ANTONIO VILLAS BOAS: TOTAL ABDUCTIONBy Pablo Villarrubia Mauso[
Pablo Villarubia is one of ufology's most indefatigable researchers, traveling to far-flung locations as he reinvestigates some of the classic mysteries of our time. His books include Brasil Insolito (1999) and Viaje Mágico por los Misterios de America (2003). Inexplicata readers will remember his re-examination of Brazil's Aracariguama case. It is with great pleasure that we present his latest investigative effort --Ed.]Fifty years later we are reopening the investigation into the first UFO abduction case in modern history: the legendary Antonio Villas Boas incident that took place in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Hitherto unpublished photographs and interviews shed startling revelations: U.S. agents kidnapped Villas Boas and a “portal” to strange phenomena appears to exist at the site of the abduction.
A veritable nightmare commenced on October 5, 1957 for a Brazilian farmer named Antonio Villas Boas, only 23 years old at the time. It only came to an end with his death in 1991 at age 52. One of the most important and discussed cases in world ufology took place within the isolated rural area of Sao Francisco de Salles, located deep inside the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. It is considered the first abduction or kidnapping of a human being by alleged alien entities.
On that distant date, Antonio and his brother Joao looked out of their bedroom window to see a circular light that cast its luminescence onto the ground, coming closer and then vanishing. On the 14th of that month, between 21:30 and 22:00 hours, while Antonio and another brother – Jose – tilled the soil with the family tractor, they were pursued by a round unidentified flying object that fired rays in every direction.
At 1:00 a.m. on October 16, Antonio Villas Boas worked alone on his tractor. A red light descended from the sky and turned into an oval-shaped, metallic object. The farmer was petrified. The object did not take long to land, setting its three legs squarely on the soil and lowering a seemingly metallic ladder.
The terrified young man tried to flee in vain – his tractor’s engine died and four robust beings of normal height (one of them shorter than Antonio) emerged from the object and seized him, hoisting him into the air by his arms and legs, and took him into their spacecraft, where his clothing was forcibly removed. They subsequently bathed his body with a sponge soaked in a colorless liquid. Conveyed from one chamber to another, the entities – human-looking, but with their heads covered by strange helmets – drew blood with suction cups attached to equidistant spots on his chin, causing some irritation.
Alone in the chamber, Antonio perceived how some tubes jutting from the wall emitted a grayish gas that made him feel nauseous and on the verge of vomiting. Later on, the frightened farmer would receive another unexpected visit: this time from a nude, white-skinned female with slanted blue eyes, high cheekbones, thin lips, straight blond hair, broad hips and heavy thighs.
And this was precisely the least likely part of the abduction experience: Antonio claimed to have entered a state of progressive, uncontrollable sexual excitement that he attributed to the liquid that had been rubbed onto his flesh. He made love twice to the unknown female.
Upon leaving, the young woman pointed at her abdomen and then toward the sky.
Antonio was subsequently ditched from the craft by the helmeted beings, but he first tried to secure some proof of his incredible experience: a box-shaped device with a glass lid, but the creatures kept him from doing so. The object took off vertically, issuing a whistling sound and increasing its brightness. Villas Boas spent approximately 4 hours and 15 aboard the craft.
In 1961, after the Brazilian farmer’s experience, an American couple – Betty and Barney Hill – underwent an abduction experience supposedly involving aliens. The Villas Boas case, however, kicked off a discussion that has not lost its currency: the likelihood of genetic experiments performed by extraterrestrials upon human beings.
The story of Antonio Villas Boas (who remained anonymous until 1967) was made known to the world by journalist Joao Martins in the international edition (Spanish) of the prestigious Brazilian publication “O Cruzeiro”, which appeared in Buenos Aires eight years after the events, on December 1, 1964. Also involved in the investigation of this case was Dr. Olavo Fontes, a major name in Brazilian ufology, who subjected Villas Boas to a battery of physical and psychological tests after the event (February 22, 1958). The witness showed no signs of mental instability and had a series of physical alterations caused during the alleged alien encounter.
The Early Revelations
What seemed absurd to many – that is to say, the abduction by aliens and sexual relations with aliens – would later be transformed into a pattern of conduct experienced by nationals of various countries.
In the year 2000, this author renewed the investigation into this case after having located one of Antonio Villas Boas’s sons. I must admit that I was rather incredulous at some of the facts of the case, and it was necessary to secure more information. His extraordinary statements – which I was not allowed to disclose – stirred my curiosity further until years later, Claudio Tshuhioshi Suenaga, the distinguished Japanese-Brazilian historian and ufologist, put me on trail once more. He had interviewed Odercia Villas Boas, Antonio’s sister, over the phone. His revelations had been startling. I immediately took off for Brazil and from Sao Paulo, Claudio and I engaged in a marathon relay of several buses until we reached Sao Francisco de Salles (pop. 3,000), the scene of the astonishing events.
It was there that we found sexagenarian farmer Joao Francisco de Queiroz, Villas Boas’s nephew, whom Claudio had also contacted over the phone. Joao informed us that on the night of the Abduction, he – Joao Francisco – was sleeping inside a tractor cab a few hundred meters away from the site of the incident. “I was only 16 years old and was deep asleep. I heard nothing. It was only the next day that I learned of the incident. He told us, his relatives, that he had been taken aboard a device that landed some 50 meters away from the Grande River and that he had had sexual relations with a short, ugly woman.”
“Ugly?” Claudio and I repeated, exchanging glances, “but the published reports said that she was a beautiful woman, despite her strange appearance...”
“No, Antonio always said that she was very ugly, and that he did not know how he felt excited to the point of wanting to make love to her. After the event, Antonio went off to Rio de Janeiro, where a reporter and a doctor investigated his case. They took him off to the United States, forcibly, as though he had been detained, but he wasn’t mistreated. He told me that he didn’t like that trip at all, because he had gone against his will.”
“Did he give you any details about that trip?” I inquired, knowing that that information would confirm the involvement of the United States in UFO research and the controversial possession of extraterrestrial craft.
“Very little. Only that he had seen a device similar to the one that appeared here, but it wasn’t the same. Antonio was a reserved person who rarely discussed the subject. What I do know is that one day he locked himself up in the house and didn’t come out until he had finished carving the flying saucer from his experience on a piece of wood. He covered it in tin foil, the kind that used to come in cigarette cartons. Then he sent it off to Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro. I saw it, it was very pretty.”
“What was Sao Francisco de Salles like back then?” I asked, hoping to put the events into a context.
“It was a small, practically isolated place. I know that in 1947 there were only ten houses. But the Villas-Boas family and I lived at Hacienda Aldeia o Mata, some five kilometers from here, on the banks of the Grande. If you’d like, we can go up there in my car.”
Claudio and I didn’t think twice: we boarded the vehicle, excited at the prospect of being on-site at one of world ufology’s mythical locations. We stopped under an enormous, hundred year old fig tree and Joao Queiroz pointed to the spot where the flying saucer emerged in 1957. “It was more or less over there, where the Grande River now covers part of the hacienda. A dam was built in 1977, the Agua Vermelha, which invaded the property. The house we lived in doesn’t exist anymore. They knocked it down, it was a little further up.”
The loneliness of that location, the green fields, the leaves of some scattered trees, gave us a sense of trepidation. There was something strange about that place. It was perhaps that sensation or intuition that made me ask Joao: “Aside from what Antonio saw, did strange things take place here?”
“During the night, right there at Hacienda Aldeia o Mata, we would all listen in terror to the sound of a hand beating the handle of a large corn-grinding mortar inside a shack. When we went to check, there was no one around and the handle remained tied, suspended, and the mortar’s opening was covered by a large clay urn.” And there was more. Joao Queiroz also said that they could hear the sound of a galloping horse that couldn’t be seen, while the farm hands told stories of a “black-hooded phantom horseman.”
Another important detail is that Hacienda Lade o Mata’s very name bespoke the existence of an indigenous settlement. Queiroz himself, in his childhood, had found many pieces of ceramic, bones (perhaps from animals) and the circular indentations of where aboriginal shacks had once stood. Researchers had never mentioned this information. We subsequently learned that the region upon which the Villas Boas hacienda had once stood was occupied, until the 19th century, by the Kayapó indians. They were decimated by the diseases, persecutions and slayings visited upon them by the white man.
We returned to Queiroz’s house. His wife, Maria Olimpia, told us that her husband’s parents had committed suicide in 1947, and that the local peasants attributed the tragedy to the fact that the area was bewitched. It was as if everything had occurred as an act of vengeance carried out by the souls of the departed indians. Olimpia also stated that she had seen the two scars or wounds that Antonio Villas Boas had on his chin, which he attributed to the placement of suction cups that drew his blood aboard the craft.
Abducted by Humans
The next day, after a night of restless sleep in Doña Manuela’s decaying boarding house – we had the fortune of finding Odercia Villas Boas, Antonio’s closest sister. 70 years old, with an impressive memory and recovering from cancer, Odercia welcomed us with great courtesy to her humble residence. Her most valuable asset is an old TV set that barely picks up the broadcasts. We were the first researchers to interview here on the Villas Boas case, by her own admission.
“Our father owned a lot of land. My brother tilled the soil with the tractor and became a cattleman, transporting cattle to distant cities,” she recalled longingly. “I was the first person who tended to him after he had been inside that device.”
Here we were faced with a privileged witness, since it hadn’t occurred to anyone to interview her and her contributions would be extremely important in adding greater depth to the Antonio Villas Boas case.
“He arrived at five o’clock in the morning. He was very pale and trembling. I saw that he had two bruise marks on his chin. I gave him some very strong coffee to drink, but then he vomited a yellowish substance. He didn’t want to eat the hen I’d cooked for him. Then he told me what had happened. That the tractor had stopped, that he’d been dragged into that thing and that he slept with a very ugly woman. He slept poorly at nights, had nightmares.”
“You looked after him, then.” I said.
“Yes, along with his brother Jose and Damiao, the tractor operator. He stayed in bed several days. Everything he ate made him feel sick. He had headaches and complained about being very sleepy. Two weeks later small, itchy marks emerged on his arms and legs. When they dried, they showed a purplish cast around them.”
“It seems that he later went to Rio de Janeiro,” I volunteered.
“Yes, a pharmacist advised him to write a letter to Joao Martins, who was a reporter for “O Cruzeiro”, since this man wrote about flying saucers at the time. My brother wanted to talk to him to find out what had happened to him. Then, four months later, they paid him to take the bus to Rio de Janeiro, where a doctor examined him. He returned and later on, five men dressed in green uniforms took him to the United States. Some spoke Portuguese; others English. I think they were from NASA. They kept visiting several times over eight or ten years. They would always give my brother books written in English as gifts.”
“Why did they take him to the United States?” I asked anxiously.
“He was subjected to questioning and the lie detector in California. He was taken to an open area where the remains of a flying saucer could be found. They then showed him another, in good condition, inside an enclosed area like a museum, asking him if it was identical to the one he had seen. He told me that it was very similar. He was always accompanied by a journalist who had a foreign name and acted as an interpreter, and was always surrounded by uniformed American personnel.”
Who could have been the journalist who spoke both Portuguese and English? I admit that we were startled, as this confirmed the cooperation between the Brazilian authorities of that time and the U.S. government with regard to the UFO research, even compelling Brazilian citizens to travel against their will, violating their rights.
“He was in the United States for three days,” Odercia told us. “They later gave him two properties near San Francisco and San Rafael. I managed to see the deeds. They sent him back to Rio, where he spent between fifteen and twenty days in a hospital, undergoing new examinations and tests. This affected him greatly, it seems. According to the medical report, Antonio was in excellent mental health and not crazy.”
“Did the Americans tell him if extraterrestrial life exists?”
“Yes, they confirmed this to him. I now recall, also, that Antonio was afraid that this abductors would come back to take him to another planet. It seems that the flying object returned, in fact, eight days after the kidnapping.”
Odercia Villas Boas also confirmed the existence of supernatural phenomena (poltergeists?) at Hacienda Aldeia o Mata, such as the movements of the mortar handle. She added that in the house where the women did the cooking, balls of mud filled with fur or long hair would fly around and land inside the ovens. No one knew where they came from or who threw them, as they emerged from nowhere.
“Was there talk about flying saucers in the area before Antonio’s experience?” I inquired of the lucid old lady.
“What I and many others saw, since I was a child, were lights that moved over a hill not too far from here. Many of them descended like stars in the evenings. I remember having seen them on several occasions since 1941. Once I saw a huge object, perhaps made of metal, silvery, that made a lot of noise. In 1964 or 1966 my daughters were playing in the schoolyard when they had to vacate it as quickly as possible: a flying saucer had landed there. The teachers saw it and were terrified. They all fled.”
“Did you notice any change in behavior in your brother after the abduction?”
“Yes, before the encounter with the saucer he was a happy person. Then he withdrew and seemed very sad. He didn’t want to talk about the event. But he was always a very kind person, donating food for the poor. He was always very religious. During Easter Week he would carry the saint on his back while barefoot. He never drank. He was studious and was already taking correspondence courses in 1957. Later on he went to live in various cities in Minas Gerais and Goiás. Thanks to his personal motivation and the encouragement of a nun, he graduated with a law degree in Brasilia.
“Did Antonio ever give any interviews? “ I asked.
“He didn’t like the subject to be made public. He was always very discreet and didn’t want to discuss his experiences. But one day received an offer from a famous television personality, Flavio Cavalcanti, and he accepted. But NASA kept him from appearing,” Odercia revealed.
Our reinvestigation of the Villas Boas case rekindles, with more proof, criticism about U.S. intervention in the UFO subject and the possibility that this country is in possession of remains or whole craft of possible extraterrestrial origin, under strict custody and secrecy.
A key figure in this plot was Dr. Olavo Fontes. Intelligent, methodical, fluent in English and with friends in the Brazilian military’s upper echelon, he was accused by some ufologists of collaborating with intelligence agencies within his own country and the United States. His constant travels to that country as a representative of the defunct APRO organization, spearheaded by Jim and Coral Lorenzen, caused even greater mistrust.
All appears to suggest that Fontes was closely tied to U.S. authorities and privy to a number of ufological secrets. He died young, in 1968, from a quick-spreading cancer. Some believe that Fontes was the victim of a conspiracy that also cut short the lives of other ufologists who “knew too much.”
Did U.S. authorities try to purchase Antonio’s silence by giving him properties in California? Why was he not allowed to speak publicly? It is very possible that the former farm boy and later trial judge took one of the greatest mysteries of all time to grave.
(Translation (c) 2007, Scott Corrales, Institute of Hispanic Ufology)
