every time the light hit me, I would feel very cold and dizzy, almost to the point of passing 
out," Chico Gama said. "It made a strange humming sound every time. This happened many times. 
When daylight came, it went away. I ran home and hid under my bed. I was very sick, very weak. For 
several days I felt that way." 


Dreams About the UFO 

The next day the skin on his arms and back were red as if he'd been sunburned, and two days later, 
it began to peel off. He also perspired heavily for about a month. These conditions, however, were 
minor compared to the emotional effects. 

"He's very nervous, very fearful, even now," Francisca, one of his grown daughters, told us. "He 
refuses to go anywhere alone because he's very scared to be by himself, even in the daytime. 
Sometimes he still hides under the bed." 

This was not a senile old man hiding under his bed. Chico Gama was only forty-seven when it 
happened, and he still has nightmares about it. "Sometimes I dream about the UFO," he said quietly. "I 
don't fish at night anymore." 

The UFO's actions seem sadistic, zapping Chico Gama countless times for three hours with a 
light that left him cold and dizzy almost to the point of losing consciousness. It's like a vicious person 
tormenting a helpless animal that can't get away. Chico Gama had to stay where he was, hoping the 
lavender-colored object would go away and leave him alone. It was trying to get him, and who knows 
what would have happened if it had. 

It's easy to understand Chico Gama's dread. He's afraid the UFO or others like it are still out 
there, waiting for him Who's to say he's not right? 

Fish constitute a big part of everyone's diet in Brazil, especially the poor people. All they need 



is a pole, and the fish are there for the taking, but when you can't fish anymore or you're afraid to, it 
can have a big impact on your life. 

This is true in the Amazon as well. Some fishermen I met there were so in dread of the UFOs — 
and the possibly deadlier risks in running from them in the dark — that they were too afraid to fish at 
night anymore. 

In July 1981,1 went into the Amazon to try to verify a report that two men fishing in a boat had 
been killed by a UFO when it shined a light on them. I'd also heard that in the same area a UFO had 
killed two horses and removed their blood, leaving large needles stuck in them. These incidents 
supposedly had occurred somewhere west of Santarem, more than eight hundred miles from the mouth 
of the Amazon. 

I spent three days in the area between Santarem and the smaller city of Obidos, a hundred miles 
to the west, traveling at times by small plane, a forty-foot boat with a cabin and covered deck, and a 
small aluminum skiff with an outboard motor on it. 

The Amazon River is up to a mile wide in much of that area, and sometimes all you can see is 
water. As mighty as it is, it must get truly awesome during the rainy season. Once as our cabin boat 
moved slowly upriver, my companions and I could see water lines thirty feet above us on the banks, 
meaning everything as far as we could see in all directions had been under thirty more feet of water 
when rains fell around the clock. We were there in the dry season, when it rains only an hour or so 
each afternoon. 

Also astonishing because of its size is the Tapajos river, which flows into the Amazon at 
Santarem It is ten miles wide just before it reaches Santarem. It is so broad that on our first day in the 
area we flew across the Tapajos to reach Vila Franca, a village on the other side where the two men 
allegedly died, and our pilot climbed thousands of feet so that we could glide down to the other shore 
in case the engine conked out. It didn't, although it did blow up four days later — fortunately while the 
plane was on the ground and the pilot was testing the engine after making some repairs. 

Phantom Witness 

Once we got safely across the other side of the Tapajos, though, we circled the village of Vila 
Franca and couldn't find anyplace to land, not for miles around, no airstrip, no open field, no road, 
not even a wagon path. 

So we flew on to Obidos, where the report about the two dead horses had originated. 3 It had 
come from a physician who had treated a woman who owned the horses. He told us she had come to 
see him and was distraught because the night before, she'd seen the UFO hovering over her pasture 
and the next morning found her animals dead. 

The woman lived somewhere across the river, back toward Santarem Our plane, a Cessna 182, 
would be no help in finding her because there would be no place to land, but the doctor knew a man 
who had an aluminum skiff with an outboard engine. 

We made a deal with the boat owner, and in the next three hours, Uyrange Hollanda and I and 
the owner skimmed across a lot of water, going far downriver, stopping to ask questions at 
settlements, houses and any place we saw someone on the bank. 4 We even stopped other boats, but no 
one knew where the woman lived. Dolphins sometimes leaped out of the water and accompanied us, 
but if they knew anything, they weren't saying. 



All we got was a sunburn, although back in Obidos we did meet people who'd seen UFOs, 
"routine" incidents that we didn't have time to look into further. We were still hunting for the dead 
men and dead horses. 

The next day we hired the bigger but slower motor vessel and spent long hours cruising from 
Santaremto Vila Franca, the village across the Tapajos (nobody there knew anything about the dead 
fishermen), then from there through one of the smaller rivers connecting the Tapajos to the Amazon 
river itself and then going farther up the Amazon. 

Again we stopped and talked to anyone who might know something. But we were never able to 
confirm anything about the dead men or horses. Many people said they had heard of one incident or 
the other, but no one could tell us anything for certain. 

Tangled Up in Nets 

Nearly everywhere we went, however, we found people who’d had UFO encounters. Some of the 
more interesting reports came in the village of Guajara. We reached it about eight at night, after the 
sun had set, and we were immediately attacked by clouds of mosquitoes that tormented us until we 
left two hours later, and the river breeze blew them away. 

On the porch of a large building at Guajara, that we thought was a warehouse but turned out to 
be a private home, were about twenty men whiling away the evening by listening to loud music on a 
radio. That seemed to be the major source of entertainment, until we arrived anyway, and then we 
became the center of attention. 

With me, in addition to Hollanda, were Charles Tucker, a fellow investigator from Indiana, and 
Carlos Montenegro, our Cessna pilot. Hollanda at that time was a major in the Brazilian air force and 
was seriously interested in UFOs. He speaks English and French fluently and interpreted for us during 
the entire Amazon trip. 

In the small crowd at Guajara was David Da Sousa, a young economist from Belem who was in 
charge of rebuilding a plantation in the area. He said that until about four months earlier the people 
had seen UFOs at least once a week for nearly two years. 

"The fishermen would see a big light like a fire that chased them when they ran," he said as all 
the men crowded around. "In one instance, when the fishermen lit a fire on the beach to cook fish, a 
UFO came within three or four meters of them and shined a light down on the fire. The men were 
afraid they'd be taken away and ran up a hill. The UFO followed them and shined a light on them all 
the way, and then it disappeared. They were very afraid. They call the UFOs 'chupa-chupa.' They 
believe the UFOs can take your blood." 

One man in the crowded room, Manoel Da Morta, said he was fishing with his son one night 
when a UFO "came down close to us and turned different colors, green, yellow, orange, red and 
white. We were afraid we were going to die, and we ran. We got tangled up in the nets and ran all the 
way home with the nets wrapped around us." 

Another man, Manoel Dos Santos, was fishing with his brother on a lake when a big light 
appeared. "It was very bright white and turned light blue, lighting up everything for four hundred 
meters around. It made our skin look blue. The light was moving around like it was searching for 
somebody. We don't fish at night anymore. We're too afraid." 

These fishermen had more to fear than just UFOs, Da Sousa said, explaining: "Everybody runs 



into the jungle to hide, and they're afraid that in the dark they'll step on poisonous snakes and be 
bitten." 

UFOs or deadly snakes that you can't see in the dark? What a choice. 

A 'Big Light' 

We didn't have to make that decision. We slapped mosquitoes away, said goodbye and started 
chugging back down river toward Santarem. Earlier I was concerned about how we would find our 
way back in the darkness, and Hollanda said: "Oh, the pilot has a big flashlight." 

I assumed his vocabulary was lacking and that he meant a spotlight on the boat some place. But I 
was wrong. The pilot did have a big flashlight, which he would turn on every few minutes. There 
were two reasons for this. One was to spot the right bank and see how far from it we were while at 
the same time dodging any floating debris in front of us. The other purpose was to warn oncoming 
passenger boats that we were out there on the river, too. That can be scary, because those boats are 
enormous monsters at least three decks high and seem to move as fast as speeding locomotives. They 
could have crunched over us and never felt a thing. 

We made it back to Santarem without mishap about midnight. The next day we flew to another 
village between Santarem and Obidos, where people had to shoo horses and goats away from the 
airstrip before we could land. There we had more interviews and heard more UFO stories. 

A day later, we abandoned our pilot, Carlos, and the Cessna in the town of Monte Alegre 
northeast of Santarem because the engine self-destructed after we made some repairs. Eventually we 
reached Belem and went our separate ways, Hollanda back to work, Tucker returning to Indiana and 
me flying on to Fortaleza. 

Perhaps someday we will find out where and how the fishermen and horses died, if they did. 
Many stories like these come to the attention of investigators, and a lot of time is spent trying to find 
out if they're true. It is simply part of the job, although no one's forcing us to do it. Sometimes we 
discover they're not true, but more often there's simply no way to find out. 

Many reports are vague, and nobody's sure where they come from. The story about the dead 
men, though, seemed authentic. The information came in a letter that a riverboat captain wrote to the 
commanding officer of the air base in Belem. The commandant in turn told Major Hollanda, who had 
once led a lengthy official investigation into numerous UFO sightings near Belem, and Hollanda had 
mentioned the report to me. It wasn't until July 1981 that Hollanda and I were able to get together to 
try to find out whether the story was true. 

Our trip was not a failure. No trip ever is, because we always come across unexpected 
information. On this trip we had some good interviews and adventures and discovered anew what 
we'd known all along - that UFOs do strange and sometimes terrible things in Brazil. 

1. Mon-WELL GHEE-YAIR-may. 

2. Con-say-SOW (as in OW!). It means conception. 

3. OB-ee-duce. 

4. Oo-ee-RAHN-gee Oh-LAHN-duh. More about him later. 




Chapter Ten 
RUN FOR YOUR LIFE 


Encounters can be so frightening that some people risk their lives to get away. Jose Pereira Da 
Souza is a prime example. He could easily have gotten killed as he fled from a UFO chasing him. 

Jose is a farmer who lives in Puxinana, Paraiba, the state adjoining Rio Grande do Norte on the 
south. 1 His brush with death remains so vivid in his memory that, when we met him in September 
1991 he recalled the exact date and time, even though it occurred twenty years earlier. 

"This happened on March 22, 1971, at eleven-fifty P.M.," Jose, forty-four, said. He had just 
finished working at his future father-in-law's farinha house, where manioc roots are soaked, mashed, 
roasted and turned into flour. "I was coming home and stopped to relieve myself. When I looked up, I 
saw a ball of light. I began running, and it chased me." 

He didn't try to hide. He ran more than four hundred yards to his home — at least one hundred of 
them across a high dam. Even in daylight just walking across the dam can be scary. The top is less 
than ten feet wide and has a railing only on the water side. The other side has just a sheer drop of 
fifty-five feet to big boulders at the bottom. A misstep could be fatal. 

With a dozen other investigators, most of them members of a UFO group from the nearby state 
capital of Campina Grande, I had to cross the dam twice, once to reach Jose's house and again to 
return to our cars. Even in the daylight it was unnerving. Jose ran across it as fast as he could in the 
dark, when a stumble could have sent him plunging to his death. He was well aware of the danger but 
was more frightened by the thing at his heels. 

"When I got to the dam, the object came very close to me," Jose said. "It was about ten meters in 
diameter and had blue, pink and red colors on it. The light was about as bright as a fifteen-watt bulb 
and was giving out smoke or vapor. It came down very low over the water. I thought they were trying 
to catch me. I was really afraid." 

He reached the far end of the dam without tripping and raced the last hundred yards to his house, 
screaming for his mother to open the door. As he dashed inside, he saw the UFO going away in the 
west. 

His mother had poor eyesight and didn't see it. When he told her what happened, she dismissed 
his story, saying: "You just saw a ghost. Men who walk around at night always meet up with ghosts." 

Could be. But it wasn't a ghost to Jose. He called it a spaceship. Initially, he'd seen what he 
thought was a big head with red eyes in the bushes, but quickly realized it was a ball of light as it rose 
up off the ground. That's when he fled. 


Some Kind of Experiment? 

Why are people like Jose put at risk in the first place? It's almost certain the UFO aliens could 
have captured him if they had wanted to. Who knows what they're thinking? We might just as well try 
to figure out what's going on in the mind of an ant or a microbe. 

Perhaps he was part of some experiment the UFO crew was conducting: 

There’s a two-legged animal relieving itself in the bushes. What will it do when we turn the 



lights on? Ah, it’s running. Right across the top of the big wall with water on one side and a long 
drop on the other. Let’s follow and see if it reaches the end without going off either side. Yes, it 
does. Interesting. They all seem to run. Let’s go find another one. 

And they do find plenty of them, even when the people are going somewhere in the dark without a 
light of any kind that would attract attention. These UFO aliens see in the darkness, either with their 
own vision or a night-sighting device, and have been able to do so for at least the fifty years or so that 
we know UFOs have been around. How this can be done is no mystery because today's modern 
armies now have such tools and use them effectively to destroy enemy targets. 

Why the UFOs pick out a particular person is another question. Most of the people who've had a 
"Sudden Daylight" experience, where everything lights up as bright as day, have been farmers or 
fishermen. And most of them have been left unharmed. Badly frightened perhaps, but nothing happens 
to them. It's as if the UFOs are making sure people are aware that they're still around. 

Many of these people simply see a bright light and nothing else. But sometimes an object or a 
part of one is seen. Joao Gomes Da Costa saw something sticking out beyond the light the night he 
was riding a burro in the mountains near the small town of Lajes Pintadas in Rio Grande do Norte. 

"It lit up everything for about sixty meters around me, and I felt a cold wind at the same time. It 
was like air conditioning. I could see an antenna on top of it, like a television antenna." 

Joao was very frightened but didn't try to run, and the burro paid no attention to the light. 2 After 
about a minute, the light disappeared and Joao hurried home as fast as the burro could take him. 

An appendage like a TV antenna doesn't make sense on something that's supposedly so high-tech 
that it's beyond our comprehension. Until World War II most military aircraft had radio antennas, but 
when the jet age brought faster and faster planes, developers put them inside the aircraft. One 
possible conclusion is that Joao either misinterpreted what he saw or the "antenna" was part of some 
masquerade for his benefit. 


Where Did It Go? 

Two other people we talked to in September 1992 had similar experiences but saw no details on 
the objects and weren't hurt in any way. 

One was a twenty-year-old man who was walking in the countryside at night with his parents 
and six younger brothers and sisters. They were going to visit some relatives on another farm. As they 
were passing a reservoir, they heard a humming noise rapidly getting louder, and it seemed to be 
coming toward them. Suddenly everything lit up for a thousand feet around. 

Everyone was frightened. The younger children began crying, and the mother was sure the world 
was coming to an end as she gathered them around her. But the light and humming noise quickly 
passed overhead, and suddenly the light just blinked out. The noise stopped at the same time. They 
didn't see or hear anything more. 

Initially, this incident meant nothing to me other than yet another light lighting up and scaring 
some people. But while shaving one morning six months later, I realized it was much, much more than 
that. 

The sound getting louder and louder meant to the family that something was coming toward them 
in the dark. And something was. It came flying through the air and when it got very close, it suddenly 



lit up everything around them, passed over them and then just as suddenly ceased to exist. If the sound 
stops in any of man's magnificent flying machines, the machine usually goes crashing to earth. But not 
this UFO. 

Where did it go? Did it simply turn "invisible" and sit there in the sky watching the frightened 
family and then decide to leave them alone? Did it slip into a parallel universe, and for that reason 
could no longer be heard or seen? If it did move into another universe, why? To go back home? Were 
the crew members bored with these earthlings? Could they have somehow spotted some other 
unsuspecting victims in a neighboring universe who were more interesting? These are questions that 
will be answered one day by our scientists, many of whom believe parallel universes may exist. 

The other case involved a young man who was helping an uncle and four or five other men tend 
a sick cow one evening when a brief blast of light lit up the sky. The uncle and the others, bending 
over the cow, saw only the flash, but the nephew was standing up and had seen a small light moving 
toward them in the sky. It suddenly flared into a brilliant light, quickly diminished into a small light 
again and then turned and shot straight up into the sky until it disappeared. 

This is what I call the "Instant Star" facet of the phenomenon, in which a UFO shoots so far out 
into the atmosphere that it is lost among the stars. Usually this takes mere seconds, far faster than any 
manmade rocket. I've heard such reports from a number of people, including American military 
personnel. 

To recap, Joao saw an antenna and felt a cold wind. The young man and his family heard a 
humming noise that shut off when the light did. The nephew saw the UFO coming, give off a blinding 
flash of light and then vanish among the stars. Joao's encounter was in 1981, the other two in 1991. It 
seems obvious that we're dealing with nuts- and-bolts craft that have been around a long time and are 
still here. 


Pre-Dawn Attack 

Most of these incidents seem to take place early in the evening, perhaps because more people are 
out and about at that time of night. One man and his son, however, had the scare of their lives just 
before dawn one day. They are Antonio Comes Da Silva, fifty, and Justino, fifteen. They live in the 
city of Sao Goncalo do Amarante, west of Fortaleza in Ceara. 

"In June 1989 we were going to a farm on our bicycles to get milk," the father said as Jean 
Alencar interpreted. "It was about five A.M. and still dark. We were near a lagoon and we saw a big 
light over the lagoon. It came toward us, about fifty meters high. The light was so bright we couldn't 
see the object. 

"There were many colors flashing on and off, beams of light, blue, green, yellow, red, strange 
colors. Some were like the sun. I've never seen such colors before. It was moving slowly, and the 
lights spread out in all directions, lighting up the lagoon. It never made a sound. 

"Both of us got scared, and we ran and hid in a house near the road. We had to wake the family 
up to let us in. The object passed over the house and went away." 

A week later, Antonio was going to the farm by himself, again on his bicycle, this time between 
four-thirty and five in the morning. 

"I was going around a curve, and I heard what I thought was a tractor ahead of me. I thought it 
was the farmer coming to meet me. But when it got close to me, I realized it wasn't a tractor. It had a 



small red light, and suddenly the noise stopped. When it was about one hundred meters from me, the 
red light started going up into the air. I got so scared I threw my bicycle down and ran into the bushes. 

"The object rose straight up and went off at an angle to the north. Then it came down again and 
shined a light toward me. It was looking for me, and I kept dodging the light. By now it was very 
bright and lighting up everything like daylight. There were many colored lights coming out of it, but 
there was one big one searching for me. I was fascinated by the different colors, but it was hard to 
look at them because of the big bright light. Then it just suddenly took off at an angle and disappeared. 

"After that I never went out on the road before dawn again. I had been going to the farm with 
thirty-liter cans to get milk for twelve years, something I have to do every day. But I don't do that in 
the dark anymore." 

Was it a coincidence or did the UFO try to pass itself off as a tractor? Antonio had come this 
way every day before dawn, and it's possible the UFO was waiting for him. The same UFO or 
another one had chased him and his son on this road a week before. But if the UFO beings were 
waiting, they didn't seem to make a serious effort to catch him. Either they were bumblers or they 
simply meant to scare him. 


Women Have to Hide 

Everyone I've talked to who's had such an encounter was scared badly because, to them, the 
UFOs were a genuine threat to their safety and perhaps their lives. Ten days after talking with 
Antonio and his son in September 1991, Cynthia Luce and I interviewed Josefa Da Costa, thirty-eight, 
a housewife and mother of five children in Apodi, Rio Grande do Norte. 

On July 20, 1990, Josefa had gone to Soledade, eight miles northwest of Apodi, to be with her 
family because a relative had died. About eleven that night, she and a sister- in-law, Evanilda Da 
Costa, also thirty-eight, went for a walk behind the house. 

"We were talking, and a big ball of light came and lit up everything," Josefa said. "It was very 
bright. It came toward us and got smaller and then diminished and then got big again. We were afraid 
because it circled around as if it was looking for us. 

"We were in the back garden with bushes around and we hid under a shelter. The light was 
about half a meter in size and only about four and a half meters above the ground. It didn't make any 
sound. It went around the garden, and once we were caught in the reflection of the light, Evanilda 
more than me. It was hot. I was so afraid I was trembling. After about twenty minutes, it went away. It 
went off into the distance, seemed to get smaller and then just flickered out." 

Sometimes a UFO inflicts damage by just hovering over a person. That happened to Manoel 
Oliveira, thirty- five, a farmhand. He was walking across a field near Lajes in Rio Grande do Norte 
one evening in May 1991 when a light flashed on above him. He ran under the nearest tree, and the 
light followed him. 

"The object was oval shaped and about five meters above me," Manoel said. "It had all different 
colored lights blinking on it. Almost immediately I got a terrible headache. The light would go out 
and come on again. I felt a prickly heat but I was also cold at the same time. This happened four or 
five times before it went away a half hour later. I was very thirsty but the worst thing was the 
headache. Since then I haven't gone outside at night anymore. I'm afraid it will happen again." 

Manoel's headache might have been caused by acute anxiety brought on by fear, but it's also 



possible the UFO was giving off radiation of some kind that triggered the headache. 

Headaches are common in encounters, as are eye strain, nausea, diarrhea and a number of other 
complaints. Several of these physical effects showed up in an unusual trio of events that took place in 
the same area over four nights. So many incidents in one place and in such a short time span are 
unusual. 

We start with the third and least eventful one. The story came from Francisco Da Silva, thirty- 
three, who was hunting doves with three other men in the mountains west of Campo Redondo in Rio 
Grande do Norte on the night of August 6, 1992. This was less than a month before we talked to him. 
The men had shot a bird and were picking it up when a light appeared in the sky near them. 

"It was like a yellowish ball of fire, one and a half to two meters in diameter," Francisco said. 
"It was eight or nine meters away from us, and it scared us because the same thing had just happened 
to two other men. We stayed under the tree for half an hour before the object went away. Then we ran 
like hell to get home." 


Barbed Wire Hazard 

The other two incidents involved men named Balinga and Borrinho, who ran afoul of UFOs in the 
same hills several nights earlier. 3 

Borrinho is the nickname of Antonio Moreira Da Silva, thirty-eight, also of Campo Redondo. 

On August 3, three nights before Francisco and his companions had their run-in with a UFO, Borrinho 
and a friend named Eranovo were hunting birds when a wind blew out their oil lamp. 

"Then we saw a big light just above the bushes," Borrinho said. "It was about fifty meters away 
from us, rocking back and forth, and we could feel heat from it. Then it started coming toward us, and 
I started running away from it." 

Unfortunately, he couldn't see where he was going and ran into a barbed wire fence, getting 
badly cut on both legs. Before he could break his momentum, he fell over the fence into an ant hill and 
was also bitten by ants. 

His companion, Eranovo, chose not to run from the UFO, and he came walking up in time to help 
Borrinho get out of the ant hill. By then the UFO had disappeared. Eranovo is one of the few people 
I've heard of who didn't run from a UFO, and nothing happened to him We weren't able to talk to him 
to find out why he didn't run. 

Besides the numerous ant bites and cuts, which required a tetanus shot, Borrinho had a bad 
headache and for two days had trouble seeing because the light from the UFO had hurt his eyes. It 
took fifteen days for his eyes to clear up. He still had scars and scabs all over his legs when Cynthia 
Luce and I interviewed him. 

One other interesting element in Borrinho's case is that the UFO was rocking back and forth like 
a pendulum, which is what happened after Moises and Francisca had their encounters on Sitio 
Timbauba, only about six miles to the northeast. 

Balinga Gets Slimed 

The third case, Balinga's encounter, is one of the strangest I've ever heard of. It occurred the night 
after Borrinho's. Balinga is the nickname of Antonio Lourenco Da Silva, thirty-five, a farmer who 



lives with his wife and children on the southwestern edge of Campo Redondo. 4 

He actually had two bad UFO experiences. The first occurred late one night in 1991. He was 
carrying a bundle of grass to feed some animals in a field behind his house when a bright light 
suddenly came on above him and made a buzzing sound. The UFO came down close and shined a 
beam of light on him as he ran, and then it went away. He had a fever for several days. 

He wasn't as fortunate the next time. On the night of August 4, 1992, just thirty days before we 
talked to him, he and his brother, Joao, eighteen, were crossing a farm northwest of Campo Redondo. 

"We were bringing a donkey home and were hurrying, trying to get home before it got too dark 
because we didn't have a light with us. It was about six-thirty and we were hitting the donkey, trying 
to get her to run. Suddenly a big light like a car headlight turned on above us. It was just like daytime 
it was so bright. It was making a noise, like 'Ping! Ping! Ping!' 

"There was no place to go. I told Joao to get under the donkey quick, and I bent over and pushed 
him down. As I did I felt a lot of heat on my back. It was quite hot, and the left side of my back got 
numb. And then I got under her myself. 

"Joao was hanging onto her back legs and I wrapped my arms around her front legs. I felt sort of 
strange and a little lightheaded from the heat. I reached back, touched my left shoulder and felt 
something oily." 

They stayed under the animal for three or four minutes, scared to death, and then the light turned 
off and the object vanished. The donkey was unperturbed throughout, content to stand still. As soon as 
the brothers realized the UFO was gone, they got the donkey moving at last, and they ran all the way 
home, more than three miles. 

"My shirt felt odd, and I took it off when I got in the house," Balinga said. "The back of it was 
covered with something very thick, oily and yellowish, like grease. It had a disagreeable odor to it." 

The substance stood out on the black cotton fabric, but neither he nor his wife, Noemia, had any 
idea what it was. She washed the shirt. She told us the greasy matter left a scum on the water, which 
she tossed out when she had finished. When the shirt dried, there was no stain or odor to indicate 
what the gunk might have been. 

Some people, on first hearing this story, believe the donkey urinated on Balinga. But he was 
holding her front legs and none of the substance got on Joao, who was under her plumbing parts. 
Furthermore, these people have been around farm animals all their lives and are quite familiar with 
the feel, smell and consistency of animal urine, and it isn’t thick, oily or greasy. In addition, urine 
wouldn't have made Balinga's back numb. Besides, who's going to admit they let a donkey pee on 
them? 

The numbness in Balinga's back gave way to soreness which lasted for a month. He also had a 
fever for a few days and suffered from headaches. 

The second incident gave Balinga new respect for UFOs. "When it gets to be five o'clock now, I 
want to be home inside," he said. 


Not Unique? 

Being slimed by a UFO definitely is unique. None of the approximately seventeen hundred people 
I've talked to who've had UFO experiences has ever been, well, dumped on the way he was. But the 
odds are that somewhere someone else has had a similar experience, and I may run into him or her on 



the next field trip. 

Both Januncio and his son, Beato, had something like hot oil dropped on them, but the liquid 
quickly evaporated and left no stains, only burns that quickly healed. Balinga was not burned by the 
oily substance, which stayed on his shirt until it was washed out, but his shoulder was numb for a 
while and sore for about a month. 

The "ping-ing" sound he heard is a little different from the humming or buzzing that others have 
reported. What that means is anybody's guess. Most of the time the UFOs are silent. 

The thing that ties all these cases together is that the UFOs suddenly appear overhead in a blaze 
of light without warning, nearly always find their victims in the dark, and then chase them Whether 
the UFOs actually intend to catch them is questionable, given their ability to snatch people at will, but 
the victims feel certain they're being chased. In none of these cases did anyone feel as if he were 
being pulled upward toward the UFO. 

Several witnesses also felt coldness or a cold wind. In a few cases the witnesses felt heat from 
the light, and sometimes that light caused such physical effects as headaches, dizziness and numbness. 

Perhaps the most interesting aspect, though, is that the witnesses were able to take refuge under 
a tree or bush or in a house or under a donkey and avoid capture, if that is what the aliens' intention 
was. 

However, hiding under a tree can be almost as dangerous as standing under one in an electrical 
storm — as the next chapter reveals. 

1. Poo-she-NAH-nah, Par-rah-EE-bah. 

2. Zhuh-WOW. In English, he'd be called John. 

3. Bah-LEEN-gah and Bo-HEEN-yo. In Brazilian Portuguese, a double R is pronounced as an H 
is in English, while an H following an N or an L is like Y, as in canyon. 

4. Da Silva is one of a number of names that are common in Brazil. Being named Antonio Da 
Silva is like being named Tom Smith in the United States. 




Chapter Eleven 
THE BURNING TREE 


A tree isn't always a safe place to hide from a UFO nor can you always count on a neighbor to 
help when things get desperate. For some people, a TV soap opera maybe more important than a 
UFO lurking outside the house. 

A fascinating encounter that illustrates these two points involved Jerinaldo Dantes, a mild- 
mannered young man who loves pop music, and Sebastiani Sales, a middle- aged neighbor who loves 
soap operas. 

A UFO took an unhealthy interest in Jerinaldo as he was riding his bicycle home about six one 
September afternoon in 1991. He was eighteen at the time and lived with his parents, two brothers 
and a sister at Sitio Inga, a farm four miles southeast of Acari in Rio Grande do Norte. 

He had worked all day on an uncle's farm and was listening to the latest hits on his Walkman as 
he pedaled along a dirt road that passes through a larger farm, Fazenda Inga. The setting sun was at 
his back, and he was about two hundred yards from the fazenda's main house and barns. 

"It was just getting dark when I saw a big ball of light coming toward me from the direction of 
the mountains," Jerinaldo told us a year later. "It was all colors, blue, red, green. It came down 
toward me, and suddenly my Walkman was filled with static. I was so frightened that I threw my 
bicycle down and ran under a tree, squatted down and wrapped my arms around the trunk. 

"The light came down and stopped right over the tree. It was sitting just above the tree, and I 
was under there for a long time. I tried to lookup at it sometimes but I was terribly scared. I felt very 
cold, but I also felt a lot of heat coming from above. It was so hot, I was afraid it was going to burn 
up the tree." 


Tree Smashes Down 

Jerinaldo hugged the trunk for about twenty minutes, but the heat had become so intense that he 
realized it was too dangerous to stay any longer. Just two or three feet to his left was a barbed wire 
fence, and he lunged under the bottom strand of wire, then scrambled furiously about twenty feet out 
into a corral — and not a second too soon. 

"Just as I went under the fence, I heard a loud CRACK!" Jerinaldo said. "I got a little farther 
away and heard a second CRACK! Then I saw the tree fall over on the fence, smashing it down." 

Jerinaldo was hunched down on the ground, terrified of what might happen next. The top of the 
tree had broken off and fallen and crushed the section of fence that he'd just scooted under. The 
menacing bluish ball of light still hovered above the scorched, smoldering stump, still lighting 
everything around. 

"I sat there really scared and trembling," Jerinaldo said. "I was still in the light, and I thought the 
thing was coming after me. But the light just turned off and a moment later came on again, way off in 
the west. When the light went out, the coldness that I was feeling went too." 

His story could be dismissed as just a teenager's active imagination, but there was an independent 
witness, something unusual in such encounters. In the big farmhouse two hundred yards away was 
Sebastiani Sales, fifty-six, whose family owns the farm. She had seen much of what had happened to 



Jerinaldo. 

We tracked her down at a neighbor's house the morning after we talked to Jerinaldo. Sebastiani 
said that when the UFO incident began, she had been watching a novela, or TV soap opera. 

"I heard the dog barking really loud as I was watching the novela ," she said. "I lost my patience 
with the dog and went to the window to see what he was barking at. I opened the shutters and saw a 
'fire' above the tree. It was a bluish ball of light sixty to seventy centimeters in diameter and was 
giving off strong blue sparks of electricity or whatever it was. It was lighting up the whole area. 

"So then I went to the door and watched. The light was very low, touching the tree. And there 
was this fellow squatting under the tree. At first I didn't realize he was underneath the tree because the 
light made it hard to see." 

To understand what happened next, an explanation is necessary. In Brazil, TV soap operas are 
broadcast early in the evening and about forty million people watch every night, a fourth of the 
country's population. Novelas are so popular that when a soap opera star was murdered in 1992 and 
her co-star was arrested, the news nearly overshadowed the resignation of the country's president in a 
corruption scandal. 


Back to the Soap Opera 

One of those forty million faithful viewers is Sebastiani — and as strange as the blue ball of fire 
was out there on top of that tree with the terrified young man under it, she wasn't going to let it keep 
her from her program any longer. 

"I realized I was going to miss my novela, so I shut the door and the window and went back 
inside to watch it," she said, laughing and embarrassed to admit that she'd left Jerinaldo to his fate. 

"Shortly after that he came to the door and started banging on it. He was very upset, and he said, 
'Look at what happened! There was a flying saucer above the tree!' He also told me that when it got 
close to him, he started feeling a terrible coldness. He’d lost his hat and thrown his bicycle down in 
the middle of the road, and he wanted me to go get his bicycle. But I said I wasn't going to go get it 
because the light was still out there." 

By that she meant the UFO could still be seen in the sky far off in the distance. "We were both 
afraid," she continued. "I said to him, 'Let's call the farm manager and ask him because I'm not going 
to go get it.' I phoned the manager and he got the bicycle." 

She didn't see the tree fall but she knew it had. 

"I heard it cracking and breaking," Sebastiani said. "This tree was very, very green, and early 
the next morning, I went out to look at it. It was very strange because it sort of had burned fibers or 
elements around the tree, the leaves were all burned, and it looked as if the tree had been scratched 
by big nails." 

Jerinaldo finally reached his own home, less than a mile away, about two hours after the 
incident began. "He was absolutely hysterical," his mother Marta told us. "He couldn't even talk." 

This case was first investigated by Sales Pagannini, at that time a high school student who 
headed a UFO group in Acari, and it was he who took Cynthia Luce and me to the farm. Also helping 
us were Ronaldo Farias, one of the dozen Campina Grande investigators who had generously shared 
some of their cases with us in Paraiba the year before, and his wife Jacqueline, a native of Acari. 

Jerinaldo didn't have any headaches, nausea or other effects following the incident, but his 



mother Marta believes it left him with some psychological problems. "He was sort of absent-minded 
for a while, and he seems more timid now," she said. 

Jerinaldo went to work again the morning after the encounter, listening to his Walkman as usual, 
which was running perfectly again. That's when he first saw the burned tree in daylight. 

We also got a good look at the tree ourselves. The charred and twisted pieces from the top half 
that broke off were still lying on the ground near the trunk, where they had been dragged off the 
smashed fence. Two of the bigger limbs on the ground had wide cracks running down the sides, split 
open perhaps as the sap inside boiled under the intense heat from the UFO. The scorched part of the 
trunk that was left standing had begun to sprout new growth and looked like it would grow into a 
whole tree again some day. 


No Storm or Power Lines 

The night this happened to Jerinaldo, the sky was completely clear. There weren't any clouds, 
which would rule out lightning. Nor are there any electricity lines near the tree, ruling out any 
electrical causes, such as wires touching and burning or a transformer exploding, causing the tree to 
burn. 

Burned trees and other vegetation are not rare in UFO encounters but don't happen too often. 
When the old rancher, Januncio, was clinging to a palm tree, the heat from the UFO above him was so 
hot that he was afraid it was going to kill him Januncio estimated the incident lasted less than two 
minutes and believed he would have died if it had lasted any longer because it was so hot. 

This must be how Jerinaldo felt when the heat became unbearable. The tree broke off only three 
to four feet above the ground, and the section of trunk left standing was charred all the way to the 
ground. This is the part that he had been clinging to, and it's very likely he would have been burned if 
he had stayed. 

As for the coldness that he felt while being subjected to the growing heat, shock could explain it. 
But the moment the UFO left, the coldness went away also, and shock doesn't end that quickly. 

The UFO must have been emitting electromagnetic radiation of some kind, in the beginning 
anyway, because it caused Jerinaldo's Walkman to broadcast nothing but static. 

Why didn't the object finish the job if it were going after Jerinaldo? It zeroed in on him as he 
was riding his bicycle and then stayed above the tree all the time he hid under it. The UFO aliens had 
to know he was there, and they poured the heat on until it became intolerable and Jerinaldo had to get 
away from it. 

Yet, as he huddled in fear in the corral only twenty feet away, still highly visible, the UFO made 
no effort to go after him Instead, it turned off the light, disappeared and re-appeared a mile or two to 
the west. Whoever these aliens are, they acted like lethal bullies and as such may have wanted to 
show Jerinaldo how mean and powerful they were. If so, he was convinced. 

As frightened as he was, he wasn't afraid to go out with friends again the next night and every 
night after that. "Nothing keeps me home at night," he said laughing. 

Almost anyone else who'd had such a terrifying experience would stay inside at night for awhile 
to make sure it didn't happen again. They'd be happy never to see another UFO. 

There are exceptions to almost everything, though, and I met one man who was hurt so bad by a 
UFO that he thought he was going to die — but he wants it to happen again. In the next chapter we see 



why. 





Top: Maria Dos Dores Lopes 

Bottom: "Balinga" (Antonio Lourenco Da Silva) 








Top: "Beato" (Benedito Henrique De Souza). 

Bottom: Francisca Bispo De Assis who was lifted by a light. 





Top: Francisco Marciano De Abreu points in the direction of bright light 
that sickened him. 

Bottom: Maria Natividade Cavalcante shows how she crouched as UFO 
hovered over her. 





Top: Luis Fernandes Barroso remained in a vegetative state seventeen 
years after UFO attack. 

Bottom: Author with Maria Souza, Firmino's wife. 





Top: "Bebeto" (lose Garinberto Dantes) has seen many strange lights in 
the sky since 1990. 

Bottom: Dam in Puxivana, Paraiba, that Jose Pereira Da Souza crossed 
fleeing UFO. 







Top: Jose Vonilson Dos Santos has been confined to wheelchair since 
1979 UFO attack. 

Bottom: "Chico Gama" (Francisco Da Conceicao hid from beam of red 
light for three hours while fishing. 









Top: Claudiomira Rodrigues who was burned by a UFO ray in 1978. 
Bottom: Benedito Bogea describes his abduction. 











Top: Luis Carlos Serra recuperates in hospital after three-day abduction. 
Bottom: Reinar and Alzerina Silva (on right) standing next to UFO 

investigators Reginaldo Athayde and Cynthia Luce. 








Top: UFO investigators Hulvio Aleixo and Cynthia Luce talk to 

Hermelindo Da Silva's wife, Maria. 

Bottom: Jerinaldo Dantes in 1992, one year after harrowing UFO 

experience. 








/ 


Top: Sebastiani Sales saw UFO hovering over Jerinaldo. 

Bottom: Firmino Souza lies unconscious in hospital after Crab Island 
incident. 









Top: Apolinario Souza, Auleriano Bisp Alves (a cousin) and brother 
Firmino Souza were placed under hypnosis by Dr. Silvio Lago. 

Bottom: Crowd that greeted author's plane in Colares (1981). 






Top: Author Pratt with UFO investigator Daniel Rebisso. 

Bottom: Tree struck by UFO beam during Jerinaldo Dantes' encounter. 






Top: Sandoval Bezerro hid from a UFO. 

Bottom: Charred upper part of tree Jerinaldo Dantes hid beneath. 














Top: Major Uyrange Hollanda and author Pratt. 

Bottom: Leonel Dos Santos never saw UFO that abducted him for four 
hours. 





Top: Ill-fated boat Maria Rosa was inspected by author. 

Bottom: Moises Campelo was pulled off ground twice by UFO in 1 991. 





Top: Raimunda Da Silva was struck down by light from UFO. 

Bottom: Luis Carlos Serra shows how tall his three ET abductors were. 






Top: Boys standing in churchyard by Colares "landing strip" (1981). 
Bottom: Jose Cosmo (left) with investigator Jean Alencar. Jose's two 
close encounters included a broken leg. 











/5&d-/6£d 


Sketch** Mdi by Major Uyrange Holland* a* he described the UFO* he end 
■littery personnel saw and photographed during official Braalllan Air 
Force Investigation of Colarea*area sight In**. 


Sketches made by Major Uyrange Hollanda as he described the UFOs he 
and military personnel saw and photographed during official Brazilian 
Air Force investigation in the Colares Area. 



















PART THREE 



SNATCHED 



Chapter Twelve 
ZAP ME AGAEV...PLEASE 


Jose Benedito Bogea thought he was going to die after a UFO zapped him, but he wants it to come 
back and do it again. 

"I was crippled for two months," he said but claimed the painful encounter was "wonderful and 
very beautiful." 

Bogea is a hard-working farmer who started with very little and became relatively prosperous. 
He lives four miles southwest of Pinheiro in the state ofMaranhao . 1 He's a short, spare man with jet- 
black hair and dark, blazing eyes who speaks in a loud voice, quickly and animatedly, gesturing 
frequently. He's been deaf for years. 

His "wonderful" experience started when he was walking to Pinheiro about one o'clock one 
morning to catch a bus. 

"I had a flashlight because it was so dark," Bogea said. "Suddenly, a bright, greenish-blue light 
appeared in the sky and chased me for about two hundred meters. Then it circled over a bush in front 
of me and stayed there, three or four meters above the ground, for just a fraction of a second. I could 
see a Vee-shaped thing fifteen to twenty meters long, with a beam of orange light going down to the 
ground. 

"I raised my arm and shined my flashlight at it, and in an instant I saw a bright flash of light. It 
knocked me down, and I felt like I'd had an electrical shock. Then I passed out." 

He regained consciousness the next morning and several hours later began to feel a lot of pain. 

"My right arm was completely numb, my kidneys, my spine, my right side all hurt very, very 
much. I thought I was going to die. I had no appetite for eight days. I didn't want to eat anything. I had 
to use a cane because I couldn't stand on my right leg, and I couldn't hold anything in my right hand 
because it would fall out of my hand." 


Strange City 

That's only the beginning of his story. The severe injury itself makes the encounter notable, but 
three even more significant things occurred, lifting the experience into a rare category of its own. 

First was the "dream." 

"After passing out, I woke up in a strange city with wide avenues and beautiful gardens," Bogea 
said. "I looked for the sun, but I didn't see it. I didn't see any sky at all, just empty space." 

He saw many people in the city. They looked very much alike, all about thirty years old, five 
feet tall and slender. All were dressed in gray and brown clothes, a few in light blue. The women 
wore long gowns, the men tunics and trousers. 

"They looked like us," Bogea said. "They appeared to be Brazilians, but there were no black 
people and no old people. Most were light-skinned and had eyes of different colors, blue, brown. The 
women were pretty and had long blond hair. All the men had short hair, beards and mustaches. 

"The people looked like they were talking to each other, but I couldn't hear anything. At one time 
one of them motioned for me to enter a large room. There were fifteen to twenty people in there who 
stood and looked at me. Another man gestured for me to sit on a sofa." 



Bogea sat there for a while, being observed, and then was allowed to leave. He walked around 
the city. Everywhere he went, a man followed a few steps behind him. 

None of the buildings was more than one story high, and they all looked alike. The temperature 
was uniformly cool everywhere, as if the entire city was air conditioned. Wherever Bogea went, the 
people looked at him, but no one said anything to him or came close to him. 

He saw a number of vehicles that looked like Volkswagen Beetles but they had no motors or 
steering wheels . 2 Inside each he could see two people who would push buttons, causing antennas to 
go up or down. 

He also saw about twenty disc-shaped objects on the ground in an area that looked to him like 
an airport. He believes they were UFOs, but none was like the triangular one that zapped him. He's 
convinced that the triangular UFO took him to the strange city, but he doesn't remember seeing it there. 

Bogea doesn't know how long he was in the city. His visit came to an abrupt end when the man 
who was following him motioned for him to get into one of the "Volkswagens." When he did, he 
immediately fell asleep. 

Then came the second unusual development. When Bogea woke up again, he found himself 
standing next to a highway near the deep-water seaport of Itaqui eight miles west of Sao Luis, the 
state capital. It was eight-thirty the next morning, some seven hours after he was zapped. 

Sao Luis is a long way from Pinheiro. It's an hour's drive to a ferry terminal at Itauna on the 
western side of the Bay of Sao Marcos, then a two-hour ferryboat ride across the bay, followed by 
another fifteen-minute drive into Sao Luis. A trip can take many hours more because the ferry runs 
only during high tides, and passengers often have long waits. 

Painful Recuperation 

When Bogea woke up next to the highway, everything around him seemed to be in bright, vivid 
colors. He was puzzled to find himself there but decided to go into Sao Luis, a city he is familiar 
with, and he hitched a ride with a truck driver. After he'd been in the city an hour or so, all the 
dazzling colors faded to normal — and for the first time he began to feel terrible pain in the right side 
of his body. 

"I thought I was going to die," Bogea said. "I felt so bad I wanted to go to a hospital, but I didn't 
want to leave my children alone." 

His wife had died several years earlier, and his four children were by themselves. An 
acquaintance helped him get onto a bus to go back home. When it arrived in Pinheiro, he was in such 
misery that he had to ask a taxi driver to help him get into the taxi to go to his house. 

He spent two months at home recuperating and was able to walk only with the aid of a cane. 

With all his suffering, Bogea should have been one of those people who’d be afraid to go 
outside at night. But he was actually very pleased by what had happened to him, and he prays for the 
UFO to come back and do it to him again. 

For good reason, which brings us to the third significant occurrence. Thirteen years earlier, a 
doctor operated on his nose because he'd been suffering from severe headaches. The operation cured 
the headaches, but it left him deaf and so impaired his eyesight that he'd had to wear very thick 
glasses ever since. 

Until his encounter with the UFO, that is. 



"When I saw the object and passed out, I lost my glasses," Bogea explained. "But it wasn't until 
I got home the next day that I realized I'd lost them. Since then I haven't needed to wear glasses 
anymore." 

The incident took place on the night of July 10, 1977. Throughout my interview with him in his 
home in December 1978, the interpreter, Angela Hadade, would write my questions on a legal pad 
and hand the pad to him He'd read the questions very quickly and promptly answer in a torrent of 
words. 

"I can also hear a little now," Bogea continued. "I can hear dogs bark and car horns, and 
sometimes I can hear the telephone ring or if you shout or scream. Now I want to meet these people 
again so I can be cured of my deafness. I think it was wonderful and very beautiful, even though I felt 
a lot of pain. I think what I saw was not of this world." 

Angela asked him if it was possible he'd just dreamed about the strange city. 

"Well, it could be," he replied thoughtfully, "but I am so sure of what I saw in that city that I'm 
almost sure I wasn't dreaming." 

Bogea's story took yet another strange twist a year and a half later. In July 1981,1 went back to 
Pinheiro to see how he was doing. He remembered me immediately — but he was wearing thick 
glasses again. 

"In July last year," he explained, "I was riding in a car that was hit broadside by a truck. I was 
unconscious for forty hours. I was in a hospital for a month and, ever since the accident, I've had to 
wear glasses again. And I can't hear anything anymore, not even very loud sounds." 

Underground Base 

Jose Benedito Bogea had a remarkable experience. He's convinced he was taken to a city that 
doesn't sound like anything we know of on this earth. There's no way of knowing how much of what 
he remembers is true. His recall included many particulars not included here, a profusion of details 
so great that it's hard to believe it could have been only a dream. 

If it wasn't a dream, does the "city" really exist or was it a "memory" created and somehow 
implanted in his mind by his UFO abductors? Or does it exist in some other world, some other 
universe? 

Bogea is not the only person to claim to have been taken to a strange city or location during an 
abduction. Many researchers have heard similar stories. In four other cases I've investigated, the 
descriptions of the cities vary greatly but only one is somewhat like Bogea's. 

In Puerto Rico a man told me he had been taken by a UFO to a large underground base where he 
saw dozens of disc-shaped craft and hundreds of small humanoid beings. Reports of underground 
bases crop up from time to time, and they're intriguing, but we have no evidence that they actually 
exist. If they do, they could explain why Bogea and several others saw no sky in the places they were 
taken to. 

Bogea's experience is exceptional for two other reasons: His being transported from Pinheiro to 
Sao Luis and his sharply improved eyesight. 

When he woke up for good, he was more than seventy miles from where he was abducted. Such 
"misplacement" has been reported in a few other UFO cases, although not many. The aliens either 
forgot where they picked Bogea up or they deliberately left him a long way from home, perhaps to 



make sure he knew something unusual had happened to him. 

The first thing he saw when the UFO appeared was a bright bluish-green light, which is 
commonly seen in Brazilian sightings and was the color of the light given off by the object that 
harassed Jerinaldo under the tree near Acari. 

Bogea's encounter came at a time when UFOs were seen almost every night for four months 
around Pinheiro. UFOs appeared so frequently that one official estimated fifty thousand people in the 
region had seen them. It was a time when many people reported being exposed to a sudden burst of 
brilliant light overhead and then being chased by the lighted object, with some of them being burned. 

The beam of light that injured Bogea sounds similar to the one that crippled Alfredo Marques 
Soares the same month, July 1977, near Cardeiros in Ceara, five hundred miles to the east. Bogea 
was crippled for two months, Soares for six. 


Like a Stun Gun 

Bogea was holding the flashlight in his right hand when he pointed it at the object, and the beam 
hit him on his right side. He felt a tingling sensation and passed out. The effects were similar to those 
of a stun gun. The ray didn't burn him, and he didn't feel its painful, crippling effect until seven or 
eight hours later. If his flashlight was perceived as a threat, then it's possible the aliens zapped him to 
prevent his attacking them. 

The vivid, almost psychedelic colors that Bogea saw upon awakening near Sao Luis may have 
been part of the stunning effect of the beam of light, much like seeing stars when getting hit on the 
head. Perhaps he was anesthetized in some way, delaying the painful effects. He felt no such 
sensations when he was in the strange city, no pain, and saw no extraordinary colors. 

Another unusual aspect was that he saw a Vee- shaped object behind the bluish-green light. 
UFOs of this shape are not commonly reported in Brazil. In several hundred cases I've investigated 
there, only five involved triangular UFOs. 

Bogea's abduction is somewhat typical of the abductions that researchers were hearing about in 
the 1960s and 1970s, when people sometimes described beautiful cities, wide avenues and curious, 
non-menacing people. This is far different from the seemingly more sinister abductions being reported 
in the 1990s in the United States, Puerto Rico and some other countries. In these cases, people tell of 
being repeatedly removed from their homes or wherever and subjected to examinations for sexual and 
possibly genetic purposes, leaving them feeling violated and angry because they're unable to do 
anything about it or keep it from happening again and again. 

In Bogea's abduction, he thought the strange city was beautiful but was puzzled by the fact that 
there was no sky above it, just emptiness. Witnesses in two other cases have told me somewhat 
similar tales. In Mendoza, Argentina, a man and his grown son who were abducted found themselves 
driving down a broad boulevard through an all- red city with buildings so high they never saw the 
sky. The other case, which will be discussed in the next chapter, involved a young man who was 
abducted only fifty miles south of Pinheiro. He saw nothing but blackness above him. 

One more point about Bogea's case is that he said the people in the strange city looked like 
Brazilians, but there were no black people nor any old people among them. This is interesting 
because a large percentage of the people in Brazil have brown skin of one shade or another, and of 



course there are plenty of old people, as in any country. If he were taken some place, it wasn't in 
Brazil. 

All of this — the city with no sky, the people who all looked much alike, the "Volkswagens" that 
had no motors or steering wheels — sounds like a show of some kind staged for Bogea's benefit. But 
for what purpose? Not to let us know "they" are here. He told his story to a number of people in 
Pinheiro but some didn't believe him. They don't call him a liar. They just don't believe it happened. 

Bogea admits it could have been a dream, but he remembered it so vividly, even on my second 
visit two and a half years after the first, that he's convinced it wasn't a dream. And if it were a dream, 
why such a strange one, especially the part about there being no sky, things he had never seen before? 

Come zap me again, Bogea says to the UFOs. But he is virtually the lone exception among those 
who have had close encounters in Brazil. For others, their encounters were much more traumatic. 

1. Peen-YAIR-roo, Mar-un-YOW. 

2. A popular model then still being built in Brazil. 



Chapter Thirteen 
THEY TOOK HIS TEETH 

All the people talked about so far who were pulled upward by a UFO were able to resist or 
were freed after going a short distance above the ground. But others were taken away, and some don't 
know what happened to them. 

One of them is Luis Carlos Serra. He not only was levitated into a UFO and taken away for 
three days but also has a big blank in his memory. He can recall the first moments of his experience 
but nothing from then until ten days later, about a week after his abduction ended. 

When he finally regained his senses, he said he'd been taken away to a strange land with no sky 
by three little men in a UFO. There was plenty of medical evidence to prove something extraordinary 
had happened to him, and his doctors were baffled. No one believed he was lying, and the mayor of 
his town said other people had seen a UFO the day Luis disappeared. 

The incident began just after noon on Good Friday, March 24, 1978, near Penalva, a small town 
in the interior of Maranhao. Luis was then sixteen. It was after dark on the following Monday evening 
when Jose Dos Santos, who had been fishing nearby, heard a shout for help. He went into the jungle 
and found Luis lying on a path. 

Dos Santos, a short, stocky, middle-aged man, recognized Luis and knew he'd been missing 
because his mother had been looking for him. 

"He seemed to be in a daze," Dos Santos said. "He didn't look like he was hurt, and he wasn't 
crying, but he couldn't move. I helped him up but he fell back down, so I carried him to my boat and 
brought him back to my house. He didn't say anything more after I heard him shouting." 

A neighbor helped Dos Santos carry Luis to the home of his mother, Maria, a walk of about ten 
minutes. From there, at her request, the two men carried him across town to the tiny ten-bed Penalva 
hospital, which is operated by the state government. The staff at that time consisted of Dr. Linda 
Madeira, who is a general practitioner and gynecologist, and half a dozen nursing aides. 

Four Teeth Missing 

Dr. Macieira, thirty three, was in Sao Luis that night and didn't see Luis until she returned the 
following day. 1 A polite, serious doctor, she was never able to determine what was wrong with him 

"Luis was completely dumb and had muscle contractions, like he was paralyzed," she said as 
we sat at a table in the hospital ten months after the incident. "I thought when I first saw him that he 
was under the influence of marijuana or other drugs, but we found out he wasn't. 

"Four teeth were missing, and we learned they'd been pulled out. Several were broken. Just one 
tooth was extracted completely, and the other three still had the roots in the mouth. All four were 
bleeding. 

"People told me he had long hair before this happened, but he was completely bald. When I 
examined him closely, I could see that his hair had been burned off. His scalp wasn't burned but the 
tops of his ears were slightly burned, like a sunburn, and they smelled like they'd been burned. The 
hair was definitely burned off." 

Luis' body was nearly rigid. 



"I tried to move his arms and legs but couldn't," Dr. Macieira said. "I pricked them with a sharp 
pin to test his sensitivities, but he showed no reaction at all, no pain anywhere in his body. I examined 
his whole body and found no marks on him. His body was completely normal, no scars, nothing, just 
the teeth. He was breathing normally, and he had no unusual breath or body odor. I couldn't reach any 
conclusions as to what caused this condition in the boy. I have no idea what happened to him. 

"He went nine days without eating. He had to be fed intravenously because he wouldn't eat or 
drink, not even water. He spent three days without going to the bathroom and had to be catheterized." 

Before talking to Dr. Macieira, we had gone directly to Luis' home. He was alone. His mother 
had gone away for the day, his father lived in another town, and he had no brothers or sisters. 

Luis was a shy, curly-headed youth, short and slender with pale, brown skin. By now he was 
seventeen but looked younger. Like most of the other kids in Penalva, he was barefoot and wearing 
only a pair of shorts. This part of Brazil is near the equator, and the weather is always warm 

Loud Noise 

Luis was reluctant to talk, but once we convinced him we weren't going to make fun of him, he 
told us what happened. Angela Hadade was again interpreting, and we talked to him in the small, bare 
living room. Fifteen to twenty people had gathered around us, some hanging in the doors and 
windows. 

"I was just inside the jungle west of town picking guava fruit when I heard a loud, sharp sound 
like a car horn," Luis said. "I got very scared. I looked up and saw a very big, bright light, bigger than 
the sun, about half a meter. It was right above the palm trees, round and white. It hurt my eyes, and I 
could look at it only for a moment. 

"Suddenly, I fell flat on my back on the ground, and I couldn't move. I don't know why. I was 
paralyzed. The only thing I could do was hear and see. I laid on the ground for some time. Then I 
began to rise in the air, and now I could see an object above the trees. Something was pulling me up, 
but I don't know what. I was amazed. I couldn't see anything holding me, and nothing was touching 
me." 

There was a note of wonder in his voice as he said this, still marveling at the fact that he rose 
into the air the way he did. 

"ft took only a few seconds," Luis said. "I wasn't afraid. I stared at the object as I was going up. 
ft was round and had four round balls on the bottom, and one of them was lighted. When I got high 
enough, I could see a dome on top and three windows that went all the way around the dome. 

"Only one window was open, and I just entered it head first, ft was about a meter square. When 
I got inside, I fell down on the floor but not hard, ft didn't seem very large inside, about the size of this 
room" 

The living room was square, about ten feet by ten. 

"I was lying on my back, still paralyzed, but I could look around. There were three little people 
in there. They were only about a meter tall. They were walking around, and they moved just like 
human beings. They didn't seem to pay any attention to me. I couldn't see their faces or skin. They 
were covered with what looked like aluminum, and glass covered their faces, but I couldn't see 
through the glass. Their bodies were just like ours, only smaller. They wore gloves and boots and had 
something like knapsacks on their backs about this big." 



Luis held his hands about twelve inches apart. 

"I didn't understand what they were saying to each other. Their voices were loud, but they 
weren't like human voices. They were very deep. I was lying on my back, and I still couldn't move, 
but I could look around. There were three chairs, like armchairs, of aluminum. The arms were made 
of rubber. They were facing the wall. The wall was white, and there was nothing on the wall." 

Luis saw something like dials but didn't know what they were. He saw no tables, benches or 
desks but there were many white lights, and the floor was smooth. 

No Sky 

The object soon began moving, he said. "I couldn't feel us moving but I knew we were. It made a 
noise like a very loud machine. I was taken to a strange land with no trees and just tall grass. I don't 
know how long it took us to get there. I went out of the window the same way I went in, on my back 
with nothing holding me up. I was still paralyzed. 

"It was a strange place that I didn't know. It looked like a field but without any birds or lakes. 
The grass was very tall, about half a meter. I never saw any buildings, I couldn't see the sky or any 
trees, and I couldn't see any stars. It was just very dark up there." 

After he floated out of the craft, he came to rest on a smooth "stone" as flat as a table. 

"I was still paralyzed," Luis said. "Then these little people came to me and put a tube in my 
nose. It didn't hurt. Then they put a transparent ball in my mouth, and the liquid just went down my 
throat very quickly. I fell asleep then, and I don't know what happened after that until I woke up in the 
jungle." 

The sun had set, and it was dark when he awakened, about seven in the evening three days and 
seven hours after it all began. Luis was lying in the same area where he'd been knocked down, but 
how long he'd been lying there, no one knows. 

"I started shouting," he said. "I didn't remember anything after that. I couldn't speak for a long 
time, and the first day I couldn't hear, either. I tried hard to speak but I couldn't. It was about fifteen 
days before I felt right again. I went eight or ten days without eating after it was over. I wondered 
what happened to me but I wasn't afraid." 

Dr. Macieira first examined Luis on Tuesday, March 28, and three days later he was flown to a 
much larger hospital in Sao Luis, the state capital about a hundred miles to the northeast. Luis 
remembers waking up on the jungle floor and shouting, but nothing more until seven days later. He 
knows he was found by the fisherman, Dos Santos, but only because his mother told him that. 

Neurologist Puzzled 

When Angela and I finished with all our interviews, we flew back to Sao Luis in a hired Cessna 
that had taken us to Penalva, and the next day we set out to talk to the other doctors who had treated 
Luis at Serme Hospital in Sao Luis. The hospital's records listed at least half a dozen physicians who 
had examined or treated him, but we could locate only three, the rest having moved on to other cities. 

One doctor, Antonio Saldanho, was especially helpful. He is a neurologist and speaks fluent 
English. Although he examines a number of patients every day, and nearly a year had passed since 
he'd last seen Luis, he readily recalled treating him. 



"I thought it was a very strange case because in my examination I couldn't find any abnormal 
neurological responses," Dr. Saldanho said. "Luis was found in a state as if he were scared, 
frightened. He couldn't talk. I wouldn't say it was aphasia, which is an impossibility to talk, but he 
wasn't able to talk. 

"He was a 'locked-in' patient. That's just an expression. He was awake, his eyes were open, 
fixed, like a fixed stare, but he wasn't able to talk, and he didn't respond to verbal commands. You ask 
him to lift his hand or his arms, he didn't respond. Simple requests like 'Open your mouth' or 'Close 
your eyes,' he didn't do that. He wasn't able to. And his reflexes were normal. He had no abnormal 
response, not in terms of neurological signs. It seemed to me he had a mental problem. 

"Something had scared him. As a neurologist, in all that time I wasn't able to explain why he had 
that clinical picture. I couldn't find any signal in the neurological examination which would justify 
what he had at that time. All the time I saw him, he had a fixed stare, as if frightened. 

"He didn't eat the first few days and had to be fed intravenously. He wasn't able to swallow 
food. It was very strange because he didn't have any reaction to food. If you showed him food, he was 
completely indifferent. The same with water, so we were obliged to give him fluids. 

"I couldn't see any skull injury, no fractures. His bone structure was not harmed. He had no 
muscle weakness. He was not in a coma, and he was breathing well. He didn't have any fever, no 
elevated temperature at all. 

"I did a cardiological checkup and found nothing unusual. His pulse rate, the cardiac rate and 
everything was normal. He had no reaction to painful stimuli. There was no way he could have faked 
those symptoms. Something had shocked the boy. It was a very strange case. I have never seen 
anything like it, and I called for a psychiatrist because I couldn't find any neurological problem." 

Examined by Psychiatrists 

As it turned out, Luis was examined by two psychiatrists. The first was Dr. Renato Bacelar, who 
told us in his office: "I tried to break his story about a UFO a number of times, but I didn't succeed. 

He repeated the story without variation each time. He could be telling the truth." 

Unable to determine what was wrong with Luis, Dr. Bacelar asked another psychiatrist, Dr. 
Bacelar Viana, a cousin, to look at him. So, Angela and I went to Dr. Viana's office. 

"There is no doubt the boy believes the story he is telling is true," Dr. Viana told us, but added 
that he himself didn't believe it. Instead, he thought Luis might have been the victim of a homosexual 
attack and that his shocked mind, unable to accept such an attack, made up the story about the UFO. 

Dr. Viana had nothing to back up his theory, but then he said: "Besides, a UFO wouldn't do that." 

Why wouldn't a UFO do that, we asked. 

"Because if they are able to come all the way here, they wouldn't be that crude," he replied, 
which evidently meant that he believed UFOs come from somewhere else in the universe. 

Sketches UFO and Aliens 

Luis began coming out of his paralysis on the third day he was in the Sao Luis hospital. He still 
wasn't able to talk yet, but gestured for paper and pencil. Then he began to write about the strange 
encounter he had with the tiny UFO beings. He also drew sketches of a disc-shaped craft and its 



occupants. 

When he regained use of his voice, he told the same story over and over again, exactly the same 
each time. 

When Luis began walking again, he had to practice for several days because he was unsteady on 
his feet. On April 7, he was discharged and sent home. 

Joao Francisco Mendes, then the mayor of Penalva, has a second home in Sao Luis, and it was 
there that Angela and I found Mendes several days later. He was holding court on the porch of his 
home, talking with several other residents of Penalva about town business. 

Mendes, a short, businesslike, middle-aged man, believed Luis' story. "Luis is not the type of 
boy to make up a story like that," he said. "He's a very normal person. He always has been, and he's 
honest. He never uses drugs as far as I know, and he's never been in trouble with the police. His 
mother didn't report him missing to the police. She was out looking for him every day. He was 
missing for four days, and the neighbors knew he was missing. 

"Many people in Penalva saw the UFO the day the boy disappeared, on Good Friday. It was like 
a fire." 

As unusual as Luis' story is, it has some elements in common with so many other UFO reports. 
The most interesting aspect to me was that he was levitated some eighty feet into the air and into a 
UFO that was hovering above the coconut trees. 

At the time Luis told us about being levitated, it didn't mean a great deal to me. Its importance 
became clear only years later after I had talked to a number of other people who had been subjected 
to an invisible, upward pull from UFOs. It means that UFO aliens can indeed use this powerful tool to 
take someone away if they so choose. 

Furthermore, once the UFO reached the strange land with no sky, the same force was used to 
float Luis out of the UFO and onto a flat surface, where the aliens gave him something to swallow that 
knocked him out for three days. Most likely the same force was used to return him to the UFO and 
then down to the ground after he was taken back to the jungle. 

Unlike some of the other witnesses, Luis felt no wind, no coldness nor any heat when he was 
rising up to the UFO. 

In the beginning, the aliens must have zapped him in some unseen fashion because he was 
knocked flat on his back as he stood looking up at the bright light, and once on the ground, he felt 
paralyzed, able only to hear and move his eyes. 

Must Have Had Nourishment 

We shall probably never know what happened to Luis during the three days he was gone. For 
whatever reason, his hair was burned off — without burning his scalp, although his ears were slightly 
singed as if sunburned — and four teeth were broken off or removed. 

The aliens must have given him some nourishment during the three days he was missing, because 
he showed no signs of starving or fasting and had to be fed intravenously for nearly a week after 
being found. For most of the eleven days he was in the two hospitals, he showed no interest in food or 
water at all. 

What would account for his paralysis, fixed stare and general condition? Dr. Macieira, a 
neurologist, two psychiatrists and all the other physicians couldn't determine the cause. Something 



unusual happened to him, something profoundly traumatic because Luis was catatonic for nearly a 
week after he was found. 

One psychiatrist theorized that Luis was homosexually raped and that, unable to cope with such 
a thing, his mind made up the story about the UFO. Yet the doctor had no evidence that this happened. 
If Luis had been raped, he must have struggled and should have had scratches or bruises on him. Yet 
Dr. Macieira found no marks on him. 

Furthermore, Luis was virtually bald when Dr. Macieira examined him, and she concluded that 
his hair had been burned off without burning his scalp. It seems to me that this would be extremely 
difficult for any human to do that without burning his scalp, and especially someone who was raping a 
youngster in the forest. Also, why would a rapist burn his hair off and pull out or break off four 
molars? And how would that account for Luis' being unconscious for three days and immobile for 
several more? 

It might have been helpful to have had Luis put under hypnosis to see if that would help him 
remember what happened, but qualified hypnotists are rare in the interior. The physician I would like 
to have used lived sixteen hundred miles away, near Rio de Janeiro, and the cost of getting the two 
together made it impractical. 


A Nothingness Above 

The three little beings that Luis saw in the UFO are similar to those commonly reported in 
encounters throughout the world. The fact that they were covered from head to toe and that their faces 
couldn't be seen is also typical of creatures reported by other witnesses, in and out of Brazil. The 
beings spoke a language Luis couldn't understand, in unusually deep voices, and they paid no attention 
to him, indicating perhaps that they knew he was so helpless they weren't worried about what he 
might do. 

The strange land with no trees or sky is similar to what Bogea reported in the last chapter, 
except that Luis saw a black nothingness above him and Bogea a daylight nothingness. Both may have 
been inside something enormously huge and covered. If what Bogea and Luis saw was not an illusion, 
they had to have been taken some place. Where that could be, we don't know. We can only speculate. 

In Penalva the day I interviewed Luis, the last question I asked was how he felt now. "I feel all 
right," he said. "The only thing different is that I feel I'm more intelligent now." 

Others who've had close encounters with UFO beings have also felt they were a little more 
intelligent as a result. Luis doesn't know what happened after he passed out in the strange land, but he 
does know how it all started. Not everyone who's been taken away is even that fortunate, as the next 
victim will show. 


1. Ma-see-AlR-uh. 



Chapter Fourteen 
A BROKEN MAN 

Luis Serra was missing for three days and wasn't aware of anything around him for a week after, 
but he emerged none the worse for wear. Leonel Dos Santos was missing only four hours, and it 
ruined his life. 

Leonel was forty-eight when I first met him. At that time he owned a farm of one-hundred-thirty 
acres with cattle, goats, sheep, horses and burros. Today he owns virtually nothing. 

The encounter that changed his life occurred on July 27, 1979. He never saw the UFO, only a 
large shadow that fell over him. 

"It happened about seven in the morning in broad daylight on my farm when two friends and I 
were trying to get some wood to build a small house," Leonel told me six months later. A slender, 
mild-ma nne red man, he appeared to be very tired or ill during the interview at the sheriffs office in 
Lajes, Rio Grande do Norte. 

"The other two men stopped to eat some breakfast. I wasn't hungry, so I wandered off looking at 
trees. A little while later I was standing in the middle of a dry river bed, looking at trees." 

Leonel had been carrying a foice, a big curved knife with a long wooden handle similar to a 
scythe, when he glimpsed something moving behind the trees. He stopped, stuck the blade in the sand 
and was leaning on the handle as he tried to figure out what he'd seen. 

"Suddenly a big, black shadow covered the ground around me," he said. "I felt cold and numb, 
and I looked at the ground in surprise. I turned to lookup and see what it was, but I seemed kind of 
paralyzed. I could feel my eyes rolling back in my head and my feet went up in front of me, like a 
backward somersault. Then I passed out. I didn't see what was above me." 

He came to four hours later, dizzy and very sick. 

"I didn't know where I was," Leonel said. "I was cold and had a bad headache, terrible thirst, 
pains in my chest and a bitter taste in my mouth. My mouth was very dry, like cotton. I couldn't hear 
anything in my right ear. I started wandering around in the woods without knowing where I was going. 
After a while I heard a train, found the railroad tracks and realized I was on the farm next to mine." 

He slowly made his way back to where his two friends, Jose Francisco Da Silva and Severino 
Cosme, were gathering wood. They had searched for him but found only a mystery. 

"He'd disappeared," Jose said. "I whistled and called but he didn't answer. We went looking for 
him and followed his footprints in the river bed. We found his foice sticking in the ground, and his 
footprints just stopped there. They just stopped. It was very puzzling." 

Jose and Severino decided to go on cutting down trees, and that's what they were doing when 
Leonel came staggering up to them late in the morning. He was sweating and pale, still dizzy and 
miserable. 

"Where were you?" Jose asked. 

"I don't know," Leonel replied. "Something took me. 1 don't know where I was. Please, give me 
some tobacco." 


Pains Persist 



They gave him tobacco but, when he smelled it, he fainted for a minute or so. He rested under a 
tree for the rest of the day as Jose and Severino continued working. About six in the evening, they 
took him home. Leonel had a dull pain in his right leg, a pain that he still felt the day I first 
interviewed him in January 1980. 

"I was also partially deaf for about a month," he said. "I could hear nothing with my right ear 
and only a little with my left. I also had chest pains for about forty-five days. My wife found a small 
red puncture mark on the back of my right hip. I couldn't see it. She said it was like an injection mark. 
It went away after eight or ten days." 

Leonel had a dream a few nights later. "I saw a strange little machine, smaller than a car, 
perhaps big enough to hold one person," he said. "It was going away from me. I could see some kind 
of fire in the back. I didn't see anyone but I heard a man's voice, very deep and ugly sounding, say: 
'Don't you want to know what happened to you?'" 

Leonel would like to know what happened, but those missing hours still remain a blank in his 
mind to this day. As we talked on that day in 1980, he seemed lethargic and melancholy. He spoke in 
a low voice. If there'd been any zest in him before, it wasn't there now. 

Twelve years later, on a brief swing through Rio Grande do Norte in September 1991, Cynthia 
Luce and I stopped in Lajes to see how Leonel had fared since then. I was astonished to learn that he 
had never recovered from the incident and has lost nearly everything he owned. 

"I have never been able to work again," he said in the living room of the small home that he and 
his wife, Aurea, now live in next to the town cemetery in Lajes. "I was a very strong worker before 
this happened. Now if I start working I begin trembling and have to stop and sit down. I am terribly 
weak and have a lot of pain in my bones, and my muscles are weak. I can't walk very far. My skin 
feels cold and clammy, and I have bad headaches." 

Leonel said he could barely move for about a year after the incident. "Then I tried to work but 
couldn't because I was so full of pain," he said. "I worked on the farm but had to sit down often. 
Eventually I sold everything I had. I had some cattle, goats, sheep, horses and burros, and I sold 
everything I had. I had a nice piece of property. I needed money and couldn't work. I couldn't walk or 
ride my horse. I didn't sell everything all at once, just some here, some there, saving the horse to the 
last, thinking I could ride it, but I couldn't even do that. I had to sell my animals one by one to pay 
someone to work my land. Finally I had to sell the land itself. 

Still Gets Dizzy 

"I'm living now because the prefeito gave me a job as a night watchman at the cemetery. 1 But this 
is just an excuse to give me money so I can exist. I have to work from six to midnight, but I come 
home and collapse nearly every night. When I lay down, my head spins." 

"I sold the farm two years ago and have been working at the cemetery for about two months. I 
own this home. The prefeito gave me this piece of land and I built this house. 2 

I saw Leonel once again in July 1993. By then he had given up his job at the cemetery to become 
custodian of a senior citizen center two blocks from his home. His physical condition remains the 
same, and he still has no idea what happened to him that day in 1979. 

Many people have been hurt in UFO encounters, and some have died, but Leonel is one of only 
three that I know of who survived but were permanently disabled. 



There is no direct evidence a UFO was involved inLeonel's case. It's possible that his dream of 
a little machine going away in the sky was a suppressed memory surfacing, but it may also have been 
just a dream. 

However, the circumstantial evidence points toward a UFO as the villain. Rio Grande do Norte 
was under a virtual UFO siege at that time, and numerous sightings were reported in the Lajes area. A 
round shadow fell over Leonel as he stood in the dry river bed. He remembers somersaulting 
backwards into the air and then passing out when he looked up. He awoke four hours later some 
distance away, sick and nauseated and not knowing where he was. His friends found his tracks going 
into the river bed and ending abruptly where his foice was sticking in the sand. Something snatched 
him from the ground and took him away. 

We don't know what happened to him during those four missing hours, except that he suffered a 
puncture wound in his back. Whether he was injected with some substance or something else 
happened to cause the wound, his life has been filled with misery ever since. 

What could have caused the deafness and chest pains? 1 2 3 Why would one leg ache and not the 
other? What kind of injection would permanently affect his bones and muscles and cause severe 
headaches? If the aliens were conducting an experiment of some kind, they apparently weren't overly 
concerned with the effects it would have on Leonel. 

Whatever it was, it left him in constant pain and unable to work for the rest of his life, one of the 
more tragic and senseless victims of UFO violence in Brazil. 

Geraldo Gomes, who was levitated and carried a short distance in the Valley of the Old Women, 
also suffered from chest pains and had trouble with his eyesight. 

1. Pray-FAY-too, the mayor of the prefeitura, or municipality. 

2. Forty by seventy feet. 

3. Geraldo Gomes, who was levitated and carried a short distance in the Valley of the Old 
Women, also suffered from chest pains and had trouble with his eyesight. 



Chapter Fifteen 
MISSING FOR A DAY 

One other case of a man who was probably abducted by a UFO should be discussed. The victim 
in this one was Francisco Cavalcante Dos Santos, who was missing for an entire day and, like Leonel 
Dos Santos (no relation), has no idea where he was or what happened to him. 

Francisco, twenty at the time, lived in a village of adobe homes scattered across barren hills 
that surround the Bom Fim mine twenty miles south of Lajes in Rio Grande do Norte. It can be 
reached only over a poor dirt road. 

Francisco not only didn't know what happened to him, but he didn't want to talk about it, either. 
Nearly everything I learned about his experience came from his father and his friends. 

"Before this happened, Francisco never drank much, only on weekends," Abrosio De Araujo, 
one of the friends, said. "Now he drinks every night after work." 

Rogerio Freitas, who had first investigated the case, and I had arrived at Bom Fim late in the 
afternoon, after most of the men had finished working for the day. Francisco wasn't drinking, so far as 
we could see, and he wasn't talking much, either. He probably wouldn't have said anything to us at all 
if his father, Jose, hadn't insisted. 

We talked to Jose and Abrosio and others outside Jose's small home while Francisco took a 
bath, and when Francisco was dressed, we moved inside. The living room was very small, but it 
seemed like a dozen or more fellow miners squeezed in there with us. It was getting dark, and Jose lit 
an oil lamp. 

Francisco, a lean, young man of average height with black hair, didn't like the attention. He sat 
in a chair next to me, staring straight ahead and grunting only "Yes" or "No" or "I don't remember" to 
our questions. Most of his story came from Jose in the dim, eerie light of the oil lamp. 

UFO Flies Over 

"Francisco went to work at seven o'clock one Tuesday morning last September," Jose said. "He 
had a small snack of bread and cookies in his left pocket. He always comes home for lunch, but this 
day he didn't. When he didn't come home, I became worried and began looking for him, along with ten 
other men from the village. We looked everywhere but we never found him. 

"Then, about eight o'clock that night, he came walking into the village and, at the same time, we 
saw a flying saucer rise up from behind the hill in the same direction Francisco was coming from. It 
was bright red and made no noise. It flew right over our house, within one hundred meters of us, and 
flew away. 

"We asked Francisco where he'd been but he didn't remember. When he got to the door of the 
house, he simply fell forward onto the floor. He still had his food in his pocket." 

Then Abrosio De Araujo said: "When Francisco got home his tongue was paralyzed. He had no 
feeling in it, and he couldn't speak clearly. This lasted for eight days, and during this time he couldn't 
eat anything. He only drank a little juice and water. Also, he didn't want anyone near him or to talk to 
him. He wanted to be left alone." 

It appeared that Francisco still wanted to be left alone. We had spent more than an hour and a 



half in the village, and it was now dark outside. We took pity on the young man and left. 

The only connection with a UFO, of course, is that Francisco's father and most of the other 
villagers saw one pass overhead just a minute or so after Francisco walked into sight after being 
missing all day. It had come from behind a hill to the east, and Francisco had come walking from that 
direction. 

Francisco could have blacked out on his way to work that morning, wandered into the 
countryside and found his way back in the evening. But that wouldn't explain his inability to speak 
clearly for eight days nor his intense desire to be left alone. Something happened to him that day that 
had a profound effect on him, whether he knew what had happened or not. 

His father and friends felt certain the UFO had taken him away for the day, which seems to be a 
reasonable conclusion. Where he went and what happened during those thirteen hours is anybody's 
guess. Whatever it was, it brought about a personality change in Francisco. 

The incident took place in 1979 and I talked to him in January 1980. Twelve years later, on a 
field trip through Rio Grande do Norte, Cynthia Luce and I managed to locate Francisco and talked to 
him. 

He had long since quit working at the mine, which had closed down and later reopened when 
new minerals were discovered there. Now thirty-three, Francisco was working on a farm called 
Pedra Preta just north of the small city of Sao Tome. This is about twenty miles south of the Bom Fim 
mine but several mountain ranges lie in between. 

A young couple and their children live at Sitio Pedra Preta. The husband said Francisco was 
working in a field, and he sent his son to fetch him. Twenty minutes later the boy returned with 
Francisco, who was as reluctant to talk as he was the first time I met him. He wasn't hostile, though, 
and didn't seem to resent being called in from the field to talk to us. However, his answers were still 
the brief yes-no variety. He never smiled. 

Francisco said he never did find out what happened to him, and his memory of that day is still 
blank. He never had any aftereffects, had never dreamed about it and said he'd more or less stopped 
drinking. He looked healthy and said he was. 

We soon ran out of questions to ask. He simply nodded and walked back to the field, possibly 
less concerned about what happened to him that day in September 1979 than we were. 

Next, the injury toll rises as UFOs run amuck. 



PART FOUR 

A HARMFUL PHENOMENON 



Chapter Sixteen 
THE 'FIRE' IS COMING 

In the small city of Pinheiro, a fisherman trudged slowly up the empty street. It was three o'clock 
in the morning, and he kept a wary eye on the dark buildings as he passed them. He'd been fishing for 
hours in the lake east of town and was carrying the fish he'd caught. Suddenly a ball of fire appeared 
without a sound in the sky, frightening him. 

"O fogo!" he cried and ran, fearing for his life. It was a fiery-looking UFO and "the fire," as he 
called it in Portuguese, had been seen many times in recent weeks. Many people had been terrified. 
Some had been chased by it, and some had even been burned by its light. Almost everyone who saw it 
was afraid it would take them away. 

As the fisherman ran for home, dogs began to bark. That awakened another man, who looked out 
a window and saw the glowing mass sitting motionless in the sky a thousand feet above the town. He 
hurried to his phone and nervously dialed the mayor, Manoel Paiva. In a faded yellow stucco house a 
few blocks away, Mayor Paiva stirred and sat up in bed as the phone jarred him awake. 

"Quick, Mayor," the excited man told him, "look out the window -- 'the fire' is here!" 

Paiva stepped over to a window. The first few times people had told him they'd seen a ball of 
fire moving through the sky, he was sure they were lying. But one night he saw it, too, and he realized 
they were telling the truth. 

By now, as Paiva listened to the man on the phone, he had seen "the fire" several times, had 
marveled at it and was awed by it. As he looked out the window, he could see the bright UFO 
hovering just north of the plaza in the center of town, lighting up everything below it. It was an eerie, 
reddish color but gave off an unusual bluish light. 

Vanishes Among the Stars 

Paiva knew not to look at it too long. Too many people had complained that their eyes hurt after 
they'd stared at it. The object seemed to be a living thing, with colors swirling around in it like molten 
steel. Occasionally there was a flash of light, as if small explosions were occurring inside it. 

Several minutes later, the object shot away with unbelievable speed, climbing so high into the 
sky that in seconds it became a mere pinpoint of light out in space. 

A year and a half later when I first went to Pinheiro, Mayor Paiva said: "What impressed 
people most was that the UFO would go way up into the sky until it seemed like a star. In fact, we 
couldn't tell it from a star. And just as suddenly it would come right back down to earth again. It had 
incredible speed. If this is something from this world, then we have reached perfection, because this 
object made no sound, had great, great speed, could stop any place it wanted to, and could go in any 
direction. 

"Many people were afraid to go out at night because of what might happen to them if'the fire' 
caught them. Two-thirds of the people of this city saw what looked like a big ball of fire. Pinheiro has 
only sixteen thousand people, but it was seen in the whole area. I'd say it was seen by fifty thousand 
people. 

"The object would come at high speed and stop. Suddenly, it would go up or down with the 



same velocity. Lots of people who were fishing in boats were chased by this ball of fire. It made 
many people sick. They had fevers and everything. Their eyes hurt. The light from the UFO was so 
bright it would seem like day. The intensity of the light left people a little dizzy. Everybody was 
afraid because we didn't know if the object had any radioactivity. I was afraid, too." 

A number of fishermen and farmers reported they'd been burned when UFOs suddenly appeared 
without warning in the night sky just over their heads, Paiva said. The objects seemed to be attracted 
by anything that gave off light, a flashlight, a lantern, the flash of a match or even the glow of a 
cigarette. 

"Some people were attacked by the UFO and chased by it, and some were burned by it," the 
mayor said. "The fishermen were so afraid that they wouldn't go fishing for three or four months. 
Many people wouldn't even go into their backyards to relieve themselves at night. 

"There was no set time for the object to come. There were nights when it would appear at six 
o'clock and other nights at four in the morning. This object would come within three hundred to four 
hundred meters of the ground." 

Mayor Paiva was so concerned with the object's almost nightly visits throughout April, May, 
June, and July in 1977 that he sent a telegram to the Regional Air Command Headquarters of the 
Brazilian Air Force asking for help. He never received an answer. 

Workers Terrified 

Paiva, a solidly built, middle-aged businessman, talked about the sightings for an hour, with 
Angela Hadade interpreting. 

"One time there were twenty-six people working about six kilometers from the city, building 
fences," he said. "They asked one of the men to go fishing so they'd have something to eat. While he 
was fishing, the object suddenly appeared just above him. He ran back to camp, exhausted, and told 
everyone about a fireball chasing him. 

"Then everybody in the camp saw it, too. It had a bluish light that lit up the area for about a 
kilometer around. It woke all the horses and cows, frightening them. The light stayed about half an 
hour and then suddenly disappeared. 

"The next day, they moved their camp to another place because they were so afraid. At the new 
place, they dressed up a piece of wood like a scarecrow and put a kerosene lamp on top of it. They 
wanted to see if the strange object would come back, and they hid in the woods to watch. 

"Later that night, the object suddenly just appeared, very, very close to the kerosene lamp. It 
stayed there for about forty-five minutes. The people said the light was so bright they couldn't tell its 
shape. After this, a lot of men left and went back home." 

As we talked, Paiva sent an aide to find a fisherman named Inacio Rodrigues, believed to have 
been the first person in Pinheiro to report seeing the UFO. Rodrigues, a tall, slender man of fifty-two, 
arrived a few minutes later and told us this story: 

"I was fishing with my friend Genesio Silva one night in April. About one-thirty in the morning, 
we saw a little 'fire' in the sky in the north. It was very small. I got a little worried and asked Genesio 
to put his cigar out. Then the 'fire' got bigger and bigger, and we could see it was spinning. 

"We jumped out of the boat into the water and tried to find a place to hide. The 'fire' was getting 
bigger and bigger and closer and closer. We hid under a clump of bushes so the 'fire' wouldn't see us. 



"The object stopped about a hundred meters away from us, and it stayed there until about five in 
the morning. We stayed hidden all that time because we were afraid to move. The light was bluish, 
but when it first appeared it was a small, red ball. It was beautiful, but it was so bright I couldn't look 
at it very much. 

"Just before dawn it disappeared, just as if you'd turned off a light. And where the light had been 
we could see a kind of shadow, shaped like a refrigerator. When the sun came up, it disappeared. I 
got sick with dysentery and was sick the rest of the day." 

Pinheiro, located in northern Maranhao, is where Benedito Bogea, the man who wants to be 
zapped again by a UFO, lives. His encounter is one of the many that took place during this period. 

Man Burned 

The day after we talked with Mayor Paiva, Angela, her sister, Cristina, and I drove to the village 
of Sao Bento, southeast of Pinheiro, to try to find a man who reportedly had been burned. We never 
located him, but we did come across another victim, Joao Barros, a fisherman in his forties who said 
he, too, had been burned by a UFO. 

"I saw the 'light' in a river when I was fishing with two friends," said Joao. "We were in a boat, 
and at about one o'clock in the morning, the 'fire' appeared. It lit up a big area. The 'light' passed 
behind me going east. It was red in the center and greenish-blue on the outside. 

"I felt a lot of heat from it, and for three days after I felt like pepper was burning my back. The 
other two men didn't have any burns. For one month after that, I wouldn't go fishing or go anywhere at 
night." 

From Sao Bento, we drove on farther southeast to the small village of Mata De Olimpio, deep in 
the tropical forest. We'd been told that a man living there, Antonio Pinheiro, had also been burned by 
a UFO. 1 

After getting lost twice, we finally reached the village only to find that Pinheiro and his family 
had gone to another village for the day. We had to settle for talking to his neighbors. One of them, 
Ladislau Amorim, said: "Antonio told me he went into his backyard one night to go to the bathroom 
and, while he was out there, the object appeared with a very, very bright light over his head." 

A dozen neighbors were crowded around us, some of them nodding from time to time, agreeing 
with what Ladislau was saying. "He ran back into the house screaming and, when he got to the kitchen 
door, he fell down. His wife pulled him inside. He was dizzy. He felt heat on the back of his arms and 
legs and back. His arms and legs were numb for eight days." 

Another neighbor, Maria Pinheiro, who is no relation, said Antonio's wife had to put damp 
cloths on his back all night long. 

Maria said her own husband, Lafonso, also had an encounter with a UFO. He made his living by 
buying food and other goods in the city of Pinheiro and other towns and carrying them back to his 
village on his horse to sell to his neighbors. Lafonso too was away that day, but this is what Maria 
told us: 

"He was coming home from Pinheiro on his horse about five o'clock one morning when 'the fire' 
stopped over his head. He was very scared. He was using a flashlight to see where he was going, and 
when the object saw him, it came down and stopped above him. Lafonso jumped off his horse and 
started running. He didn't get burned, but he said he felt as if he had. He said the heat from the object 



was very strong. The 'light' stayed about two minutes and then disappeared. But my husband stayed at 
a friend's house the rest of the night." 

Neither Lafonso nor Antonio would go outside at night anymore, she said. 

At the time all these incidents happened, as many as fifty thousand people saw the UFOs, 
according to Mayor Paiva's estimate, yet few people outside the area knew what was happening. TV 
stations and newspapers in Sao Luis, located three hours to the east by car and ferryboat, had covered 
the sightings extensively, but the news apparently had never circulated much beyond Sao Luis. 

Cameraman Film s UFO 

I had learned about these incidents from Monica Carneiro, who had been my chief interpreter 
while I was in Sao Luis investigating another case. She took me to see Cinaldo Oliveiro, a TV 
cameraman who had spent two weeks in the Pinheiro area in July 1977 with a reporter. 

"About ninety percent of the people we talked to had seen the UFOs," Oliveiro said. "Many 
fishermen had actually been burned. One night we filmed this thing going through the sky in a wavy 
motion. It looked like a satellite but it varied so much in form and shape. It would grow bigger and 
suddenly disappear. The people there said it would reappear a little later near some person, and that 
is when they'd get burned. 

"This thing we filmed actually made like a triangle in its flight through the sky. It would come 
from Crab Island in the Bay of Sao Marcos and go to Anajatuba and then to Sao Bento and Pinheiro. It 
looked like a star, but as the light grew bigger and bigger, it would change in color to yellow, blue 
and red. Then it turned off. 

"The next day, about three kilometers from where we had been, we talked to a man with burns 
on his back. He told us that the night before, when the light turned off, it turned on again right above 
him, and that was when he got burned. 

"I don't know how many fishermen were burned, but we interviewed about ten. They weren't 
very serious burns, but the men were so afraid that they didn't want to go out to work anymore. 

"We talked to some people on a farm that has a building where all the workers live and sleep. 
This one man was fishing one night when the light suddenly turned on just above him He ran as fast 
as he could into the building, and the light kept going around and around the building for twenty 
minutes." 

While we were at the TV station, Jose Raimundo Rodrigues, thirty-one, a teacher in Pinheiro 
and a part-time reporter for the station, told us: "Some people in Jussaral, a village near Pinheiro, 
said they saw an object come down to the ground, and they saw two or three small figures come out 
from under it and get something off the ground. They said the light was as bright as the sun. After the 
thing disappeared, they found some marks on the ground." 

Rodrigues said he had seen the object twice himself. 

Joel Camara, then an engineering student in Sao Luis, and an uncle, Sanatiel Pereira, an 
engineer, went to Sao Bento at the height of the sightings because they wanted to see for themselves 
what was going on. 

"We were just leaving Sao Bento when we met a man who was burned horribly," Camara told 
me. "The man told us that when he saw the UFO, he started running and, when he couldn't run any 
more, he fell down. We could see the burns all the way down his arms from where his sleeves ended. 



The skin was peeling off, and this had happened a week earlier." 


Important Elements 

The Pinheiro sightings were among the first I investigated in Brazil, and nearly everything I 
learned impressed me. Today, many of the happenings seem commonplace, but three things still stand 
out. 

First is the fact that UFOs would suddenly appear without warning above a farmer or 
fisherman's head in a brilliant blaze of light that turned everything as bright as day, Sudden Daylight, 
as it were. The victims would always run, with the UFO hot on their heels, and although all 
apparently managed to escape, some were burned by the light from the UFOs. 

Secondly, the UFOs would sometimes hover over Pinheiro and suddenly shoot so far out into the 
atmosphere that they would be lost among the stars, all in a matter of seconds. I have heard of this 
happening elsewhere, especially in the United States, and have a copy of a Pentagon document signed 
by a general stating that military personnel in Wyoming had seen this happen. What was even more 
impressive in Pinheiro is that sometimes after shooting out into space, the UFO would just as 
suddenly return to earth, again in seconds. Wouldn't the Pentagon love to have an aircraft with that 
capability? 

Finally, it is amazing that so many people could see UFOs so often over such a long period 
without the outside world knowing about it. However, most of the cases I have looked into in Brazil 
have never been publicized or reported to anyone, and often no one except relatives and neighbors 
know about the incidents. Most of these cases are in rural areas, but they are not remote and most can 
easily be reached by car. 

When sightings continue in an area for more than a few days at a time, it's called a flap. The 
four-month Pinheiro flap is one of the longest I know of, although not the longest. Sightings around 
Pinheiro dropped off sharply after July 1977 but never stopped completely. As in most parts of 
Brazil, sightings and encounters still take place from time to time. 

Whether the aliens lost interest in Pinheiro or finished whatever business they had there, they 
seemed to vanish almost overnight. After four months of harassing the inhabitants almost every night, 
the UFOs seemed to have moved away. But where did they go? Too often, we never know because 
there is no investigator network to record sightings and keep track of when and where UFOs appear. 

In this case, however, we do know where they probably went next. At about the same time they 
stopped showing up around Pinheiro, they began appearing over many small villages at the mouth of 
the Amazon, four hundred miles to the northwest. There they harassed people for sixteen months, 
terrorizing many, injuring at least forty and killing a woman and a man. These sightings occurred 
fairly close to a major city and were so threatening that military authorities conducted a lengthy 
investigation. 

These incidents will be fully discussed later. 


1. Pinheiro is a common name in the area. 



Chapter Seventeen 
THE INJURED 

In September 1976, an Iranian Imperial Air Force F4 was scrambled to intercept a UFO in the 
sky near Teheran. 1 When it got within fifteen to twenty miles of the UFO, the jet's crew locked their 
missiles on the target — and got the shock of their lives. The UFO instantly sent a signal toward them 
so powerful that it knocked out not only the jet's weapons system but its radio, intercom and all 
navigational aids. The jet was defenseless. 

This information came from a "Memo of Record" written by two U.S. military pilots, who 
attended a debriefing of the jet's crew, and was later confirmed by a general who was deputy 
commander of operations for the Iranian air force. 2 In Washington a short time later, an electronics 
warfare officer analyzed the American pilots' memo for the Defense Intelligence Agency. 3 He was 
impressed. In an official report to his superiors, he called the incident a "classic" case that met "all 
the criteria necessary for a valid study of the UFO phenomenon." 

In a telephone interview one year later, the analyst told me the encounter was "rather 
frightening...I'd love to go into combat with the capability of turning off my opponent's weapon-system 
panel at will and to cut off his communications." 

That is an awesome capability, and it was effective at a distance of fifteen to twenty miles. 
Something similar happened in Brazil, although on a smaller scale. A UFO emitted a strong beam of 
light from atop a mountain that chilled eight people in a farmhouse two and a half miles away and left 
them sick. At the same time, it lit up the entire valley as far as the people could see to the left and the 
right as if it were daytime. That, too, is awesome. 

Girls Attacked 

One of those who saw the light was Francisco Marciano De Abreu, who was sitting on the 
veranda of his farmhouse with his wife and six neighbors at the time. 

"I was nauseated and had a headache for two weeks because of the light," he said. "I had trouble 
with my eyes for two months. They kept running and itching. All of us had the same trouble 
afterwards." 

This happened at Marciano's farm four miles south of Lajes in Rio Grande do Norte. He said 
everyone on the veranda felt very cold when the light was focused on them. 

Among the others in the group were Raimunda Da Silva, then thirteen, and a friend of hers, 

Lidia, fifteen. A short time before the light hit the people on the veranda, the UFO had terrorized the 
two girls as they were walking to Marciano's house from Raimunda's home. The girls had seen the 
UFO in the distance but thought it was a car light. 

However, the UFO suddenly swooped down from the mountain and stopped a few feet above 
the ground very close to the girls, who were thirty to forty yards from Marciano's house. The girls 
panicked and began screaming. The UFO, looking like a huge ball of yellowish light, was so bright 
that Raimunda's mother, watching from her own home a hundred yards away, could see pebbles on the 
ground. She yelled at the girls to run, but Raimunda collapsed and nearly fainted. Lidia fell to the 
ground with her, and they clutched each other in fear. 



Less than a minute later, the UFO shot back to the mountaintop and from there shined a light 
toward Marciano's house. By now the light had turned bluish in color. 

Meanwhile, Marciano's wife, Maria, and another woman had run down the path and helped the 
girls to the veranda. With the light still shining on everyone from the mountaintop, Marciano and his 
neighbors tried to calm the girls down. After a few minutes the light simply vanished, but the coldness 
lasted about an hour. 

That happened in August 1979, and I talked to Raimunda, her parents, and Marciano four months 
later. I went back in September 1992 to see whether Raimunda or Lidia had suffered any aftereffects, 
but both had moved away, Raimunda to Rio de Janeiro and Lidia to Natal. 

Busted Romance 

Marciano said everyone on the veranda suffered from headaches and eye problems for up to two 
months. People can get hurt by UFOs in other ways, and in more ways than one, in an encounter. A 
young man named Sinval Santos, for example, not only got badly cut up in a run-in with a UFO but 
lost his girlfriend as well. 

Late one night in June 1990, Sinval rode his bicycle high into the hills near Baldim in the Valley 
of the Old Women in Minas Gerais to visit his sweetheart. The visit ended around eleven o'clock, 
when he said goodnight and began pedaling back toward his own home down in the valley. 

"Just as I got down to the main highway, my bicycle threw off its chain," Sinval, twenty-five, 
said in an interview in September 1991. "I got off and was trying to fix it when, all of a sudden, there 
was a bright light above me. 

"I threw my bicycle down and ran toward the woods. The light followed me, and there was a 
barbed wire fence I didn't see. I hit it and was knocked over backwards. I got puncture wounds in my 
hand, my thigh and three or four places in my body, and it ripped my clothes. 

"I got up, jumped over the fence, ran into the woods and hid. The light passed over me about 
eight meters high and went a little beyond. Then it stopped. I couldn't see it, but everything was still 
lit up around me. It made a sound like air escaping from a balloon." 

Sinval didn't dare move or make a sound. Then an airplane came flying toward him and the 
UFO. A minute or so later, when the plane got close, the UFO turned all of its lights off. Except for 
the drone of the small plane, the night became eerily quiet and totally dark. 

"I stayed very still," Sinval said. "After the plane passed over, I looked around and saw the 
object far away. I carefully and quietly got my bicycle and went home like a bat out of hell." 

The incident so frightened Sinval that he stopped seeing his sweetheart. "I don't go up there 
anymore," he said. "She wanted to know why, and I told her: 'You live too far away, and it's too 
dangerous.'" 

Sinval said that when the UFO passed overhead, it looked like a squashed sphere with a big, 
bright, yellow headlight in the middle and purple, green and dull, yellow lights revolving around it. 

Something so mysterious and unknown can be frightening, and it's easy to understand why 
people panic and run blindly in the dark to get away. It's a wonder more people don't get hurt. 

Besides unseen barbed wire fences, there are holes, trees and bushes that people can run into. 

One bush is particularly threatening. It has slender, green, pencil-thin branches that break easily 
and ooze a milky substance that can damage the eyes and even blind a person. In desperation, some 



people have hidden in these bushes, less afraid of going blind than of being caught by a UFO. 

In all of the cases I know about, most of the injuries were inflicted by the UFOs rather than by 
collisions with such things as trees, bushes and fences. 

Mechanic Zapped 

A very different kind of incident occurred in Belo Horizonte and involved a mechanic at a 
Volkswagen dealership. 4 

The mechanic was ending his work day when he spotted a door open on a car in the lot. He went 
out and, just as he closed the door, he noticed two balls of yellow light circling above the lot. He 
stood watching them for a moment, and suddenly one shot a ray of light down at him, hitting him on 
his right side. He got a severe headache almost immediately. At the same time, the yellow lights 
disappeared. 

As it was quitting time, the mechanic went into the building to shower and change clothes. When 
he took his shirt off, he saw a small hole on the right side of it. It smelled as if it had been burned. He 
stepped into the shower, turned the water on and, as he touched his face, it felt oddly rough. He went 
to a mirror and discovered he had small burns on his right cheek. Examining himself more closely, he 
found more burns on the right side of his chest and on his right arm, as well as bruises and small dots, 
all of which were later photographed by investigator Hulvio Aleixo. 

Teacher Burned 

Most people injured in encounters eventually recover, although some have bad dreams and 
emotional scars. Others never fully regain their health and are affected for years or even the rest of 
their lives. Two brief examples: 

Shortly after eight o'clock one morning in October 1974, a teacher was taking a bath in a lake in 
northern Ceara when she heard a noise. 5 Looking up, she saw a UFO rise from the ground, move 
sideways and then come down the middle of the lake toward her. As it did, it shined a bright, blue 
light at her. She felt tremendous heat. Then the UFO flew away, zig-zagging toward the southwest. 

After the encounter, she was dizzy and nauseated, felt sharp pains and prickly sensations, and 
had slight burns on her back and arms and spots on her legs. Later, blisters formed on the burned 
areas, and she had nightmares about the incident. 

In the next six to eight months, she lost thirty-five pounds and stopped teaching. Her health has 
been poor ever since. 


Loses Voice 

The other case occurred in Minas Gerais in central Brazil. The same day that we talked to Sinval 
Santos in the Valley of the Old Women, Hulvio Aleixo took me to the home of a woman in Baldim 
named Isauru Dos Reis. 6 The case involved her father, Geraldo Da Costa, who lost his voice in an 
encounter and underwent a marked change in personality. He blamed it all on a UFO. 

Geraldo is now dead, and his story came from Isauru. One night in May 1977, she said, he was 
riding home on his horse when an oval-shaped object passed over him less than ten feet above the 



ground. It had many colored lights and gave off a lot of heat. 

He continued riding and, about fifty yards beyond, he came upon the UFO on the ground. Two 
little men were standing near it. They had large eyes and long hair. One asked him to help them, and 
then one reached up and touched his shoulder. Suddenly, Geraldo found himself floating down to the 
ground, with the frightened horse running off. Geraldo remembered yelling for help, but apparently he 
blacked out and was never sure what happened after that. He thought he was taken inside the UFO. 

The next day people found him lying in a nearby bamboo grove and believed he was dead, but 
he was only unconscious. He had a red, six-inch scar on the inside of one arm and five tiny puncture 
wounds, two on each side of his chest and waist and one on his left shoulder. The holes had silver 
edging around them which gradually disappeared as the injuries healed. 

Geraldo was taken home, and he stayed in bed for three days in a daze. He couldn't speak, even 
when he was well enough to get up, and he went to three hospitals in Belo Horizonte trying to find out 
what was wrong. Some doctors thought he might have had cancer, but tests showed nothing. Later he 
went to another hospital closer to home, and a small tumor was found growing on his vocal cords. A 
surgeon removed two small fragments. 

Until the encounter, Geraldo had always been a vigorous, hard-working, bossy man who spoke 
in a clear, strong voice. Afterwards he was quiet and docile and could barely speak. Only Isauru 
could understand what he said, and then she had to put her ear to his mouth. 

"The problem began the day of the encounter, and my father said it was caused by the UFO," 
Isauru said. "After this happened, he told me he kept hearing a noise like a motor in his head. Until the 
day my father died, every time there was a knock on the door, he thought it was the little men again." 

The encounter also severely affected the horse, leaving it too weak to carry anyone anymore. 
Despite her father's request, Isauru said, her husband put a saddle on the horse one day and tried to 
ride it but broke its ribs. It was sold for horse meat. 

Geraldo died in 1985 at the age of seventy-two. Although the encounter robbed him of his voice 
and turned him from a domineering man into a mild-mannered one, he still lived pretty much as he 
wanted to. Isauru said he insisted on going out almost every night to a party or dance, and one of his 
children would trail along to help him if he fell down. 

Despite the changes in his life, Geraldo enjoyed the last seven years of his life even though he 
couldn't speak loud enough for most people to understand. Two other people injured by UFOs weren't 
as lucky. One was left totally helpless the rest of his life, and the other is now a cripple, confined to a 
wheelchair. We meet them next. 

1. This was two years before the Islamic revolution, a time when the United States maintained 
friendly diplomatic relations with Iran and U.S. military advisers were stationed in the country. 

2. Since 1969, when the U.S. Air Force ended its official investigations of UFOs, it has 
steadfastly denied having any further interest in them. At the time of the 1976 Teheran incident, 
the Iranian officer, Lieutenant General Abdulah Azarbarzin, said the information the Iranians 
gathered in their investigation had been passed on to the U.S. Air Force. “That was the request 
from the U.S.,” he said in a telephone interview. “They have this procedure, if we have some 
information on UFOs we’re just exchanging all this information, and we did it.” The top 
American military officer in Tehran at the time was General Robert Secord, who later became 
one of the prominent figures in the Iran-Contra investigation. 



3. The memo was leaked to a now-defunct civilian UFO organization by a still unidentified DIA. 

4. Information provided by Belo Horizonte investigator Hulvio Aleixo. 

5. Case investigated by Reginaldo Athayde of Fortaleza. 

6. EES-ah-OO-roo Dose Hice. 



Chapter Eighteen 
PERMANENTLY ZAPPED 


For seventeen years an old man lay in a small room at the back of a large house in Ceara, 
helpless and needing a full-time nurse. In a small, humble, mud-walled house one-hundred-thirty 
miles to the north, a younger man sits all day long in a wheelchair, unable to walk or speak clearly. 
Both were victims of UFOs. 

The older man, Luis Fernandes Barroso, had been a businessman and rancher in Quixada, a city 
in the central part of the state. 1 From late 1976 until he died in April 1993, Luis had been in a 
vegetative state, totally dependent, able to say only three words and recognizing no one but his wife, 
Teresina. 

His sad story began several hours before dawn on April 23, 1976, when he hitched a donkey to 
a two-wheel carriage and set out from the family home in the city to go to his farm ten miles east of 
town. He never made it, at least not on his own. 

Around seven o'clock that morning, a cowboy named Joao Francisco found him sitting in the 
carriage on the side of a highway three miles from the farm. Both Luis, then fifty-three, and the donkey 
were in a daze. Joao took them to Luis' farm. Later in the day, when Luis became coherent, he told his 
wife, Teresina, what had happened. 

Two hours before daybreak, he said, a big, lighted object came down from the sky and hovered 
over him and the donkey. A door opened on the bottom, and a beam of hot light hit him and the 
donkey. He passed out and doesn't know what happened after that. 

Before the day ended, Luis was very sick, vomiting and suffering from nausea, diarrhea and 
headaches. Teresina took him to Dr. Antonio Moreira Megalhes in Quixada. The doctor, then forty, 
had known Luis most of his life and listened sympathetically to his story about the UFO. He then gave 
him some medicine. 


Hair Turns White 

Luis didn't get any better, though, and Dr. Megalhes suggested he see a psychiatrist. Teresina took 
Luis to Fortaleza, one hundred miles to the north, and over the next two months he was examined by a 
total of twelve psychiatrists and psychologists. None could say what was wrong with him although 
some thought he might have a lesion on his brain. 

Not one of the doctors put any credence in Luis' story about the UFO, and because of this he 
stopped talking about it long before the end of his stay in Fortaleza. The only people who believed 
him were Teresina and Dr. Megalhes, and Dr. Megalhes was ridiculed by fellow physicians because 
he did. 

By the time Luis returned to Quixada, his speech was beginning to deteriorate. Three months 
after the UFO incident occurred, his hair turned white almost overnight. By the end of six months, he 
had lost all his mental faculties and had regressed to the age of a one-year-old child. 

From that moment on, the only words he ever uttered were mamae, medo and da. In English, 
they mean "mama," "danger" and "give." He didn't react to any stimuli, with one exception. When 
anyone took a photograph of him with a strobe light, as I did once without realizing what would 



happen, he would scream when he saw the flash. 

Reginaldo Athayde was the first investigator to study this case. In 1986, we went to Quixada 
together and talked to Dr. Megalhes and Teresina Barroso, both of whom told me the story of what 
had happened to Luis. 

Dr. Megalhes even went with us to the Barroso home, where Luis was being watched over by a 
nurse. Luis sat in an easy chair, staring straight ahead and moving his eyes from time to time but 
apparently seeing nothing. All his days for seventeen years were like that, with Luis either sitting in 
the chair or lying in a bed. One by one Dr. Megalhes raised Luis' arms and legs, and Luis would 
slowly lower them by himself. This, Dr. Megalhes said, showed that Luis still had full control of his 
arms and legs and hadn't suffered a stroke. 

Luis may have suffered some undetected mental condition at the same time the UFO hit him with 
a beam of light, and the whole affair could have been just a strange coincidence. However, the 
donkey that was pulling his carriage that morning was also affected by the light. Teresina said the 
animal seemed to be in a stupor for about a week after the incident and wouldn't eat for several 
weeks, but then recovered without any further effects. Forever after, though, it was skittish and easily 
frightened. 

Luis died on April 1, 1993, of pneumonia. Fortunately for him, Teresina was able to carry on 
the family businesses and could afford full-time nurses to take care of him for the seventeen years he 
lived after the UFO left him a helpless invalid. 

Another Zapped 

The other victim crippled by a UFO, Jose Vonilson Dos Santos, has not been as lucky. Vonilson 
has been an invalid ever since the day he, too, was hit by a beam of light from a UFO. 

It happened shortly after dark one evening in May 1979 as he climbed over a wooden fence 
while walking across a farm on his way to a religious meeting. 2 He was twenty-two at the time, 
worked as a farm laborer and lived with his widowed mother on a farm near Carnaubinha, west of 
Fortaleza. 

"When I was almost over the fence, I was hit by a beam of yellow and green light," Vonilson 
said. "The UFO was about ten meters above me. The beam hit me on the right side of my neck. I was 
halfway over the fence and was putting one foot on the ground at the time, and I tried to hide in the 
bushes. But I fell down. I got up and fell down again. I couldn't move. I was paralyzed." 

It was when he first fell to the ground that he looked up and saw the round, silent object above 

him. 

"It was about two meters across, and it had a small hole on the bottom," he said. "I saw some 
lights on it, but I don't know how many there were. After about five seconds, it went toward the ocean 
and disappeared." 


Helpless for Three Days 

The Atlantic coast is five miles north of the spot where Vonilson fell to the ground. As he 
watched the UFO disappear, he discovered he couldn't move either leg and had only slight control 
over his arms. He lay where he fell and, incredibly, stayed in the same spot for nearly three days and 



nights, helpless. He was in a field, and the nearest house was a mile away. 

In the beginning, the ground was still wet from rain that had fallen the day before. He was 
bothered at times by mosquitoes but escaped getting sunburned because he was in the shade of a tree. 
Unable to control himself, he also wet his pants. 

"I was scared but I didn't feel any pain," he said. "I was very thirsty and hungry. I was awake 
most of the time. There were so many stars, so much wind." 

No one realized he was missing. This occurred on a Sunday evening, and his mother had gone to 
Fortaleza and didn't return home until the following Wednesday. The people at the farm where he 
worked assumed he, too, had gone away for a few days. 

Vonilson was discovered on Wednesday by twelve- year-old Luis Perreira, a farm boy who 
happened to be walking by. Luis ran and got his father, Joaquim, who took Vonilson home. Vonilson's 
mother, Regina, wasn't there so they took him to another farm where he was given some herbal tea 
and brandy. When Vonilson's mother returned, she took him home and also gave him tea and brandy. 

He didn't get any better and, some weeks later, she took him to a doctor who examined him and 
said he had suffered a stroke. Regina, who has ten other children living elsewhere, told us Vonilson 
had been healthy, spoke normally and had no disabilities before the UFO incident. 

Vonilson, who never went to school but learned to read, now has no way to support himself. He 
and his mother are very poor and live on a small pension she receives in a simple house on the 
outskirts of Caucaia. 

In one way, Vonilson is like Benedito Bogea, the farmer who wants to be zapped again. "I think 
the UFO did something to me," Vonilson said. "Now I want someone from the UFO to come back and 
fix me." 

What happened to Luis and Vonilson is tragic. Luis lived seventeen more years and never 
recovered, while Vonilson is still alive and probably will be co nfi ned to a wheelchair for the rest of 
his life. 

Other victims of close encounters, though, haven't been even that fortunate. 


1. Kee-sha-DAH. 

2. This case was first investigated by veteran Fortaleza researcher Jose Jean Alencar. 



PART FIVE 

A DEADLY PHENOMENON 



Chapter Nineteen 
DEATH ON CRAB ISLAND 


Jose Sousa was twenty-two the day he died. He was healthy and had no known ailments. What 
killed him is a mystery. 

The day started out sunny and hot as he and three other men sailed an old, weather-beaten boat 
from Sao Luis to Crab Island fifteen miles to the south in Sao Marcos Bay. They arrived early in the 
afternoon, anchored in a stream well inside the island and spent the rest of the afternoon cutting down 
trees and shaping them into poles. They planned to sell the poles for use in constructing simple 
buildings. 

The island is twenty-five miles long and seven wide. It's a desolate, swampy, uninhabited place 
infested with mosquitoes and covered with scrub brush and trees. People go there only to get wood or 
catch crabs. 

With Jose were two of his brothers, Apolinario, thirty- one, and Firmino, thirty-eight, and a 
cousin, Auleriano Bispo Alves, thirty-six. They worked all afternoon cutting and stacking poles on the 
bank. They quit at six o'clock as the sun was setting and ate a supper of beef and rice. The tide was 
out, and the boat was sitting in the mud of the empty stream. 

They chatted until eight o'clock, then went to sleep inside the boat, covering the hatch with a 
piece of canvas to keep mosquitoes out. A small louvered window at the back of the cabin allowed a 
little air to circulate. A lantern with the wick turned low hung on one side of the cabin. 

The men planned to wake up around midnight when the tide came in, load the poles onto the boat 
and sail back to Sao Luis on the outgoing tide. Jose, Apolinario and Auleriano had made this trip at 
least a hundred times before and had never failed to wake up when the tide came in. The rocking 
motion of the boat as the stream filled plus the sound of the rushing water hitting the hull was as good 
as any alarm clock. 

Firmino was the only novice. The regular fourth man in the crew was sick and Firmino, a 
farmer, asked to take his place because he needed poles for an addition to his house in the tropical 
forest. It was his first trip, and he was to regret it. 

Something went terribly wrong after they went to sleep. By midnight, Jose was dead and 
Firmino and Auleriano were badly injured, but no one would know what happened or why. No one 
knew then. No one knows now. 


Shocking Discovery 

Instead of waking up at midnight, no one awoke until five the next morning as the sun was rising. 
Apolinario, who had slept on a mat on the cabin floor, heard Auleriano calling for help in the front of 
the boat. Apolinario was puzzled, because Auleriano had gone to sleep in a hammock at the back of 
the boat, four feet behind Apolinario's mat. 

Apolinario scrambled forward, ducked under another hammock where Jose had gone to sleep, 
and threw back the canvas covering the hatchway. With the cargo area suddenly visible in the early 
light of dawn, Apolinario saw Auleriano lying in several inches of water in the bilge. He asked what 
was wrong, but Auleriano didn't know. He was in pain, couldn't stand up and didn't know how he got 



there. 


Apolinario helped Auleriano climb through the hatch onto the deck and discovered he was 
burned on both shoulder blades. Auleriano then pulled his shorts down and discovered he also had a 
burn on his left buttock. Strangely, his shorts were not burned. 

Apolinario began fixing tea for Auleriano, and then he heard someone moaning back in the boat. 
He went down into the cabin, again ducked under Jose's hammock, and found Firmino lying on the 
floor under Auleriano's hammock. This was another surprise, because Firmino had gone to sleep in 
the front of the boat, where he'd found Auleriano. But Apolinario's surprise turned to shock as he 
examined Firmino. 

"Firmino was all burned and swollen and the skin had come off," Apolinario said later. "I tried 
to talk to him, but he didn't answer. His eyes were closed, and I tried to open them but couldn't. I got 
really scared." 

Desperate, Apolinario turned to Jose's hammock to get him to help, but as soon as he touched 
him, he realized Jose was dead. Apolinario was horrified by the latest discovery and checked Jose's 
pulse. But there was no beat. Jose's body was cold and stiffening with rigor mortis. One leg hung over 
the side of the hammock. Grief-stricken, Apolinario felt he had to put the leg back in the hammock, but 
it was a struggle. 

He was overwhelmed and wanted to cry, but he was the only healthy man on board, and he'd 
have to get everyone back to Sao Luis by himself. There was no medicine or first-aid kit aboard, and 
he couldn't do anything for the burned men. Worse, the tide was now out and the boat was sitting in 
the mud again. 


God Helped Me 

He had to wait more than eight hours for the tide to come in again. About two o'clock in the 
afternoon, he began sailing back to Sao Luis. It was a difficult journey because normally it takes at 
least three men to handle the sail and rudder of the forty-foot boat, and Apolinario had no help. Jose 
was dead, Firmino was unconscious and Auleriano was in too much pain. All the way back, Firmino 
rolled from one side of the cabin floor to the other as the boat rode the heaving waves in the bay. 

"God helped me," Apolinario, a small, thin man just over five feet tall, said simply. "We would 
all have died without God's help." 

The sun was setting when they arrived at the Port of Itaqui near Sao Luis, but Apolinario's 
nightmare was far from over. The only people at the small, deep-water port were two security guards, 
and they weren't able to help him He had to walk six miles into Sao Luis, tell the police what had 
happened and then walk home to get his oldest brother, Pedrinho. The two returned to the port in a car 
at nine o'clock and took Firmino to a hospital. Although Auleriano was suffering from his own burns, 
he stayed with Jose's body. 

The police didn't get to the boat until one A.M. They took Jose's body to the Medical Legal 
Institute, and only then was Auleriano able to go to a hospital for treatment. 1 His burns were to leave 
scars, but he was able to go home that night. 


’Emotional Shock' 



Firmino was in a coma for a week, and he stayed in the hospital for more than a month. Second- 
degree burns covered much of his body. The most serious were on the left side of his rib cage, the 
inside of his left arm and on his forehead. The arm muscles were so badly damaged that the fingers on 
his left hand were left permanently curled and virtually useless. 

No autopsy was performed on Jose. Sao Luis is near the equator and, after more than twenty- 
four hours in the heat, his body was badly decomposed. The doctor who examined him for the 
Medical Legal Institute said in his report that there were no cuts or bruises on the body. The death 
certificate stated that Jose had suffered a "cerebral vascular accident caused by arterial hypertension 
as a consequence of an emotional shock." The cause of death was listed as "emotional shock." 

There was no explanation of what that "emotional shock" was. I spent one month in the Sao Luis 
area investigating this and other cases and, for much of that time, tried to find the doctor. With Monica 
Carneiro and other interpreters, I tracked him from place to place, leaving messages everywhere, but 
when we finally found him, he refused to talk to me and wouldn't say why. However, I discovered 
that when he submitted his report on Jose's death, his boss strongly criticized him for his conclusions. 

The police couldn't determine what happened on Crab Island. Investigators went to the island, 
examined the area where the boat had been anchored, inspected the boat itself, and talked to the 
survivors and people who knew them. There was no evidence that the men had been drinking or 
taking drugs, suffered from food poisoning or toxic fumes or had been fighting. The police found no 
sign of a fire on the boat or on the island. The only conclusion they did reach was that the three 
survivors truthfully did not know what happened. 

None of the three men can recall the smallest detail of that night, not even under deep hypnosis. 

A burn has to be one of the most excruciatingly painful injuries anyone can suffer, yet two men were 
severely burned before midnight and neither knew anything about it, one not until the next morning and 
the other not until he came out of a coma a week later. 2 

How could these things happen and the men not have any memory of how they got burned? What 
or who could inflict such injuries and then completely blot the painful experience out of the minds of 
the victims? How could a healthy, young man like Jose simply die in his sleep without any apparent 
cause? 


Media Attention 

These are a few of the questions that puzzled Maranhao police, and they have never found the 
answers. 

There is no direct evidence that a UFO was involved in the incident. The men saw nothing 
unusual. It occurred on the night of April 25, 1977, during a period of numerous UFO sightings 
throughout the area. The newspapers and radio and TV stations in Sao Luis immediately jumped on 
the story, and most blamed a UFO for what happened because of the mystery surrounding the case and 
because so many UFOs had been seen. 

Despite the media attention, the Crab Island incident was not publicized outside of Sao Luis. I 
learned of it only because Roberto Granchi, son of veteran Rio de Janeiro UFO investigator Irene 
Granchi, went to Sao Luis in early 1978 to repair some electronic equipment on a boat at the Port of 
Itaqui. While there, Roberto heard about the case and managed to talk to Auleriano. He told Irene 
what he'd learned, and I heard it from her. In late November 1978,1 went to Sao Luis. 



It is an old, colonial city on an island at the mouth of a huge bay, with narrow, hilly streets and 
buildings in pastel shades of green, pink, blue, yellow and other colors, many covered with 
ornamental tiles. It has miles of beautiful beaches. At that time it had a quarter of a million people, 
but the city grew rapidly in the 1980s and, by the mid-1990s, was approaching a population of one 
million. 

One of the first persons I talked to about the Crab Island case was Clesio Muniz, chief of 
criminal investigation for the Maranhao police. 

"I saw these people with those strange burns, and I do not believe they were burned by ordinary 
fire," Muniz said. "I don't believe in UFOs, but this is a strange phenomenon that I have no 
explanation for. I had heard reports of the 'fire ball' having been seen in cities around Crab Island and 
west of here. A lot of people had seen the 'fire ball' when this happened, both before and after. 

"From reports I received, the 'fire balls' do not seem like falling stars. They go up or down or to 
the left or right, horizontally or vertically, slowly, fast, or very slow and then very, very fast. It is an 
unusual phenomenon, and I do not know what it is." 

Another investigator told me he believed lightning caused the death and burns. His theory was 
that lightning struck the sand or mud near the boat, bounced back up and then flew horizontally into the 
cabin, striking three of the four sleeping men. 

He Saw a ’Fire’ 

Two doctors from the Medical Legal Institute who examined Firmino in the hospital also thought 
lightning was the cause. One was Dr. Carneiro Belfort, then director of the Institute and later a 
professor of medicine at one of the universities in Sao Luis. 

"I wanted to see Firmino because the newspapers were saying UFOs caused it, and I wanted to 
see for myself," Dr. Belfort said. "I've never seen a UFO, and I don't believe they exist. The burns 
were characteristic of lightning, but I cannot definitely say it was lightning. If it wasn't lightning, I 
don't know what it could have been. The man told me he had seen a 'fire' before passing out." 

That last remark— that Firmino in his delirium had mumbled something about "the fire" — was 
the only discernible link to a UFO. O fogo or "the fire" is a common term for a UFO throughout 
Brazil. 

The other doctor favoring the lightning theory was Jose Oliveira, then a member of the staff of 
the Legal Medical Institute. 

"Firmino had many second-degree burns and could have died," he said. "In my opinion, it was 
lightning. But if lightning was the cause, then the boat should have had some damage or burns and the 
one who died should have been burned." 

Neither doctor saw the boat or Jose's body, but the death certificate stated there were no marks 
or lesions on the body. 

As we talked, Dr. Oliveira examined the institute's records on the injured men. Regarding the 
burn on Auleriano's buttock, he said: "ft is likely that if he had been struck by lightning his clothing 
would have been burned as well." Both Auleriano and Apolinario said Auleriano's shorts were not 
burned. 

Clesio Muniz, the chief criminal investigator, strongly disagreed with the lightning theory, as did 
Sergeant Atenor Costa, an Air Force meteorologist at the Sao Luis airport. The airport, fifteen miles 



northeast of the island, is served by four national airlines, two regional airlines and several air taxi 
companies. The meteorology station's records show no lightning or violent weather between five 
P.M. April 25 and six A.M. April 26. There was a light rain at eleven P.M. and again at midnight, but 
otherwise the night was clear and quiet. 

"There is no way lightning could come down, hit the sand and bounce back up and then go 
sideways into the boat," Sergeant Costa said. "It just doesn't do that. If it had, it should have burned 
the canvas curtain. Lightning wouldn't hit two or three men at the same time because their positions in 
the boat were so different. The lightning would have to be like a winding road to do that. 

"Furthermore, it is highly unlikely it could kill the one man without burning him. It just is not 
possible for lightning to burn two men and kill the other without leaving a mark on him." 

Natalino Filho, director of the weather station, said lightning could have hit the water and 
passed through it to the boat, since water is a good conductor of electricity. "If that had happened, 
however, Apolinario should have been killed because he was lying on the floor nearest the water," 
Filho said. 


The Swamp From Hell 

There definitely weren't any burns on the boat. I personally inspected it myself, and it was a 
hellish experience. Firmino was then living in the forest some distance south of Itauna, the western 
ferryboat terminal across Sao Marcos Bay from Sao Luis. With Ana Teresa Britto and her sister, 
Leila, as interpreters, I went to find Firmino and take him back to Sao Luis. When we reached his 
home, we learned that the Maria Rosa , the boat used by the four men for their trip to Crab Island, was 
anchored in a nearby stream. I had been searching for it for days but far away in the Sao Luis area. 

We had to wait for Firmino to get ready to go to Sao Luis with us, so Ana Teresa, Leila and I set 
out to inspect the boat, with Firmino's wife, Maria, showing us the way. We drove to a small village, 
parked and started walking down a path into the forest. Five minutes later we came to a swamp where 
the path disappeared under the water for about seventy-five yards. Maria said there was no other way 
to get to the boat. 

Thoughts of piranhas and other vicious creatures gave me a headache as I studied the dark 
water. I couldn't see a thing under the murky surface, and we had to go through it barefoot or lose our 
shoes in the muck. I wanted to cry. 

Maria assured me it was only knee deep, but I didn't want to go through it barefoot or otherwise 
no matter how shallow it was. However, I had no choice if I wanted to examine the boat. All three 
women laughed at me as I stalled. Then, hating every second of it, I plunged in and sloshed across, 
with Maria in front and Ana Teresa and Leila behind me. But nothing happened, and we got to the 
other side with all our toes intact. 

A few minutes later we reached the boat. The tide was out, and it was sitting in the mud. It was 
made entirely of wood and had a single huge sail. It was old, and its paint was so faded that I could 
just barely make out the name, Maria Rosa. 

There was no one around. As the three women sat on a log and waited, I walked up a plank onto 
the deck. The only entrance to the cabin and cargo hold below the deck is through a square hatch just 
behind the mast. I spent about thirty minutes looking the boat over thoroughly inside and out. There 
was no sign of any fire or violence anywhere. I took a number of photos, and then the four of us went 



back— through that same swamp again. 3 

We tookFirmino to Sao Luis because I had arranged for Dr. Silvio Lago to come to Sao Luis 
from Niteroi, near Rio de Janeiro, to hypnotize the three men. Dr. Lago was a physician and professor 
of medicine who, at that time, had used hypnosis in his practice for forty-five years. The three men 
agreed to the sessions because they had been depressed ever since the incident and hoped he could 
help them. 


Mental Block 

Dr. Lago spent a total of sixteen hours with the men, six hours talking to them individually and 
together about their lives and what happened at Crab Island and the other ten hours in individual 
hypnosis sessions. When he was through, he was convinced the men were telling the truth, but he 
hadn't gained any clues about what happened that night. 

"They were unable to remember anything that happened to them after they went to sleep that 
night," Dr. Lago said later. "I am not accustomed to seeing this kind of mental block. This is a very 
strange and complicated case." 

Emotion alone would not be enough to cause the mental block, he said. "It was something 
physical and psychic but not common. A very strong emotion could cause amnesia, but it doesn't seem 
likely that it was their emotional reaction that caused the mental block. It is possible that before or 
during the experience they had some kind of hypnosis, a very deep one, preparing them not to 
remember whatever it was after they experienced it." 

Another thing that puzzled him was that Apolinario, who had no apparent injuries, had the same 
kind of mental block as the other two. 

"One hypothesis is that Apolinario would have to have had a very strong emotion that would 
cause the block," Dr. Lago said. "I can't imagine what that would be unless he had seen whatever 
happened. Whatever imposed this mental block was much stronger than his grief at seeing his brother 
dead, because he remembers everything before and after but nothing in between, and I cannot believe 
there is any greater emotion than seeing a brother dead and two men injured. It is very strange." 

Still another part of the mystery is the fact that Auleriano went to sleep at the very back of the 
boat and awoke in the front, while Firmino, who had gone to sleep in the front, was found at the back 
near Auleriano's hammock. Neither man had any recollection of changing position during the night. 

Some people familiar with the case believe a UFO plucked the men out of the boat, did 
whatever it did to them, and then put them back but mistakenly placed Firmino in Auleriano's location 
and Auleriano where Firmino had been. 

Whatever happened that night aboard the Maria Rosa occurred between the time they went to 
sleep at eight P.M. and midnight, when they intended to awaken. Three of the men were accustomed to 
waking up when the tide came in, but no one awoke until the next morning. This suggests that all four 
were unconscious before midnight. 

Whatever or whoever burned Firmino and Auleriano most likely was also responsible for 
causing Jose's death. Just exactly when these events occurred can't be determined, but probably 
before midnight. Jose's body was getting stiff, and Apolinario had difficulty putting his leg back in the 
hammock between five and five-thirty A.M. Normally, rigor mortis begins setting in three to four 
hours after death and takes about twelve hours for complete stiffening of the body. 



Now in Poor Health 


When I interviewed the three survivors, I was hoping that the mental blocks that suppressed their 
memories of that night would eventually weaken and they'd remember. But that may never happen. I 
went back in 1981 and talked to Auleriano and Apolinario, and again in 1992, when I talked to all 
three. None of them has ever remembered anything. 

Interestingly, the two who were burned, Firmino and Auleriano, are now in robust health but 
Apolinario, who suffered no apparent injuries that night, is in poor health. A year and a half after the 
incident, he began to feel a weakness in his left arm. By 1981, the year he turned thirty- six, he could 
no longer hold anything in his left hand without dropping it. By 1992, at the age of forty-six, he had 
little strength in his left arm and hand, suffered from severe headaches, and walked with an odd, stiff- 
legged gait. He doesn't know why. He's never had any crippling accidents or illnesses. When he can 
work, he makes charcoal. 

Firmino, who lost weight and did little for several years after the incident — and even acted a 
little silly at times, according to his wife, Maria — is husky and mentally sharp once again. He now 
does light labor work despite his twisted left hand. He and Maria also now own and operate a small 
grocery in one of Sao Luis' poorer neighborhoods. 

Auleriano's scars have virtually vanished. Two years after the incident, he began going to Crab 
Island to get wood once again and continued going there until 1991, all without anything unusual 
happening. But he gave that up and now works as a security guard for a construction company. 

Neither Apolinario nor Firmino has ever gone back to Crab Island. 

Another Crab Island Death 

That is not the end of the Crab Island story. Virtually the same thing happened nine years later to 
another crew, with one man dying, another being burned and two others mysteriously stricken. 

On April 28, 1986, the four other men sailed in a similar boat to Crab Island to get wood. They 
worked for two days cutting more than three hundred poles and stacking them on the bank next to the 
boat. 

On April 30, they finished working at six o'clock, and one of the men, Juvencio, twenty-two, 
began cooking supper. Verissimo, twenty-one, said he wasn't feeling well and asked Juvencio for 
garlic to rub on his arms to make him feel better, but Juvencio suddenly became dizzy and fell to the 
deck unconscious. In quick succession, the other two men, Ans el mo and Lazaro, both in their forties, 
also passed out. 

No one knows what happened to Verissimo. Lazaro regained consciousness at noon the next 
day, eighteen hours later, and found Verissimo lying on the deck dead. There were no marks on him, 
but a little blood had trickled from his mouth. 

Anselmo awoke two hours later, and Juvencio revived about five o'clock, almost twenty-four 
hours after he passed out. The right side of his head was burned and swollen. Anselmo and Lazaro 
tried to load the wood onto the boat but gave up after getting less than thirty poles on board. They 
began sailing back to Sao Luis, but it was difficult because all three were sick and nauseated. 



Loud Crashing Noise 


The second Crab Island death wasn't news outside of Sao Luis, either. I happened to go to Sao 
Luis five months after it happened and learned about it from Monica Carneiro and Ana Teresa Britto, 
the principal interpreters during my investigation of the first case. They helped me find Juvencio, who 
told me what had happened. 

As in the first case, none of the three survivors knows what happened that night, except that all 
three got dizzy and passed out. Port authorities questioned them and told me they believe the men 
were telling the truth. The men were certain food poisoning was not to blame. They hadn't yet eaten 
and were feeling well until they became dizzy. Authorities also discounted the possibility that any 
kind of poisonous gas seeping from the swampy land could have been the cause. Juvencio said no one 
smelled any unusual odors before getting dizzy. 

No autopsy was performed on Verissimo. As in the first case, by the time the boat reached port, 
his body was badly decomposed. Verissimo's death certificate simply lists the cause as 
"undetermined." 

The UFO connection in this case is also tenuous. One unusual thing happened shortly before the 
men passed out. They heard a loud crashing noise in the brush somewhere near the boat. In the 
darkness, they couldn't see anything, and they don't know what caused the noise. 

The only way to get to the island is by boat or helicopter, and the men weren't aware of anyone 
else being on the island with them UFO buffs may see the crashing noise as a clear indication that a 
UFO landed, crushing trees or bushes in its way, while debunkers might claim it was just a tree 
falling down. There is no way to prove either is right, but the men would have recognized the sound 
of a falling tree. 

When Monica, Ana Teresa and I interviewed Juvencio in his home, a number of neighbors 
gathered around to listen. One man in the crowd said he'd had a UFO encounter in a similar boat not 
far from Crab Island one night in 1983. His boat was anchored in a stream on the western side of the 
bay when a big bright object came down and hovered overhead, shining a light down on the boat. The 
man and his companions dived overboard and hid in the bushes until the UFO went away. He said 
people in several other boats in the area also had UFO encounters that year. 

Both Lazaro and Anselmo were in the interior the two times I've been in Sao Luis since the 
second incident, and I've never talked to them. However, I saw Juvencio again in 1992. He said he 
was in good health, but Anselmo and Lazaro both now feel numbness in their legs, while Lazaro 
sometimes has dizzy spells and headaches. 

The two cases are strikingly similar, except that none of the men in the first incident felt dizzy at 
any time. It's very possible that UFOs were not involved in either case, since the men remember 
nothing unusual, and there were no other witnesses. But if UFOs weren't to blame, then some other 
phenomenon just as bizarre was responsible. Either way, it is all part of a strange mystery that injures 
people and leaves some dead. 

1. The state medical examiner’s office. 

2. There is a remarkable similarity between Firmino’s serious burn and coma and what happened 
in a case investigated by Hulvio Aleixo in the Valley of the Old Women. In Florestal one 
afternoon, an elderly woman was found unconscious in her backyard with a bad burn on one 



arm. She was taken to a hospital, where she later recovered. The burn was so severe that she 
needed skin grafts, and it took three months to heal. No one knew what caused the burn, and 
she didn’t have any idea how it happened. For some days before this occurred, people living 
in the area had seen strange balls of fire flying through the sky. Some people thought there was 
a connection between her burn and the fireballs. 

3. Several years later, Ana Teresa remarked: "You know, that was dangerous." 



Chapter Twenty 
VAMPIRES IN THE SKY 


UFOs have been deadlier in Colares than perhaps any other place in the world. Colares is one 
of thirty villages at the mouth of the Amazon river where for more than a year people weren't safe 
from UFOs even inside their own homes. UFOs would beam down rays of light that would penetrate 
roofs as if they didn't exist. Sometimes the beams would strike someone and, at other times, they 
would snake around as if searching for something. Terrified inhabitants would jump out of the way, 
but some got burned anyway. 

This happened in a broad area only fifteen to thirty miles north of the busy metropolis of Belem 
Just how many persons were injured will never be known, but in Colares alone approximately forty 
were burned and two of them died. A third person died three years later, possibly as a result of the 
UFO burns she suffered. 

In addition, a pregnant woman lost her baby after being hit by a beam of light, and a dog died 
after a UFO shined a light on it when it was barking at the UFO. 

The discos were seen so often that the Air Force conducted an official investigation in the area 
for months. A captain and a number of sergeants from the Belem air base questioned hundreds of 
people who'd had sightings and harmful encounters. They also reportedly administered drugs to help 
calm people down. The information that the team gathered, plus numerous photographs of UFOs that 
the investigators themselves took, were sent to Air Force headquarters in the nation's capital, 
Brasilia, but none of the findings or photos have ever been officially released. 

Sightings and encounters began in July 1977, were particularly heavy in the last four months of 
the year, and continued sporadically through November 1978. UFOs were reportedly seen in thirty 
communities, with Colares, Mosqueiro Island and Baia do Sol seemingly getting the brunt of the 
visits. 1 


Doctor Treats Burns 

With the results of the military's investigation still secret, the principal source for the number of 
injuries and deaths in Colares is Wellaide Cecim Carvalho, who was the only doctor on the island 
when the sightings began in 1977. 2 Then twenty-four, she was in charge of the small state-run 
hospital in Colares, serving from December 1976 to December 1977. She's now a doctor of public 
health for the state of Para, dealing with children, cholera and AIDS. 

Wellaide lived through the worst months of the UFO attacks, and she discussed them during an 
interview in her Public Health office in Belem on July 15, 1993, with Daniel Rebisso interpreting for 
us. 

Q. How many people did you treat for injuries connected to the sightings in Colares in 1977? 

A. Approximately forty people, mostly adults. 

Q. What kind of injuries were they? 

A. Mostly burns on the chest, like sunburns, near the face, the throat and chest. 

Q. Most of the people were like that? 

A. Yes. The burns usually covered an area of ten to twenty centimeters. 



Q. Almost as big as a soccer ball? 

A. Yes...The skin peeled off. These burns healed quickly. Usually it takes about seventy-two 
hours for burned skin to peel. UFO burns begin to peel almost immediately. 

Q. Peeled off and healed quickly? 

A. Yes. Very interesting cases. I could see two small puncture wounds in the center of these 
burns. 

Q. In all of these cases? 

A. Yes, in all. All had irritation, swelling, redness. Very red. 

Q. Almost always in the chest and throat and face? 

A. Yes. 

Q. A ray of light hit them? 

A. Yes. 

Q. This is what people told you? 

A. Yes. I know of two deaths. 

Q. Two deaths? 

A. Yes, a man and a woman. The woman was taken to Belem...Eight hours later, after I treated 
her for burns, she died here in Belem of a heart attack, and that morning she had a large burn on her 
chest. 

Q. Do you remember her name? 

A. No. I remember another woman who had her hands burned by a light from a UFO and a great 
burn on her chest. She was working— 

Q. But not the same woman? 

A. No. This other one was sewing at home at night when a UFO arrived and shined a light 
through the garden. She was on her veranda. Her hands were badly burned, and she said the cloth was 
burned, too. 

Q. Do you remember the month the woman died? 

A. September 1977. 

Q. You also said a man died? 

A. And then the man died. He was a fisherman. 

Q. One month later? 

A. More or less, yes. 

Q. Do you remember the approximate age of the woman or man? 

A. She was forty-four to forty-five years old and the man was younger, thirty-two. 

Q. What kind of injuries did he have? Was he burned? 

A. The same burns on the chest. The document from the government didn't specify the cause of 
death. There was no autopsy. The Air Force didn't allow an autopsy. 

Q. Was the Air Force there at the time these two people died? 

A. Yes. They arrived in Colares in August or September 1977. 

Q. Hollanda? 3 

A. Yes. Hollanda's team They had drugs to calm people down because many people were very 
frightened. All of my patients were burned. I did blood tests on them, and all had low levels of 
hemoglobin. 

Q. This is not normal? 



A. No 4 

Q. The woman who died, she was burned and then she went to the hospital and died of a heart 
attack. The man who died, did he go to the hospital or did he die at his home? 

A. They both died the same day they were burned. He died at home in Colares, the same day, 
about two hours later after I talked with him. 

Q. What was his occupation? 

A. He was a fisherman, and the woman was a domestic worker... 

Q. Did you believe these people (who had been burned) when they came to you and told you 
what happened? 

A. Not at first, I didn't believe them. 

Q. When did you start believing? 

A. At first I thought they were crazy, but after about the fifth case, I began to take it 
seriously...For a long time the sheriff, the priest and I were the only professionals in Colares. When 
the UFOs came to Colares, many people left. Only three professionals remained there. No stores 
were open. We had little to eat except eggs and farinha. The fishermen wouldn't fish because they 
were afraid. 

Q. You treated about forty people over how long a period? 

A. About three months. Many people left the area. 

Q. How long did you go without food, a week, two 
weeks? 

A. September, October and November, no food as no fishermen would go out. Only eggs and 
farinha... 

Q. You saw a UFO yourself? 5 

A. Yes, I saw a UFO in November (1977). It was a cylindrical thing. About six o'clock in the 
evening. My secretary was with me. She fainted. 

Q. What did you think about the UFO? 

A. I think the UFOs come from another place in the universe. It is stupid to think we're the only 
ones in the universe. 

Q. What colors did you see on the UFO? 

A. Metallic, silver. Part of it was a lighter color. 

Q. How close was it? 

A. About forty meters. 

Q. For how many minutes? 

A. A few minutes. I don't know how long because I was fascinated by it. More than ten minutes. 
It was very beautiful. 

Q. Several other people saw this? 

A. Yes. Everybody else was afraid, and they ran home. I was the only one who stayed on the 
street. Everyone yelled for me to run, but I stayed. 

Q. This was near the beach? 

A. About two hundred meters. People were shouting at me to run, but I didn't. I was too 
fascinated...One time a UFO flew very low. It was going to land. People shot at it and threw stones to 
drive it away, but Hollanda's team arrived at that moment and shouted: "No! No! No! Don't do that!" 
But people were very frightened...Many people said they could see people in UFOs like me, with 



blond hair, long blond hair. Many people said this. They said I was like the extraterrestrials. I was 
the only woman there with blond hair...The UFO I saw circled and made rings in the sky. It was 
beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! The Air Force knows about this case, but the Air Force told people not 
to talk about these cases. 

Q. Hollanda? 

A. Hollanda's team. But I don't forget. 

She said she began keeping a record of the people she treated but later destroyed her notes. 
Brazil was then under a military government, and she got worried about official reaction to the record 
keeping. 

No autopsy was performed on the woman who died, she said, and the death certificate stated 
simply that the woman had suffered a heart attack. It made no mention of the burns on her chest. 
Wellaide said she thought that was strange because she had seen the burns that same morning, and the 
victim had been very agitated and frightened. This led Wellaide to believe the UFO aggression could 
have brought on the heart attack. 


UFOs Go Into River 

I learned about the Colares-area cases in December 1978 and have gone to Colares three times, 
in February 1979, July 1981 and July 1993. On the first visit, people said they'd seen UFOs going into 
and out of the Amazon River near Colares. Some had also seen glowing blue objects moving about 
under the surface of the water. They were frightened and felt threatened by them. 

Rosil Aranha De Oliveira, thirty-six, who owned a store on the beach at Colares, told me: "I 
often go fishing at night, and I get out to this spot, and we can see these lighted things coming at great 
speed, and when they get close, they just stop. Sometimes they go into the water and sometimes they 
don't." 

He had seen UFOs going into the river three times, twice in 1978 and the third time on February 
14, just two days before the interview. At three o'clock in the morning, he said, he and his brother, 
Sebastiao, eighteen, were in a boat when a blue light went into the river about one- hundred-fifty 
yards from shore. 

"Some men were fishing in other boats nearby, and they seemed to be frightened by it," Rosil 
said. "I could hear them shouting: 'The Thing! Here comes the Thing!' 

"I have seen a blue spot moving around in the water, and I've seen them come out of the water. It 
just goes up and away, a blue light, going north toward the ocean. Once I saw one sitting on another 
beach south of here for about fifteen minutes. I tried to figure out the shape, but all I could see was 
just the lights. Then it took off and went north, going up and down in a wavy motion as it went away." 

During that same visit to Colares, Marcelo Do Nascimento, who was in charge of the village's 
electricity plant, said: "Many times we would see UFOs very high, and they'd be shining red beams of 
light down on the houses. It was like an airplane light pointed to the ground, like a streak of reddish 
light. Many people saw the UFOs, and the beams of red light would go inside the house and circle 
around as if they were searching for something." 

He knew of at least three people who had been burned, but we couldn't locate any of them then, 
so I went back to Colares again in July 1981. 



The Airstrip That Wasn't 


You can get to Colares in one to two hours by car or boat but the quickest way is by plane. It's 
only twenty minutes by air from Belem, but it's risky because Colares has no airport or landing strip. 
Instead, your plane touches down in a churchyard and hurtles a hundred yards down a narrow lane 
with bushes smacking the wings before coming to a halt. 

Taking off is scarier because by now you know — or should know — that the lane wasn't meant 
to be a runway. I've flown in there twice, but it wasn't until the second trip that I realized that. 

The first time, in 1979, it was raining and a veteran jungle pilot was at the controls of our 
Cessna. He was concerned only with how muddy the ground was. He simply swooped down for a 
quick look, came around again and landed without hesitation. The bushes weren't so lush then, and 
they posed no threat as we squished along in the mud of what I assumed was a landing strip. 

On the second trip I learned the truth. With me this time were Hollanda, the officer who had led 
the Air Force investigation, and Charles Tucker, a UFO investigator from Indiana. Our pilot was 
twenty-three-year-old Carlos Montenegro, who'd been flying for only three years. In Hollanda's 
earlier visits to Colares, he had gone by car or helicopter. I was the only one of the four who'd flown 
there in a plane. 

On this day the weather was sunny and dry. Carlos took one look down at that lane and quickly 
vetoed any landing there. I assured him it could be done, but the wide dirt road leading into the 
village looked much safer, and Carlos started to land on it. However, he changed his mind when he 
spotted a bus coming toward Colares. Rather than have the driver and a bunch of passengers mad at 
him for blocking the road, he headed back to the churchyard. 

As soon as we hit the hard, packed dirt in front of the church, things got very scary. Unlike a car, 
a plane has no undercoating to deaden the noise and virtually no springs. With the engine screaming at 
high pitch just a few feet in front of us, the wheels smacking every bump and rut, setting up a horrible 
racket, with each jolt instantly transmitted to our backbones, and with the bushes whacking our wing 
tips as if they were trying to rip them off— with all this the din was deafening. This wasn't at all the 
way I remembered it. In seconds, however, Carlos had braked to a halt just before we reached the 
end of the lane, spun around and taxied back to the churchyard. 

Even before the propeller stopped turning over, we were surrounded by at least a hundred kids 
and adults. The circus had come to town. 6 

On this second visit, we found one of the burn victims, Claudiomira Rodrigues, who was 
working at a nearby farm when we walked up to her house. One of the boys who had greeted our 
plane ran to the field to bring her back. 

While we waited, her husband, Manoel, told us a twenty-three-year-old woman named 
Domingas had just died, three years after getting burned by a UFO. He said Domingas' health had 
been bad ever since she was burned, and her family believed the burn caused her death. 

’Man' in Diving Suit 

Claudiomira, a short, thin woman, finally arrived. As people gathered around to listen, she sat on 
a bench outside her house and told us her story, with Hollanda interpreting. 

"I was sleeping in a hammock in the house of a friend with five or six children when a beam of 



light burned me," she said. "It was eleven o'clock at night in September 1978 when it happened. The 
Air Force people were here studying the cases. I saw very clearly a bright light outside, very strong, 
and the air became warmer and warmer. 

"The first time the light shined through the window, it was green. It touched my head and passed 
across my face. I woke up, and the color changed to red, like when you put your hand in front of a 
flashlight. 

"I could see a person, but only from the chest up. I think it was a man, but he had on what was 
like a diving suit. I saw the face of the man, and his eyes were very small. He had an instrument like a 
pistol. He pointed the weapon at me and shined the beam three times, hitting me in the chest all three 
times almost in the same place. It was very hot. I think each time he took blood." 

The burns left three, little, pinpoint scars in a triangle on the upper right side of her chest. She 
tried to explain what the scars looked like, then tried to pull the top of her blouse down to show us. 
But the blouse wouldn't go down far enough. Finally, with a shrug, she simply lifted her blouse and 
showed us three tiny marks in a triangular pattern just above her right breast. 

"It was hot and it hurt," she said. "It was like being stuck with a needle. I bled at all three points. 
At the moment it happened I got very thirsty. I was terrified, but I couldn't move my legs. I was 
paralyzed. I was very frightened, and I screamed and screamed. My cousin, Maria Isaete, was 
sleeping in the same room. She woke up and saw the light and she screamed, too." 

The man and the light disappeared and, a few minutes later, Maria helped Claudiomira get to the 
Colares hospital, where she was treated for her burns. She stayed until four o'clock in the morning 
and then went back home. 

"For many weeks I had headaches and fever," she said. 

She said several times that the beam of light was sucking blood from her. We kept asking how 
she knew it was taking her blood, but we never got a satisfactory explanation. 

Nascimento, the man in charge of the electricity plant, mentioned the same thing on my first visit 
to Colares. "People think the UFOs come to take blood," he said. "I know one man who says the 
UFOs took blood from him." 


Officer Sees UFO 

Hollanda said that during the Air Force investigation, he saw a UFO while he was interviewing 
Claudiomira in 1978. 

"We were studying cases on orders from my commander," he said. "He was interested in 
knowing what was happening here. The people were afraid of being burned by the UFOs. We had 
equipment to photograph the UFOs, and we were on the beach. We saw this thing crossing the sky at 
about seven-thirty in the evening. It was in the low clouds, shining intermittently at one-second 
intervals, blinking. Everybody in Colares saw it. 

"I was talking to Claudiomira when it crossed again at the same height, about three hundred 
meters high. It was just like a barrel. I saw this shape after we processed the film, but during the 
sighting all we saw was the light." 7 

One of the people most knowledgeable about the Colares-area cases is Daniel Rebisso, who 
interpreted for me during the interview with Dr. Wellaide Carvalho. Daniel, in his late thirties, is a 
biologist with the state health department in Belem, dealing with diseases transmitted to humans by 



bats, monkeys and other animals. 


Woman Loses Baby 

He became interested in UFOs while earning his degree in the southern Brazilian city of Curitiba 
in the early 1980s. On his return to Belem, he spent several months investigating UFO reports 
throughout northeastern Brazil and has written a book on what he learned. 8 

"The people in this area call the UFOs chupa-chupa, and they believe they were sucking energy 
and perhaps blood from victims," he said when we first met in 1992. "Dr. Carvalho saw small 
puncture wounds in victims. She thought blood had been taken out of the arms. But it was quickly. It is 
not similar to the attack of vampire bats because, when a vampire attacks, he bites. It wasn't like that." 

Daniel began investigating the Colares cases in 1985. He has since located a number of people 
who were burned but has never learned the identity of the ones who died. 

One tragic incident that he uncovered occurred in Tapiapanema, a settlement of three or four 
houses in the interior ofMosqueiro Island. Seventeen-year-old Silvia Maria Trinidade, who was five 
months pregnant, was hit by a beam of light from a UFO. The incident left her emotionally distraught. 
She lost her baby, and her marriage broke up. She now lives alone. 

This incident occurred about six o'clock on the night of October 29, 1977, as Silvia and her 
husband, Benedito, twenty-four, were lying down resting. It was dark outside. 

"Silvia woke up and saw a light in the sky," said Daniel. "It was a UFO. Suddenly she saw a 
beam of light from the UFO entering her house, and it touched her arm She screamed, awakening her 
husband, Benedito. The neighbors ran outside and saw the bright object. One of them shot at the UFO 
with a rifle, and it disappeared. The man thought he saw two people near the house, just shadows, but 
couldn't see who or what they were. Because Silvia was very upset and nervous, her husband put her 
in a small boat and took her to the hospital in Mosqueiro." 

In a visit to Mosqueiro in July 1993, Daniel and I located Benedito and talked to him 

"When the light hit Silvia, she began to scream, and I took her to another room, but the light hit 
me, and I felt strange," Benedito said. "I couldn't talk and Silvia fainted. The light went away and, 
after a few minutes, I could talk." 

Silvia revived but was so upset that Benedito put her in a boat and started rowing down the 
river to take her to the hospital in Mosqueiro, ten miles away. It took about an hour, and on the way 
they saw the UFO again. 

"We were in the boat, and the UFO flew over the river several times," Benedito said. "It 
followed us and shined a light down on the river for ten or fifteen minutes. It didn't make any noise, 
and it didn't shine the light on us, just the river. It was about eighty meters away. Then the UFO flew 
over the jungle and disappeared." 

Silvia wasn't burned by the light but did have a bruise on the inside of her left elbow. She was 
in the hospital for a week and lost her baby two months later. 

Daniel and I also talked with her mother, Osmarina De Souza, who told us Silvia was badly 
frightened by the incident and has never fully recovered. Silvia and Benedito are still married but no 
longer live together. 

The incident had one other victim, a little dog named Victoria which was owned by one of their 
neighbors at Tapiapanema. 



"When I was helping Silvia, I could hear Victoria barking," Benedito said. "Then a light from 
the UFO passed over Victoria, and she stopped barking. For many days after that, Victoria didn't eat 
much, and no one heard her bark again. Three or four weeks later she died." 

Reports Leaked 

Some of the reports that Hollanda and his team sent to Brasilia were leaked almost immediately 
to civilian UFO investigators. However, it wasn't until 1991 that I learned of this and was able to 
obtain copies. They contain brief summaries of two hundred eighty-one incidents in Colares and 
twenty-nine other communities. Of these, one hundred ninety-two occurred in 1977 and eighty-nine in 
1978. Also included were seventeen detailed maps and twenty photos of UFOs taken by Hollanda's 
team. 

The documents I received were photocopies of photocopies, and the UFO in the photos looked 
mostly like blobs of white light in a black sky. On the back of each photo, however, were finely 
drawn sketches of what Hollanda's team had seen as they took the photographs. 

Daniel Rebisso also had obtained copies of some of Hollanda's reports but they aren't the same 
ones I have. His documents contain long, detailed accounts of some incidents. Neither his reports nor 
mine mention any injuries or deaths, yet we know Hollanda's team investigated many if not all such 
cases. In addition, a neurologist named Pedro Rosado told Daniel in 1991 that an Air Force colonel 
had shown him many photos of burn victims. Dr. Rosado died in 1992. 

During our visit to Colares in July 1993, Daniel and I talked with Manoel Emidio Campo, sixty- 
six, who was burned in 1977. 

"I was living on a farm close to Colares and was asleep," Emidio said. "It was about two 
o'clock in the morning. I woke up and saw a light coming through the roof, very bright, white. Then I 
saw my leg was burned." 

He pointed to his left thigh and said the burn was a little bigger than an orange. "It had a little 
hole in the middle and was very, very red. It hurt a lot." 

He didn't go to the hospital for treatment because he was afraid to leave his house. "I was very 
frightened because people said that light killed people," Emidio said. "A day or two later I was 
interviewed by the Air Force people, and they took pictures of my leg." 

Somewhere hidden away in the Brazilian government's archives are greatly detailed reports on 
what may well be the most thoroughly investigated series of UFO encounters in one area, incidents in 
which many people were burned and several were killed. The government's reasons for withholding 
this information aren't known, but the reports would go a long way toward proving UFOs are very 
real. 

1. Co-LAR-ayz, Moce-CARE-oh Island and BYE-uh doo Sol. 

2. Vuh-LYE-gee. 

3. Uyrange Hollanda, the officer who headed the official investigation. He was then a captain, 
and he retired in 1992 as a lieutenant colonel. 

4. This indicates anemia, but low levels are common in people who are malnourished, and most 
people living in Colares at that time didn’t have balanced diets, according to Daniel Rebisso, a 
biologist. 



5. I had chatted with her briefly in 1992 and knew a little of what she had seen and heard. 

6. It would be impossible to land on that lane today. Over the years it has been washed out by 
rains and recreated by cars and wagons countless times, and neither the lane nor the ruts go in a 
straight line any longer. Electricity wires also cross the lane. Colares itself has grown 
enormously and has paved streets. The highway leading to it is also now paved, and the 
Colares beach is one of many in the area that attract huge throngs from Belem on weekends. 

7. A few days later, Hollanda described for Tucker and me some of the UFOs that he and his men 
photographed during their investigations. Much of what he had to say is covered in Chapter 
Thirty. 

8. Vampiros Extraterrestres na Amazonia. 



Chapter Twenty-One 
THE DEADLY 'TRAIN* 

For sheer terror, few cases can match the encounter that led to the death of Cicilio Higinio 
Pereira. He was only thirty when he died, and there is little doubt that a UFO was responsible. 

I never talked to Cicilio. He died in 1976, a year after I first became interested in UFOs and two 
years before I made my first trip to Brazil. All of my information about Cicilio comes ffomHulvio 
Aleixo, one of the most experienced, cautious and thorough investigators in Brazil. 

Cicilio was a poor, illiterate farm worker who lived with his mother in the country near 
Jaboticatubas in the Valley of the Old Women. 1 This is about an hour's drive north of Belo Horizonte, 
where Hulvio lives. 

On the evening of August 9, 1976, Cicilio was walking home from Jaboticatubas with Anita and 
Geralda, two older women who were neighbors of his. They were on a dirt road in an isolated area 
where there are few homes. A few minutes after eight o'clock, as they were walking down a hill past 
some charcoal ovens near the road, they spotted a bright light in the sky. 

They soon realized it was coming straight toward them, getting closer and closer. Strange lights 
in the sky were rather common then, and all three were frightened. 

"Let's run," Geralda said. "I'm really scared!" 

All three began running, but Cicilio didn't get very far. He was wearing rope-soled sandals, and 
suddenly a strap broke on one of the sandals. He couldn't keep it on, and he couldn't run barefoot 
because sharp stones in the road cut his feet. He stopped, but the women kept running. 

Like an Open Umbrella 

"I was very afraid," he told Hulvio later. "They didn't want to wait for me, so they ran on, and 
one of them yelled back at me: 'It looks like a flying saucer!"' 

Cicilio dropped down on one knee and tried to fix the strap, but calamity struck before he could 
finish. 

"Suddenly'the Train' was downright above me," he said, referring to the strange object. "It was 
like an open umbrella, but it was huge. I was yelling: 'Help me! Dear Mother of Jesus, help me! Dear 
Jesus, save me!' Then the light rose up again, and it got so bright I could see a pin on the ground." 

Cicilio had been carrying a small bag of food, but he threw it away as the object came down a 
again, this time so close that he could have reached up and touched it. 

"I fell down from shock and fright and tried to get away from it. I was thrashing around and 
screaming for help." 

Cicilio tried to roll off the road to get away from "the Train," but it didn't help. 

"I felt a shock. It stopped in the air. When I got shocked, it lifted me up a little bit. I felt very 
cold, and there was a terrible cold wind. I could hear a small humming noise." 

As this was happening, there was a smell of sulfur in the air, he said, and when the UFO came 
very close to him, he could see what looked like two or three small men inside the object. 

"I saw little men of this height (about four feet tall) inside the Train. Then the Train 
disappeared." 



By now the women had vanished from sight also, and Cicilio could barely walk. Almost 
immediately, he felt sick and began throwing up, spitting up bile and suffering mostly from the dry 
heaves. He ran the rest of the way home as fast as he could, arriving exhausted, contused, scared and 
still nauseated. 

He continued to throw up the rest of the night. It was the beginning of a sickness that eventually 
ended in his death. 

Hulvio heard about the incident a few days later and at first had trouble locating Cicilio. 
Eventually a guide led him to a house that was deep in the woods and difficult to get to. There he 
found Cicilio sick in bed. He was very lethargic, depressed and demoralized, but managed to tell 
Hulvio what had happened to him on the road that night. 

Why Cicilio called the UFO a "Train" isn't known. He wasn't able to describe the object except 
when it came down close to him. 

"The thing comes like a headlight, and the moment it gets close, it looks like an umbrella," 
Cicilio said. "The light is green and another one is yellow, like the headlight on a truck. And it 
blinks." 

He couldn't give any details about the little men but said he saw them through a door of some 
kind that opened and closed. 


Other People Attacked 

Hulvio learned later that other people in the area had encounters at that time. A neighbor named 
Henrique had twice been chased by UFOs. A motorist had engine trouble one night, left his car, 
started walking and was chased nearly a thousand feet by a UFO. And a woman was burned as she 
clung to a fence post to keep from falling down in fear when a UFO came close to her. 

Hulvio, and members of his Belo Horizonte UFO group, spent many years investigating UFO 
cases in the Valley of the Old Women, and they built up a network of people who would keep them 
informed of sightings and encounters. About two months after Hulvio interviewed Cicilio, one of his 
informants phoned to tell him Cicilio had died. 

"He eventually got out of bed but wasn't able to do much," Hulvio said when he first told me 
Cicilio's story. "Just when people thought he was getting better, he died. The impression everyone 
had was that after this encounter, Cicilio lost all of his energy. 

"No one knows why he died. The man came from a poor family and, in all that time, he never 
saw a doctor. Since there was no doctor available to issue a death certificate, the family burned the 
body." 

The exact cause of death will never be known nor even the exact nature of his terminal illness. 
The fact that he began vomiting and became sick almost immediately after the extremely close 
encounter, and never got better, clearly indicates the UFO's presence had a detrimental affect on his 
health. It hovered within three feet of him and was so bright he had difficulty seeing. Whatever power 
source it had, allowed it to move silently and give off a brilliant light at the same time. This means it 
could have emitted electromagnetic waves of some kind that damaged or weakened Cicilio. 

During that moment when the UFO lifted Cicilio off the ground, he felt a terrible cold wind 
blowing at the same time. This is much the same thing that happened to three people in Rio Grande do 
Norte — Francisca Bispo De Assis at Sitio Timbauba in 1979 and Maria Dos Dores Lopes, her 



daughter, Marileide, and their pet dog in Bom Jesus in 1983. 

And in March 1991 Jorge Fernando De Sousa had to struggle hard, crouching down and hanging 
onto the grass with both hands, to keep from being drawn up into a UFO as a cold wind swirled 
around him near Lake Apodi in western Rio Grande do Norte. 

There was another similarity between Cicilio's encounter and those involving the women. 
Francisca also described the UFO that pulled her into the sky as looking like a big, open umbrella, 
while Maria said the UFO she saw was shaped like a tub. 

These cases cover a span of fifteen years and occurred in areas fifteen hundred miles apart, an 
indication of the continuing presence of hostile UFOs throughout much of Brazil. 

1. Jah-BOO-chee-cah-TOO-bus. 



Chapter Twenty-Two 
HUNTING THE HUNTERS 

Deaths have been reported in UFO encounters since the 1950s, but they are rare, and there may 
have been no more than two or three dozen in the world. In most cases, it's impossible to say a UFO 
was the direct cause of a death, usually because there were no witnesses. No one, to my knowledge, 
has actually seen a UFO kill anyone. Yet people have died during or soon after encounters, and most 
observers conclude that UFOs contributed to those deaths in some way. 

Researchers thought they'd struck a bonanza when newspapers and magazines in Brazil and the 
United States published stories claiming that in October 1981 four hunters had been killed by UFOs in 
the mountains around Parnarama, a small town in the interior. 

Parnarama at that time was rather difficult to reach. It is in Maranhao, but it's easier to get there 
from the state of Piaui to the east. Parnarama lies on the western bank of the Paraiba River, fifty miles 
south of Teresina, the capital of Piaui. The river separates the two states, and the terrain on both sides 
of the river consists of forested hills and low mountains. 

When I first went to Parnarama in September 1986, the dirt road going south out of Teresina 
was in poor condition and in some parts was so sandy that our car once got stuck. Nearly two hours 
after leaving Teresina, we turned off at an unmarked spot in the road recognized only by the local 
residents, drove down a steep embankment and entered a lane that runs through woods. A half mile 
beyond we came to the river. 

From that point, Parnarama is only two hundred yards away, but there's no bridge across the 
river. Instead, a ferryboat big enough to carry only one car or truck at a time takes you across the river 
in five minutes. 

Even then, though, things were changing. Part of the difficulty in getting to Parnarama was long 
traffic delays caused by construction crews who were building a new highway. By the time I returned 
two years later, the dirt road had been replaced by an excellent two-lane asphalt highway, and now 
getting to Parnarama is almost a breeze. Almost but not quite. The turnoff to the ferry remains 
unmarked and can easily be missed. 

Parnarama is hot and dusty and has about three thousand inhabitants. Everyone we met there was 
quite friendly. One of the positive things about investigating UFO reports in Brazil is that most people 
are willing to help you find whoever you're looking for. In talking to perhaps a thousand UFO 
witnesses and people who were just giving us directions during ten visits to Brazil, I remember only 
three who became hostile when the subject of UFOs came up. None of them were in Parnarama. 

Because the published stories about the deaths of four hunters had quoted the mayor and police 
chief of Parnarama, my friends and I went directly to the City Hall on that first visit in 1986. 1 
Unfortunately, neither man was in office anymore, and neither was in Parnarama at that time. 

However, as soon as we started asking about UFOs, we attracted a crowd. More than a dozen of 
us crowded around a long wooden table in the council chambers, and everybody seemed to be talking 
at the same time. Everyone had a UFO story to tell, but no one knew anything about four hunters being 
killed. 


Zapped by UFO 



The dead men named in the stories were Abel Boro, Raimundo Souza, Jose Vitoria, and 
Dionizio General. Each man allegedly had been hunting with companions, most of whom were named. 
It didn't matter. None of the people we were talking to had heard of any of them, dead or otherwise. 
Each name provoked a discussion, mainly over whether that was the victim's real name or nickname, 
because many people are better known by their nicknames. Still, no one recognized anyone we 
mentioned. 

Gradually, one man began to dominate the conversation, and everyone stopped to listen. He was 
a tall, lanky thirty-three-year-old named Luis Silva Da Silveira who told us how a UFO zapped him 
in August 1985, just a year earlier. 

"I was hunting with a friend about eight o'clock one night when we saw two green lights coming 
toward us," said Silva, who identified himself as a landowner. "We were scared. We jumped out of 
our hammocks and ran and hid in the bushes. I tried to shoot at it, but when I did, I got a shock. I felt 
paralyzed and couldn't fire my gun. I began to think it was the chupa-chupa." 

The paralysis lasted less than a minute. By the time he was able to move again, the object had 
disappeared. The two men then ran all the way back to town. It took them more than two hours. 

Silva began telling us about another incident involving a friend but suddenly remembered that a 
man had died near Parnarama, possibly because of a UFO. 

"His name was Jose Batista Lima, but he was better known by his nickname, Jose do Ramao," 
Silva said. "He and a friend had been hunting. Ramao had shot a bird and was going to sleep in his 
hammock when he was attacked by a light. 2 The friend ran away and, when he came back later, 
Ramao was dead." 

Silva couldn't remember when this happened. "Maybe last year. Three or four years ago?" 

None of the other men remembered either, but several added details, saying Ramao had purple 
splotches on his neck. No one else knew anything about Ramao's death. 

We were then taken into the office of the new mayor, Raimundo Silva Da Silveira, who 
happened to be the brother of the landowner we'd just talked to. The mayor told us there had been at 
least one hundred sightings in the Parnarama area in just the past year alone, with the most recent 
occurring just ten days before our visit. 


Pulsating Light 

One witness to that latest sighting was a city councilwoman. We went to her home, and she told 
us that she and two men were fishing in a lake at night when a UFO in the form of a big, lighted object 
came toward them. They hid in the bushes as it hovered over the lake one hundred fifty yards away 
from them for several minutes. She said the light was so bright that she and her companions could see 
the fish swimming in the lake. 

Earlier in City Hall, a man named Antonio Vitorino Da Silva, thirty-eight, told us that he and a 
friend were hunting near their homes south of Parnarama one night three or four weeks earlier when a 
pulsating light as big as the moon came toward them. They could see red, yellow, blue and green 
lights around it. They ran to their homes, where they pointed out the UFO to their families. 

Antonio said that before the UFO arrived, he and his friend had been burning babacu shells 
(which look somewhat like huge pine cones) to keep mosquitoes away. When they ran back to their 



homes and watched the UFO, they could see the UFO shining a light down on the burning shells. 

Antonio also said a brother-in-law had been stunned by a beam of light from a UFO in the same 
area and was paralyzed for a while, but in the confusion surrounding the council table, we failed to 
get the details of that incident. 

In September 1988,1 went to Parnarama again with Fortaleza investigators Jean Alencar and 
Reginaldo Athayde, hoping to learn more about the alleged deaths, but we had no more luck than the 
first time. 


Breaks Leg Running From UFO 

Again we found people who'd had experiences with UFOs. One of them was Jose Morais Da 
Silva, known also as Jose Cosmo. He'd had three encounters, two of them in 1975. 

"The first time was at midnight," he said. "My brother-in-law, Santiago, and I were going to 
Bom Jesus on horseback. 3 Suddenly a big, bright light appeared in front of us. It came quickly and 
hovered about thirty meters above us, and we felt heat from it. I had a revolver and tried to shoot at it, 
but the UFO disappeared." 

He and Santiago continued on until they leached a friend's house. "We were telling him about the 
UFO when the UFO came again and shined a light on our horses. The horses stayed quiet, and the 
UFO disappeared." 

The second incident occurred near his home at Gaveao, fifteen miles southwest of Parnarama. "I 
was chasing an armadillo with a friend when we suddenly saw a bright light coming in our direction. 

I said, 'It must be the chupa-chupa,' and we ran into the woods and hid behind bushes." 

Jose Cosmo broke a leg during the encounter. "It happened when I fell down in a hole trying to 
hide," he said. "The UFO slowly circled for an hour looking for us." 

His third encounter was the worst of all. It occurred in September 1984 when he and his son, 
Antonio Francisco, then ten, were fishing at night in the Paraiba River. 

"ft was about seven P.M. when I saw a light about fifty meters high coming toward me," said 
Jose Cosmo. "We tried to hide under roots along the river bank. A light rain began falling. Then the 
light turned off, and I thought the UFO had gone away. I began fishing again, and suddenly I saw my 
shadow on the water, and I turned and saw the UFO land on the river bank about twenty meters away 
from me. My son and I ran and hid under roots again. I was burned this time when the UFO attacked 
me with a beam of light. The boy wasn't burned. 

Nightmares About UFOs 

"Afterwards I became very dizzy and had a headache and backache. There was a house near the 
river, and I sent the boy there to hide. I couldn't see the shape of the UFO, just the light, ft was just 
two or three meters above the ground and about twenty meters from me. 

"About midnight the UFO moved to another part of the river and shined a light on some other 
fishermen. I moved to another hiding place, and then the UFO came back to the river bank near me 
and stayed there until four A.M. ft made a humming sound like a bicycle on a highway. 

"I have dreams about this, and in the dreams I think the UFO is coming to hit me again with the 
beam of light. I was afraid the UFO would suck the blood out of me." 



There, again, is the belief that UFOs suck blood out of people. We asked him why he thought the 
UFO would do that. 

"Because my mother-in-law knows the name of a person who died from the UFO with no blood, 
with some bites on his arm," he said. 


Widow Has Doubts 

His mother-in-law, Maria Jesus, was in the house during the interview, and he called her over. 
She gave us the name of a man who supposedly died, but she didn't know anything firsthand. She then 
gave us the name of still another man who supposedly knew the details, but we didn't have time to 
look for him 

On this second trip, we again tried to find the hunter who was with Jose do Ramao, the man who 
we'd been told in 1986 was killed by a UFO. Again, no luck. We were told that the man was in Sao 
Luis, hundreds of miles to the north. 

This time, however, we did find Ramao's widow, Maria Dos Reis Batista De Lima — and she 
was not convinced that a UFO killed her husband. 

"He died August 26, 1982," she told us. "He was forty years old. I have doubts about the UFO 
because the man who was with him told me my husband ate so much just before he died. When he got 
through eating, he had coffee and water, and then he told this man he felt bad. This man went off to 
chase an animal and, when he came back, he found my husband dead." 

So, maybe Ramao died during an encounter and maybe he didn't. No autopsy was performed, 
and the cause of death isn't known. Until we're able to find the man who was hunting with him, we 
will never know what happened the night Ramao died. 

Obviously he didn't die in October 1981, the month the newspapers and magazines claimed the 
four hunters were killed by UFOs. It now seems likely that none of those deaths occurred. The various 
articles agreed only on the names of the victims. Some gave conflicting information as to the details 
of the alleged deaths, the names of the companions, and the locations of the incidents. 

A number of investigators, including noted UFO researcher and author Jacques Vallee, have 
now made at least eight trips to Parnarama, but none of us was able to confirm the UFO deaths 
reported by those publications. In CONFRONTATIONS, A Scientist's Search for Alien Contact 
(Ballantine Books, 1990), Vallee reported that the former police chief said one hunter, Raimundo 
Souza, did die, apparently during or after an encounter, but had fallen out of a tree and may have 
suffered a heart attack. 4 No autopsy was performed, and there was no evidence a UFO caused the 
death. 

None of the victims or their hunting companions named in the articles were known to the people 
that we talked to in Parnarama during our two visits there. Nor did anyone recognize the names of the 
localities where the deaths allegedly occurred. 

Researchers Didn't Know 

Furthermore, excellent, very detailed topographical maps are available for every region of 
Brazil, showing even individual farms and houses, and the Parnarama map doesn't show any of the 
communities named in the newspaper and magazine articles. 



Adding to the doubts about the authenticity of the published reports was the fact that the four 
UFO investigators from Teresina who accompanied us on the first visit to Parnarama had never heard 
of the alleged deaths until we talked to them, and Teresina is just fifty miles away. 

There's no doubt that the region around Parnarama has had plenty of sightings and encounters, 
and UFOs are probably still visiting the area. As for Ramao, his death may or may not be related to a 
UFO encounter. Various accounts of what his hunting companion reportedly saw or heard supports 
either view. 

It is my belief that the four deaths in October 1981 never occurred or, if they did, not as UFO 
deaths as was reported. I suspect that a newspaper or magazine published a story based on 
speculation about the cause of the death of Raimundo Souza and embellished upon it. Other 
publications then picked up the story and published variations of it without making a serious effort to 
check its authenticity. 

This type of thing happens, not only in Brazil but in the United States and, probably, many other 
countries as well. Some people never let facts get in the way of a good story. 

1. Jean Alencar, a UFO investigator from Fortaleza, and four Teresina investigators, Pericles 
Dos Santos Reinaldo Filho, Jose Alves de Souza Neto, Francisco Savio Pereira Pimentel, and 
Iran Barbosa Pimental Junior. 

2. Sounds like Ha-MOAN. 

3. Not to be confused with the Bom Jesus in Rio Grande do Norte near Natal. Many communities 
throughout the country are named Bom Jesus. 

4. Vallee located the police chief of Sao Luis, and the chief denied quotes that had been attributed 
to him in the various stories. 


Chapter Twenty-Three 



STILLBIRTH BY TERROR 


It was an encounter much like thousands of others in which people flee in terror when they're 
surprised by the sudden appearance of a UFO. In this case, two pregnant women ran for their lives 
when a UFO chased them. They escaped, but both paid a high price. One lost her baby, and the other 
gave premature birth to a child with heart problems and who has never walked since then. 

Most encounters occur at night, but this one took place in daylight, late on a Monday afternoon in 
April 1982 on the beach near Pecemwest of Fortaleza, Ceara. The sun was setting, and the women, 
Maria Das Gracas and Maria Merces De Paula, had been hunting for wood near a lake. With them 
were Maria Das Gracas' younger sister, Maria Neuma Ferreira Lima, and two children. The women 
were in their mid to late twenties. 

I never met Maria Das Gracas, who lost her baby. I heard the story from Maria Merces when I 
visited Pecem with investigator Jean Alencar in September 1986. 

"Maria Das Gracas and I were both pregnant, and we had gone to the bush near the lake to get 
wood," said Maria Merces. They planned to use the wood to make charcoal and were on their way 
home, walking peacefully, each of the three women carrying bundles of wood. 

As they left the bush on the east side of the lake, Maria Neuma's six-year-old daughter, Fatima, 
said: "Mama, look at the big star!" 

All turned to look. 

"I saw a bright star, but I wasn't concerned about it," Maria Merces said. "We were trying to 
climb up a sand dune. Then Fatima yelled: 'It's coming after us!' We all quickly turned around and 
saw a reddish-blue fire, shining and giving off sparks. It was about two hundred meters away, very 
low, coming down toward us." 


Run Across Dunes 

Badly frightened, they threw the wood down and all began running toward a grove of trees on the 
top of a hill. Fatima and the other child, Maria Das Gracas' daughter, Marcia, eight, were crying and 
ran on ahead of their mothers, who were having difficulty running in the sand. 

"We ran about five hundred meters over the dunes to the woods and, when we got inside the 
woods, the UFO passed over about fifty meters above us, going very slowly. It went toward the sea. It 
was like a fireball, about a third of a meter in diameter." 

When they felt sure the UFO wasn't going to come back, they ran home. All were nauseated and 
had headaches for a week. 

"Nine days later, Maria Das Gracas, who was two months pregnant, lost her baby, and Neuma 
became very nervous," said Maria Merces, who was seven months pregnant herself at the time. A few 
days later, Maria Merces gave birth prematurely to Kelvia. 

"When Kelvia was born, she didn't cry," said Maria Merces. "She would drink only tea, not 
milk. She wouldn't eat anything." 

As we talked, Maria was holding Kelvia, then four. She was a sweet, bright-eyed child, alert 
but silent. 

"She's never walked," Maria Merces continued. "She talks sometimes. She has heart problems 
and is always weak and tired. The doctor thinks she's not normal." 



The women blame the UFO for the stillbirth and the birth of an impaired child. It could have 
been just a coincidence, of course, but both coming so soon after such a horrifying experience 
certainly points to the UFO as the culpable party. Had the UFO never chased them, or given the 
impression it was chasing them, they wouldn't have run, and both might have had normal, healthy 
children today. 

Maria Das Gracas is not the only woman to lose a baby because of a UFO encounter. Silvia 
Trinidade, as we have seen, lost hers after being hit by a light from a UFO on Mosqueiro Island 
during the long Colares-area UFO flap in 1977 and 1978. And, according to Belo Horizonte 
investigator Hulvio Aleixo, another pregnant woman, Fatima De Jesus, lost her baby fleeing from a 
UFO in 1987 near Esmeraldas in the Valley of the Old Women. Fatima, who was in the fifth month of 
her pregnancy, and another woman had run up a hill to escape from a UFO. 

Still another pregnant woman lost her baby after an extremely unusual encounter in 1988. The 
victim this time was Joana Rodrigues Ferreira, then forty, who lived on a farm near Carnaubinha, 
Ceara. 1 

Joana and her daughter, Elisvalda, ten, left their house late one night, carrying baskets of 
vegetables. They were going to meet another woman, walk to the nearest road, take a bus into the 
small town of Paraipaba and sell the vegetables at the market there. 

UFO’s Scratching Sounds 

"We had gone about four hundred meters from the house when we saw a ball of light in the sky 
the color of fire," Joana said when we talked to her in 1991. "We went along, and it kind of 
disappeared behind a school. My daughter said: 'Let's not go any farther because that's a flying 
saucer.' But we continued on, and we soon came to a small stream. We took our sandals off and had 
them in our hands. We were carrying baskets of vegetables on our heads, and we put them down 
because we were going to wait for another woman who was going with us. 

"When we got to the stream, the UFO went away and my daughter asked: 'Mama, do you think 
it's going to come back again?' And I said: 'No, it's not going to come back.' I began to comb my hair 
and, all of a sudden, it appeared again. It came down over a tree ten meters from us and stayed there. 

"I didn't know what to do. I was terrified. It made a loud scratching noise. At first we didn't 
connect the noise to the flying saucer. It was over a tree, and we were five meters from the tree. It lit 
up everything around us very bright. 

"Suddenly we saw two men who looked exactly alike standing near the tree. I don't know where 
they came from. They were small and short, about four feet tall. Their clothes were like aluminum 
They glowed, reflecting the light. I couldn't see their eyes or faces because the light was so bright. 
They were just standing there three meters from me, making a noise — 'tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk.' 

"I was so terrified that I couldn't move. My daughter hooked her arm in mine and dragged me 
away from the men." 

She and Elisvalda ran to a house about eighty yards away, banged on the door and screamed to 
be let in. "Senhor Martins, for God's sake, open the door, something's trying to get us!" 

At first, Martins didn't hear them because his dogs were barking so loudly after being awakened 
by the noise the UFO was making. 

"He opened the door just a little bit to let us squeeze in and then banged the door shut," Joana 



said. "He didn't look out at all." 

Joana was so frightened that her body was shaking. Martins and his wife tried to get her to take 
some rum. She refused because she had been taking medicine but later relented and had a sip because 
she couldn't stop shaking. 

It turned out that Joana and Elisvalda had arrived too early at the place where they were to meet 
the other woman going to market. 

"We had gotten there at one o'clock in the morning, and we weren't supposed to be there until 
three o'clock," Joana said. "So we all settled down and waited. I had left everything there by the 
stream, my sandals, my purse, the vegetables, everything. 

"When it got to be three o'clock, Mr. Martins put on his gun and got a light and took us to the 
point. By then the UFO was gone. When I told the other women in the market what happened, they told 
me I was lucky because the UFOs usually take your blood. 

"I was five months pregnant, and for seven days after this happened, I was sick with headaches 
and fever and no energy. Then I went to the hospital in Paraipaba, and I miscarried there." 

Tree Was Burned 

Elisvalda didn't suffer any ill effects from the encounter. The day after this happened, Joana and 
others went back to the tree where she and Elisvalda had seen the two little men. 

"The tree was burned, and all the leaves had dropped off," Joana said. "And where the light hit 
the ground, under where the UFO hovered, there was no more grass." 

Joana and her family later moved to another farm She's never gone back and doesn't know if the 
tree recovered. 

This is a particularly notable case because of several unusual elements. First, the UFO spotted 
Joana and Elisvalda in the dark, disappeared momentarily and then suddenly reappeared only thirty 
feet away, making a strange screeching sound. The light that it emitted was so hot that it burned the 
tree, perhaps in the same manner that another UFO burned a tree that young Jerinaldo was hiding 
under near Acari. 

As the frightened mother and daughter stood listening to the screeching sound, two small beings 
dressed in silvery garb just suddenly appeared under the tree ten feet away from them Because the 
light was so bright, Joana and Elisvalda couldn't see their faces, but they could hear them making a 
fast 'tsk-tsk-tsking' noise. Joana was so terrified that her daughter had to pull her to safety. Finally, 
seven days later, Joana lost her unborn baby. 

In only two of these four stillbirth cases did the pregnant women overexert themselves by 
running because they were badly frightened, one in the sand dunes near Pecem and the other on a hill 
in the Valley of the Old Women. In Joana's case and that of Silvia's, the young wife on Mosqueiro 
Island, neither ran. But they were so terrorized that they lost their babies. 

These four women had three things in common: each was pregnant, each had what was probably 
the most traumatic experience of her life, and each lost her baby shortly after. I don't know the 
pregnancy histories of these women or whether they might have lost their babies later even if there 
had been no UFOs. But they all miscarried after having encounters, indicating the UFOs were a major 
factor in the deaths of their babies. 



1. Jean Alencar was the first to investigate this case. 




PART SIX 

A WEIRD PHENOMENON 



Chapter Twenty-Four 
SILENT EXPLOSIONS 


"It was beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, but we thought it was going to kill us. It was the most 
beautiful thing I ever saw in my life. It was gorgeous, but it was lethal." 

Reinar Silva got excited telling about the night a UFO firebombed him and his wife, Alzerina, 
when they thought they were going to die. 

It's an incident that helps illustrate not only how weird the phenomenon is but also shows that 
UFOs aren't necessarily what they seem to be — that is, "just" spaceships from other planets. 

"When I talk about this I relive the trauma of it," Reinar said. "I'm prepared in my mind to meet 
aliens from different worlds, but I wasn't prepared for this kind of experience." 

Reinar is a strong, husky man about five-foot-nine who looks like nothing would scare him. 1 
He's a clerical worker for the city of Fortaleza, and he and Alzerina also own a small sidewalk lunch 
stand where they'd been working on the busy Friday night this happened. Sometime after midnight, 
they finally locked up and rode off on their motorcycle to go to their small farm south of Fortaleza. 
Things started happening at one-thirty a.m. on the highway fourteen miles south of Fortaleza. 

"I was joking about a point of light we saw in the sky, and all of a sudden a big light came down 
above our heads," said Reinar, who was thirty-three when this happened on March 9, 1991. "It was 
ten to fifteen meters above us and sort of ahead of us. Our motorcycle stopped running and we thought 
something had happened to it. 

"The light stayed above us for two minutes and we both were paralyzed with fright. Lights were 
going around it and we felt very hot. The ship was two stories tall, had a very pretty rainbow tail and 
it gave out very bright colored lights. On top was a transparent, luminous dome but we couldn't see 
anybody inside it. Alzerina was very frightened and started panicking. After two or three minutes, it 
disappeared very rapidly, in a matter of seconds." 

He and Alzerina sat on the motorcycle for a moment, but before they could recover, their 
tormentor returned. 


Transparent Ball 

"ft came back above us a second time," Reinar said, "ft didn't make any noise, ft was completely 
silent. The object stopped in the air. Then it disappeared again and finally we got the motorcycle 
going. I was afraid to say anything." 

They went on down the highway but had gone only two miles when the UFO appeared once 
again. 

"ft came back a third time but didn't stop, and as it passed over us this time it dropped a 
transparent ball, like a big soap bubble, one and a half meters around," Reinar said. "Because of the 
lights reflecting off of it, it looked like it was on fire. The ball came down and blew up in front of us. 
Alzerina screamed and I put on the brakes, ft was only about one and a half meters in front of us when 
it exploded. I would have gone into it if I hadn't hit the brakes. The ball of fire was a dark blue, ft 
made no sound at all when it exploded." 

The UFO then went away and they never saw it again. 



Fortaleza UFO investigator Reginaldo Athayde heard about the incident and began investigating. 
He located three other people who had seen a UFO about the same time not far from where this 
happened to Reinar and Alzerina. 

"They were in a car and said the UFO went up and down and zig-zagged through the clouds and 
then came back and lit them all up," Athayde said. "This was at Seis Bocas, only four kilometers from 
Reinar and Alzerina's encounter." 

Alzerina, thirty-two at the time, had blisters on her face the day after the transparent ball 
exploded. 

"My face got very red," she said. "I didn't feel any heat or anything when this happened and I 
was so terrified." 

She believes she was burned not by the explosion in front of them but by exposure to the light 
from the UFO in the first encounter. She was sitting behind Reinar on the motorcycle and the light fell 
more on her than it did him. The blisters took about a week to heal. 

Reinar drew a sketch of the UFO showing a sombrero-shaped object with a large fan-shaped 
tail extending from it. He said the tail was in rainbow colors, while the transparent dome was 
yellowish and the body of the object itself was green with yellow lights around it. 

There are three unusual aspects to this incident. First, the UFO came back twice after the first 
encounter, as if it was uncertain what it wanted to do to these people. The only other major case that I 
know of in which a UFO came back to harass the victim again was the one in which Moises Campelo 
was levitated twice, three hundred miles to the southeast in Rio Grande do Norte, just ten weeks 
later. 

The second strange feature is the dropping of a fiery- looking transparent bubble about five feet 
across that exploded just in front of the couple. People have reported seeing bits of flaming debris 
falling from UFOs, but dropping an explosive "ball of fire" directly in the path of two people on a 
motorcycle maybe unique. 

Had Reinar not braked in time, he and Alzerina might have been caught in the middle of the 
explosion. There's no way of knowing what might have happened to them if they had. Perhaps nothing. 
They felt no heat from the explosion nor any rush of air, and they heard absolutely nothing as the 
bubble burst. 

This brings up the third angle — the lack of sound as it blew up. Silent explosions have been 
reported before, but not often. 


UFO Controls Car 

On the same day we talked to Reinar and Alzerina, Reginaldo Athayde, the Fortaleza researcher 
who introduced us to them, told us about another incident in which a silent explosion occurred. 

"On April 3, 1965, about eleven-twenty p.m, two traveling salesmen were driving toward 
Fortaleza when they saw something in the sky that looked like an infrared lamp. It shined a ray of light 
on the car. Francisco Muller, director of a laboratory, pointed the object out to the other man, Jose 
Araujo, but it was off to the side and Jose couldn't see it well. 

"The UFO then descended and was right above the car. Muller started to stop the car but the car 
began to shake and its lights went out. Then they saw a ray of light coming down and Muller realized 
he had no control over the car. The car skidded sideways and came to a stop. 



"The object set down in front of the car. Two entities that looked like robots came out and began 
moving toward the car. Both men got out. One of them had a rifle and he shot at the two entities. 
Suddenly there was a terrible explosion and the two men were temporarily blinded, but they heard no 
sound. 

"It was ten to fifteen minutes before they could see again and when they could, the object and the 
two entities were gone. They thought they had killed someone but they couldn't find any indication that 
anything had been there. The men got back in the car and drove to a gas station, where an attendant 
told them he had seen the same object at the same time. They went on home to Fortaleza." 

More Silent Explosions 

In 1991, Cynthia Luce and I heard the story of two more silent explosions when we visited the 
city of Mossoro in western Rio Grande do Norte. The witness was Antonio Fernandes Duarte, then 
forty-three, a city councilman, rancher and owner of an auto parts store. He said that in early 1988, he 
was driving to his thirteen-hundred-acre farm ten miles south of Mossoro. 

"It was raining, a light rain," Duarte said. "It was about eight-thirty p.m. When I was entering my 
property, I saw a big ball of light off to my left about forty meters away. It was an oval-shaped object 
on the ground with a big light and three legs on it. I stopped and was looking at it. It was a dull, 
silvery metallic color. It was about the size of a car, maybe four and a half to five meters but round 
and it stood about three meters high. The legs were about two meters long. 

"I could see three very small men the size of dwarfs. One was standing in the door, which was 
like a window hinged at the top, and two were on the ground. There was an accordion-like cable 
coming out of their backs. One was wearing an amber-colored jumpsuit, one was orangish and the 
third was grayish-green. He was in the door of the object. 

"They were about one meter twenty centimeters tall, normally proportioned but the heads were 
largish. 2 The distance was so far it was hard to tell but I had the impression they had flatfish faces. I 
couldn't tell what sex they were. I didn't see any hair. It was almost as if they were wearing helmets. 

It was strange because the skin seemed sort of grayish, like the style of a robot. 

"They didn't seem to notice me. They seemed to be distracted. One man was going down on the 
ground and then he would go back into the ship. He would jump and float to the ground and float back 
up again. He was connected by a cable. They would go down and do something on the ground and 
then go back up, but I didn't see any kind of stairs. They seemed to float down and back up. The object 
made a beeping sound, like an amateur radio. 

"I was fascinated by it. I didn't know what to do. I had a revolver and I wanted to shoot it into 
the air to see their reaction but didn't. I was watching this scene, with my car still running and my 
window open, when all of a sudden there was a big flash of light. It was like a flash bulb, only a 
million times more brilliant, and the thing simply disappeared. There was no sound of explosion, 
nothing, just this huge flash of light, very, very intense and the thing was just gone. 

"I was blinded by the flash of light, and for about three minutes I couldn't see a thing. I thought 
maybe I was dead. But I kept feeling my face and knew I was alive, but it was such an incredible 
flash of light. My whole body was sort of numb. 

"In 1959 when I was a boy, an uncle told my father and me that he had seen the same type of 
thing at dawn on a road about twenty kilometers from where I saw this. It was an oval UFO on the 



ground with three legs and three little men in it. It, too, exploded and disappeared, and he heard no 
sound. After all that time I saw the same thing. I thought to myself that they were still around and were 
doing research of some kind. They were obviously hunting for something on the ground." 

UFO Splits in Two 

The final silent explosion report comes not from Brazil but Puerto Rico, where an unusually 
high number of sightings and encounters have been reported through the years, particularly since the 
late 1980s. 

One of the most spectacular events took place shortly before eight o'clock in the evening of 
December 28, 1988, near Laguna Cartagena, a lake east of the small town of Betances in the 
southwestern part of the island. A number of witnesses told San Juan investigator Jorge Martin that 
they had seen a huge triangular-shaped UFO passing overhead when two military fighter jets tried to 
intercept it. 

In 1990, Martin introduced me to two of the principal witnesses, Wilson Soza and Carlos 
Mercado. They said that first one jet seemed to disappear into the huge UFO and then, shortly after, 
the second also disappeared, with the sound of the jet engines ceasing the moment the jets vanished. 

At that point, Soza and Mercado said, the enormous UFO slowly came down low over Laguna 
Cartagena about a mile away from them and suddenly blew up in a massive but totally silent 
explosion, with flaming bits of debris appearing to fall to the ground. Then, as the "fireworks" died 
away, the two men saw the huge UFO, still above the lake, divide into two smaller objects which 
rapidly streaked away in opposite directions. Soza searched for debris the following day but found 
nothing. 1 2 3 

So, now we're getting into the really gee-whiz aspect of the phenomenon, and more is yet to 
come. These witnesses reported explosions so massive that several thought they'd been blinded, yet 
the explosions made no sound. Even the smallest firecracker makes a lot of noise as it blows up, and 
usually the bigger a detonation, the louder it is. How can these silent explosions be explained? We'll 
offer some speculations in the final chapter. 

The firebombing of Reinar and Alzerina was quite unusual and hardly seems to have been an 
experiment on the part of the ufonauts {"What will happen if..”). More likely it was just plain 
nastiness, like a mean kid tormenting a cat. 

The splitting of the huge UFO into two smaller ones in Puerto Rico is truly bizarre, but not 
uncommon. Throughout the world a small number of witnesses have reported seeing UFOs change 
shape before their eyes. An object may be triangular to start with, reshape itself into an oval and 
release a number of smaller objects, and then revert to the triangular shape. Some researchers call 
this polymorphism 

There's nothing cut and dried about UFOs. These "explosive" incidents are offered to provoke 
thought about what it is we are dealing with. Most of the time UFOs seem very real, but in the blink of 
an eye they can become very unreal. Stay tuned. 

1. HAY-nar. 

2. About four feet. 

3. All the military bases in Puerto Rico denied losing any aircraft and say they know nothing 



about the incident. 



Chapter Twenty-Five 
A PUSHY PHENOMENON 

Silent explosions are just one item on a long list of weird things UFOs seem to be capable of, 
suggesting that UFOs may not be simply craft made of nuts and bolts from wherever. In addition to 
creating noiseless blasts that leave no debris, UFOs do "magical" things that defy explanation. For 
example: 

* They seem to appear instantly and disappear even faster. 

* They have been seen to jump about the sky in quantum leaps, appearing here, then there and 
again elsewhere, without ever being seen moving from one spot to the next. 

* They can sit, massive in size, low in the sky without making a sound. 

* They can streak across the horizon in a second or two from a standing start. 

* They can change shape, divide into two or three or more objects and just as easily merge back 
into one. 

* They give off colored lights more brilliant and pure than anything any witness has ever seen 
before. 

* They give off light that "performs" in many strange ways that ordinary light does not do. 

The list seems endless. The phenomenon is so complex that researchers frequently discover 

some new capability never reported before. 

We've seen how UFOs can pull people upward, but this power also seems to be 
omnidirectional. They can push people away, pull them sideways, pull them up and then down at the 
same time, and even pummel them 


Roof Knocked Down 

Francisco Oliveira's bar was thumped when a UFO knocked its roof down without touching it 
as it passed overhead. Just PUNNNGKL.and a shower of shattered roofing tiles and splintered 
wooden beams came down. 

"It was about midnight and I had been shooting pool with a customer named Waldemar," 
Francisco said as we sat on wooden stools in his small bar on the side of a dusty road in Sitio 
Dentro, a quiet little community far off the main highways in central Rio Grande do Norte. 

"Waldemar was going to go home but he had to put air in his bicycle tire. I started to lockup and 
go home, too, but Waldemar asked me to stay a few minutes because flying saucers had been 
bothering people and he was worried about them. 

"We were looking around the sky when all of a sudden a big light suddenly appeared that made 
everything as bright as daylight. I looked up and saw a huge object coming toward us with two beings 
in it. They were in a window that looked like a television screen across the front. I could see them 
from the waist up. They looked almost like dolls because they looked alike." 

Francisco and Waldemar were terrified and ran around the corner of the bar toward Francisco's 
house next door. 

"We squatted down next to the wall, trying to hide, and as the UFO passed over the bar we 
heard a loud noise," Francisco said. "We were so afraid that we ran into the house and didn't come 



back out until the next morning. My mother and father were there and my mother saw the light and 
heard the noise." 

Early the next morning Francisco and Waldemar went back to the bar and discovered half of the 
roof had fallen in. The main beam and several rafters had broken, and smashed tiles and debris 
littered the floor. 

This happened late on the night of August 26-27, 1979. There was no wind that night, Francisco 
said, and the building was not old or dilapidated, having been built just seven years earlier. 

Francisco was exposed to the light from the UFO for only a few seconds but he was sick for 
three days. 

"I felt numb all over," he said. "You could pinch my skin and I couldn't feel anything. I had no 
energy, no appetite. I just slept a lot and didn't walk very much." 

In a slightly different manner, a zigzagging UFO caused a diesel locomotive to slow down every 
time it passed overhead. According to Faustino Fima, the assistant engineer, it happened one night in 
late 1977 as a freight train was going to Crato in southern Ceara. 

"It was between ten and eleven o'clock," said Faustino. "The speed of the locomotive started to 
diminish rather suddenly. It would go fast, then slow, fast then slow. I looked around to see what was 
causing it. Then I saw a big disk in the sky. It was bluish but had green and yellow in it. It was very 
bright. It was going very quickly back and forth over the train. Our normal speed was about sixty 
kilometers an hour, and the locomotive would slow to about fifty-five when the UFO was overhead. 

"Two security guards who were on top of the train ran up and hid in the locomotive cab because 
they were frightened. I was kind of fascinated by it and I went out onto the front platform to watch it. 
But it affected my eyes and for about a week after I felt them stinging. The UFO suddenly went off 
across the mountains and disappeared when we approached the town of Missao Velha." 

Knocked Off His Feet 

Repulsion is also in the UFOs' bag of tricks. Far to the south in the Valley of the Old Women in 
Minas Gerais, researcher Hulvio Aleixo talked to a man who was knocked more than thirty feet away 
by a UFO when he apparently became too curious. 

"In Ismeraldas, a man named Joao de Jesus was coming home alone on a very dark night and 
saw a light curving toward him," Hulvio said. "It went out and within seconds he noticed a dark 
silhouette in front of him six meters away. It was a spherical object with two landing legs. 

"To get a better look, he tried to shine his flashlight on it but it wouldn't work. Then he tried to 
light a match but just as he was about to scratch the match, he was instantly pushed backwards about 
ten meters. He was not hurt. It was fast but not violent. 

"I asked him, 'Did you feel any kind of mechanical impact over any part of your body?' He said 
no. He didn't feel anything except he found himself over there, ten meters away. 

"After falling on the ground, he saw nothing more. His eyes were swollen and he couldn't see 
correctly and had to crawl home. For three days he stayed in his room and kept the door locked. He 
couldn't stand any kind of light. He couldn't tolerate the faintest light. Even the light that came through 
cracks bothered him. From that day on he suffered partial blindness." 


Pulled Sideways 



At least two people have reported being pulled sideways by UFOs. One incident occurred in the 
city of Belo Horizonte and was also investigated by Hulvio Aleixo. 

"This involved a woman named Fatima Maria de Paula," he said. "She was twenty-three. This 
was May 4, 1981, at ten-thirty-five in the evening. The street was deserted. She had walked with a 
friend to the friend's house. She descended the stairway to the entrance, which was below the street 
level. Soon after this they said goodbye to each other. When she reached the street level again, she 
saw a very bright oval-shaped object, yellowish with a very strong light, in a lot across the street. 

"She was astonished when seconds later the object vanished. At this very moment she felt her 
body being pulled sideways. She felt as if she was becoming lighter and lighter and attracted by the 
object, but with a great effort she broke free and ran away. 

"Later, a burned place was found in the grass, suggesting the object had been there with the 
lights out when the women arrived." 


Farm Hand Resists 

The other "sideways" case was investigated by Cynthia Luce, and it occurred on a road several 
miles from her home in Sao Jose do Vale do Rio Preto in the state of Rio De Janeiro. The subject was 
Ennio Ferreira, a twenty- five-year-old farm worker who was walking home about one o'clock in the 
morning on a dark night in mid-1981. A light mist was falling. 

Ennio doesn't drink but he stopped at a small roadside bar and bought a pack of cigarettes. He 
continued walking and, about seventy-five yards beyond, he heard a sound like metal striking metal. 
This was immediately followed by three or four echoes. He'd never heard the noise before and 
couldn't identify it. It seemed to come from behind a hill he was passing. 

He kept walking and, about seventy-five yards farther on, he came to a gate across a small lane 
intersecting the highway. He glanced to his left and saw a "big, reddish, glowing object about halfway 
up the hill, shaped like two soup plates." It was six or seven feet off the ground and about forty yards 
away. 

"As soon as he saw it, it seemed to swoop down and come to rest just beyond the wooden gate," 
Cynthia reported. "Immediately he felt a terrific pull on him, as if the object were a magnet, and he 
was being pulled towards it. Ennio was terrified and wanted to flee but it took a tremendous effort for 
him to turn and run back to the bar." 

When he reached the bar, he was in such a state of shock that the bar owner and her husband had 
to take him home in their car. They passed the spot where Ennio had seen the UFO but they saw 
nothing. 


The ’Vacuum Cleaner’ 

There are also at least two cases in which UFOs acted like vacuum cleaners of sorts. The first 
occurred about three o'clock one afternoon in 1976 in Baldim on the bank of a river when two sisters, 
sixteen and seventeen, saw an object at low altitude making a loud noise. 

Hulvio Aleixo interviewed them. "They were frightened," he said. "It came within about thirty 
meters and was yawing or rocking. It stopped over a bamboo grove by the river and the bamboo trees 



began to sway. From the top something like a ribbon was fluttering. There were three protuberances 
and a little blue thing was spinning around the object. 

"On the bottom was a hole and it was sucking in sand, leaves and dust, everything loose, like a 
vacuum cleaner. This hole on the bottom was too small for people. A human body wouldn't have fit in 
it. It didn't come close enough for the girls to feel the affects of this." 

Taking on Water 

The other vacuum case took place over the Atlantic Ocean around six-thirty at night on July 17, 
1992. Three shrimp fishermen in a boat were about two miles out to sea off the coast near Iguape, 
forty-five miles southeast of Fortaleza in Ceara. It was dark and the men saw a bright light 
approaching them on the horizon. 

"It was so low they thought it was a ship that was going to collide with them," said investigator 
Reginaldo Athayde, citing a report submitted by Colonel Liberato Andrade, who interviewed the 
fishermen. 1 

"They pulled their sail down to slow their boat to avoid a collision, but when the ship 
approached their boat they realized it wasn't a ship. It was a UFO with a lot of lights on it. It was 
sucking water up into it and passed slowly within twenty meters of the boat, but the fishermen don't 
think the UFO saw them. It just went by them about six meters above the water, sucking up a column 
of water almost as wide as the UFO. The water didn't fall back into the ocean. The UFO went past 
them and disappeared in the distance." 

Colonel Andrade may have seen the UFO himself. He reported that the same evening he and 
three other people saw a lighted object pass through the sky just off the coast near Andrade's house on 
the Iguape beach. 


Buzzed by UFO 

The final item in this category involved two other men who were fishing about seven o'clock in 
the evening on April 20, 1986. They were in a boat on a reservoir near Pacajus, a small city just 
south of Fortaleza. 

The men said a gray object about the size of a car, giving off a yellowish light, swooped down 
toward their boat and rushed by so fast it left the boat rocking. The UFO made no noise. It quickly 
climbed back into the sky and disappeared. 

So, more puzzles: Strange craft that suck up dirt, leaves, water and people; pull them sideways 
or push them away; slow down trains, knock down roofs and buzz a boat, nearly swamping it. 

What would Sherlock Holmes deduce from all this? Although his creator was fascinated by the 
occult, the ever practical Holmes probably would have said: "It definitely isn't elementary, Watson. 
None of this conforms to the laws of the universe." And perhaps as an afterthought: "At least, as we 
know them." 

It would be even more interesting to know what Albert Einstein would think, if he were alive 
today and someone persuaded him to take a serious look at UFO phenomena. 

Anyone who believes UFOs are secret weapons of the United States government, or any other 
government, should have realized by now how wrong they are. No nation has any weapons capable of 



doing any of the things that UFOs can do. If any country did, it would rule the world. 


1. Andrade, a military police official and a professor, is a member of the Center for Ufological 
Research, the Fortaleza UFO group that Athayde heads. 


Chapter Twenty-Six 



FALLING FISH NETS 


One of the most curious aspects of the phenomena — and least understandable — is that 
sometimes UFOs look like a fishing net when they come down toward people. 

The first time I heard this description was in 1980, when a Natal investigator told me about 
several cases in Rio Grande do Norte where people said they'd seen nets falling toward them At that 
time, however, I was never able to talk to anyone involved. 

Those reports came about the time the old man, Antonio, told me about being dangled under a 
UFO by a hook in the back of his shirt, and the year after I talked to Januncio, who was dragged up a 
tree trunk by a UFO. Those two cases had convinced me that the so-called intelligence behind UFOs 
could on occasion be quite crude. Hearing about the fish nets only strengthened that belief. 

Because of the technological unsophistication of those two cases, I had the impression that in 
"fish net" encounters the UFO crews were dropping nets over men much as animal dealers do when 
trying to capture wild animals. That turned out to be a totally false interpretation, but it was a dozen 
years before I realized it. 

It wasn't until 1991 that I talked to a man who said he saw a fish net coming down. That was 
Alfredo Soares, who was crippled for six months after a UFO zapped him in the leg with a beam of 
light in 1977. 

"I saw a big beam of light trying to hit me, like a fishing net," said Alfredo, who felt himself 
being pulled toward the UFO but clung to a fence until it went away. "It was a white light like a big 
fishnet." 

By the time I heard his story I had forgotten about the fish net cases I'd heard of years earlier, 
and its significance in Alfredo's case escaped me until weeks later when I was back home 
transcribing the interview. By then I'd missed the chance to get a better understanding of the fish net 
image. 


Beato’s Case 

By coincidence, only five days after interviewing Alfredo, I talked to another man who saw 
what looked like a fish net coming down. That was Beato, the farmer who hugged a bush to keep from 
being pulled up into a UFO in 1979. 

"ft was seven or eight at night," Beato said. "I was walking along and a UFO came down...It 
looked like a fishing net and it wanted to suck me up...When the object saw it couldn't suck me up, it 
threw hot oil on me...and then disappeared." 

But again I slipped up. The fact that Beato had an experience almost identical to Januncio's 
seemed so extraordinary that I again overlooked the fish net angle and failed to question Beato about 
it. 

Since then I've talked to three other people who've described UFOs as looking like a fish net, 
and I have questioned them at length. However, I haven't learned a great deal more, other than that no 
nets as such were dropped or thrown at them. 

One witness was Iran Cosme, a man involved in the very first such case I'd heard about. Iran 
had an encounter in August, 1979, but it wasn't until July, 1993, that I was able to interview him 

Iran and two others were hunting armadillos in the mountains southeast of Lajes, about eighty 



miles north of where Beato had his experience. With Iran, then thirty- three, were Joao Batista, 
eighteen, and Joao's brother, Jose, twelve. I interviewed Joao in 1980 but it wasn't until I talked to 
Iran Cosme that the fish net was mentioned. I had located Iran in 1980 but at that time he wouldn't talk 
about the incident. 


Light Behind the Net 

I found him again in July, 1993, working on his farm near Lajes. This time he was quite willing 
to discuss what happened the night he and the two brothers were hunting on a mountain in the vicinity 
of the Bom Fim mines. 

"We were under a tree when a ball of fire appeared and started coming toward us," Iran said. 
"Then there were two balls, one higher than the other. They moved separately. We ran and the lights 
were chasing us. Something like a net appeared near one light. I could see through it and the light was 
behind the net." 

He thought the net was part of the UFO. It never changed shape as it moved. Iran and the two 
brothers ran about five hundred yards down the mountain to reach the safety of a relative's home. 

"When we reached the house, the light was over the house and was going around," Iran said. 
They stayed inside the house until dawn. 

When I interviewed Joao in 1980, he said everyone in the house watched the two UFOs for two 
hours before they went away. 

"There was a big reddish-orange one the size of a basketball down low and a smaller blue one 
way up above it," Joao said. "The one on top would move up and down every once in a while but the 
big one stayed in the same place all the time. I've never gone hunting at night since then. I've never 
been so afraid in my life." 

Iran made a sketch of what he saw, but instead of a round net he drew a long vertical loop, as if 
it hung from the bottom of the UFO. Language problems kept us from getting a clearer understanding 
of what he saw. The interpreter's knowledge of English was somewhat limited but my Portuguese was 
far worse. 

In September, 1992,1 heard a much more detailed description of the fish net aspect. This came 
when Cynthia Luce and I interviewed Maria Dos Dores Lopes, who was pulled into the air with her 
daughter and dog. They and another daughter had taken the dog out for a walk, and their attention was 
drawn to a light in the sky, which moved toward them very quickly. 

"Suddenly something came down like a fish net," Maria said. Her younger daughter fled into the 
house but Maria, the other daughter and the dog were quickly pulled several feet off the ground as a 
cold wind swirled around them. The incident ended quickly when the UFO flew away and they fell to 
the ground. 


Like a Camera Shutter 

I talked to Maria in 1992 and again in 1993, and it was during the first interview that we 
discussed the fish net angle. Alberto Da Silva, a police detective who had taken us to her house, sat in 
on the first interview. He'd also seen UFOs and knew what she was talking about. 

"I saw a net, a tarrafa} and she saw it, too," Alberto said. "There are lines all through it. It's 



spinning and then it closes. It opens and shuts, like a camera shutter. And it goes around, opening and 
shutting. It rotates and looks like it opens and shuts. I think it comes down like this spinning net, it 
comes over a person and if you don't get out from underneath that, it closes and picks you up. 

"I've seen it change shape. It gets tiny and disappears. It pulls together, shrinks. It gets down to a 
small size and then it goes out. If you don't get away, you get pulled up in it. But everybody runs 
underneath a tree to get away from it." 

Alberto, thirty-three, a police officer for twelve years, said hunters in the Bom Jesus area 
southwest of Natal have also seen UFOs and fish nets. 

"The hunters say that around two o'clock in the morning they see things in the sky," he said. 
"They go hunting armadillos. It's dangerous to hunt at night here because they come and get you, these 
flying saucers, even now. They come down and they start going around. The flying saucer comes 
down and creates a wind for the hunters. It gets to you really fast, comes zeroing in on you really fast. 
What Maria saw was white. What I saw had a lot of colors in it. 

"The hunters see a small light sometimes and in seconds they open up and get very big, change 
shape. The hunters are always on the lookout and when they sense that there's one around, they run. 
They turn off their flashlights, find a big tree and get under it." 

He said his most recent sighting of a UFO was on a July night two months before the interview. 
"It was a holiday," he said. "That's why I remember it. I was hunting. They all had lights of different 
colors and made rapid humming sounds. The light is so intense that you can't see anything else. It 
almost blinds you." 

A Brazilian Air Force base is located at the Natal Airport about twenty-five miles east of Bom 
Jesus. Sometimes when UFOs are seen in the area, Alberto said, air force jets soon come zooming 
over as if searching for the UFOs or trying to intercept them 

At the airport two days later, Cynthia and I saw an air force colonel waiting for a flight and we 
asked him about this. He emphatically denied that planes were ever sent up after UFOs and said, in 
effect, that there are no such things as UFOs. 

Earlier in the year I had written to Fortaleza investigator Jean Alencar and asked him to 
question Alfredo Soares about the fish net he'd seen. After Cynthia and I were ending our discussion 
of fish nets with Maria and Alberto, I pulled out a sketch that Jean had sent me. It looked very much 
like a camera shutter. When I showed it to Maria and Alberto, both exclaimed: "That's IT!" 

Unfortunately, we still don't know what "it" is. But at least three witnesses tend to agree on the 
details of the fish net aspect. 


1. This is a circular net that fishermen use. 



Chapter Twenty-Seven 
WINDOW IN THE SKY 


Of all the strange elements associated with UFOs, one of the most bizarre factors is a "window" 
that simply appears in the night sky and then vanishes a short time later. 

I've heard of this only twice, once from a hunter in Texas and the other time from a truck driver 
in Brazil. The Texan said he had camped out for the night in the 1970s and, before going to sleep, saw 
two "windows" that simply materialized low in the sky near his tent. After a while, they disappeared 
as quietly as they had come, and nothing happened to him. 

The Brazilian is Jose Garinberto Dantes, better known by the nickname Bebeto. He lives in 
Acari, Rio Grande do Norte, where he drives a water tank truck for the municipality, delivering 
water to the more drought-stricken areas within twenty miles of the city itself. 

The sun sets in this region around six o'clock most evenings and Bebeto's working days end long 
after dark. Since 1990, he said, he and his helpers have seen at least thirty strange lights of different 
sizes and colors moving about in the sky, sometimes in an erratic manner. Several times he and the 
men with him had dramatic close encounters. 

In one, he and two helpers saw two balls of red light and a yellowish "TV window" in the night 
sky. I've interviewed Bebeto twice, in September, 1992, and again in July, 1993. In the first 
interview, my tape recorder began sticking when he was talking about the window, and my notes 
didn't cover all the details. In 1993 he explained it to me again. 

"We were coming back from a farm, empty, one night in February, 1991, and we were near the 
river on the east side of Acari," Bebeto, thirty-seven, said. "Me and two workers. When we stopped 
to get water, we saw something like the flashing red light on top of police cars. It was about forty 
centimeters wide and three hundred meters away. Then it stopped revolving and another light came 
out of it. 


Light Jumps Up and Down 

"The second light was also red. It was the same shape and size. It went toward the river and 
then came back toward the first one. When the second light got back to the first one, the first one 
began to revolve again. The second one stopped beside the first one. Then the second light turned off. 
As it did, a 'window' appeared near it. It was about one meter high and twenty centimeters wide. 

"The 'window' was open about two or three minutes. It was yellow. The red light was beside 
the window. It was revolving. Two or three minutes later it stopped revolving and the window 
disappeared at the same time. 

"When the window closed, another red light came out of the first and went to the river. It was 
jumping up and down like a kangaroo. When it reached the river, it stayed for several seconds and 
then it went back, jumping up and down again. When it arrived back where the first one was, it turned 
off. 

"The first red ball was still there. Then it began moving toward us, jumping up and down three 
times, and suddenly everything turned off. We never saw anything more. And at the same time the 
dogs in the neighborhood began barking. They hadn't been barking before. 



"This was about seven-thirty at night. The ball was a very bright red. The window was a dim 
yellow, like a dead light. We didn't hear anything." 

Bebeto admitted that at times he and his helpers have been frightened by the UFOs, and one man 
quit his job. One of the other incidents had an odd ending somewhat similar to the window incident, 
he said. 


UFO Paces Truck 

It started about seven-thirty p.m. on December 4, 1990. Bebeto and his helpers were driving 
back to Acari on a dirt road after delivering water to a farm eight miles southwest of town. 

"About fifty meters from the truck we thought we saw a fire in the brush, so we stopped," 

Bebeto said. "It was a big three-meter ball which looked like fire from a distance, but it wasn't a fire. 
It was reddish-orange. Then the thing got smaller to about half its size and began to pulsate. 

"It didn't make any sound. The radio was on but there was no interference. We watched this light 
for ten minutes. Then I got kind of nervous and we got in the truck and started driving. The man sitting 
next to the passenger door was watching the light. It was on his side of the truck. We went about thirty 
meters and he got scared and said: 'It's going up! It's going up!' 

"We looked at it and it was spinning at a great speed, but going up slowly. I got scared and 
started going faster. Then it began to zig-zag. It went to the right and to the left again and when we 
came around a curve it was three hundred meters in front of us. It was an oval-shape, like a squashed 
sphere-shape, and a little more than a meter wide. It was like a dead yellow, like it had lost its color. 
It was about three or four meters above the bushes." 

The object kept pace with the truck for about two miles, following the contour of the ground, 
going up and down just above the height of the bushes. When Bebeto and his helpers got close to 
Acari, the object shot away at great speed. 

"We stopped and climbed up on top of the tank," Bebeto said. "We could see it just over some 
mountains about ten kilometers away. It had covered that distance in just seconds. We watched it for 
twenty minutes." 

Suddenly the object came back to within about two miles of them with "a big blast of light," 
Bebeto said, adding: 

"Then two smaller, spirally white objects came out of it and went straight up from it about a 
hundred meters. Then everything turned off. We never saw anything more. The next day we went back 
to where we first saw the object over the bushes and tried to locate the spot where it had hit the 
ground but we didn't find anything." 

Bebeto said he and his helpers still occasionally see strange blue, yellow or red lights in the 
countryside. 

So, now we add two more strange elements to the UFOs' repertoire, windows in the sky and 
spirally objects climbing into the sky. Recapping, thus far we've seen how UFOs disappear in highly 
visible but silent explosions, how they move people forward, backward, up or down with an 
invisible force, and how they create not only the appearance of nets coming down over helpless 
victims but also of "windows" suddenly opening in the sky. None of these things have any apparent 
explanation. 

Just as UFOs violate the laws of physics as we know them, so does light that is emitted by 



UFOs. Light coming from UFOs behaves in incredibly strange ways, ways that light as we know it 
definitely does not. We look at some of the wilder examples in the next chapter. 




Chapter Twenty-Eight 
SEEING THE LIGHT 

Earlier, a farmer named Marciano told how a strong light from UFO on a mountain two and a 
half miles away chilled him and seven other people and made them sick. At the same time, it lit up the 
valley as bright as daylight. A scientist could estimate how much candlepower would be needed to 
light an area that big, but it's doubtful any manmade light could illuminate an area that large with such 
intensity or make people sick. 

As has been shown, UFOs seem to operate under a set of physical laws all their own. Huge 
objects can hover silently above the treetops and disappear across the horizon in an instant. Some 
make right-angle turns while streaking across the sky at high speeds. Planes can't do that nor can 
human bodies withstand the pressures created by such sharp fast turns. Perhaps the laws of physics as 
we know them are not the sum total of the laws of the universe. 

If so, these yet unknown laws may explain the curious properties of light emitted by UFOs. As 
described by a number of witnesses, they provide a fascinating illustration of the complexity of this 
phenomenon. 

In Chapter Fwenty, people told how beams of light from UFOs penetrated roofs of houses in 
Colares at the mouth of the Amazon river. Most homes in the region don't have ceilings, only the 
rafters and tiles that form the roofs. Fhe roofs are constructed in such a way that light and air can 
penetrate while rain is kept out. 

When I first heard about the Colares cases, I envisioned the beams of light actually going 
straight through the tiles and being seen inside as a solid beam. Since then I've been inside many such 
homes and have seen light coming through numerous chinks between the tiles. Fhis led me to change 
my mind about the solid light beams and conclude that the light was coming through the small 
openings and thus was diffused, much as sunlight is. However, on my third visit to Colares, in July, 
1993, investigator Daniel Rebisso said both assumptions were correct. 

Lights Penetrate Solid Tiles 

Daniel, a biologist who sees the UFO phenomenon as a scientific challenge, has done extensive 
UFO research in a large area of northern Brazil. In a number of cases, he said, people had told him 
they'd seen the lights actually come through the roofs as solid beams of light and move around inside. 
Tiles are solid objects about an inch thick and made of fired clay. Laser beams can penetrate steel but 
only by burning holes in the steel. None of the roofs in Colares were burned by the lights from UFOs. 

Penetrating solid objects without leaving holes is not the only strange capability of light coming 
from UFOs. Here are some other peculiar examples, not all from Brazil: 

Case One: Late one Saturday night in January, 1980, a Brazilian electronics businessman and 
nine other people saw a disc-shaped object shine a light down on the water near the eastern shore of 
the Tapajos river in the Amazon. The man, his family and some relatives, were camping at a beach 
thirty miles south of Santarem, and the UFO appeared around eleven o'clock. 

Several teenagers were still awake, lying in hammocks and talking, when they saw the UFO 
come toward them from across the river. It stopped about thirty yards from the beach and shined a 



light down on the water twenty yards below. The kids awakened the others. The UFO hovered briefly 
and then began moving north, or to the campers' right, parallel to the shore. It traveled more than half 
a mile, with the spotlight still shining straight down, before it disappeared. 

The curious thing about all this was that as the beam of light moved along the river, it left behind 
a trail of luminescence on the surface for several hundred yards. The trail gradually faded out, south 
to north, at about the same speed as the light itself had moved. 

Case Two: A somewhat similar report was given to me by an Indianapolis computer expert 
who had served in the U.S. Air Force. He had been a sergeant in charge of a fire truck crash crew at 
an air base on the west coast of South Korea overlooking the China Sea. Late one night in 1958, two 
American jet fighters flying in from Japan to another base in Korea requested permission to make an 
emergency landing because one of the planes was low on fuel. As is normal in such emergencies, the 
fire truck and its crash crew were positioned near the runway in case the plane ran into difficulty. 

As the men waited for the planes to arrive, they saw a bright light approaching from across the 
China Sea. The light grew bigger and bigger and, when it got within several hundred yards of the 
shore, it stopped and hovered a few hundred feet above the water. The sergeant radioed the control 
tower and asked what it was. The controllers didn't know. They were examining the light through 
binoculars, but couldn't determine anything. 

Suddenly, the object shined a beam of light straight down on the water. A short time later the 
light went off, but the water remained luminescent for a while before fading out. The object again 
shined a light down on the water, and turned it off again a minute or so later. Once again, the water 
remained luminescent for several minutes. 

By this time the jet fighter that was low on fuel was landing, and the control tower asked the 
pilot of the second plane to check out the light, which was still sitting in the same spot. The pilot of 
the second jet circled around and as he approached the object, it instantly shot back toward China and 
disappeared in seconds. 

Case Three: In the spring of 1975, a half dozen young people were partying one night near 
Carmen in southern Manitoba, Canada, when they saw an orange-colored object above one end of a 
reservoir. It changed shape several times, usually returning to a halfrnoon shape. During one of these 
half-moon moments, the object shined a beam of light down on the water at an angle of thirty to forty 
degrees. 

The odd thing was that this beam of light was "hyphenated," or apparently traveling in bursts or 
pulses. Once the light hit the water, it spread out on the surface and moved toward the shore, still 
broken up in patches. 

Case Four: Three women driving along a rural highway in Kentucky one night in January, 1976, 
saw a brightly lit oval object flash down out of the sky and stop above the highway ahead of them. It 
rocked gently for a few seconds and then circled around behind them In the next instant, their car was 
roughly drawn backward. As they struggled to control the car, they saw what appeared to be a long 
white road ahead of them, something that doesn't exist in that hilly country. 

In what seemed to them to be only minute or two later, they found themselves driving on the 
regular highway again, approaching another town that normally would have taken them ten minutes to 
reach. None of the three women could understand how they got there so fast. When they finally 
arrived home, it was an hour and a half later than they thought it was. UFO researchers call this 
missing time. 



For six months, the women were still unable to explain how they lost that time. Then, under 
hypnosis, in separate sessions with none of them being told what the others had said under hypnosis, 
each relived the experience of that night. Each told of being taken aboard a UFO, with their car being 
drawn up into the UFO on a long white beam of light. 

Case Five: Late one evening in March, 1977, a young couple driving a truck encountered a huge 
object above a highway in southwestern Missouri. The object suddenly came down over the truck and 
lit up the sky. The strange part of this was that the light seemed to flow out of the UFO and visibly 
expand like a billowing cloud until the whole area gradually filled with light, sort of like cream 
spreading as it is poured into a cup of coffee. 

Case Six: One night in March, 1981, two hunters near the small Amazon town of Monte Alegre 
said a UFO came down and shined a beam of light at them. One man was "imprisoned" inside the 
cone of light. He tried to break out but it was as if the outer limits of the cone of light were an 
impenetrable wall. This continued until the other hunter fired two rifle shots at the UFO, at which 
time the UFO turned its light off and went away. 

Another hunter in a similar incident a week later wasn't as fortunate. When he raised his gun to 
shoot at a UFO above him, he was struck by a ray of light and knocked unconscious. 

Case Seven: In September, 1976, a mechanic in Colusa, California, was watching TV late one 
night when the reception started going bad. Soon, both the TV and the air conditioner stopped 
working. Thinking a transformer had blown, he stepped outside to check it. As he did, he felt all the 
hairs on his body stand up. 

Looking up, he saw a large, circular UFO hovering silently above his barn — and a cone- 
shaped beam of light coming down from the object. The odd thing is that halfway to the ground, the 
cone of light just stopped in mid-air, cut off flat. 

Case Eight: In the Amazon village of Curuai, a store clerk said an object about as big as a car 
and shaped like a toy top came down from the sky and hovered just above a landing strip one night in 
1979. It shined a light down to the ground. What was unusual is that the beam of light was straight and 
narrow, like a pipe, but halfway to the ground the beam flared out like a beam from a flashlight. 

And in a case to be described later, a military officer who investigated a series of sightings for 
the Brazilian Air Force said one victim told of seeing a small humanoid creature leave a UFO and 
come down a beam of light toward the tree where he was hiding and later go back up to the UFO on 
the same red beam 

How is any of this possible? Perhaps it isn't light as we know it. Perhaps it is some other form 
of energy that we have yet to discover. In other cases, people have been zapped by a flash of light 
from a UFO, others have been sucked up by a light, some have been made sick by light and still others 
have been burned by lights from UFOs. 

These are unusual properties of light. With all the other strange abilities of UFOs illustrated in 
previous chapters — the silent explosions, the physical manipulation of people and animals, the 
casting of "nets" over victims, creating "windows" in the sky, changing shapes and dividing into two 
or more objects, appearing and disappearing in an instant — they clearly show that this is a truly 
bizarre phenomenon. 




PART SEVEN 

ONE PHENOMENON OR MANY? 



Chapter Twenty-Nine 
SHAPES AND OCCUPANTS 

"It just disappeared bit by bit by bit, and I was all alone. That's what was so bad about it. 
Nobody believed me. My husband said I was crazy." 

Weeks later as Jackie talked about the "MeBurger Case," she was able to laugh about it. But the 
night she saw the UFO, it wasn't funny. The incident lasted only a short time. It happened as she was 
driving home about nine o'clock one night and something startled her. 

"I happened to lookup and just above the trees on the left side of the street half a block ahead 
was an oblong object glowing blue with orange flame color at the back end," said Jackie, a soft- 
spoken woman in her thirties whose husband was a police lieutenant. 

She stopped her car in the middle of the street, dumbfounded. 

"It was just clearing the treetops and crossing the street to my right. I couldn't tell how big it 
was. There's a house on the left and a church on the right, and when it got over the church it began 
disappearing. You've seen these TV commercials where bites are taken out of a hamburger with trick 
photography? That's the way this looked, with bits of it disappearing from right to left. I wondered 
how it could do that. It was frightening at first, fascinating but scary." 

In ten seconds it had disappeared completely. She quickly looked around, hoping someone else 
had also seen it, but she was alone. 

This was one of the strange tales I picked up while checking out reports of UFO sightings in 
Alabama early in 1976, and it helps illustrate not only the bizarreness of the phenomenon but also the 
difficulty in pinning down exactly what these things look like. 

The terms "flying saucers" and "UFOs" are generic or catch-all descriptions. When most people 
think of UFOs, they visualize disc-shaped objects, but a disc is just one of an uncountable number of 
shapes. The same goes for sizes and occupants. 

Many photographs and videotapes have been taken of UFOs, but often the images are small and 
fuzzy and tell us very little. Photos exist of alleged occupants of UFOs and alien bodies, but many if 
not all are suspect. It is virtually impossible to prove such photos are authentic. 

Round and Squashed 

For the most part, our knowledge of the shapes and sizes of UFOs and their occupants is based 
on the descriptions given by people who've had close encounters, such as Jackie in Alabama. She 
saw "an oblong object glowing blue." It's likely that each of us would have a different interpretation 
of exactly what she saw. 

Too often people cannot describe clearly what they see. "It was round and sort of squashed," 
one might say, telling us very little, and too often the investigator has his or her own ideas as to what 
this means. 

In central Brazil, Hulvio Aleixo has used a unique technique in his investigations of some three 
hundred cases in the Valley of the Old Wbmen. He carries Play-Doh of different colors as part of his 
investigative tools. During the initial interview, he asks the witness to use the Play-Doh to make a 
model of the UFO he or she has seen. 1 



From these usually crude models, Hulvio and members of his UFO organization have made 
more precise models, all of which are kept on display in glass vials in the group's headquarters in 
Belo Horizonte. There are more than a hundred different shapes and sizes, attesting to the great 
variety of UFOs that people have seen in just one area of the world alone, the Valley of the Old 
Women. 

"The diversity of the forms is so immense that it confuses us," Hulvio said as we examined some 
of the models in 1992. Part of that diversity, as Cynthia Luce pointed out, may be explained by the 
fact that people often see things from different angles and don't always see the object from all sides. 

For instance, Hermelindo — who was yanked up toward a UFO by a hook around his ankle after 
fighting with a little creature -- saw the object as being round. However, his brother-in-law saw it 
differently. Awakened by Hermelindo's screams for help, he watched most of the incident from the 
house some distance away — and to him the UFO was conical or bell-shaped. 

Even among investigators there can be wide differences in perceptions of shapes. In my 
investigations, I became convinced that the most commonly seen UFO in the United States during the 
1970s and 1980s was a triangular or boomerang-shaped object, usually very large. Triangular UFOs 
have been seen in many other countries, particularly in Europe, yet they're seldom reported in Brazil. 

Hulvio Aleixo says he's never had any reports of triangular cases in the Valley of the Old 
Women. Yet there have been many bell-shaped objects and some cone-shaped ones. As we discussed 
all these shapes, we realized we could be talking about much the same thing. 

One of the most common descriptions of UFOs in Brazil is o fogo, or a ball of fire. It's usually a 
round, reddish-orange object of varying size, depending on how close it is. InPinheiro, where this 
type of object was seen almost every night for four months, the fireball would come down within a 
thousand feet of town and hover. It was close enough at times that witnesses could see colors swirling 
around on its surface, much like molten steel. 2 

UFO Rises Out of River 

It's possible that the fireball and the disc-shaped objects are one and the same thing. In my one 
venture into the Amazon, in July, 1981,1 met Noemi Rodrigues, twenty- eight, who had seen a UFO in 
both forms. A tall, dark-haired woman, she taught first and second-grade pupils in Santarem. She had 
seen a UFO on two occasions, both just several weeks before I talked to her. 

Her first sighting was on June 20 and the second on July 1. Both occurred when she was a 
passenger on an overnight boat from Alenquer to Santarem, a trip of about eight hours. 

"The first time was about two o'clock in the morning," Noemi said. "Everybody else was 
sleeping in hammocks on the deck but I couldn't sleep because the rocking of the boat bothered me. I 
was standing at the back of the boat when I noticed a big ball of light about a thousand meters behind 
the boat, zigzagging from one side of the river to the other. It didn't come close to the boat. Then it 
disappeared. I didn't say anything about it to anybody. I asked the pilot if another boat was behind us 
but he said there wasn't. 

"The second time, I saw the UFO come out of the river. I was standing by myself at the back of 
the boat again, between midnight and one o'clock. When the saucer left the water, it was not very 
bright, so I could see the shape. I could see water dripping off it, draining, and it was disc or saucer¬ 
shaped, like a plate. 



"It was about a thousand meters behind the boat and it rose up maybe six meters. It was big, 
maybe a meter and a half wide or more. Then it got very bright and looked like a ball of fire. It began 
zigzagging back and forth like the other one did. It was going so fast it made me sick. I was very 
frightened, too frightened to say anything to anyone. Then it disappeared. It dimmed out to nothing." 

Thus, the dull-red disc-shaped object flared into a brilliant light that looked like a ball of fire. Is 
it possible that the ball of fire that most people see conceals within its fiery aura a disc-shaped craft? 
Maybe. 


Future Scientist Sees UFO 

A somewhat similar experience — seeing a disc turn into a fireball, but in reverse order — was 
reported by Charles E. Kohlhase, who was mission design manager for the Voyager space mission at 
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. 

One night in August, 1956, before he became a scientist and was still in college at Georgia 
Tech, he and his father went out into a field near their home in the vicinity of Americus, Georgia, to 
see how well young Kohlhase, then in the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps, could locate stars. 

After about fifteen minutes of stargazing, they spotted a light over the far end of the field moving 
parallel to the horizon. It blinked on about every ten seconds for a duration of two or three seconds. 
The light appeared to be going back and forth, left to right, above the trees, about the width of the 
field. 

They thought little of it at the time and decided to return to the house. Looking back at the light, 
though, they realized it wasn't moving back and forth anymore. Instead, it was moving slowly toward 
them, pulsing on and off. 

"It kept coming and finally stopped at a place that was about a forty-five-degree angle of 
elevation to us," said Kohlhase. "It emitted no sound and no exhaust. Then the first thing happened that 
really scared us. This thing turned a brilliant white hot. I shouldn't say hot because I didn't feel any 
heat from it, but it was extremely bright. 

"I crouched down covering my face with my arms in anticipation of a possible explosion. I was 
convinced that whatever this — whatever it was, maybe an airplane — was about to blow up in a 
trillion pieces. But nothing happened. There was no noise. This brilliant whiteness began to dull, to 
tone down to about a blacksmith's horseshoe red, like when you pull a piece of iron out of the fire. 

For the first time, I could see its outline. It appeared to be a saucer-shaped object thirty to fifty feet in 
diameter that was fifty to a hundred yards away. 

"Then it began to move slowly back in the other direction. When it got fairly far away, it looked 
more spherical than it did saucer-shaped. The object continued moving until it got back over the tops 
of the distant pine trees. Then two other lights somewhere in the distance rose up from the other side 
of the trees. The three objects then moved off to the southwest and disappeared in a minute or so." 

Airmen See Ball-Disc 

Kohlhase first revealed this to his scientific colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1968 
and told them: "Being of a scientific discipline, I do not believe in 'flying saucers.' And, yet, what I 
saw did look like a large 'flying saucer' of a diameter of thirty to fifty feet and a thickness of five to 



fifteen feet. It is my opinion that the object was solid, that it contained an energy source that was the 
cause of the object's luminosity, and that it was under control. I will always remember and be 
impressed by this UFO sighting." 

When Noemi Rodrigues saw the object rise out of the Amazon river, it was disc-shaped and 
glowing dull red. Then it turned brilliant and looked like a ball of fire. Kohlhase saw a brilliant white 
object tone down to a dull red, and then he could make out its outline. It was disc shaped. 

Some Brazilian Air Force personnel also have seen a ball of light that turned out to actually be a 
disc-shaped object. It happened late one night in 1977 during the long UFO flap at the mouth of the 
Amazon, which a captain and some sergeants were investigating. They were on the river when a ball 
of light as bright as the sun passed over them and stopped on the other side of the river. It then turned 
its light off, and they saw a disc-shaped object twice as large as a Boeing 737 airliner with many 
white windows. 3 

One of the few people who have seen the fireball up fairly close is Francisca Oliveira, a 
housewife in her sixties who lives in Sao Goncalo do Amarante, Ceara. Late one Saturday night in 
January, 1990, she was walking home after visiting her son. She was in the middle of the street a few 
steps from her home when a flash of light lit up the sky. 

"I thought it was lightning," she said. "Then it happened again, and a second later a third time. I 
looked up and saw a huge ball of light the color of fire. I saw something large and round, kind of 
mushroom-shaped and with a kind of tube or thin stem coming down. It was higher than the light pole. 
It had a light focused on me." 

Francisca screamed and dashed inside her house. "I was sure the thing was going to get me," she 
said. "I tried to wake my husband but when I looked out again it was gone." 

Matter of Terminology? 

The cigar-shaped object is another description heard from time to time in the United States and 
other countries but seldom in Brazil. Again, though, this may simply be a matter of terminology. 
"Refrigerator" and "silo" shapes — meaning long and cylindrical — are reported in Brazil, and 
several Brazilian investigators have suggested we're probably talking about the same general shape. 

The sizes of UFOs vary greatly throughout the world. In the United States, some triangular 
objects have been reported to be as big as football stadiums. At the other end of the scale, a 
Tennessee woman once told me that in the spring of 1974, she and her husband saw five disc-shaped 
objects no more than two feet in diameter slowly fly in and land among a herd of cows in a field 
across the road from her house. One cow took offense and kept running at one disc, which rose up and 
crossed over the cow several times before it flew away with the other discs. 

In Brazil, most objects are neither very small nor enormous, nowhere near as large as a stadium. 
They generally range in apparent size from five to thirty yards across. Not all of them are disc-shaped 
or like fireballs. For example: 

Case One: In Apodi, Jorge Fernandes saw a square object. Jorge is the man who had to hold 
onto the grass to keep from being pulled into the air by a tornado-like wind. He believes the wind 
was generated by a UFO which suddenly appeared about forty yards above him as the wind blew. He 
said the UFO was square, four to five yards across and had a round, blue-white light about two yards 
in diameter in the center of it. 



Case Two: In 1977, electrician Jose Antonio De Oliveiria and three other people saw a 
rectangular object pass slowly overhead on the outskirts of Santa Cruz. It was lit up with red, green 
and yellow lights that alternately blinked on and off. It was the size of a big truck and, as it passed 
slowly overhead, a sound like running water, as in a shower, was heard. 

Case Three: In Quixeramobim one afternoon in 1982, businessman Jorge Simao and a dozen 
other people saw a strange object pass through the sky. 4 Simao said the object moved slowly and 
was composed of one long cylinder or tube and two shorter ones centered above and below it. 5 

From the back end of the larger tube came something like smoke or steam. It was about two hundred 
yards high and took seven minutes to pass out of sight. It made no sound. 

Case Four: In 1988, Marconi Cabral, a state agriculture official in Rio Grande do Norte, was 
spending the weekend with his family at their farm northeast of Santana Do Matos. Shortly after dark 
one evening, he and his seventeen-year-old son, his sister-in-law and a farm worker saw a ball of 
light pass over a mountain several hundred yards away. 

"It was yellow with a bluish tinge around it, had a vivid red light in front and had a tail like a 
comet," he said. "It was smaller than a volley ball and was going east following the ridge toward 
Natal." 

Before they had time to recover from their surprise, another object identical in size and colors 
went rapidly over the same path. Then every half minute or so for about ten minutes another would 
pass, and another. Cabral said they didn't count them but estimated they saw fifteen to twenty such 
balls of light. All disappeared toward the east and none were seen going in any other direction. 

The Occupants 


The crews of UFOs come in different sizes and shapes, too, but the variety doesn't seem to be as 
great as the UFOs themselves. 

Luis Carlos Serra, the teenager who vanished for four days near Penalva in 1978, saw three 
beings less than three feet tall. They wore uniforms like spacesuits with visors that covered their 
faces, and spoke a language he didn't understand. 

Both Januncio and his son, Beato, reported seeing ordinary-looking humans. Januncio saw a man 
and a woman sitting inside a UFO but motionless, as if they were robots. Beato saw two men and a 
woman, and one of the men looked down at him with what he interpreted as a shrug of scorn or 
contempt. 

Antonio Duarte, the Mossoro councilman who saw a UFO disappear in a silent explosion, saw 
three beings about four feet tall. They were dressed in what looked like jumpsuits, one amber, one 
orange and the third gray-green. They were normally proportioned but had large heads and flatfish 
faces. Their skin looked grayish. 

Joana Rodrigues Ferreira, who lost her baby after an encounter in Ceara in 1988, and her ten- 
year-old daughter saw two small beings in silvery suits. They seemed to just appear at the base of a 
tree ten feet away while a brightly lit UFO hovered over the tree. Joana couldn't see their faces 
because the light was so bright but could hear them making a tick-tick-ticking sound. 

Antonio Amador De Lima, the old man who was yanked into the air with a hook in the back of 
his shirt, saw two "kind of ugly" women with yellow arms and a man with a beard in the UFO. 



Otherwise, they looked like humans although not Brazilian. The UFO itself was cigar-shaped, twice 
as big as a car, brown, and had a red light in the back. 

Hermelindo fought with a creature smaller than him and lost. It was gray, about four feet tall and 
had slid down a cable that dangled from a UFO. It was covered with material that felt to Hermelindo 
like metal. 

Here is what others have reported seeing, in chronological order: 

Case One: Faustino, the assistant engineer on the diesel freight train that was slowed by a 
zigzagging UFO, had an earlier experience around 1950 as a teenager. He had accompanied a man 
and his son into the mountains near Maranguape to get bananas. 

On their return at mid-day, Faustino was walking some distance ahead of the other man and his 
son when he came upon a UFO sitting on the ground. Nearby were a man and a woman, both about six 
feet tall and skinny. They were "ugly," had wraparound eyes and were wearing long yellowish robes. 
Their arms were loaded with branches 

Faustino called out to them. They looked at him, hurried into the UFO and suddenly took off with 
a blast of air that nearly knocked him down. The UFO itself was big, silvery and shaped like a 
squashed oval. The reflection of the sun from it hurt his eyes. 

Case Two: On the morning of April 7, 1964, Maria do Socorro Inocencio was washing clothes 
in a pond when she heard a noise in the sky. Seeing an object coming down very rapidly, she hid in 
some trees and watched as it landed on the ground. 

Two beings emerged. They had small bodies, large heads and wraparound eyes and were 
greenish looking. They had backpacks on their clothing, which looked like loose-fitting jumpsuits. 
They were talking to each other but she couldn't understand what they were saying. 

The two spent about half an hour picking up stones, pebbles, plants and soil samples, all within 
fifty feet of the UFO. She was only fifteen feet from them but was quite frightened and stayed hidden. 
The two beings then entered the craft, which quickly rose into the air, spinning and leaving a sort of 
vapor trail behind. 

Maria was nine months pregnant. She lives in Pocinhos, Paraiba, and had gone to the farm to 
stay with her sister. She remembers the date she saw the UFO because it was just three days before 
her youngest child was born. 

Case Three: Around midnight one moonlit night in May, 1974, Manoel Pacheco Juca, forty- 
seven, and a friend, Pedro, had been fishing along the Atlantic coast two miles from his farm near 
Paraipaba, Ceara. They were walking to another location when Manoel looked back over his 
shoulder and saw something that hadn't been there minutes earlier. 

About forty yards away were three men standing near what looked like a jeep near the water. 
Manoel and Pedro were frightened. They ducked down and watched. The strangers were dressed in 
dark clothing and apparently did not see them. 

Five times the three strangers hurried side by side into the ocean and just as quickly returned to 
the jeep. They were wet and seemed to be measuring something with a rope. They said nothing, and 
no sounds were heard. After about three minutes, the three climbed into the jeep and disappeared into 
the ocean, jeep and all. 

Case Four: Joao Ferreira, forty-seven, and his son, Ademar, twenty-one, were fishing in a river 
near Trairi, Ceara, one night in May, 1975. They had caught a fish and Joao had left his son to start a 
fire to cook it while he went to fish farther down the river. 



About eight o'clock, Joao heard his son shout: "Father! Someone's trying to catch me!" Joao ran 
back and, in the light of the fire, saw a blue disc-shaped object as big as a car on the sand with three 
men standing near it. The UFO had a dome and five or six windows around it. 

One of the men was a short, stocky fellow and the other two were tall. The stocky one had 
yellow clothes. The tallest one wore green and the other blue. All had light skin. 

"I surprised them and they quickly entered the disk and went away," Joao said. "What impressed 
me was that when it took off, it gave off all these sparks or rays of different colors and it went very 
rapidly. It lit up the whole area. I understood them to tell me: 'You stay here, we're leaving.' I 
understood the stocky man even though he wasn't speaking Portuguese. 

"I didn't see my son at first and I was crazy trying to find him. I thought they'd taken him into the 
spaceship but he had hidden in the bushes beside the river." 

Case Five: Just before dusk one afternoon in 1976, Hercilia da Costa, then nine, was walking 
home from catechism class in Sao Goncalo do Amarante, Ceara. As she passed through a patch of 
woods, she saw a light ahead. Seconds later she came upon a UFO sitting on three legs in a dry river 
bed. 

Gathered near it were seven men about six feet tall in dark suits. They appeared to be surprised 
to see her and stared at her. One was kneeling and putting pebbles into a transparent bag. He spoke to 
her but she didn't understand him 

"The men looked like Americans," Hercilia said. "They had normal mouths, hands, no hair. I 
didn't see the hair. It was covered by their clothes. I didn't see their eyes. They were wearing black 
boots that came to mid-calf. The man who spoke to me opened his mouth when he spoke. They didn't 
try to catch me." 

The UFO was round, silver colored, had a door and two little round windows with dark glass in 
them. Hercilia remembers very clearly seeing two red lights on the front and hearing a motor noise 
that sounded like a helicopter. 

"I was so afraid that I felt chest pains," she said. "I ran back to the village and told some men 
who went back there, Horacio and Augusto. When they got there about ten minutes later, the UFO was 
gone but they found footprints and three square holes in the ground." 

I have talked to all of these people, been in the homes of most of them and even stayed overnight 
in the home of Manoel Pacheco Juca and his wife, Adelaide, a poor but generous couple. None of 
these people have the slightest doubt about what they saw, and most are certain they have seen alien 
beings in craft that come from some place other than Earth. 

Comparisons 

In the 1964 case, Maria Inocencio described the two beings as "greenish looking." This is 
unusual because "little green men" are rarely ever seen. Nearly everyone, especially scoffers, makes 
jokes about them, but in the hundreds of cases I've investigated, there were only four or five such 
reports. 

One other interesting thing about her case and Faustino’s in 1950 is that they are typical of the 
humanoid cases reported in those days, when UFO crews seemed to be obsessed with picking up 
plants, stones and soil samples. Such incidents were reported in many parts of the world in the 1950s 
and 1960s but are seldom heard of now. 



In 1976, nine-year-old Hercilia saw seven men next to a landed UFO, with one of them kneeling 
down and picking up stones. By that time, there were fewer and fewer such reports. Hercilia was a 
quiet-spoken, impressive witness. A twenty-four-year-old housewife and mother when she told us her 
story in September, 1991, she often paused to think before giving precise answers to our questions. 

Antonio Duarte's experience near Mossoro in 1988 and Manoel Pacheco's on the beach in 1974 
are somewhat similar to Hercilia's. Duarte saw three busy beings floating to the ground and backup 
into a UFO before it disappeared in a silent explosion, and Pacheco and his friend saw three men 
running back and forth between their "jeep" and the ocean. In all these cases the entities gave the 
impression that they were very busy doing something of great importance. And that may be the key. 

Some researchers suspect that much of the so-called activity of UFO crews on the ground is a 
deception, that the aliens are aware of witnesses watching them and that the gathering of soil samples 
or whatever is just a show, a display of some kind. What the motives could be is anybody's guess. 

One possibility is that they want people to believe they are explorers from other worlds. This 
transition from "sample gathering" to plucking humans and dogs from the ground maybe part of an 
evolutionary process in the phenomenon. 

What we can say is that these craft come in many shapes and sizes, not only in Brazil but 
throughout the world, and they have crews consisting of small creatures with large heads or people 
who look like normal humans and sometimes both. 

The fact that there are so many UFOs, of so many shapes and sizes, makes it hard to believe 
UFOs come from other planets or stars in our universe. With hundreds of thousands of sightings and 
encounters reported throughout the world, even millions, there would have to be a steady stream of 
UFOs coming from all parts of the universe to account for them. This fact alone — among others — is 
what keeps many scientists from considering the possibility that UFOs are real. So what are they and 
where do they come from? 

1. In most cases he goes back several different times to question and requestion the witnesses. 
This is to check for discrepancies and guard against a hoax and—once he’s convinced the 
witness is telling the truth—to get as much detail as possible. 

2. I've heard this description many times in the United States as well, especially in northern 
Wisconsin and southwestern Missouri. 

3. More on this in Chapter Thirty. 

4. Keesh-er-RAM-oh-been. This is a city in Ceara one hundred thirty miles south of Fortaleza. 



Chapter Thirty 
THE GOVERNMENT 

There was a brief moment when the Brazilian government was surprisingly open about UFOs. 
That was immediately after twenty-one UFOs were tracked on radar in the skies over much of Brazil 
on the night of May 19, 1986. 

Six jet interceptors armed with missiles were scrambled, three F-5Es from an air base near Rio 
de Janeiro and three French Mirages from another base near Brasilia, the nation's capital. For several 
hours the jets chased or were chased by what were described as balls of light. 

Four days later, on May 23, the government held an unprecedented televised press conference to 
let the fighter pilots tell the country what they'd seen when they went after the UFOs. 

"I watched the lights in front and on each side of my radar screen," said one pilot. "I managed to 
close to within six miles of one light, but from that moment on I was unable to get closer." 

Another pilot said: "I was warned by ground control there were several contacts ahead of me 
approximately twenty miles away. I was also warned that contacts were approaching from behind and 
they came on until they were two miles behind me. I had to dive and as I did the contacts started to 
climb." 

Still another pilot was told by ground controllers that he was being pursued by thirteen objects, 
six on one side of him and seven on the other. Yet another pilot chased a ball of light two hundred 
miles out to sea before breaking off and returning to his base. 

What triggered the surprising public acknowledgement was the fact that Ozires Silva, one of 
Brazil's most respected industrialists, was personally involved in the incident. For years, Silva had 
been president of the aircraft manufacturer Embraer but at the government's request had recently taken 
charge of Petrobras, the nation's troubled oil corporation. 

"Unidentified Aerial Movements" 

Earlier in the evening of May 19, Silva had conferred with then President Jose Sarney in 
Brasilia and was returning to Sao Jose Dos Campos, near Sao Paulo, in an executive jet piloted by 
Alcir Pereira da Silva. As they prepared to land at nine o'clock, air controllers told them three 
unidentified objects were in their path. Then Silva and his pilot spotted red, white and green objects 
in front of them and chased them but couldn't catch up with them 

The next day, Ney Siqueira, head of CINDACTA, or the Integrated Center of Air Defense and 
Air Traffic Control, refused to describe the objects as UFOs. Instead, he called them "unidentified 
aerial movements." 1 

Siqueira's explanation: "We don't possess sufficient technical means to be able to state that they 
were unidentified flying objects." 

The following evening, Wednesday, May 21, Air Force Minister Octavio Moreira Lima went on 
national TV and made a short statement: "Technically, there is no explanation. We shall obtain the 
CINDACTA reports. We haven't the slightest intention of hiding anything from the press." 

Two days later, after the Air Force pilots had told their stories on the nationally televised news 
conference, Moreira Lima declared that nothing more would be said until a special investigative 



commission had given its report, which he said was expected in "about two months." 

That was in 1986 and, since then, the government has said nothing more about the incident. 

For some months before these events occurred, I had been planning to visit Brazil the following 
September. Encouraged by the government's apparent openness about the May 19 sightings, I wrote to 
Moreira Lima in June, informing him that an almost identical over flight of UFOs had occurred above 
the city of Tucson, Arizona on the night of October 5, 1985, except that no jets were scrambled. 

The Tucson-based Aerial Phenomena Research Organization had reported that sixty to one 
hundred objects were tracked on Federal Aviation Administration and military radar as they passed 
over Tucson in groups of four to seven each. 2 One radar observer also noted that one object was 
much larger than the others, an object that an eyewitness said was cigar shaped. 3 

The Colares Investigations 

I sent a copy of the APRO report to Moreira Lima, along with information about similar 
sightings of large numbers of UFOs, including one in Rio de Janeiro in March, 1978 and another in 
Mendoza, Argentina, in July of the same year. I also requested an interview with him and asked for 
permission to talk with the pilots and controllers involved in the incidents on the night of May 19.1 
never received a reply. 

When I got to Brazil in September, I learned that nearly all Brazilian UFO investigators had 
made similar requests and all had been ignored. 4 

The only other instance in which the Brazilian government has shown such an overt interest in 
sightings was in 1977 and 1978, when UFOs harassed people in Colares and other villages at the 
mouth of the Amazon river. A team composed of an officer and sergeants from the air force base in 
Belem spent six months investigating several hundred reports of sightings and encounters. 

Brazilian researchers say that occasionally over the years military personnel have appeared on 
the scene of encounters in other parts of the country, but the general government policy seems to be to 
ignore the phenomenon. 

In 1977 when sightings were reported nearly every night for four months in the Pinheiro area, 
the mayor sent an urgent telegram requesting the government to intervene. He never received a reply. 
However, a researcher in another part of the country told me he knew definitely that a colonel had 
gone to Pinheiro, perhaps clandestinely, to see what was going on. If so, the officer never revealed 
his presence to the mayor. 

The government obtained a wealth of data from the Colares sightings. I first heard about them in 
1979 from Irene Granchi, the grande dame of Rio de Janeiro investigators who was the source of all 
my Brazilian reports in those days. At her suggestion, I went to the air force headquarters in Belem 
and found my way to the office of Captain Uyrange Hollanda 5 He was the base's finance officer and 
was also the officer who had directed the official on-site investigation of the Colares-area cases. 

Hollanda was suspicious of me at first, but I convinced him I had a legitimate interest in the 
sightings and had no ax to grind. Eventually, he decided to trust me and later, after finishing work for 
the day, he and Sergeant Flavio Costa, a meteorologist, described in detail some of the several 
hundred sightings and encounters they had investigated. 

Hollanda and Costa said they'd also taken a number of photos of UFOs, which they sent to air 
force headquarters in Brasilia along with the written reports. Hollanda said that was the last he heard 



of the photos and reports. He and Costa then showed me copies of some of the photographs. The two 
men seemed quite pleased by what they'd photographed but to me the photos showed only simple 
blobs of light in a black sky. 

I do not recall all that we talked about that evening but nothing was said about injuries or deaths 
in Colares. 

The next day, Sergeant Costa, an interpreter and I flew to Colares in a hired Cessna. It was only 
then, in talking with some of the villagers, that I learned some people had been injured. 

What Hollanda Saw 

More than ten years later I finally understood why Hollanda and Costa were excited by the 
photos they'd shown me that night in 1979. In the early 1990s, a civilian researcher in another part of 
the country gave me photocopies of some of the reports and photos that Hollanda's team had sent to 
Brasilia. On the backs of the photos were finely drawn sketches of what they had seen when they 
photographed the UFOs 6 

Hollanda was personally interested in the phenomenon, and we kept in touch after my 1979 
visit. 7 It was he who told me that a river boat captain had sent a letter to the air force base 
commander saying two fishermen had been killed by a UFO near Santarem. At the time, the idea of 
deaths in UFO encounters was new to me, and what Hollanda said about the fishermen was intriguing. 
In July, 1981 the two of us joined forces to try to confirm the report. 8 

As reported earlier, we spent several days in the Amazon but never found anyone who knew 
anything substantial about the dead fishermen. We'd gone there in a hired Cessna, but the plane later 
had engine problems and we had to fly back to Belem from Santarem by jetliner. While sitting in the 
airport restaurant waiting for the airliner to leave Santarem, Hollanda told Charles Tucker and me a 
fascinating tale about some of his team's investigations in the Colares area. His commanding officer 
had sent him there soon after the sightings began. 

"We were looking for the ladies who got hurt by the UFO beams, and I talked with one who was 
showing me the scars where she got hurt," Hollanda said. "About that time, I was called outside to 
see something crossing the sky. The sky was cloudy and the object passed higher than the clouds, but 
was blinking very rapidly. It was an intense blue light, about one thousand feet high, going from south 
to north. I thought it was a satellite, but two minutes later it came back in the other direction. We were 
surprised to see this. 


UFO Goes Into the Water 

"We took photos of it and, when they were developed, the object was shaped like a barrel lying 
down. There was an American priest there at the time, Alfredo De Lao, who said he had seen this 
many times, very close." 

Hollanda stayed in Colares for fifteen days that time, interviewing people and taking 
photographs. He then returned to Belem, and one or two days later, returned to Colares for another 
fifteen days. 

"On my first day back," he said, "my group saw a UFO entering the water. I wasn't there because 
I was sleeping. Sergeant Flavio Costa and others took pictures of it entering the water. It was near a 



fisherman's boat and, when the fishermen returned to shore, they were afraid. They told us they’d seen 
a big ball of fire entering the water about five hundred meters from their boat. 

"We returned to Belem. I was worried because things were happening at Baia Do Sol, closer to 
Belem, and people there were very much afraid. So I went there with four friends and, about six or 
seven o'clock one night, we saw three UFOs crossing from west to east very high. About twenty 
minutes later, we saw two more going south. 

"I had to return to Belem because my wife and my children were waiting for me to buy a 
Christmas tree. It was around seven when we decided to return. Then one of my friends pointed to the 
sky and there was a big object stopped over us about two hundred fifty meters high. It was as big as a 
city bus. I couldn't see the precise shape. 

"There was something dark in the middle of a yellow shining but the yellow shining grew 
brighter and dimmed. It pulsated at different intervals five times. When it pulsated, it lit the water 
with a strong yellow light. We were very excited, but we finally had to leave because my family was 
waiting for me. 

"The next morning, I told my commander what I'd seen and he asked me to continue the research, 
so I did. We had heard a story about three young people hunting in Rio Guajara, near Belem. One of 
them stayed in the forest and the other two stayed in a boat waiting for him, and while they waited, 
they fished. The guy in the forest was in a tree. He climbed the tree and hung a hammock to wait for 
small animals. 

"He was surprised and frightened to see a bright light approach, make like a half loop and stop 
over him. He was afraid and he jumped to the ground and tried to hide. The light from the UFO was 
so bright it hurt his eyes. He shaded his eyes with his fingers, and he saw a door open on the bottom 
of the UFO, and a man came down with a red light in his hand which he shined on the hammock. 

"This young man's name is Luis. Luis said the man from the UFO just floated down a beam of 
light with his arms and legs spread out and he shined the red light over the hammock. The light was in 
the palm of his hand. The man then returned to the UFO in the same way. 

"Luis began to run but the forest was muddy. He ran and ran and the disc chased him with the 
beam of light. It took him an hour to get to the place where his friends were. When he got to the shore, 
his friends weren't there and he screamed. They heard his screams and walked back and saw the 
object, a big ball of light, searching for them. All three jumped into the water and swam and tried to 
hide in the weeds. 

"Then the UFO stopped over the boat and again the man came floating down like before and 
passed a red light in his hand over the boat, searching for something in the boat. Then the man went 
back to the flying saucer and it went away. 

Little Man Comes Back 

"Luis said the man was about a meter and a half tall and appeared to be wearing a black suit of 
some kind. He said he could see inside the dome of the UFO and he saw another man in there. The 
disc was three to four meters wide and about two meters high. 

"Luis is twenty-two or twenty-three now, the other guy would be about twenty-one and the third 
was a boy, who would be fourteen now. This happened in August, 1977.1 talked to Luis and 
convinced him to go back to the same place with me and four air force sergeants. He was afraid at 



first. He wasn't willing to cooperate but finally he agreed. 

"We went to the tree he had been in and stayed there until about ten o'clock one night. Nothing 
happened, so I decided we would go to where they'd tied up their boat, the one the humanoid 
examined. We stayed on a small island in the middle of the river and decided to fish with a net. We 
put the net in the water and waited. 

"About eleven-thirty, we saw a big ball of fire, dark yellow, about two kilometers down the 
Guajara river. We took some photographs of it. 

"Then, about eleven-forty-five, we saw the same ball of fire again, but this time it was smaller 
and going at a slower speed. Now it was only a thousand meters from us over on the right side of the 
river and maybe two hundred meters high. 

"At midnight, a big ball of fire passed directly over us, going across the river. When it got to the 
other side, it turned its light out and we saw a disc-shaped object. I can't tell you the exact size, but it 
was about twice as big as a Boeing 737, very, very big. It was amber-colored with many bright white 
windows, many windows. I couldn't count them. When it passed over us, we heard a small noise like 
a turbine, but low. It crossed the river and disappeared. 

"We photographed this object also, but the only thing that came out in our pictures was a point of 
light. I couldn't understand that when we could see a disc shape. Then, about two in the morning, we 
saw it again. This time it was coming down the right side of the river. It looped out and swung back 
toward us and stopped for a minute above the opposite shore. It looked like the sun had stopped in 
front of us about seventy meters away and six to eight meters high. It was a very, very big ball of 
bluish light. It was very bright but we could look at it without hurting our eyes. 

"We were taking pictures all the time. Then the object went into the sky very fast and shut its 
light off. When it did that, we couldn't see the shape but there was one green light on top and a red 
light on the bottom. We couldn't see the shape but when the pictures were developed, we could see a 
large disc-shaped object standing vertically, rather than horizontally. 

"The picture showed a door or window near the top and from it a beam of light was shining 
down in our direction. We saw none of this when we took the pictures. All this came out only in the 
photos. The right side of the object was dark yellow and the left side white and light yellow, and 
there were several circular marks on the left side." 

Eight Different Shapes of UFOs 

Hollanda said he and the sergeants interviewed two hundred to three hundred people over a six- 
month period inColares, Vigia, Itaituba, Baia Do Sol and Rio Guajara, all villages or towns 
northeast of Belem. 

"We took about three hundred photos and we photographed eight different shapes of UFOs. The 
first was a disc with windows. The second was rectangular, like a barrel on its side. The third was a 
trapezoid, or like a pyramid with its top cut off. The fourth was like a Boeing. The fifth was triangular 
or like an arrowhead. They flew very high in the sky and very fast. They were also seen leaving the 
water. The sixth was domed, like an Adamski UFO. The seventh was pointed on the top and bottom 
and was black on top and white on the bottom. The eighth was like a ball with three sticks coming out 
the back, with lights on the sticks. 

"We had many files and photographs, and all these were turned over to the air force. I don't 



know what the air force did with this material. They don't say anything." 

The copy of Hollanda's report to Brasilia that I obtained many years later gives only sparse 
details of two hundred eighty-four sightings and encounters in Colares and eighteen other villages and 
towns in the area. Of these, nearly two hundred occurred in 1977 and the rest in 1978. Also included 
are sixteen maps showing where incidents occurred, and nineteen photos of UFOs. In the photocopies 
I have, they still look like blobs of light in the night but the accompanying sketches show what 
Hollanda and his team saw when they photographed the UFOs. 

Nowhere in the two hundred eighty-four summaries is there mention of anyone being burned or 
dying as a result of an encounter. 

A Brazilian investigator told me that he had also obtained copies of the official report of the 
investigation, but when he showed them to me, they were quite different from the ones I have. Again, 
though, there was no mention of injuries or deaths. 

Dr. Wellaide Carvalho said members of the air force team knew people had been burned and 
had drugs available to help calm the victims. She said the investigators were also aware of the deaths 
"but they did not have the authority to order autopsies." 

Obviously there are many more official reports filed away someplace in Brasilia, not only on 
the Colares-area cases and the 1986 over flights but possibly many other incidents. Why they remain 
a secret is something only the government can answer. 


1. Most of this information was supplied to me by veteran UFO researcher Irene Granchi, author 
of UFOs and Abductions in Brazil (Horus House Press, 1994). 

2. Then America's oldest UFO group, APRO went out of existence in 1988 after its founder, 

Coral Lorenzen, died. Her husband Jim, also highly respected in the ufological community, had 
died several years earlier. 

3. The APRO Bulletin, Volume 33, Number 3. 

4. The U. S. Government is sometimes no more cooperative. Citing the Freedom of Information 
Act, on May 25, 1986,1 asked the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington for copies of any 
reports it had received on the Brazilian UFO incidents that took place on the night of May 19. 
Two weeks later I received a reply stating the DLA had no information on “the requested 
subject.” However, Robert Todd of Ardmore, Pennsylvania, a tenacious researcher and a 
master of using the Freedom of Information Act, found otherwise. He obtained a copy of a 
report sent to the DLA from the American defense attache in Brasilia giving details of the 
incidents as obtained from “various BAF sources/open sources.” (BAF is the Brazilian Air 
Force.) 

5. OO-ee-RAHN-gee Oh-LAHN-duh. 

6. The researcher said the reports had been leaked to civilians soon after they'd been sent to 
Brasilia. 

7. Hollanda was a captain when I first met him. He had risen to the rank of major by 1981, and in 
1992 he retired as a lieutenant colonel. Sergeant Costa later left the Air Force but remained in 
the Reserve. He died of a stroke in March, 1993. 

8. This was immediately after I left the magazine I had been working for. It was the first time I 
had gone to Brazil at my own expense to investigate cases simply to satisfy my own curiosity. 



Chapter Thirty-One 



THEY'RE STILL HERE 


Finding people who've seen UFOs isn't difficult. You just talk to people and ask questions. 
Sooner or later you're bound to find someone who's seen something or knows somebody who has. 

I first discovered this in Manitoba, Canada, in 1976. No matter where I went, there was always 
someone who had a tale to tell. The same held true later in the United States, and it's just as true in 
Brazil. It may be true in every country in the world. 

Each time I've gone to Brazil, it was with the idea of checking out old cases I'd heard about and 
wanted to look into firsthand, but each time I came back with many more new cases than old ones. 

For years I'd kept a one-page report from a Natal investigator, now dead, about an alleged 
abduction attempt. It said that one cold morning a farm woman tending a fire in her backyard heard a 
noise behind her. She turned and saw her eight-year-old son being sucked up by a disc-shaped object. 
She panicked but managed to grab his legs and pull him down, and the UFO went away. This 
reportedly occurred in the Serra do Doutor, a low mountain range northwest of Campo Redondo in 
Rio Grande do Norte. 

That supposedly happened in 1981, but it wasn't until 1992 that I was able to visit Serra do 
Doutor. Cynthia Luce and I were touring the state and, when we reached Campo Redondo, we started 
searching for the woman named in the report. We never found her, but we did find twelve other 
people who'd had sightings or encounters. 


Tremendous Heat 

Most of those interviews came when we left the main highway and drove up a dirt road that 
climbed higher and higher to the top of Serra Verde, at over two thousand two hundred feet the tallest 
peak in the state. Huge communications towers owned by TELERN, the telephone company of Rio 
Grande do Norte, stand on the highest spot. A surprising number of people live on the mountain, and 
five of them told us they had seen strange lights moving about in the night sky. 

One man saw more than he wanted to. Versalao Perreira Dos Santos, a forty-nine-year-old 
farmhand, had a terrifying experience on August 25, just ten days before we talked to him. 

"I was walking by myself about nine p.m when suddenly a bright light came on around me," he 
said. "I was near the TELERN towers. It lit up an area about a hundred meters around. It was a bright 
white light which then became red. When it was white, it started getting hot. When it was red, the heat 
was unbearable. Then the light got smaller and smaller and it went away, slowly, and the heat went 
with it. I was scared to death." 


Current Cases 

During the 1991 and 1992 field trips, more than thirty other witnesses described encounters that 
had occurred recently, evidence that UFOs are still very much with us. Among the more interesting or 
stranger reports are these: 

October, 1989: A seventy-one-year-old mid-wife, Raimunda Barbosa, and two teenage 
granddaughters, Antonia and Rita, live on a farm in northern Ceara. Shortly after dark one evening 
they had bought a bottle of propane gas and were walking home when they heard what sounded like a 



pig grunting in the lane ahead of them. They were almost on top of it when a bright light suddenly 
came on, rose jerkily into the air and went away. "It went up in fits and starts but quickly," Raimunda 
said. "It was shaped like a coffin and gave off yellow, clear and red rays of light." 

November, 1989: Jackson Felix Pereira, twenty- nine, a photographer and founder of a UFO 
group in Sao Jose do Compestre, Rio Grande do Norte, has recorded sixty-eight confirmed cases that 
occurred within fifteen miles of the town since 1968. None were deaths, abductions or occupant 
sightings but, in twenty cases, people reported being chased by UFOs. 

Jackson's most significant case was a landing in a field that left impressions in the ground in 
November, 1989. They consisted of nine pairs of holes, all six inches deep, in a symmetrical circle 
covering an area seventeen feet across. Between two of the pairs of holes were four other 
depressions in a straight line, also six inches deep. The circle appeared to have been burned and 
vacuumed clean of debris. 

April 11,1991: For several hours in the evening, twenty-five military policemen and a 
lieutenant at the Papuda maximum-security prison near Brasilia watched a lighted object hover thirty 
to forty yards above a command post near the prison. It was oval-shaped and vertical and rapidly 
changed colors — blue, yellow and some green. The color red did not appear but suddenly the whole 
object turned red from the center out to the edge. 

The men ran outside for a better look but the object had vanished. Seconds later, it reappeared 
above the prison itself some distance away, changing colors constantly, occasionally blinking. 

During the evening the lieutenant, Jorge Damasceno, talked four times by phone with air traffic 
controllers at the Brasilia airport several miles away. Eventually the tower co nfi rmed tracking the 
UFO on radar, and once the lieutenant heard the tower order a jetliner to alter course because the 
UFO was in its path. At ten forty-five p.m, the object vanished. 1 

March, 1991: About eight o'clock one night, farmer Joao Bernardino Torres, forty-three, was 
riding a bicycle in the village of Cajazeiras in Rio Grande do Norte when a huge bluish light lit up 
about thirty feet above him He stopped, put his feet on the ground and looked up, tilting his head 
back. As he did, he became numb and couldn't move. Two minutes later, the light vanished and his 
paralysis ended. 

April 1991: Rita Lima, fifty-three, her husband Joao, sixty-four, and their seventeen-year-old 
son, Francisco, live on the edge of Lake Apodi in Rio Grande do Norte. One night they had visited 
her sister, who lives two miles away on another part of the lake, and were returning home in their 
canoe. Suddenly an intense red light a foot and a half in size came on above them and lit up the area 
around the canoe. 

"We didn't know what to do," Rita said. "We stopped the canoe. We were terrified because 
people said this light takes people. The light was so bright we couldn't make out what it was." 

A short while later the object went away, blinking as it ascended over the town of Apodi. 

September 9,1991: Fifteen-year-old Wellington Silva had visited a friend and was walking to 
the farm home that he shares with his parents and grandparents near Ibicuitinga, Ceara. 2 It was dark, 
around eight in the evening. As he was walking past an aunt's house two hundred yards from his own 
home, he felt heat on his head and shoulders. He turned and saw three small lights above the ground 
about sixty feet away. 

He hid behind a tree, but the lights moved toward him. He had been carrying his shirt over one 
shoulder but dropped it and ran to his aunt's house. No one was home, so he broke the latch on a 



wooden window and dived inside. For about fifteen minutes he watched as a circular object not quite 
as big as the house hovered ten feet over his shirt. It had a number of small lights that blinked on and 
off Then the UFO disappeared and Wellington ran home. 

An hour and a half later, he went back for his shirt. When he took it home, he and his family 
discovered four circular areas on it, each as big as an apple. When he touched them, they crumbled to 
pieces. 

For three days, Wellington's back felt as if it had been burned. He suffered from headaches and 
eye irritation for fifteen days. 

September, 1991: Marcondes Cury, fifty-three, owner of an auto parts store in Santa Cruz, Rio 
Grande do Norte, was tending a sick cow lying under a tree on his farm near the city. Five or six 
people were with him, including a nephew, Etefferson Carvalho, nineteen. It was about seven at night 
and they were using a lantern to see. Suddenly, a flash lit up everything for fifty yards around them. 
The light was gone as quickly as it had come, but Etefferson had seen more. 

"I was standing up and looking off in the sky when they were working on the ground and I saw 
the light coming toward us," he said. "It passed within two hundred to three hundred meters. When it 
got near it just gave out a big blast of light, and then just shut it off and went straight up into the sky." 

March, 1992: Josefa Oliveira, twenty-nine, lives with her parents, Pedro, seventy-five, and 
Maria Emerita, sixty-nine, on a farm south of Lajes in Rio Grande do Norte. It was eight o'clock and 
her parents were asleep. Josefa had washed the supper dishes and when she went into the backyard to 
throw the dish water out she saw a bright light on a hill a hundred yards away. It began moving 
toward her and she ran into the house. The UFO hovered over a tree near the back door. 

By now, Josefa had run into her bedroom and lay down. The bright light then began filtering 
through the tile roof, and Josefa's bed began shaking. She was badly frightened and thought the UFO 
was trying to take her away. After a half hour, it left and the bed stopped shaking. 

May, 1992: Ana Teixeira, sixty-six, her daughter Maria, twenty-six, and granddaughter 
Francisca, eight, were walking along a highway in the Serra do Doutor mountains in Rio Grande do 
Norte. 3 It was six-thirty at night and dark. Maria saw a "little star" that was moving and called it to 
their attention. Then it came closer, and all three became apprehensive. Suddenly it flared into a 
brilliant blue light a hundred yards away, lighting up everything around. It seemed to be spitting red 
sparks from its top as it hovered over a cashew tree. Ana, Maria and Francisca were scared to death 
and ran into a nearby house. When they looked out again, the thing had gone away. 

August 31,1992: About nine-thirty at night, Damiao Dos Santos, twenty-nine, saw lights 
zigzagging back and forth underneath high tension wires near Alto do Sitio, a town north of Natal. 
They changed colors, going from yellow-orangish to blue and back, and also changed shape, getting 
smaller and then bigger. He got the impression they were not pulsating but were actually changing 
shape. 

September, 1992: Severino Rodrigues, sixty, was driving to his farm south of Lajes, Rio 
Grande do Norte, about eight at night when he saw a big red light high on the east side of Mount 
Cabuji, an extinct volcano. No one lives on the mountain and there are no roads on it. The light was 
stationary and solid red. It was sharply defined and very clearly outlined. Severino turned south to go 
around Cabuji and, when he looked back, the red ball was gone. 

March 20,1993: For nearly six hours, astronomer Claudio Pamplona and eleven other people, 
all members of an astronomy club, observed a lighted object about thirteen thousand feet above 



Fortaleza and took numerous photos of it before it disappeared about midnight. 

"The object was stationary," Pamplona, fifty, a university professor, said. "When the stars and 
planets moved, the object stayed there. That's when we realized it was something like a UFO." 

The object was discovered by his wife, lolanda, thirty-eight, also an astronomer and high school 
teacher, as she searched for Jupiter in preparation for the club's weekly meeting. 

"At first we saw a bright cloud and then we saw two little balls of light inside the cloud," 
Pamplona said. "One was red and the other was orange." 

Denis Weaver, a young astronomer and teacher, took a number of twenty-second exposures with 
a powerful camera. The prints show two very fuzzy balls of light, one larger than the other, with no 
discernible details. Pamplona said that if the bigger object was at thirteen thousand feet as he 
estimated, "It would have been about two hundred fifty meters across." 4 

Thousands of other people in Fortaleza saw the lights because five radio stations and several 
TV stations were broadcasting reports throughout the evening, and people gathered in the streets to 
watch. 

April, 1993: Arnaldo Cordeiro, thirty-three, and his father, Juvenal, sixty-seven, were hunting in 
the mountains around Quixaba twelve miles south of Sao Tome, Rio Grande do Norte, when they saw 
a light moving behind the clouds. 5 It then turned on a beam of light and focused it on them They hid 
under a tree. 

The beam lit an area about thirty feet around them and continued shining for about ten minutes. 
All that time it rapidly changed from green to red, blue, white and other colors. The rays seemed to 
bounce off the ground and pass between their legs. 

"We were afraid all during this," Arnaldo said. "We wanted to shoot at it but didn't dare to 
because we were afraid of what it might do. This is not something from Brazil and not something from 
the Americans." 

Jose Paixao, who lives in Quixaba, said many people in the Quixaba area saw something 
similar in 1992. "It was a powerful light like fire that would stop in the air," he said. "It would come 
within two to three hundred meters and three or four people felt like they'd been shocked." 

May 10, 1993: Heraldo Medeiros, thirty-two, his wife, Ikka, thirty-one, their three children and 
a teenage girl were driving back to Fortaleza from Santa Quiteria about three in the morning when 
they saw a bright light in the sky. Medeiros, a professional photographer, stopped, got out a video 
camera and put it on a tripod. Off and on for the next three and a half hours he videotaped the object. 

Four times they saw a smaller object emerge from the bigger one, move off a short distance and 
then go back. When this happened, it appeared as if a ray was stretched between the two. The object 
remained in the same position until about a half hour after daybreak and then disappeared. The video 
is very sharp at times and has been shown on national TV. 

Prolonged Sightings 

There are some areas where repeated sightings have been reported for years. One is just south 
of Sao Tome in Rio Grande do Norte, where Sandoval Bezerro, a forty- eight-year-old farmer, lives. 
Since early in 1991, he has seen strange lights moving about low in the sky just before dawn. 

Sandoval lives in Sao Tome, but all his life has worked at the family farm seven miles south of 
town. Every day, weekends included, he gets up at three in the morning, has something to eat and then 



walks two hours to reach the farm. Part of the way he goes by road and part through fields, taking 
shortcuts. In mid-afternoon, he walks back home. It is during the walk before daybreak that he sees the 
lights. 

"It's a ball of light that wanders around," he said. "Sometimes it's like a headlight, yellow, and 
sometimes red, like fire. It changes color. It lights up the ground." 

The farm is just two or three miles north of Quixaba, where Arnaldo Cordeiro and his father 
saw a UFO in April, 1993. 

Sandoval used to carry a lantern but stopped after a ball of light came toward him. At first it 
was small but then grew bigger. The area around him began getting lighter, frightening him so much 
that he hid in the bushes. Suddenly the light turned off and Sandoval heard an explosion, like a rifle 
shot. 

He left the lantern home after that but, since then, he always looks around him all the way to the 
farm. If he sees a light and it appears to be close, he hides until it goes away. 

There is no pattern to the sightings, Sandoval said. When Cynthia Luce and I first talked to him 
in September, 1992, he was seeing lights at least once a week and sometimes every morning. I talked 
to him again in July, 1993 and, by then, he said, the sightings had tapered off to only two or three a 
month. 

1990 to present: Another area where strange lights have been seen frequently is Acari, in 
southwestern Rio Grande do Norte. The principal witness is Bebeto, the water tank truck driver who 
saw the weird "TV window" in the sky. 

Bebeto and his helpers deliver water to residents within a twenty-mile radius of Acari and 
always end their day well after the sun sets. It is dark when they see balls of light moving about 
among the desert brush. They vary in color and size but usually are yellow, red or white. They turn on 
and off. Sometimes they pulsate. 

One came close enough that Bebeto and the other men could see a cylindrical-shaped object, 
spinning rapidly. It frightened them, and Bebeto started driving faster to get away from it, but the 
object got in front of them. He stopped and it stopped. Now it appeared to be an oval object, 
somewhat flattened, a dull yellow in color. Bebeto drove on and the object stayed with them for two 
or three miles before going away. 

1991 to present: On top of Serra Verde in September, 1992, Cynthia Luce and I talked briefly 
with Antonio De Oliveira, forty-six, who was walking with his wife, hurrying to get to their home at 
Quixaba before dark. 

"For the last two years I've seen lights almost constantly when I go out at night," he said. 
"Sometimes they're red, sometimes blue, sometimes yellow, and they blink. Sometimes they're 
stationary and then they move a little bit. Everybody seems to see them around here." 

Quixaba is the same area where Arnaldo Cordeiro and his father hid from a UFO in April, 

1993, and not far from where Sandoval has been seeing lights moving about before dawn for several 
years. 

1991 to present: UFOs have also been appearing irregularly in the Ibiapaba mountain range in 
Ceara two hundred miles west of Fortaleza. Since the flap began in April, 1991, Thynam Salmi to de 
Melo, thirty-four-year-old founder of a UFO group in Sao Benedito, has investigated fifty-eight cases. 

In general, people report seeing a strange light of many colors. One man was hit by a light and 
momentarily paralyzed until the UFO went away. He felt intense heat and suffered small blisters. On a 



neighboring farm, two girls, eight and twelve, were chased by the light and suffered minor burns like 
sunburns. 

One man who was relieving himself was badly frightened when a light suddenly appeared forty 
yards above him. He ran into the house and watched from there. When the UFO went away, it left 
behind a smell of sulfur. 

In all, some twenty-five people said they had been chased by the light in the Ibiapaba area. In 
nearly every case the witnesses panicked, and for two weeks no one in one area would go outside at 
night. Farm production fell and people were in danger of starving. 

In May, 1993, a thirty-two-year-old pregnant woman fainted when she thought a UFO was 
chasing her. Other witnesses said the object, like a fireball, then went straight up, changed directions 
and moved horizontally, came back down to the mountain ridge, went up again and back down and 
finally moved out into space. 


An Old Phenomenon 

All these cases, and too many others to list, simply mean that UFOs are still being seen. There 
has been little, if any, let up over the years. The profusion of cases is almost mind-numbing. Details 
blur and run together, and sometimes the significance of what is going on is lost in the seemingly 
unending repetition of happenings. 

For more than forty years Brazil has been the scene of numerous UFO incidents, and it continues 
to be a UFO hot spot. Reports go back much farther than the 1950s, and occasionally old-timers tell 
of hearing stories about UFOs when they were kids. 

One of them is Joao Duarte de Siqueira, a farmer who was eighty-one years old when I met him 
in September, 1988. Fortaleza investigator Jean Alencar introduced me to Joao at the Siqueira home 
nestled among palm trees near a pond at Trapo in northern Ceara. 

"Last night I saw a ball of fire come from some distance and stop on the far side of the lagoon," 
Joao said. "It lit up the whole area. This thing has been seen frequently. My father Manoel said fire 
was often seen in this area and sometimes it lit up the whole side of the lagoon. He said others saw it 
before I was born. Old men told him the carnauba trees looked like they were on fire during the night 
but when they went out there the next morning nothing was burned." 6 

If these strange lights were being seen before Joao was born, then they've been around since at 
least the turn of the century — a possibility that gained more credence when I heard a similar report 
several years later. 

Near Lajes in September, 1992, Maria Emerita Oliveira, sixty-nine, said: "Twenty five years 
ago, my ninety-year-old grandmother said she had always been seeing these things and that they 
signaled the end of the world." 


Tens of Thousands of Cases? 

One last but significant point is this: Not only do these cases show that the phenomenon is very 
much alive but strongly suggest there could well be thousands or tens of thousands of such incidents 
occurring every year in Brazil. 

In 1991, 1992 and 1993 I visited sixty-five communities or rural areas and talked to one 



hundred five Brazilians who'd had close encounters of one kind or another. Many of the incidents had 
not been reported to anyone other than their neighbors. More than half had occurred within the 
previous year. Brazil has more than a hundred thousand cities, towns and villages and vast rural 
areas, and those sixty-five localities represent only a tiny portion of the country. If the incidents in 
those sixty-five areas are indicative of what's happening throughout the country, there could easily be 
ten thousand to a hundred thousand times more sightings and encounters than anyone is aware of. 

Brazil is almost as large as the United States and has one hundred sixty million people, yet 
probably has no more than three hundred to four hundred active investigators. Most live in the major 
cities. Large areas of the country have no investigators at all. Much that happens, perhaps most, never 
comes to the attention of any investigator. 

Many Sightings Videotaped 

This is best illustrated by the UFO flap that took place around Pinheiro in 1977, when sightings 
tool place nearly every night for four months. The mayor estimated fifty thousand people had seen the 
UFOs, yet Brazilian investigators learned of these massive sightings only a year and a half later. 

A flap of such magnitude probably would not go unnoticed these days. The population is ever- 
increasing, more paved highways are being built in the interior, electricity is spreading farther into 
rural areas, satellites now bring TV to even the most remote parts of the country, and Brazilians and 
the news media are much more aware of the UFO phenomenon today than they were in the 1970s. 

Furthermore, camcorders are becoming ubiquitous and a number of videotapes of spectacular 
UFO sightings have been shown on national TV. One investigator in Sao Paulo has even developed a 
sideline business of collecting, copying and selling such videos. 

Still, it's possible that many "mini-flaps" and most encounters go unrecorded because there are 
no investigators in much of the country. 

The next time Brazil takes a national census, perhaps it should include a few questions to gauge 
how widespread the UFO phenomenon is. It's possible that we would all be shocked. 

1. Incident investigated by Wilson Geraldo de Oliveira, then an anthropology student at the 
University of Brasilia. 

2. Ee-bee-kwi-CHEEN-gah. 

3. Tay-SHAY-ruh. 

4. Roughly eight hundred feet across. 

5. Kee-SHAH-buh. 

6. During a lengthy UFO flap in McDonald County, Missouri, in early 1977, many people saw 
balls of fire in the woods and thought the trees were burning, but on examination in daylight the 
next day they would find nothing burned. 




Chapter Thirty-Two 
THE CHALLENGE TO SCIENCE 


This is an outrageous phenomenon that assaults common sense and all we've been taught about 
our world. We can't say UFOs are definitely extraterrestrial, but they're certainly alien to everything 
we know about life on Earth. However, there's nothing special about UFOs. They are simply 
something in our life that we don't yet understand. Most of the things that UFOs do seem like magic to 
us, but one day we'll be capable of doing the same things ourselves. 

Each case in this book, if taken individually, might be dismissed as hallucination, imagination or 
whatever. But taken together, the mass of reports shows a clear picture of a very real alien presence 
that can strike terror into the hearts of victims, sometimes injuring them and on occasion causing 
someone to die. 

It's easier to assume that people who've had UFO experiences are crazy than to face the 
possibility that what they say happened really did happen. But worldwide that could number in the 
hundreds of millions, since it seems likely that five to ten percent of the Earth's inhabitants have UFO 
experiences. 

Many skeptics believe they're all crazy or hallucinating. Typical of this attitude is the comment 
of a British astronomer who dismissed the whole idea of UFOs and aliens as "bunk." He refused to be 
drawn into a discussion, saying it was "a closed season on nuts." 1 

Some experts who've never had a UFO experience or talked to witnesses have the arrogance to 
say: "You only think that happened to you." Kinder critics say people who report UFO sightings are 
sincere but see them because they have "certain psychological needs." If so, everyone in the world 
should be seeing UFOs, because we all have certain psychological needs. 

Try telling Moises he had a psychological need to be traumatized by a UFO as he walked home. 
Or Januncio, Beato, Chico Gama, Francisca, Jerinaldo, Leonel, Cecilio, Hermelindo or any of the 
many others. 


Explanations That Don't Explain 

There are also the experts who claimed UFO sightings were and are a reflection of our anxieties 
over such things as the Cold War, something we conjure up because of our fears of nuclear holocaust 
and other potential disasters. However, that doesn't explain sightings long before the Cold War 
started. And now that it's over, the same experts say it's the instability in the world caused by the end 
of the Cold War that is causing people to see UFOs. 

Still others who have all the answers say people have seen strange lights throughout history, as 
if that explains everything. It doesn't explain anything. These are not just bizarre lights in the sky. They 
are things, things that carry lights, things that create light. 

But, the experts say, even if you do see things in the sky, your memory can't be trusted. 
"Perceptions and memories become distorted and embellished," they claim Does this mean we can't 
believe anything that anybody remembers? 

Finally, some skeptics claim people report UFO sightings for publicity and money. The truth is 
that laughter and ridicule are often the only reward for revealing a sighting or encounter. A few 



people have received money for their stories, but no one's gotten rich from UFOs, except possibly for 
two or three stars of the UFO lecture circuit. 

As for the people discussed in this book, for most of them there's been no permanent change in 
their lives or lifestyles as a result of their encounters. The exceptions, of course, are those who died 
and those whose physical or mental health were ruined. 

To be a victim does not require a belief in mysterious gods or black magic. It requires only that 
you be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Regardless of what happens, the experience is nearly 
always profound and details are vividly remembered years later. 

Science: Friend or Foe? 

It's true that we have no hard evidence that UFOs exist. They leave impressions in the ground, 
break tree limbs, and injure and kill people. They've been tracked on radar, photographed and 
videotaped, but none of this is convincing proof to the skeptics. On the other hand, what proof do we 
have that black holes exist or that the universe was created by the Big Bang? Lack of physical proof 
doesn't stop scientists from devoting their lives to exploring and defending such theories. 

Read any newspaper article about the latest development in science and you will see it strewn 
with such words as "may," "maybe," "might," "could," "possibly" and similar cautionary terms. It's 
only when the subject is UFOs that most scientists have no doubts whatsoever: It's all "bunk." 
Amazing. And few if any of them have ever taken a firsthand look at the phenomenon. 

However, science is not the enemy. Nor is government. On the whole, ufologists have done a 
poor job of presenting their case. Not all the nuts are on the fringes. Too many who have made names 
for themselves in the UFO community have made bold proclamations that sooner or later embarrass 
not only themselves but all ufologists. Too often there's been a rush to judgment, and people who 
should know better say: "THIS is the greatest case ever!" Then it turns out to be another ufological 
Chernobyl. 

Science offers the best hope for explaining the UFO phenomenon. The fact is that UFOs are a 
part of our lives, and science must eventually deal with them The "end of physics" — a phrase that 
scientists used to use to mean the time when we will know all there is to know about the universe — is 
nowhere in sight. Just our world alone is filled with fascinating mysteries that have nothing to do with 
the paranormal. 

One of the most exciting photographs I've ever seen was a massive enlargement of the antenna of 
a tiny insect, showing an incredibly intricate, symmetrical network of hairs and cross members. It is a 
hint of the unbelievably complex creativity of nature -- and perhaps a hint of how little we really 
know about life on Earth. The sum total of all we know about our world may well be nothing 
compared to what we have yet to learn. 

And UFOs are part of that unknown world. It's just possible that science has something to learn 
from UFOs. Perhaps a lot. The supernatural maybe more natural than we believe. On the other hand, 
the phenomenon may simply be too big for science to tackle. 

Assuming it isn't, though, think what could be gained by using the technology that enable UFOs 
to do what they do. Craft as big as football stadiums, and about as aerodynamic, can rise silently, 
hover quietly, then zip across the horizon in seconds or land in a space no bigger than they are. We 
wouldn't need to spend billions of dollars developing aircraft and airports. The travel and transport 



industries would be revolutionized. 


Not Secret Weapons 

UFOs seem to be indestructible, so crashes would be rare. With unbelievable speeds, travel to 
other countries would take mere minutes. The savings in space, fuel, pollution and time would be 
unbelievable. 

Quite a few people believe UFOs are secret government weapons or projects. Too bad it's not 
so. UFOs have been around for decades if not centuries. We've gone through several wars in the past 
fifty years in which aircraft with the capabilities of UFOs would have been very helpful. 

Our space effort would have been a breeze if we had UFO-type craft. Many people have seen 
UFOs shoot out into the stars in seconds. But we're still strapping our cosmonauts and astronauts to 
rockets carrying highly explosive fuel and then firing them into space, sometimes to our great sorrow. 

UFOs are capable of making instant ninety-degree turns at high speeds, turns so sharp that human 
beings would be crushed. We cannot do that, even with our most advanced aircraft. In July, 1993, the 
Pentagon proudly announced that the X-31, a joint U.S.-German experimental fighter jet, had 
completed a revolutionary rapid turn far beyond the aerodynamic capability of any conventional 
fixed-wing aircraft. The Air Force released video film and photographs of the jet as it slowed from a 
speed of about three hundred miles an hour and reversed direction in only nine seconds using a tight 
looping turn. 2 

Even at such a slow speed, it still took nearly a mile to turn around, hardly a ninety-degree turn. 

Revolutionary News 

This phenomenon presents a profound challenge to science. It seems to obey physical laws all its 
own or, if it is abiding by the laws of physics as we know them, then there are loopholes we're not 
aware of. 

By hovering silently and effortlessly, UFOs are able to counter the effects of gravity. However, 
they sometimes give off sparks which fall to the ground, obviously pulled down by gravity. And 
UFOs have picked up people and animals and then dropped them, so gravity is still at work in these 
incidents, but apparently not against the UFOs themselves. 

Being able to counter the pull of gravity without effort would be a revolutionary tool that could 
be put to work in many industries. Scientists are trying to determine what gravity is and why it works. 
Perhaps they can get their answers by solving the UFO mystery. 

Some Questions For Science 


It's possible that by finding the answer to just one of the many questions we have about UFOs — 
beyond the obvious ones of what they are, where they come from and what they're doing here — we 
can begin to answer all the other questions. Here are ten questions as a start: 

One: How could Faustino's diesel locomotive be slowed down each time the zigzagging UFO 
passed over it? Could it have been deception, that the engineer and Faustino were somehow led to 



believe their train was slowing down when it actually wasn't? Or was it in some way draining energy 
from the diesel as it passed over? If so, why didn't it have a similar effect on the humans on board the 
train? 

Two: After many encounters, witnesses suffer severe headaches, nausea, diarrhea, extreme 
thirst, dizziness and other illnesses. How do UFOs cause these ailments? Are they emitting 
electromagnetic radiation that affects or kills certain organisms in bodies of victims, thereby causing 
health problems and sometimes even death? Is it possible that pre-existing health problems are 
aggravated? 

Three: How can a brilliant light from a UFO positioned on a mountain top not only light up an 
entire valley as bright as daylight but also make eight people sitting on a veranda more than two miles 
away sick for up to two months? 

Four: How can "Sudden Daylight" be explained? Many times objects have appeared just over 
the heads of witnesses in a blinding burst of brilliance with the suddenness of a light being switched 
on. What kind of man- made light would be needed to duplicate it? 

Five: UFOs have been seen to rapidly shoot way out into the atmosphere so far that they are lost 
among the stars. A Pentagon document reported this happened in Montana in 1975, and former 
military officers have told me about UFOs being tracked by radar going one hundred and two hundred 
miles high in seconds. What kind of propulsion systems would be needed to do this? 

Six: At least five witnesses cited in this book reported feeling a fierce but silent wind blowing 
around them during an encounter, as if they were in a tornado. What mechanism would be required to 
create this? 

Seven: In two cases, UFOs burned trees. In Jerinaldo’s bizarre encounter, the tree split in two 
from the heat and the top broke off. Other witnesses have reported feeling extreme heat, and one of 
them, Januncio, believed he would have died from the heat if the UFO hadn't gone away when it did. 
How can UFOs emit such high heat without doing damage to themselves? 

Eight: The same question applies to the feeling of coldness reported by a number of witnesses, 
sometimes during the same incident in which they also felt very hot. 

Nine: How can UFOs simply appear and disappear? Witness often don't see them go away. 
They just blink out or vanish. Do they move so fast that they're not seen coming or going? Do they go 
into another dimension? One researcher believes they are able to become invisible. Is this possible? 

Ten: Perhaps the most difficult question to answer is how do UFOs change shape or appear to. 
Not only do they sometimes change shape but will split into two or more objects, each going away in 
different directions, and sometimes the objects will merge into one again. 

Once those questions are answered, we have many more to tackle. 

1. Chichester Observer, Sussex, England, February 4,1993. 

2. Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, July 7, 1993. 



Chapter Thirty-Three 

THE CHALLENGE TO INVESTIGATORS 


It's possible that sometime in the next century, UFOs and the enormous efforts of ufologists 
around the world will be forgotten. UFOs, if remembered at all, may be just a footnote to history, an 
unsolved curiosity of the Twentieth Century. 

We should stop treating the phenomenon as possibly the greatest story in the history of mankind 
and begin to regard it as simply a still unexplained part of life on Earth. 

As stated before, the enemy is not science nor the government but ourselves. The bickering and 
feuding among ufologists have been enormously destructive. We don't need enemies. We do an 
excellent job of destroying each other without any outside help, although most victims of the UFO 
wars suffer self-inflicted wounds. 

Perhaps the best thing that could happen would be for UFO organizations to disband, shut down 
their publications and tell members to go their own ways. The would-be stars can seek some other 
form of ego gratification, and serious researchers can go on quietly investigating on their own. 

Many people in the UFO business are paranoid, but it is highly unlikely that anyone is out to get 
any of us. The only purpose such paranoia serves is to make the "victim" feel important. If the CIA is 
interested in my UFO files, it's welcome to them I'd like to think someone in the government is 
interested in UFOs and is trying to figure out what's going on. 

Belief in government conspiracies and disinformation programs also serve egos starved for 
recognition. The government can keep secrets, as we've learned many times. A notable example came 
to light in 1993, when documents were released showing the United States had spied on dozens of its 
allies during World War II. 


The Whole Picture 

But that was an operation lasting only several years. UFOs have been an ongoing phenomenon 
for at least half a century. Many ufologists believe the government has known the truth about UFOs all 
this time. But if so, thousands and maybe tens of thousands of people over the past fifty years would 
have had to know this terrible secret, and it's difficult to believe that not a single one would let 
something leak. It's very possible that the U.S. government and most governments around the world 
are as much in the dark about UFOs as the rest of us. 

The U.S. government doesn't deny that UFOs exist. What it says is that they do not pose a threat 
to national security. And this must be true, since we've survived the phenomenon all this time. 

Researchers are like the three blind men feeling the trunk, leg and tail of an elephant. I suspect 
very few of us — including myself — are seeing the whole picture. We've been dealing with UFOs as 
a single phenomenon, and have believed until now that any "solution" must account for all of the 
almost infinite number of bizarre things that have been reported about UFOs. Instead, we may be 
dealing with a great many different phenomena, and no two of them are exactly alike. No matter how 
many hundreds of thousands of cases we collect, by trying to fit all the data into a single solution, we 
may be going at it all the wrong way. 

With abduction experiences dominating the thoughts and research of the ufological community, 



at least in the United States, is investigation of "routine" UFO events being ignored or forgotten? 
Virtually every sighting and encounter is now considered a potential abduction, but is it? UFOs 
apparently aren't even necessary for abductions now and often are never even seen. 

If abductions are for genetic purposes, as some researchers claim, why are old men like Antonio 
and Januncio attacked? If abductions and implants are as widespread as some researchers allege, we 
may already be totally under the control of aliens — and may have been for centuries. Are "we" 
possibly "they"? And if so, why are the aliens continuing to do whatever it is that we think they're 
doing? 

In the natural evolution of UFO investigations, leading to the current concentration on abductions 
(what will be next?), have we reached the point where we ignore or discard the "old-fashioned" 
sightings and encounters, such as those in Brazil? 

Abduction victims reportedly aren't safe anywhere. The UFO beings come and get them no 
matter where they are and no matter how much resistance they put up. In Brazil, in contrast, people 
are often able to hide while a UFO searches for them, and it usually gives up and goes away. 

Furthermore, none of the people in the Brazilian cases cited in this book needed hypnosis to 
remember details of their encounters. Nor did any of them seek therapy afterward. They usually 
recovered quickly from the frightening and sometimes harmful experiences, although some were 
afraid to go outside at night for a while. They knew what happened to them. 

While American-style abductions seem to be a serious problem, let's not overlook those 
encounters that are just as traumatic but may not be abductions. 

This Is NOT the Year 

It is time to put aside the Gulf Breeze, MJ-12 and other controversies and get back to studying 
the phenomenon itself. Let's also stop deluding ourselves in thinking that movies, TV shows and 
articles in news magazine about UFOs are part of a gradual behind-the- scenes government effort to 
prepare the public for the truth about UFOs. This is wishful thinking. By and large, such movies and 
TV shows are pure fiction, and most aren't worth watching. They give serious research a bad name. 1 

We should also declare a moratorium on declarations that "THIS is the year that we finally learn 
the truth." Every year someone says that, and every year we are no closer to the truth than the year 
before. 

I particularly dread the approaching end of the century and the millennium, as if this most 
certainly will be THE TIME when it all comes out. Nonsense. The century and millennium exist only 
in our minds. January 1, 2000 (or 2001, as some claim will be the beginning of the next millennium) 
will be just another day, and a lot of people are going to be greatly disappointed. 

It's also time to stop spreading stories about someone, always unnamed, who saw something that 
the government had hushed up or knew someone who accidentally examined a secret photograph or 
document or whatever. Such stories are common. They're UFO folklore and no one has ever 
successfully traced them back to the person who supposedly saw the photos or whatever. Unless you 
have a firsthand witness who's willing to go public, all such stories should be ignored and forgotten, 
never to be revived. We waste time perpetuating what in all likelihood are myths that can never be 
proved. 

Let's also face the possibility that it's not significant that a well-known rocket scientist or public 



figure believes UFOs are real or are a military secret. It simply means these people are just as baffled 
as the rest of us and have no idea what UFOs are. It is nice, though, to have someone highly respected 
or admired siding with us. 

We should renew our commitment to research. To paraphrase one of my Brazilian friends, 
Daniel Rebisso, many investigators are like butterfly collectors who collect specimens without 
having any idea how they're related to life on Earth. Some ufologists, he says, are like street 
sweepers, sweeping up everything. We end up with a pile of ufological debris, not knowing how any 
of it is connected with the rest. 

Much of what we collect is junk. Once while interviewing a man who'd seen an unusual light in 
the sky, I listened in disbelief as another researcher asked: "Did you feel it was sucking something 
from your brain?" 

"No," the man replied. "I just saw a light." 

Something must have been sucked from the researcher's brain, long before he asked the question. 

In another case, I was with a medical doctor who was also a UFO researcher. We were 
interviewing a man who'd had an encounter. As he described the object, the doctor interrupted to say: 
"What you saw was a forty-five- foot-diameter scout ship from Zeta Reticuli." One can only hope he 
is a far better doctor than he is a UFO investigator. 

Such questions or comments have no place in serious research. They put silly ideas in the heads 
of witnesses and contaminate a case. Many people regard investigators as experts on UFOs, and we 
are not experts. 


Get Back to Basics 

There are good ufologists and some who are not. What we need is to develop a new breed of 
intelligent, young researchers who haven't yet acquired bad habits, who are still open-minded and 
haven't decided they know what it's all about, who can work together and set standards for research, 
and are able to establish guides for the kinds of questions to ask and not ask. Right now there are no 
rules. Anybody can call himself or herself an investigator. 

Whatever happens, however, we must continue studying the phenomenon itself rather than 
keeping ourselves perpetually mired down in endless quarrels. Let's get back to basics, good 
research. We have to. We cannot sit back and wait for the scientists to solve the UFO mystery or for 
the government to reveal its big secrets. 

Jerome Clark, editor of the International UFO Reporter, put it very nicely when he said: "What 
ufology is supposed to be is something like a holding action; however inadequately equipped for the 
task, it studies and records events which may prove important to fixture science even if current science 
is apathetic. Someday, we assume, science will have to deal with UFOs, and when it does, it will 
first turn to the best research and writing the most conscientious ufologists produced; if not for us, 
much valuable information will have been lost.” 2 

1. When the phrase “Based on a true incident ” or something similar appears at the beginning of 
a movie or TV program, it’s a sure tip-off that what follows is all or mostly fiction. Such 
claims are designed solely to con the gullible into believing that what they are about to see is 
true. 



2. IUR November/December, 1991. 




Chapter Thirty-Four 
THE WAY IT IS 

UFOs may have been around for hundreds or thousands of years. They've definitely been here 
since World War II. This means most of the people in the world have grown up hearing about UFOs 
all their lives. Only five to ten percent of us, though, have learned about them firsthand. The rest of us 
know them only from books and what we've been told by those who've had encounters. 

It's surprising sometimes how so many people who know so little about UFOs believe they're 
real. The most frequent explanation given is this: "It's pretty egotistical to think we're the only living 
things in the universe." It's as if they've never really thought about what it means to have creatures 
from other worlds in our midst, coming and going as they wish, doing whatever they want. 

UFO aliens are living creatures and as such have had to evolve in their worlds just as we did in 
ours. We don't live in a world of magic where they are reality and we are unreal. We're all members 
of the universal family, living and dying. 

No one should be under the illusion that UFOs are manmade. If they were, we'd have flying 
saucer junkyards all over the planet. 

We assume UFOs are capable of anything, going wherever they want to, doing whatever they 
wish. But there may be limits to what they can do. The aliens operating them apparently can see in the 
dark but sometimes can't seem to find people who hide from them. They have technology that in battle 
would make them almost invincible — paralyzing people, levitating them, zapping them from a 
distance, hovering silently, moving at incredible speeds, and appearing and disappearing in the blink 
of an eye — but they've made no attempt to conquer anyone. 

Little lizards and ants live on my patio, and both fascinate me for different reasons. Lizards are 
combative creatures that race each other to gobble up every bug in sight. Ants obviously must eat, too, 
but I've never seen one eating. Instead, they're always busily scurrying here and there, working 
together, as if following some grand master plan. I talk to the lizards, assuring them I mean no harm, 
but most flee into the plants whenever I step onto the patio. The ants ignore me, perhaps because their 
eyesight is so poor they don't even see me. 

Take Me to Your Leader 

Unfortunately, years of observing lizards and ants hasn't given me a single clue about what goes 
on in their tiny brains. Just as observing UFO aliens, through the stories of people who've met them, 
has revealed nothing about what they think. 

When was the last time you asked an ant: "Take me to your leader?" 

The major problem in trying to understand or interpret the actions and motives of UFO 
intelligences is that we can look at the problem only from the human point of view. We can't think like 
ants or lizards, and we can't think like UFO aliens. It is no different from attempting to decipher the 
thought processes of any of the millions of different microbes that share our planet with us. 

Trying to determine the aliens' intentions maybe a waste of time. Whatever those intentions are, 
they may be totally incomprehensible from a human viewpoint. 

At the same time, we cannot expect the aliens to think as human beings. Even though they may be 



able to talk to us and tell us all kinds of stories, it doesn't mean they're telling us the truth or anything 
useful. It's possible that they aren't seriously interested in us at all. 

Some people believe UFO aliens are superior beings. They may be, but there's no reason why 
we should consider ourselves primitive. We are primitive only in our own minds. Mankind is not 
dumb. In spite of all the bad things we've done to each other over the centuries, we are amazing 
creatures who, despite appearances, care for each other and our planet, and we're beginning to reach 
out to other worlds. 

Some researchers believe UFO sightings are an "internally generated psychic phenomenon," that 
witnesses simply create visions in their own minds. Debunkers say they're all the result of 
drunkenness, hallucinations, hoaxes or misinterpretations of normal phenomena — none of which 
explain the injuries, deaths, physical traces, radar tracks or mass sightings . 1 

Many people believe aliens are benevolent creatures who are concerned about us and have 
come to help us. With one possible exception, none of the witnesses I've talked to in Brazil would 
agree with that. 

Some researchers and witnesses think the aliens have our best interests at heart, but the aliens 
may have no better understanding of us than we have of them. And our "best interests" may mean 
nothing to them. 


A Control System? 

Other researchers are convinced that a very public meeting with the aliens is imminent, 
whenever we are able to handle it. The theory is that each sighting and encounter is part of some 
slowly evolving plan by the extraterrestrials to bring our worlds together in the interest of cosmic 
harmony. However, the Brazilian victims I have met would undoubtedly agree that the aliens could 
best promote harmony by staying in their own worlds. 

Other people believe UFOs are a control system, slowly conditioning us to accept not only their 
presence but also our admission into the cosmic community . 2 If the phenomenon is a control system, 
perhaps we are being conditioned for goals that are not good and beneficial, as we might hope. The 
human race has become more murderous than ever — wars in the twentieth century alone have killed 
between one hundred million and two hundred million people — and we're now capable of destroying 
the world. 

The aliens could be just as crazy as some of us are. The fact that they can get here from there 
doesn't mean they're particularly wise or bright. The vast majority of Earth people are intelligent, and 
there's no reason to believe aliens are any smarter. They may simply have been around a lot longer. 
What will we be capable of in a hundred or thousand years? Try a million. 

There are a number of theories as to what UFOs are, where they come from and what they're 
doing here. Most people believe they're from other planets or stars. However, scientists tell us the 
nearest stars that may have inhabitable planets are too far away to reach unless you're moving at the 
speed of light. That's something like six hundred sixty nine million miles an hour, and even at that 
pace it would take years. 


Parallel Universes 



Some people believe UFOs are time travelers, coming here from the future or the past. I don't 
share that belief because I don't believe time is a physical dimension. That's always a dangerous thing 
to say, because once you do the nearest physicist will jump down your throat with both feet, not 
bothering to take his boots off. Too many of his equations and theories are based on time as a major 
component . 3 

To me, time is just a mental concept — and the greatest discovery anyone's ever made. It has 
enabled us to organize our lives, create civilized societies and complex technologies, play video 
games, drive cars that talk to you and make ships that can go to the moon. One day it will help us go to 
those worlds where UFO aliens come from and pester them for a while. 

Finally, a growing number of researchers are coming to believe UFOs come from other 
dimensions. I do, too, although I prefer the term that many scientists use, parallel universes. Most 
physicists believe parallel universes may exist, and some believe they actually do exist, side by side 
by side with our universe, perhaps in i nfi nite numbers. 

If there are other universes, there must be stars and planets and life in them, just as we have in 
ours. (Once people get used to the idea of multiple universes, you'll hear them saying: "It would be 
pretty egotistical to think ours is the only universe with life in it.") 

If other universes do exist, then it's possible that inhabitants of one or more of those universes 
have learned how to travel between universes. They come in craft that can counter the pull of our 
gravity, allowing them to hover silently and motionlessly, then zip out of sight in seconds. They can 
also pop in and out of our universe at will and maybe into any of several other universes. 

This could explain why people see UFOs suddenly appear and just as suddenly disappear. It 
could also explain where UFOs go when they're through bothering people, because they simply seem 
to vanish rather than go park in a field for a while. 

The aliens may just be coming through, passing on to some other universe perhaps, and there 
may be many different civilizations traveling through space all the time. We will just have to put up 
with it until we learn how to travel to other universes ourselves. 

Parallel universes might clarify some abduction reports where people say they are taken to a 
strange land, a red city, for example, or a land with no sky. The victims might simply be taken into 
another universe and eventually returned to our own . 4 

Underground Base 

One abduction witness in Puerto Rico told me he went aboard a disc-shaped UFO late one night 
after a small creature came to his house, knocked on the door and invited him to go with him. The man 
was neither curious nor afraid, and he voluntarily walked down the road with the creature to a UFO 
sitting in a field. 

They entered, the UFO moved into the sky and a short distance away it simply went straight into 
a mountain, apparently just passing through the rock walls without difficulty. Inside was an enormous 
chamber, like a cavern, in which the man saw dozens if not hundreds of other UFOs of different sizes 
and many creatures similar to the one that had come to his house. 

He was shown about for a long time and then was taken back home. If parallel universes exist, 
he may simply have been taken into another universe rather than "melting" through the walls of the 
mountain. 



If residents of one parallel universe have learned how to move from one universe to another, 
then residents of a second and third or a dozen or more universes may have the same capabilities. 
This could explain the great variety of UFOs and the different behavior of various aliens, some 
helpful, some harmful, others indifferent. 


A Universe Warp? 

Parallel universes may also explain what happened in England in October, 1987, when two men 
saw a glowing object in the sky. It was hovering, looking at first like a shaft of light. Then it seemed 
to change shape, to a rugby ball, to a hemisphere, to a triangle and finally to a square. Then it slowly 
shrank into a red dot and disappeared. 

Could it be that the object was in the midst of a "universe warp," partly here, partly there, partly 
elsewhere? Could it be that we can see into some adjoining universes but aren't aware of it? 

UFOs are tracked on radar, have broken tree limbs, left marks on the ground, and caused burns 
and other injuries. All of these would be possible when they're fully within our universe. But when 
they're seen passing through walls, when they're not tracked on radar even though pilots see them near 
their planes, when they appear and disappear like ghosts, and defy gravity, then they may be moving 
beyond our universe on their way home or somewhere else. They may even be visible to us in two or 
more adjoining universes before passing out of sight. 

If this is actually happening, then the denizens of parallel universes probably have visited other 
worlds besides ours, and Earth's humans and animals could be just another batch of creatures that may 
or may not be interesting. But we must seem inferior or even greatly [ inferior to them, something to 
observe or torment. Just as we study ants and find them fascinating, we'd never think of socializing 
with them. 


Something Real That Isn’t 

Parallel universes could also explain the silent explosions. In the Puerto Rican case, after the 
triangular object allegedly swallowed the two jet fighters, it came down low near the ground, 
exploded without a sound in a big shower of sparks, and then divided into two smaller objects with 
each disappearing in different directions. The explosion may have occurred a universe or two away, 
visible to the witnesses but with neither sound nor debris penetrating into our universe. 

We're dealing with something real that isn't real. Parallel universes might explain that paradox. 
Parallel universes would also mean we're dealing with an "earthbound" phenomenon and nothing 
extraterrestrial. It's "here" all the time, and it isn't. 

All this sounds absurd, but so is the phenomenon. 

We should always be aware of the possibility that the UFO phenomenon, when its mystery is 
solved, will be of little or no importance, that it will have no significant impact on life. 

To put the phenomenon into perspective, since its "discovery" in the 1940s, it has had little 
effect on the scheme of things. It may be potentially the biggest story of mankind, as most researchers 
believe, but as of now it can't be considered important compared with such terrible worldwide 
problems as poverty, hunger, racial, religious and ethnic hatred and warfare, gangster governments 
and the still-real threat of nuclear annihilation. 



A Haphazard Phenomenon? 


We have enough difficulty dealing with each other in this world of ours, and we certainly don't 
need more trouble from outsiders, regardless of where they're from. But these outsiders are here, or 
are coming here from time to time, and we have no choice but to deal with them. The people of this 
world have a right to know that intruders are in our midst and that some of them are harmful. 

UFOs have not had any serious effect on the overall life of the people in this world. The 
witnesses are too scattered and too often are not influential members of their communities or nations. 

I don't believe witnesses are "chosen" by the phenomenon but simply are unfortunate to be at a place 
where and when a UFO appears. It|is, I suggest, a rather haphazard phenomenon. Although hundreds 
of thousands and possibly millions of people have had UFO sightings and encounters, relatively few 
had their lives changed profoundly by an experience. 

The possibility always exists that the phenomenon will remain a mystery for thousands of years, 
to tantalize, taunt and terrify the generations to come. Or it could just disappear tomorrow, unsolved. 
However, there's no sign that it has gone away or even diminished. Sightings continue. The space 
travelers may well be around forever. 

Even if UFOs do come from parallel universes, it doesn't explain why aliens have been on such 
a rampage in Brazil and virtually nowhere else. None of the several hundred interviews I've had with 
victims in Brazil have given me any clues. 

At one time I thought that what's been happening could be likened to "wilding," the mindless 
violence that has taken hold in the United States and other countries in recent years. Wilding is a term 
describing what a gang of kids do when they brutally beat up an individual simply for the fun of it. But 
what they do is deliberate, and there's been no indication the UFO beings are deliberately hurting and 
killing people. 

What seems more likely is that the UFO beings are simply insensitive to the harm they cause. 
That shouldn't be difficult to understand. Here on Earth, some scientists are accused of experimenting 
on animals without apparent regard for the pain and misery they inflict. The bad guys of Brazil's 
UFOs don't seem to be experimenting on people nor are they necessarily ganging up on people, but 
they're also not concerned about the fact that they're terrorizing, injuring and killing people. 

Meanwhile, life goes on. In no way has the presence of UFOs halted normal life in Brazil. A 
few witnesses refuse to go outside at night for a while after an encounter, and entire communities may 
stay inside for a few weeks, but eventually everyone gets over their fears and goes on with living. 

The only problem is that we don't know what lies ahead. The UFOs have not gone away. They're 
still very much here, not only in Brazil but in all countries in the world. And we don't know what is 
going to happen in the future. Will these bad guys of Brazil move on to other countries or will the 
"good guys" in other countries go bad? 

The violence that has been taking place in Brazil may be the first faint wisps of smoke arising 
from a volcano that will one day explode. 

1. One of the largest recorded mass sightings occurred in Puerto Rico in 1977. Approximately a 
thousand people watched two glowing balls of light drift slowly over the port city of Mayaguez 
and land in the ocean a mile offshore, where they bobbed for several hours, sometimes going 



beneath the surface and then coming backup. The police had a nightmare trying to unsnarl a 
massive traffic jam 

2. We’re already part of the cosmic community, even though we aren’t yet able to travel to other 
worlds. 

3. A physicist once admitted to me that he thought a lot about time over the years and had come to 
believe it is a physical dimension, but he couldn’t prove it. Another physicist, after 
figuratively stomping me into the rug, boomed: “Time is from the Big Bang to now!” I’m not 
sure what that meant either, but if he’s correct, then there is no future, only the past. 

4. Perhaps we move into other universes in our dreams. How many times have you dreamed 
about places you’ve never seen before in your life? And sometimes gone back to those same 
strange places in subsequent dreams? Maybe we even live in two or more parallel universes 
simultaneously. That could explain why one tennis player of my acquaintance frequently calls 
shots “out” when the rest of us see the ball land inside the court. Maybe his universe is half a 
second ahead of or behind ours and he’s honestly calling the shots as he sees them. 



Epilogue 

THE CAPTURE OF TWO LIVE ETs 

The Brazilian military captured two live extraterrestrials in January 1996 and secretly sent them 
to the United States for study. 

This revelation, which could have world-shaking consequences, was made by veteran UFO 
investigators Ubirajara Rodrigues, forty-two, and Vitorio Pacaccini, thirty-two, both intelligent, well- 
educated and very sane men. Their evidence seems quite strong. 

They say the aliens were captured in Varginha, a medium-sized city about two hundred miles 
northwest of Rio de Janeiro, at a time when UFOs were being seen throughout Brazil in perhaps far 
greater numbers than ever before. 1 

Witnesses described the two creatures as humanoid, about three feet tall, with dark brown, 
hairless skin that was very oily, big triangular heads with three short "protuberances" on top and 
huge, red, vertically-oval eyes. They had long, thin arms and short, thin legs. They had no obvious 
noses or ears and only a slit for mouths. They were not wearing clothing, and no sex organs were 
visible. One had a small pot belly and very tough nails. Particularly striking is that they had unusually 
large veins growing out of their necks and running down their shoulders, arms, chests and backs, 
making them look like weightlifters. 

"(Brazilian) Army Intelligence captured them, and the authorities are keeping it quiet," 

Pacaccini said when I visited Brazil two months after the incident. "There is no doubt about it. We 
have evidence that we can't reveal right now because people would go to jail. But we will continue 
our investigation until we have the proof we need." 

Pacaccini and Rodrigues based their conclusions on interviews with more than half a dozen 
people who actually saw one or both creatures, and at least fifteen others who have second or third- 
hand knowledge of them. 

It all began about three o'clock on the afternoon of January 20, 1996, as three young women 
were walking home in the Endare district of Varginha after helping a woman pack to move to another 
home. 

"We decided to take a shortcut through a vacant lot," said Liliane Silva, sixteen, who was with 
her sister, Valquira, fourteen, and Katia Xavier, twenty-two. Katia is a maid for the woman who was 
moving, and the sisters are still in school. 

The lot covers most of a city block and is filled with tall grass and weeds. On one side is an 
empty, cinderblock building. When they had walked about fifty feet into the lot, something caught 
Liliane's attention. 

"Look at that!" she cried. What they saw about twenty feet away was a strange creature squatting 
down next to the cinderblock wall with its left side to the girls. Its left arm was between its legs and 
the right was next to the building. Its feet were hidden in the grass, and the girls never saw the hands 
or feet. 

"ft had oily, brown skin with big eyes and three horns on its head," Liliane was to say many 
times later to UFO investigators and news reporters. She and the other two said the creature was 
repulsive looking, but it was the huge, red eyes that disturbed them most. 

All three stared at the creature for a stunned moment, then screamed. The creature turned its 



head and looked at them, seemed almost frightened and crouched a bit lower, perhaps trying to hide 
from them. The three immediately fled back to the street and didn't stop running until they reached the 
Silva home more than twenty blocks away. 

Fifteen to twenty minutes later, after they'd calmed down, Katia and the girls' mother, Luiza, 
found someone to drive them back to the vacant lot. By then the creature was gone, but they found a 
round area of crushed grass where it had been and a smell like sulfur. Later that day a severe 
thunderstorm washed away any traces of the creature. 

Enter UFO investigators Ubirajara Rodrigues and Vitorio Pacaccini. 2 Rodrigues heard about 
the girls' encounter a day or two later, and over the next few days repeatedly questioned them, going 
over and over their stories, having them retrace their steps through the lot and questioning their 
families, friends, and neighbors. The first few times he interrogated the three, they cried when they 
described the creature. Rodrigues had an artist make sketches based on their descriptions, and the 
girls were upset all over again when they saw the drawings. He was convinced they were telling the 
truth. 

Two weeks later, he began hearing rumors that there had been not one but two creatures and 
both had been captured by the military. With his busy law practice, however, he couldn't devote as 
much time to the investigation as he wanted to. At this point, his longtime friend and fellow 
investigator, Pacaccini, began helping. Pacaccini's export-import business in Belo Horizonte, one 
hundred eighty miles to the north, allows him considerable flexibility, and he began to make more 
frequent trips to the family home in Tres Coracoes where his widowed mother and grandmother live. 3 

It is fifteen miles from Varginha. 

Fascinating information came tumbling in from various people, including two nurses who saw 
one of the creatures in a hospital and a man who helped capture one. Other sources recounted 
conversations they'd had with military personnel who had confided in them. This is the scenario that 
Rodrigues and Pacaccini pieced together: 

What the three young women had encountered on Saturday afternoon January 20 was actually the 
second creature seen that day, and the first was captured around ten that morning just three blocks 
farther down the same hill. Involved in the capture were an army major and two sergeants as well as 
six military policemen who work as firemen. 

In Brazil, the military police are not part of the nation's armed forces. They are state police 
under the control of a state's governor. They perform a variety of functions, such as highway 
patrolmen, riot police and rescue workers in floods and other disasters. They are also the nation's 
firemen, and one of their duties as such is capturing mad dogs, wild animals and dangerous snakes. It 
was in this capacity that four firemen answered a call on the morning of January 20 about a wild 
creature being seen on a hillside in the Endare district. 

The four arrived in a fire truck, only to discover the three army men already there, standing near 
a large army truck. The army is a much more powerful authority in Brazil than the military police, and 
the firemen were unsure what they should do. They radioed their superior and asked him to come to 
the scene. He arrived some minutes later in a car with another fireman, conferred with the army major 
and then sent the first four firemen down the hill to capture the creature. 

Earlier, the creature had been seen slowly shuffling down the steep embankment, which leads to 
a set of railroad tracks and a patch of woods beyond the tracks. Three kids had been throwing stones 
at it, and three adults were watching when the sergeants and major arrived and told them all to leave, 



saying it was a secret army operation. 

By now the creature had disappeared into the woods. The four firemen proceeded to walk and 
slide down the embankment, cross the tracks, and go into the woods. They found the creature without 
difficulty and threw a net over it. It didn't resist and made only a slight buzzing sound with its lips. 

The firemen carried it back up the hill in the net without difficulty. It was put in a wooden box in the 
back of the army truck and covered with a canvas. No one said anything. The two sergeants then 
climbed into the back of the truck with the box, and the major drove to a large army base fifteen miles 
away in Tres Coracoes. 

Rodrigues' and Pacaccini's informants said the second creature was captured in the same 
Varginha neighborhood about five or six o'clock that afternoon after Luiza Silva phoned the firemen 
and told them about the creature her daughters and Katia Xavier had seen. The wife of one fireman 
who helped capture it reportedly was so disturbed about his uniform being so oily from the creature 
that she burned it. 

The second creature may have appeared ill. The firemen took it to a small, state-run health 
clinic and asked a doctor to come to the car to see if it was all right. The doctor took one look at it, 
instantly refused to help and insisted they take it away. Eventually they drove it to the regional 
hospital in Varginha. 

The creature was placed in a hospital bed, and that section of the hospital was closed off. Later 
in the evening the two nurses, after hearing about the strange creature but ignoring warnings from 
colleagues that it was "very ugly," sneaked a look at it through a partially open door. It was alive and 
an oxygen mask covered its face. 

Two army trucks loaded with soldiers, two jeeps and an ambulance were parked outside the 
hospital entrance for several hours late that night, but the soldiers, who were armed with rifles and 
bayonets, never left the trucks. Then, about one or two in the morning, the creature was taken to the 
army base in Tres Coracoes. 

About four o'clock in the morning, a French-built Puma helicopter arrived from somewhere, 
landed on the base's polo field and left again before daybreak. The creatures were taken elsewhere, 
possibly to a base in Rio de Janeiro and then on to the United States. This information came from 
disgruntled military personnel who resented that something so important should be turned over to the 
Americans. 

This is basically the story that Pacaccini related over a six-day period when I visited Varginha, 
Tres Coracoes and Belo Horizonte at the beginning of a three-week visit in March and April. 

No UFO was seen in connection with the ETs, although at one-thirty the morning before, on 
January 19, a farmer and his wife six miles from Varginha woke up when they heard their cattle 
bellowing. Cattle thieves, they thought, and rushed outside to see the animals running up a hill—and 
just beyond the corral was a strange object the size of a small bus. It was moving silently a few feet 
above the ground. The farmer said it was a "gray submarine," and his wife said it was cigar-shaped. 
And the night before that, another couple had seen a green flash in the sky over Varginha. 

This book was well into the production process when I decided to go to Brazil one more time. It 
had been three years since my last trip, and for all I knew, UFOs could have abandoned the country 
altogether. I wanted to know what, if anything, was going on. 

When I arrived in Rio de Janeiro on March 21,1 knew nothing of the capture of the two ETs. 
However, by coincidence I had planned to start my visit in Varginha, simply because Ubirajara 



Rodrigues had shared an abduction case with me in 1979, and I wanted to see him again. Further, I 
had worked with Pacaccini in 1991 and believed he was living in Tres Coracoes, so I had a double 
reason for going to that region. 4 

Cynthia Luce, with whom I had worked several times before, joined me once again. When we 
arrived at Pacaccini's home at noon on my second day in the country, he told us a television interview 
about the ET case had been arranged for later in the day. He asked me not to reveal the title of this 
book because he was afraid it would panic the people. I didn't want to be responsible for that 
happening, so I agreed. 

Over the next few days, he told how he and Rodrigues had learned the details of the ETs' 
capture, but he didn't name their informants for fear they would be severely punished. He said at least 
four military men had already been jailed or put under house arrest in connection with the case, and at 
least three had nothing to do with the creatures. 

A colonel at the army base curtly denied all reports that any creatures had been seen or 
captured. However, a construction worker helping build a house a block away from the capture site 
was quoted on TV as saying he had seen the army truck and fire truck that morning and that people had 
told him they'd seen the creature being captured. He soon came under severe pressure from the police 
not to say anything more, and shortly after he moved to another city two hours away. 

The UFO investigators did learn the identity of one of the six people told by the army major to 
leave the scene that morning, but she adamantly refused to talk to them 

Rumors abounded. The more I heard, the more it sounded like nearly everyone involved kept 
their mouths shut—except to confide in close friends and relatives. I made no effort to find out who 
Rodrigues' and Pacaccini's sources were or to check them out, mainly because I didn't want to 
jeopardize the informants. 5 Besides, from what little I knew, it seemed to me that it wouldn't take 
Army Intelligence long to find out who was talking. 

It also seemed that all Army Intelligence had to do was to continue denying anything happened, 
keep those involved quiet and eventually the public would lose interest. The story would die and with 
it one of ufology's best chances ever to prove UFOs come from other worlds. 

I had many questions in my mind about the whole thing, and even wondered if Rodrigues and 
Pacaccini, or someone using them, were trying to hoax me. If so, I couldn't figure out why or how 
anyone would benefit. Besides, long before I arrived, at least two witnesses who had seen the 
creatures went on TV with their faces blanked out and their voices electronically altered to tell what 
they had seen. 

On April 10, two days before leaving Brazil, I phoned Pacaccini one last time. He said he and 
Rodrigues had learned their phones were being tapped, and their cars had been followed. He also 
said that just two days earlier they had received startling information that explained everything, but he 
wouldn't discuss it over the phone. 

In the meantime, UFO sightings were being reported virtually everywhere in the country, from 
the Amazon in the far northwest all the way down to the southernmost state, especially in March. 

Many reports came not only from Varginha and Tres Coracoes but also from other cities in southern 
Minas Gerais. 

In my last two weeks in the country, Cynthia Luce and I talked to about thirty people who'd had 
sightings or encounters. Nineteen of the incidents had taken place between March 4 and April 6. 

Never before in my previous ten visits had I found so much current UFO activity. 



Even more interesting is that we went to only four localities: (1) the Varginha-Tres Coracoes 
area, (2) Jequitiba in the Valley of the Old Women north of Belo Horizonte, (3) Conceicao do Mato 
Dentro, also in the Valley and farther northeast, and (4) Sao Jose do Vale do Rio Preto, where 
Cynthia lives in the neighboring state of Rio de Janeiro. The four areas are quite some distance from 
each other, and it is difficult to believe that we went to the only localities in Brazil where UFOs were 
being seen. It is more likely that what we found is a representative sample of what was happening all 
over the country, and instead of thirty witnesses, there could easily have been three thousand or even 
thirty thousand in March and April alone. 

Besides the January 20 incident involving the three young women, and the one on January 19 
when the farmer and his wife saw the "submarine" or cigar-shaped object, two other interesting 
sightings occurred in Varginha. 

One took place late on the night of March 16, when a married couple and another man in their 
thirties saw a huge, red sphere in the same district where the girls had seen the creature. The top half 
of the sphere remained stationary while the bottom half—with three short, slender projections 
sticking out the sides-oscillated. The object was slowly moving about as if looking for something, and 
then it came back and stopped about a thousand feet over the couple's house. After several minutes it 
slowly drifted to the east, then suddenly disappeared at great speed. 

The other sighting was even more spectacular. At eleven in the morning on April 2, a silver disc 
was seen moving through the sky. It came to a stop above a multinational company's plant where parts 
are made for autos. A short time later a second disc appeared, stopped directly above the first and 
then slowly settled down on top of it until they somehow merged, at which time the single unit floated 
around a bit and then zipped away at fast speed. Reportedly, fifty workers witnessed this. 6 

In the mountains around Jequitiba, a teenager on horseback was badly frightened when a red 
light followed him one evening in January, and he fled to a farmhouse. 7 In the same area late at night 
on March 15, a thirty-six-year- old farmer riding his horse home also got a bad scare when an intense, 
red light appeared in the sky about a hundred yards away. It was so bright he could hardly see. Then it 
began zigzagging and going up and down. He galloped away to the nearest farmhouse. 

A thirteen-year-old boy in the same area told us he and his family often see a revolving, red 
light circling above their farm and making a shhhh-ing sound. 

In a five-year-old case, a butcher's car stopped of its own accord on a lonely dirt road near 
Jequitiba late one night when a huge light in the sky came toward it. The light was revolving and, as it 
got closer and closer, his car got hotter and hotter. He couldn't get the engine started. He got so scared 
he fired two shots with a revolver into the air, but it had no effect on the object. Eventually, it went 
away and the car started again. 

One minor tragedy occurred in Jequitiba itself in September 1995. A power failure blacked out 
the city, and a fourteen-year-old boy went out to the sidewalk to take a look. Then he saw a round, 
lighted object in the sky nearby with a number of colored lights blinking on and off. It scared him, and 
he ran back into the darkened house—only to collide with his seventy-year-old grandmother and 
break her right leg. It had healed by the time we talked to her, but she said it was still sore. 

Conceicao do Mato Dentro is fifty miles northwest of Jequitiba, but a mountain range lies in 
between, and driving there over the rugged, dirt roads takes three to four hours. 8 At four-thirty in the 
morning on March 20, ten days before we arrived, a market owner, her husband and thirteen-year- old 
son were awakened by a beeping sound. Leaning out a window, they saw a big, red light about ten 



feet above the street a block away. It sat there beeping for a moment, then blinked out, and the sound 
stopped. An hour later the same sound was heard again, and again the light was seen in the same area. 
Then it vanished again. 

Around ten in the evening on March 4, two revolving lights flashing red and yellow in unison 
were seen near the dirt road thirty miles east of Conceicao do Mato Dentro. The witnesses were a 
businesswoman and her son-in-law. Her shop makes articles for babies, and they were returning from 
a business trip to Belo Horizonte. The lights, about the size of beach balls, moved up and down in the 
sky until they disappeared. 

In Taboleiro, a hamlet in the mountains six miles east of town, five men and women, all related, 
were fishing in a river about eleven o'clock one night around March 20. 9 They had a small fire 
going. A bright light came on in the sky about a hundred feet away. It then shined a beam of light 
down, moving it around as if inspecting the area. The big light, about sixty feet in the air, would stand 
still and then move and at times seemed to oscillate. After half an hour, the light simply turned off At 
no time did the ray of light come near the five people nor did they ever hear anything. 

Also in Taboleiro, we interviewed four people who had seen a huge light sitting above a 
cornfield near a farmhouse about four o'clock one morning in May 1986. It was so bright that the man 
who owned the farm shaded his eyes with his left arm. The arm was numb for a month after, he said. 
He also said he heard two voices but didn't understand the language. An electric wire leading to a 
neighbor's house was broken the same night, and the farmer believes the UFO broke it as it flew away 
from his house. 

Around Sao Jose do Vale do Rio Preto, Cynthia Luce's home area more than two hundred and 
fifty miles to the south, UFOs were seen frequently in 1994 and 1995, and a flap was again under way 
during my visit. 

Most of the current sightings involved strange lights, such as one seen March 17 on a farm next 
to Morro Grande, which at nearly three thousand feet is one of the highest mountains in the region. 
About seven that evening a seventeen-year-old youth saw a huge, yellowish light in the woods on a 
hill two hundred yards away. It lit up all the trees around it. Nearby are two pens holding a hundred 
and fifty pigs but the animals didn't react to the light. After four minutes it disappeared. 

Two nights later, at five minutes after eleven, two teenage sisters and their aunt and uncle in a 
car saw a big ball of red light as they left the main highway and started up the dirt road leading to 
homes near Morro Grande. The light was revolving but soon disappeared toward Sao Jose. Five 
minutes later, one of the girls spotted the same red light or one like it. It was low in the sky straight 
ahead of them. It was sitting still and was revolving. Then the aunt spotted a second one, identical to 
the first, about twenty degrees to the left of the first one. Both stayed stationary for another minute or 
two. Then the one on the left flew directly toward the side of Morro Grande and simply vanished. 
Then the other one flew toward Morro Grande, turned sharply downward and also vanished into the 
face of the mountain. 

About seven-thirty on the night of March 27, at least half a dozen eighth-graders standing on the 
porch of a night school nearby saw a big, red light fly slowly over the school toward the hill on the 
other side of the road, then turn around and pass back over the school. It made no noise. 

Two nights later, at seven in the evening, the caretaker of a farm was sitting on his porch not far 
from where the other sightings occurred. Suddenly something like a huge headlight appeared just 
above banana trees to his left. To get a better look, he started walking down the hill toward the road. 



As he did, the light crossed directly in front of him for a short distance, then reversed direction, and- 
like the other two—vanished into the face of Morro Grande. 

UFOs appear to be showing greater interest in Brazil than ever before, and the fascinating 
Varginha ET case indicated that some aliens may not be as invulnerable as once thought. 

None of the witnesses in the 1996 sightings that we talked to had been hurt or been victims of 
attempts to abduct them. Many said they weren't even frightened. But too many cases remain to be 
investigated before we can say whether the hostile UFOs have left. Still, the history of UFOs in Brazil 
shows they can be a threat to anyone anywhere. At the same time, it must be pointed out that, every 
day, most of us face a far greater threat of being hurt or killed in traffic or by criminals. 

Bob Pratt, 26 April 1996 

1. Varginha (Var-ZJEAN-yuh) is a city with several hundred thousand inhabitants, many of whom 
work for multi-national firms with offices or plants there. It is in a mountainous region of 
southern Minas Gerais, and the city spreads over a number of hills. 

2. Ubirajara (Oo-bee-ruh-ZJAR-uh) Rodrigues is a successful lawyer in Varginha handling 
worker-compensation cases for companies and has been investigating UFOs for more than 
twenty years. He and his wife, Angelica, who teaches English, have two children. Vitorio 
Pacaccini (Pak-uh-CHEEN-nee) is an export-import broker in Belo Horizonte who arranges 
for worldwide shipment of products to and from Brazil in cargo containers. He also manages 
his family's three large coffee farms, is single and has been investigating UFOs for seventeen 
years. Most of the information for this account comes from Pacaccini, who has studied in the 
U.S. and speaks fluent English. 

3. Trace Core-uh-Soysh. 

4. By now he had moved back to Belo Horizonte but was making frequent trips to Tres Coracoes. 

5. Although I did spend about an hour interviewing the three young women who had seen the one 
creature, and they seemed quite believable. 

6. When this happened, we were far away in Conceicao do Mato Dentro, and this information 
came from Pacaccini. 

7. Juh-KEETCH-ee-BAH. 

8. Cone-say-SOW doo Mah-toe DANE-trow. 

9. Tah-boo-LAY-rue.