Table Of ContentUFO 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 Horus 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
Acknowledgments
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
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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
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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 confusing as the
phenomenon itself. Out of that confusion 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
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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
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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
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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 full 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.
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The terror comes from UFOs-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.
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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,1 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
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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
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