by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
Brazilian UFOlogy goes back a long time. One of the first UFOlogists there to come to international attention was Dr. Olavo Fontes, who wrote regular reports in the late 1950s and into the 60s for the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization that were published in the APRO Bulletin. Fontes wrote the first report on the 1957 Antonio Villas Boas abduction case. He sent it to APRO, and it remained unpublished by that organization until 1966. Two years later, in 1968, a retired General from the Brazilian Army, Alfredo Moacyr Uchoa, got involved in his first case, and it brought him to international attention as well.
Uchoa was an extraordinary researcher and investigator who was active until a few years before his death at age 90 in 1996. Bob Pratt, an American journalist who wrote extensively about South American UFOs, wrote an article headlined “The UFO reports of Brazilian General Alfredo Moacyr Uchoa” which can be found in the online magazine Alternate Perceptions. According to Pratt, Uchoa became interested in UFOs after seeing a film on the subject that was produced by the U.S. Air Force. He quotes Uchoa from an interview:
In 1960, when I was a student at our Superior School of War, all the students were invited to the America Embassy to see a film made by the U.S. Air Force, and in the film, we saw the big event of the visit of many objects over Washington in the 1950s that was caught on radar. I saw this and got inspired, got interested.
While Uchoa came to UFOs late in life, he had been a student of the paranormal and the esoteric since the age of 18. Uchoa’s son, Paulo, created a website General Alfredo Moacyr Uchoa. At the top of the section titled “Spiritualism and Theosophy” the beginning of his interest in these subjects is described:
During the course of the Polytechnic School in Rio de Janeiro, Uchoa lived in a boarding house. One morning, he woke up to the piercing screams of a man coming from a nearby room. He realized that they were screams of suffering and he felt an uncontrollable desire to relieve that person’s pain. He had just turned 18. He went to the patient’s room and intuitively placed his hands on the man’s head, who immediately fell into a deep sleep. Later, the patient was taken to a hospital, where he died of cerebrospinal meningitis. Doctors could not find a logical explanation for the man falling asleep at the height of a crisis like the one that was consuming him.
After this, Uchoa devoted himself to “transcendental healing,” studied the paranormal and the esoteric, including theosophy and spiritualism, and even helped set up a monastery with Swami Sevenanda, with whom he became friends. At the same time, he spent 40 years in the Brazilian Army, the last 25 of which was as a professor of engineering mechanics, head of the math department, and deputy director at the Military Academy of Brazil. He retired in 1963.
In 1968, Uchoa moved to Brasilia, and according to him during an interview with Pratt, his son told him about a farm in Alexânia, 120 kilometers to the southwest, where “certain things had happened.”
According to Pratt, Uchoa put together a group of seven investigators which included his son and a friend of his son who were both in the Army as a lieutenant and a major respectively, a physics professor, a law professor, “and others in different positions.”
According to Uchoa, their first “contact” was on July 22, 1968, when the entire group saw an object that emitted “an intense bluish-white light.” He said it moved to a new position, disappeared, reappeared in its original position, and then moved up to 2000 meters, and from there, lit up the area around them.
Uchoa told Pratt that over the next 10 months, they saw “extraordinary phenomena” on the farm “at least 60, maybe 100 times.” He wrote a book about the investigation titled Parapsychology and Flying Saucers: The Alexânia Case. He said he wouldn’t have written it if he were the only witness, and the law professor, Dr. Oswaldo Franca, confirmed for Pratt that “everything he wrote was true.”
There is a 3-part series of articles on the case by Gordon Creighton starting in Flying Saucer Review Case Histories December 1972, Supplement 12. Part 2 is in the June 1973, Supplement 15, and Part 3 is in the August 1973, Supplement 16. Creighton tells the reader that his series is a “resumé” of the case from a 9-part series of articles by Eduardo Santa Maria that appeared in the Rio de Janeiro paper O Dia from October 26, to November 4, 1972.
In Part 1, the farm is described as a plantation, and the owner is identified as Wilson da Silva. According to Creighton, the investigators interviewed locals and found that many believed the plantation was haunted. In spite of this reputation, their first sighting on July 22, 1968, came after 4 months of seeing nothing after beginning their investigation in March.
Wilson is described as having the ability to predict when the UFOs would appear and is said to have exclaimed on July 22, “It will be tonight, General! I know it! I will guarantee that the saucers will appear at 9 o’clock, over the Hill, in their usual place!”
The sighting is described quite differently in Creighton’s article. According to him, they saw something like a “magnesium flash” that disappeared and then reappeared as pink, nearly the size of a house, and “giving out tiny spurts of slightly purplish light.”
Creighton describes da Silva telling everyone to join hands when the light first appeared. One man is said to have become ill, and da Silva is said to have been knocked to the ground by an unseen force.
According to Creighton, when the light reappeared, da Silva walked towards it saying he was going to make, in Creighton’s words, “mental contact.” Then, just a few steps in, he turned around and ran full-speed past the group shouting “Danger! Watch out for your lives! Put a hand to your chest, everybody!
While da Silva kept shouting about danger, the rest of the group stayed put. The light is described as appearing once again and being blue with a mist around it. Creighton tells the reader that Santa Maria explained that the mist served as protection from radiation but didn’t say “how this was known.”
According to Creighton, the light headed straight for the group, and they ran from it. It stopped, disappeared, and then reappeared 500 meters away, this time “blue, flashing, and twinkling like a star,” and stayed there for 15 minutes.
After the light was gone, the group discussed what they had experienced, Uchoa wrote up a report, and they all signed it. Creighton ends Part 1 describing a calmed- down da Silva saying to the group that he “guarantees” there will be more manifestations over the next few nights.
Next week: a landing and contact.
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