Latin American High Weirdness: The UFOs Part I

In previous installments (which can be found here, here, and here) I put forth the notion that Latin America has served as a kind of playground for the Cryptocracy. In those installments I mainly focused on the role cults (especially those founded by expat Americans and Europeans) have played in the latter half of the 20th century amongst various Latin American nations. Most notably several of these sects had links to various intelligence agencies with a special emphasis on brainwashing.

In this installment we shall focus on the legacy of UFOs in Latin America, especially Brazil. Latin American UFO sightings and encounters are badly neglected amongst US ufologists and for good reason -They are hard to reconcile with the extraterrestrial hypothesis that dominates the American UFO field. Latin American UFO encounters are even more surreal and mystical and occult connections are even more overt. Let us consider the case of Jose Antonio, a Brazilian soldier in the military police, which I've already chronicled in the context of entheogens. Antonio's abduction experience began 'typically' enough with a burst of light hitting him while he was out fishing. Two masked figures in dull aluminium suits seized him a brought him on board a craft that looked like an upright cylinder. It was when Antonio was brought inside the craft that things started to get weird.

"After a period of travel that seemed 'interminable,' the machine landed with a jarring sensation, and the little men unfastened Jose Antonio. They put a bandage over the eyeholes in his helmet and carried him with his knees dragging on the ground. He heard footsteps and the sound of many people talking. Finally he was placed on a backless seat and the bandage was removed

"Jose Antonio found himself in a large quadrangular room, thirty by forty feet, about fifteen feet away from a robust dwarf who stared at him 'with apparent satisfaction...'
"Other beings of similar appearance began arriving until about fifteen dwarfs were in the room. The soldier assumed there was a door in the back beyond his field of vision. The three walls he could see had no window and no door. To his left was a low shelf with the corpses of four men, one of them a Negro. He thought they had been killed by the homunculi. The whole room seemed to be made of stone, and at one point Jose Antonio was given something to drink out of a cubical stone glass, and the cavity containing a dark green liquid was in the shape of an inverted pyramid...

The leader of the dwarfs began a strange conversation with the soldier. It was conducted entirely through gestures and drawings and revolved around the concept of weapons. (Jose Antonio thinks that they must have perceived that he was in the military and illustrated this by their actions.) At one time, a little man shot a beam of light against the stone wall. The communication seemed to be a request that Jose Antonio help the little beings in their relations with earth. Was he to be their guide among men? This is what Jose Antonio understood. He gestured his refusal and began praying, fingering the rosary he always carried with him:

The leader stepped towards him and, displaying irritation for the first time, seized the crucifix and snatched it from him. One of the beads rolled onto the floor and was picked up by one of the little men, who showed it to the others. The crucifix was passed around in the same way, arousing the curiosity of all of them.

While this discussion took place among the homunculi Jose Antonio had a vision of a Christ-like entity, 'his eyes clear and serene,' barefoot and wearing a dark robe. The figure made some revelations to Jose Antonio, who now refuses to disclose them. The apparition vanished, the irritated dwarfs blindfolded him again, and he was transported back. As the machine landed, he felt that he was being dragged and he lost consciousness. He woke up alone near the town of Vitoria in the state of Espirito Santo, two hundred miles away from the spot where he had been fishing. He had been way for four and a half days.
(Dimensions, Jacques Vallee, pgs. 189-190)

Various aspects of Antonio's abduction experience resemble the initiation rites of various secret societies. This is hardly the only instance in which the occult appears in connection with UFOs in Latin America. Let us consider the curious deaths of Miguel Jose and Manuel Pereira da Cruz, both of whom were electronics technicians. One day in 1966 their bodies were found atop a steep hill across the bay from Rio de Jeneiro dressed in neat suits and new rain coats, laying on their backs.

"The investigators found no blood, no signs of any violence at the site. The two corpses were lying peacefully side by side. Next to them were crude metal masks as well as slips of paper covered with notes. One of these notes contained elementary electrical formulas. Also found was a crushed piece of aluminized blue and white paper, some cellophane soaked in a chemical substance, and a handkerchief with the initials AMS.

"The skin of the corpses had a pinkish color and showed possible burns, but decomposition had progressed to the point where such a finding was not significant. Indeed, the coroner, Astor de Melo, soon concluded that death was by natural causes (cardiac arrest) and closed the file. His examination of the bowels had revealed no poison. The men had died sometime between Tuesday, August 16, and Saturday, August 20...

"Unhappy with the stated cause of death, the man in charge of security for the state of Rio, Col. Eduardo de Cento Pfeil, held a review meeting with police delegate Jose Venancio Bettencourt and an electronics technician. The next day he contacted Toledo Pizza, director of the Coroners Institute. Dr. Alberto Farah was asked to conduct a second autopsy. The viscera were removed and analyzed. The pathologist also looked for possible injection sites in the bodies, but the second autopsy revealed nothing new.

"On the basis of these facts the police examined a number of hypotheses. Could robbery have been a motive for the crime? A large sum of money seemed to have disappeared between the time Miguel and Manuel left Campos with nearly 3 million cruzeiros and the time they were found dead. But this hypothesis did not explain the manner of death and the absence of a struggle.

"Were the men spies? The Morro do Vintem is a strategic spot from which the entire area can be surveyed. More prosaically, it would also be an idea location for a TV repeater, the type of electronic installation in which the two men specialized. The absence of any violence, again, seemed to exclude espionage and foul play."
(Confrontations, Jacques Vallee, pgs. 6-8)

Even more curious were reports called into the police of a UFO flying above the hill on which the bodies of Manuel and Miguel were found near the time of their deaths as well as the obsession both men had with spiritualism.

"One of the first callers was a society matron, Gracinda Barbosa Couninho de Souza. She told Officer Bettencourt that as she was driving along Alameda Sao Boaventura in Fonseca with three of her children on Wednesday evening, her daughter Denise, then seven, told her to look up in the sky over the Morro do Vintem. She saw an oval object, orange in color, with a line of fire around its edges, 'sending out rays in all directions,' while it hovered over the hill. She had time to stop the car and to observe it carefully as it rose and fell vertically for three or four minutes, giving off a well-defined 'blue ray...'

"This observation was soon confirmed by a large number of witnesses who called police independently to report they had seen an orange-colored, egg-shaped object giving off blue rays over the Morro do Vintem, adding that they had not reported it at the time for fear of ridicule that attaches to UFO cases. All reports placed the object in the vicinity of the victims near the estimated time of death...

"Also interrogated was Manuel Pereira da Cruz's widow. Her testimony indicated that the two victims were members of s 'spiritualist' group, an occult society with unknown objectives. It was rumored that the group attempted to communicate with other planets. A civilian pilot named Elcio Correa das Silva was also a member of the group.

"Elcio disclosed to the investigators that he had, indeed, conducted a number of 'experiments' with the two victims, one in Manuel's garden in Campos, and another time on the beach at Atafona. In that experiment Elcio and another man named Valdir had witnessed a huge blast. This had taken place on June 13, 1966, two months before the tragedy in Neteroi. There was an explosion, a luminous object in the sky, a blinding flash. Local fishermen stated they had seen a flying saucer fall into the sea. The explosion was so powerful that it was heard in Campos. But speculation was dampened when the families of the victims testified at the inquest: the devices used at Atafona and in Campos were only homemade bombs, they said, manufactured with pipes and wires.

"The police started digging deeper into the victims' backgrounds: they had attended courses in Sao Paulo organized by Philips Electronics and other firms; they had purchased sophisticated equipment, yet they were not thought to be qualified to conduct scientific experiments. There were allegations that the victims maintained an illegal radio station in Glicerio, in the Macae district. And again, witnesses spoke of their interests in the paranormal. A few days before his death, Manuel is supposed to have said that he was going to attend a 'final test,' after which he would say whether or not he was a 'believer.'

"Another curious element in the case was one of the notes found next to the corpses. It read:

Meet at the designated spot at 4:30 P.M. At 6:30 P.M. ingest the capsules. After the effect is produced, protect half of the face with lead masks. Wait for prearranged signal.

"Were the two men expecting to be contacted by a UFO? Or were they, more prosaically, taking part in a spiritualist experiment that went wrong?..

"A group of Brazilian spiritualists claimed to be in contact with Jupiterian beings through psychic channeling. According to these messages, the deaths of the victims were an accident that resulted when 'they started running forward [toward the saucer that was supposed to pick them up] before they were instructed to do so.' The channel also disclosed that the Jupiterians were female, one foot taller than the average humans, with vertical mouths and four fingers on their hands. Nobody took the revelations seriously, since there was no evidence the men had died while running...

"...the channeled revelations from Jupiter had explained the specific details of the murder. A lengthy discussion we had at the home of Professor Silvio Lago, a medical doctor who had been called by the court as an expert witness on parapsychology, threw some light on the spiritualist aspects. According to Professor Lago, the victims may have been engaged in a series of seances during which a paranormal entity was supposed to manifest itself. After the experiment in Campos, and again after the explosion on Atafona Beach, Manuel had found powder at the site. He may have suspected that others, possibly including Elcio, had designed a hoax to convince him of the reality of the 'entity.' Yet... they were willing to make a third attempt at contact with the entity in question: there must have been a higher-level person who remained in the background and whose instructions they trusted -possibly the person who gave them the orders written on the note."
(ibid, pgs. 8-12)

the lead masks found with the bodies

Both of these encounters occurred in the framework of the occult. In the case of Jose Antonio his abduction resembles the initiation process used by secret societies such as the Freemasons as do various symbols present within the flying saucer. As for the deaths of Manuel and Miguel, they seem to have been engaged in some kind of magical working leading up to their final hours. In both cases the victims consumed some form of a sacrament. In the case of Antonio, he was given a dark green liquid out of a cubicle stone glass sporting an inverted pyramid. In the a mysterious of Manuel and Miguel, they were told to ingest a mysterious capsule before the presumed working began.

the letter telling Manuel and Miguel to ingest the mysterious capsules

Were these substances entheogens? I speculated as much in the case of Antonio in a prior installment. In the case of Manuel and Miguel I have found no evidence of entheogens, but their deaths occurred in the mid-1960s in Brazil, so possibly something was missed or covered up. Brazil was something of a hot spot for the black opts in the 1960s as we shall discuss in a future installment.

Vallee briefly speculates that Manuel and Miguel were spies before dismissing the notion. I don't think its as far-fetched, however. In a prior post I've chronicled how the US Intelligence community has used cults as guinea pigs in various experiments centered around mind control. In my prior pieces on modern Latin American cults (which can be read here, here, and here) we found ample evidence of this. Perhaps Manuel and Miguel were not spies themselves, but assets being manipulated by a handler for some kind of experiment. Jose Antonio was a soldier in Brazil's elite Guard's Battalion and would make a fine test subject.

The presence of UFOs and possibly entheogens could point to an intelligence link. Certainly UFOs have been used heavily in PSYOPs (as I've chronicled before here, here, here, and here) by the US Intelligence community to both cover up the use of experimental aircrafts in addition to manipulating the public. Entheogens, as noted before here, were heavily used in various mind control experiments by the CIA and the like. Both Colonia Dignidad and Jonestown used drugs as tools of behavior modifications, as I noted before here and here. Both institutions may have had ties to various intelligence services as well.

Colonia Dignidad, an 'agricultural' experiment accused of using drugs for brainwashing purposes.

So, perhaps there's more to the spy angle than Vallee believes. The infamous UFO experience of Antonio Villas Boas may shed further light on the spy angle. First, let us consider a conventional account of Villas Boas' experience.

"On the night of 15 October 1957, twenty-three-year-old Antonio Villas Boas was out on his tractor plowing a field at his farm in Sao Francisco de Salles, which is in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, near the border with Sao Paulo. At about 1 a.m. he saw a large red 'star' approaching. It was similar to a red ball of light that both he and his brother had seen the previous night, and which he chased up and down the field but failed to catch. This second light, however,turned out to be an egg-shaped object so bright that the tractor's headlights could not be seen. It landed some ten to fifteen meters in front of him, on three metallic legs. Since his tractor would not start, Antonio jumped down and began to run away, but he was grabbed by three figures who dragged him into their machine.

"He was led into a circular compartment where rubber tubes were attached to his chin, apparently to draw blood from him. His captors were dressed in tight-fitting metallic suits and round helmets which hid their faces except for their small, bluish eyes. Next, he was taken to another compartment, stripped, and laid down on a white plastic-like couch. One of the abductors began to wash him down with a sponge containing a clear refreshing liquid. Left alone, he suddenly noticed a pungent smell which caused him to be violently sick.

"After a while a woman entered the room. She was blonde, small (about four feet eight inches tall), with a small mouth, nose, and ears but large slanting blue eyes, and unusually high, broad cheekbones. Also, she was naked. In spite of the circumstances, Antonio found her most attractive and became aroused by her sexual advances. They had sex, normal in every way, except that he was perturbed by the guttural barks the woman gave at certain moments, giving him the impression that he was lying with an animal. Before she left, the woman pointed at her belly and then at the sky -which Antonio took to mean that she intended to return and take him away to wherever she lived.

"Antonio's clothes were given back to him and he was then returned to the first room, where three of the 'crew' were sitting talking. After his attempt to steal a box with a clock-like dial on one face was foiled -he wanted it as proof of his experience -he was carried out of the craft and dropped in his field. He had spent four and a quarter hours in the hands of his captors. He was left with some odd wounds on his limbs (they became violet while they healed), and a scar."

(Daimonic Reality, Patrick Harpur, pgs. 208-209)

Again, one can't help but be struck by the surrealism of this encounter. Villas Boas' abduction comes off as much as a retelling of a fairy encounter from the Middle Ages than as an experience involving a vastly scientifically advanced race. What's more, as outlandish as this account may sound, recent evidence has emerged that Villas Boas was in fact used in some kind of black opts experiment by the US Intelligence community. We shall examine this angle and various other instances of black opts and mysterious crafts in the second part of this installment.