UFOs reportedly burned dozens
of fishermen and farmers during a four-month flap around the small city of
Pinheiro in northern Maranhão, Brazil in 1977.
These injuries often occurred
when a UFO suddenly appeared without warning just over the head of someone
in a brilliant burst of light. It would light up everything as bright as daylight
for hundreds of meters around. As the victims fled in terror, some of them
suffered sunburn-like burns on their arms and legs.
In many cases the victim had
been carrying a lamp or flashlight or had lit a cigarette. Any kind of light
seemed to attract the attention of the UFOs.
One of the most curious incidents
involved a man who was carrying a flashlight in his right hand as he walked
down a gravel road in the dark. He was not burned but was hit by a beam of
light from a UFO that hurt him so much that he was in pain for weeks.
The victim was José Benedito
Bogea, fifty-two at the time, a successful chicken and cattle farmer who lived
six kilometers south of Pinheiro.
"I was crippled for two
months after I saw the UFO," said Bogea (shown below with interpreter
Angela Hadade at left).
Around one o'clock one morning
in early July that year, he was walking to Pinheiro to catch a bus. It was
very dark and he was using a new flashlight he had bought earlier in the day.
Suddenly
a very bright greenish-blue light suddenly appeared in the sky near him.
He started running, trying to get away from it.
“The device
chased me for about two hundred meters and then it went over a bush and stayed
there just a fraction of a second,”
The object had circled around
in front of him and stopped just above the ground. It was V-shaped and it
shined a beam of orange light straight down to the ground.
Bogea was frightened
but curious. “I tried to shine the
flashlight on the object and it flashed a light back at me. I fell down. The
sensation was just like if I had had an electrical shock."
THOUGHT HE WAS GOING TO DIE
Seconds later
he passed out. When he came to hours
later, he was very sore.
"My right arm was completely
numb, my kidneys, my spine, my right side. It hurt very, very much. I thought
I was going to die.”
He had no appetite for eight
days. “I didn't want to eat anything. I had to use a cane because I could
not stand on my right leg, and I couldn't hold anything in my right hand because
it would fall."
Even
more bizarre was the rest of Bogea’s story. After passing out, he said, he
awakened in a strange and beautiful city, and later went to sleep again only
to wake up to find himself far, far away from where the UFO zapped him.
When he regained consciousness,
he discovered he was near a highway west of São Luís, the state capital. São
Luis is about ninety kilometers away from Pinheiro in air distance but seventy-two
kilometers by car and then a two-hour ferryboat ride across the Bay of São
Marcos.
That’s not the end of his story.
After passing out and before he woke up near São Luís, Bogea said, he found
himself in a strange, "wonderful" city. It had wide avenues and
beautiful gardens where people were dressed much alike in very colorful clothes.
He looked for the sun but saw no sky, “just 
emptiness.”
The buildings were all just
one story high. All the people seemed to be the same age and height and all
appeared to be Brazilians, but he saw no black people or old people. If anyone
spoke, he didn’t hear them. He had been deaf for years.
The people talked to each other
in sign language. One of them motioned for him to enter a large room, where
fifteen to twenty people stood watching him. One motioned for him to sit on
a sofa and after he was observed for a while he was allowed to leave.
He went outside and began walking.
Wherever he went, one of the men 
followed
him, staying a short distance behind him.
Bogea said he saw a number
of vehicles in the streets that looked like cars but had no motors or steering
wheels. They were occupied by two people who would push buttons, causing antennas
to rise up and go down.
IN TERRIBLE PAIN
In one area he saw about twenty
disc-shaped objects sitting on the ground as if at an airport, but none of
them were like the one that had zapped him.
At the end of his visit in
the strange city, Bogea said, the man following him motioned for him to get
into one of the vehicles. When he did, he immediately went to sleep. When
he woke up, he was standing beside the highway eight kilometers from São Luis.
He hitchhiked into São Luis,
where he had intended to go on business if he had caught the bus. For two
hours or so he saw everything in bright, vivid colors, as if in rainbow. But
then the vivid colors began to fade to normal and he began to feel terrible
pain throughout the right side of his body.
Bogea soon felt so bad that
he had a friend help him get on a bus to go back to Pinheiro. He thought he
was going to die but wouldn’t go to a hospital because he was afraid to leave
his four young children home alone. Their mother had died six years earlier.
Even stranger yet is Bogea’s
claim that the encounter improved his eyesight tremendously. Thirteen years
earlier he had undergone nose surgery to relieve constant headaches. The headaches
ended but the operation left him totally deaf and he had to start wearing
thick glasses.
During the encounter with the
UFO, however, he lost his glasses and didn't realize it until he got home.
"Since then I haven't
needed to wear them any more," he said, as he read questions that my
interpreter Angela was writing on a legal pad.
Bogea said his hearing had
also improved slightly. "Now I can hear the dogs bark and the horns on
cars and sometimes I can hear the telephone ring or if you shout or scream.
“So, I want to meet these people
again so I can be cured… I think it was wonderful and very beautiful, even
though I felt a lot of pain. I think what I saw was not of this world."
Angela asked if all that happened
to him could have been a dream. He said it was possible but he didn’t think
so because he remembered everything so vividly.
I talked to him again two and
a half years later and he was even more convinced that it wasn’t a dream.
Every detail remained sharp in his memory.
When I saw him the second time,
he had another reason for wanting a UFO to zap him again. About a year earlier
he had been riding in a car when a truck struck it. He was knocked unconscious
and woke up in a hospital forty hours later.
When he woke up, his good eyesight was gone and he had to start wearing thick eyeglasses again. And he couldn’t hear any more loud noises.
(For a guide in pronouncing unfamiliar Brazilian names, click here.)