Violent UFO Encounters in Brazil

There are many UFO reports that involve injuries to witnesses. A particularly dramatic case from Hobbs, New Mexico, in 1964 involved an eight-year-old boy named Charles who was reportedly burned by a black, top-shaped UFO. While his face swelled up to where his nose reportedly disappeared, he felt no pain. Injury reports come from all over the world, but Brazil seems to have had more than its fair share. Bob Pratt, a UFO investigator who had a long career as a journalist that included a stint as the head of the UFO desk at the National Enquirer, traveled extensively in Brazil and collected UFO and occupant reports that have a common thread of violence to the witnesses.

Pratt wrote a book titled, UFO Danger Zone: Terror and Death in Brazil – Where Next?, that was published in 1996. In his acknowledgements, he thanks the many Brazilian citizens and investigators who helped him. In his introduction, he describes making over ten visits to Brazil between May 1978 and July 1993. He lists the elements peculiarly common in Brazilian reports, including: the sudden appearance of a UFO over a witness’s head followed by “a burst of sunlight” and a subsequent chase by the UFO as the witness runs, attempts to pull the witness up into the UFO using an unseen source and sometimes grappling hooks, and UFO occupants dropping hot liquids on the witnesses to make them let go of whatever they might have grabbed in an attempt to resist being taken away.

fAccording to Pratt, Brazilian names for the malevolent entities include “the animal,” “the fire,” and “the worm.” For UFOs with a habit of sucking blood from the witnesses, as was reported in Colares starting in July 1977, there are the names “chupa chupa” or “chupa sanguine.”

Pratt begins Chapter One with a case he calls “Attack on Moises,” that has elements common to many of the cases he describes later. According to Pratt, on Sunday evening, May 1991, a farmer named Moises Campello was on his way home from his brother’s house. At the top of a hill, a flash of light over the crest of a mountain two miles away, caught his eye. With a surprising speed, the light was then over him. It was big and bright and hard for Campello to look at. It was about the size of a house, made no noise, and seemed to be spinning.

As Pratt interviewed Campello in Campello’s living room, Campello said:

I was paralyzed almost at once, and I thought it was going to take me away. It lit up everything around me, it was very hot. And then I felt like I was being sucked upwards. I got really scared. I was raised about two and a half meters. I couldn’t speak or cry for help, and I couldn’t move. The light was very hot, I was terrified.

According to him, he was let down gently, and the light moved off and hovered nearby at treetop level.

Campello said he couldn’t walk, so he crawled like a lizard. The light came over him and lifted him up in crawling position. He said that his head hit some branches as he went up, that he was paralyzed, and very cold. He said that “the thing” was spinning, that he couldn’t yell for help, and that the light hurt his eyes. According to Pratt, Campello was held up for about fifteen minutes. Then the UFO flew off with a low hum, and Campello dropped to the ground like dead weight.

Campello said that his left eye swelled and that he couldn’t see out of it by the time he got home. According to Pratt, Campello told him, “I don’t go out alone at night.”

Pratt spoke with another man, Januncio De Souza, a seventy-eight-year-old he describes as looking like he “walked out of a Western movie” in Rio Grande do Norte. According to Pratt, De Souza described an experience similar to Campello’s except that De Souza managed to grab on to a tree. De Souza told Pratt that he was dragged up the tree five times and that his chest was “scraped raw.”

He described the light as being so hot, he was afraid he would die if he had to endure it any longer. Through a hole in the bottom of the UFO, he saw a man and a woman, who looked like she was wearing a dress, sitting in what looked like car seats. He said that when they saw he wouldn’t let go, “they dropped something like hot oil on me.” De Souza hung on, the door closed, the light went out, and the craft moved off “like lightning.” De Souza was afraid of going out at night from then on.

Pratt tells the reader that De Souza’s burns and scrapes had healed by the time he spoke with him to the point where he could see no trace of them.

This sort of story came up over and over again and there were accounts where one witness would be unaffected by whatever was pulling the other witness up, and they would grab their distressed companion and pull them back down. This was described by Francisca Bispo De Assis, who was pulled back to Earth on January 27, 1979, by her daughter Josefa. Pratt tells the reader that he spoke with the women 12 days later, and that Francisca became more and more agitated as she told the story.

Many people reported after-effects including headaches, numbness, loss of hearing, loss of sight, and lack of energy that lasted days, weeks, months, or years. One man, Leonel Dos Santos, was so affected that he could no longer work. Pratt wrote that he interviewed him in 1980 and 1991.

According to Pratt, Dos Santos went missing on July 27, 1979, while looking for wood with two friends to build small house on his 130-acre farm. His friends searched for him and all they could find were his footprints, which ended abruptly in a dry riverbed. This was where Dos Santos last remembered being as a large shadow came over him. He said he “seemed kind of paralyzed,” felt his eyes rolling back in his head, had his feet go out in front of him, and then passed out.

He came to on a friend’s farm. He was cold, had a headache, a bad thirst, pains in his chest, a bitter taste in his mouth, and couldn’t hear anything in his right ear. From then on, he suffered chronic pain, dizziness, and lethargy to where he could no longer work. He was forced to sell his farm and was given a job as a night watchman for the local cemetery so he could have money to live.

Pratt describes two others who were disabled by their encounters. One man deteriorated over a period of six months after his encounter to where he had the mind of a one-year-old child. He had been reportedly hit with a beam of light from a UFO in 1976 while riding his donkey. According to Pratt, the donkey was in a stupor for a week, wouldn’t eat for several weeks, and then recovered.

The other man was hit by a beam of light from a UFO in 1979, and he instantly lost the use of his legs and had only partial use of his arms. He was unable to move from the spot until someone found him three days later and got help to get him home. He was still confined to a wheelchair at the time of Pratt’s writing.

Pratt describes case after case of violent UFO encounters and has many pictures of those who reported them along with their names. He discusses the Colares incidents, and is a principal source for interested Western researchers. The Brazilian military conducted an extensive investigation and the documents, which were released in 2005, have many intriguing details.

Why Brazil has so many violent UFO reports is anyone’s guess. Pratt brings up many questions, offers a few speculations ranging from interplanetary to inter-dimensional visitation, but doesn’t come to any conclusions. With this in mind, if one sees a UFO in Brazil, it would probably be best to run and hide.