Fort Itaipu and Olavo Fontes Revisited

My recent postings on Fort Itaipu has ignited a firestorm of controversy. Well, not exactly. It sparked a semi-heated debate about the incident that seems to be more directed at the use of the term “fraudulent” in conjunction with information developed by Dr. Olavo Fontes than it was the facts of the case. It seems the alleged “character assassination” of Fontes was the source of the annoyance.

Dr. Olavo Fontes

Given this minor flap, and two different interpretations of a single article, I thought I would revisit this case because, frankly, I had no dog in the fight. I am more interested in getting to the bottom of a story than I am in sticking to a theory that might be in error.

Although it is often overlooked in the various accounts of the events and mentioned almost in passing in others, in the early morning of November 4, 1957, the pilot of a cargo plane, Captain Jean Vincent de Beyssac, reported that he saw a red light to his left. As the light seemed to grow, de Beyssac decided to investigate but as he turned toward it, the light suddenly jumped in size suggesting it had come closer. At that moment the aircraft’s automatic direction finder (ADF), the right generator and the transmitter burned out. The UFO vanished at that point.

Frank Edwards, in Flying Saucers – Serious Business devoted just over two pages to this sighting. He then noted that one of “those well-documented ‘heat cases’ took place in Brazil on the same night” as de Beyssac’s encounter. Edwards provided no source for his two paragraph report on Fort Itaipu and no documentation for it, but a good guess would be that he was following the path provided by NICAP. This lead back to APRO and Fontes because there is nothing new in that account. Note, however, this is speculation based on Edwards’ relation with Donald Keyhoe and NICAP.

Some forty minutes after Beyssac saw his UFO, and according Dr. Olavo Fontes Teixeira, at Fort Itaipu, on the Atlantic coast of Brazil, two sentries spotted a bright orange “star” appear in the cloudless sky. “The whole garrison was sleeping in peace. Two sentries were on duty on top of the military fortifications. They were common soldiers, they did not know that flying saucers existed.” I could ask how he knows this since he never interviewed them but will let that go for now.

The light raced toward the fort and stopped overhead then began drifting down. The reports suggest that it was large, disc-shaped and surrounded by an orange glow. They heard a hum coming from it and the sentries were then hit by some sort of heat wave. Fontes reported, “The sentries were frozen on the ground, their eyes wide with surprise, the Tommy guns hung limply from their hands like dead things.” (And I can’t resist on saying that this is some really lousy writing.)

Fontes continued, “The sentinels were startled, unable to think what to do about the UAO.” [I interject here that it would be logical for them to alert the corporal of the guard or the sergeant of the guard… SOP] … Then something hot touched their faces (one of them thinks he heard a faint whining sound he could not identify at that same moment). [parens in the original].”

Fontes goes on saying that one of the sentries later reported that “when the heat engulfed him it was like a fire burning all over his clothes.” At that point blind panic “yammered at him.” He staggered around, attempting to escape from the heat that he believed was burning him alive. He blacked out at some point. (I will note here, again, that neither of the sentries was ever interviewed, and those soldiers who were in the fort that night and who were interviewed provided no information to suggest this description is accurate.)

Fontes wrote that the other sentry also had the feeling his clothes were on fire. He began to scream, horribly, while running and stumbling and crying. He didn’t know what he was doing but found some shelter under one of the cannon emplacements. Fontes wrote that his cries were so loud that they woke the rest of the garrison.

Apparently things were no better in the living quarters of the soldiers. There, according to Fontes, “everything was confusion.” While no one seemed to have a clue as to what to do, the lights went out (and yes, this is my interpretation of what Fontes was suggesting, boiled down so that we can move along). The power failed, and even the backup generators failed. Fontes provided a long list of things that were going on and tells us that there was fear on every face… I’m sorry but this strikes me as hyperbole regardless of the unusual, strange, and frightening situation.

Fontes wrote that the event lasted about three minutes. He said that the next day the fort commander ordered no one to talk about what had happened or what had been seen. The injured soldiers were being treated for their burns and the fort was placed under martial law which seems a strange thing to have said since, as a military installation, it would already be under martial law.

Fontes claimed that officers from the U.S. military mission arrived to investigate. They were accompanied by officers of the Brazilian Air Force, and learned that intelligence officers, apparently from the fort, were in charge of the investigation.

According to Fontes, some three weeks after the sighting, he was contacted by one of the officers who knew of his, Fontes’, interest in UAOs.  Fontes refused to give the name because the officer feared some sort of repercussions for revealing information that had apparently been classified by his commanding officer. This first leak was not enough, for Fontes, and he said nothing about it for two months when three other officers from the Brazilian Army who had been there that night told their tale. It seems that Fontes contacted them, though this isn’t clear in his first article if this was the case. They did, however, according to him, confirm the details.

This then is a rough outline of the story as originally told by Fontes. What I sometimes do, as those who visit here regularly know, is chase the footnotes. I have said that the story, in all its various forms, meaning the attack on the fort as opposed to the sighting of an orange object, comes from Fontes. Let’s see how that works with this one. Richard Dolan in his UFOs and the National Security State reported on the case on page 203. He doesn’t provide much in the way of detail and his footnote takes us to Don Keyhoe’s Flying Saucers Top Secret, Jerome Clark’s The Emergence of a Phenomenon: UFOs from the Beginning through 1959 and to Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia. Both Keyhoe and Vallee also

APRO's Coral Lorenzen

mentioned the case in other books, Keyhoe in Aliens from Space and Vallee in Anatomy of a Phenomenon. Vallee’s footnotes take us to Coral Lorenzen and her The Great Flying Saucer Hoax (which was later published as Flying Saucers: The Startling Evidence of Invasion from Outer Space) which, of course, takes us to Fontes and his report from the APRO Bulletin. Clark takes us to both Fontes and Lorenzen.

Keyhoe adds a detail that is interesting. According to him, “Since the United States had far more knowledge of UFOs, the high Brazilian officers asked the American Embassy for help in their investigation. As soon as possible, U.S. Army and Air Force officers were flown to the fort, accompanied by Brazilian Air Force investigators.”

This, I believe, is supposition by Keyhoe. Fontes mentions that military mission members, meaning, I would guess, the American Embassy military attaches, accompanied the Brazilian Air Force officers, but there is no mention of a request for help. Given the circumstances as outlined by Fontes, there would be no way for the Americans to know of the attack, so a request is logical given these circumstances.

There nothing to tell us Keyhoe’s source. However, Richard Hall who compiled The UFO Evidence for NICAP, the organization that had Keyhoe as its director, mentioned the case in two places. According to the footnote, his information came from the APRO Bulletin which was where the information was first published in the United States. Fontes was the author of that report. He also references it in another section with little detail and no footnote. It seems clear that Keyhoe used the Fontes information in his analysis of the case because it is obvious that NICAP had the information in their files.

Although the story was carried in a variety of UFO books over the years, there seemed to be nothing new to it. No names of witnesses surfaced and inquiries to the fort produced no corroboration. Magazines in Brazil did mention the case, provided several dates for the event and little in additional detail. Given the number of dates, it was difficult to find any sort of corroboration.

Over the years a number of UFO investigators attempted to learn more even though the date was in question. The case was carried in the  Flying Saucer Review of January 1960 which is a rehash of the APRO Bulletin article, which is to say, it is traced back to Fontes. An analysis of the information was published at http://thebiggeststudy.blogspot.com/2010/04/flying-saucer-review-volume-6.html. Here is was noted:

I have a small discomfort zone about Fontes. The three great Rio UFO researchers [identified in the text as [Auriphebo Berrance] Simoes, [Flavio Augusto] Periera, [Jose Escobar] Faria] knew Fontes well and liked him. I believe they felt he was an honest man. But they thought that he was a bit “enthusiastic” about his research. Just due to that, I take Fontes’ cases with more discretion than some others. Ft. Itaipu is one such instance…

Fontes heard about the case from a military friend on the condition of anonymity [this is quite possible, as there were Brazilian officers high up who would talk to the Rio guys often]. [The brackets appear in the original text]. Fontes said that he could not use his medical doctor status to get entry to the hospital, but did find out that the burns were severe and over about 10% of the bodies. Later he said that he got confirmation of the affair from three other personnel.

This incident could [emphasis in original] have happened. If so, it would be a very rare incident of severe damage to a witness.

This is the first reference that I can find that suggests that Fontes might have been less than candid in his reporting. Although they use the term “enthusiastic” to describe some of his research, it also suggests that he might exaggerate the claims or embellish them for dramatic effect. This is not an allegation that he was inventing details, only that he was providing his own analysis that might not have been overly supported by the information he had. In another arena and another subject it might be best described as literary license. The information is an extrapolation from the apparent facts but that extrapolation might not be accurate

Brazilian UFO researcher Edison Boaventura at the
front of Fort Itaipu near Sao Paulo, Brazil.

and without names, there is no way of knowing what Fontes might have been told and what additions he might have made.

More research was conducted over the years as outlined by an article written by Edison Boaventura. One of the first things that he accomplished through a FOIA request was a document from the Brazilian Embassy in the United States. It said:

At two o’clock on the morning of November 4, 1957, in Fort Itaipu, located in the vicinity of Santos, Sao Paulo [Brazil], according to a Report by Dr. Olavo Fontes, two guards where [sic] on watch duty at the top of the highest lookcout [sic] tower facing the ocean. Suddenly an orange color light appeared and quickly positioned itself at approximately 50 meters about the guards. With inoperable automatic weapons, they watched the starange [sic] glow and high pitched noise emerging from the strange object. Suddenly the two guards were hit by an intolerable heat wave, knocking one of the guards unconscious. The other thought himself to be in flames, and screamed to alert the others. The troops in the Fort quickly became alarmed due to a failure of all the power systems, including lights, elevators and weapons. Three minutes later the power returned with many officers claiming to have seen the strange object rapidally [sic] climb towards the sky. The two guards sustained first and second degree burns over 10% of their bodies. The alarm system and the automatic electric clocks which were originally set for 5 am, went off at 2:30 of the same morning. After the incident the Fort was shut down and investigations by the Brazilian Secret Police and afterwards by North American Officials was conducted. The results were not made available.

There wasn’t much new in the document, other than a mention of the Brazilian Secret Police being involved and the alarm clocks ringing early. As mentioned in the document, the information came from the same source as all the other information, that is Fontes. There is nothing to suggest that anyone else provided any information to the report. Boaventura noted, “Interestingly, the document that briefly brought the episode [to their attention] did not contain the names of the military, only the name of Dr. Fontes and also there was no sign of anyone who could identify the source of the document.”

Boaventura did search for other documentation including newspaper or magazine articles published at the time. According to him:

Through research I conducted at the National Library of Rio de Janeiro I found four unique stories of Robert E. Sullivan, published in the defunct magazine Mundo Ilustrado (Nos 50, 51, 52 and 53 -  Period November – December 1958 [or one year after the reported incident though it seems that only one article mentioned Fort Itaipu]) that allows us to glimpse the setting in which it occurred…

The second issue of the journal “Mundo Ilustrado”, entitled “Operation outer vast proportions over the planet as a show of force [the translation of some of the article is not in precise English] found on page 26… [was] information that multiple installations of the Brazilian Army had been overflown… Itaipu, in Santos, Sao Paulo (5 or 6 Nov) …

Boaventura goes on to explain that most of the sightings can be explained but that two of them are without explanation. He’s not sure which two but that Fort Itaipu might be one of them. There is one passage that said, “One of these, which was not reported in the press, particularly [in] stunning detail, able to shake the most stubborn of skeptics.”

In the four articles, there is nothing more about the alleged incident at Fort Itaipu. The date given for it is wrong if the November 4 date is accepted and there is the question about which of the sightings Sullivan thought were reliable. It is apparently confusing and it is only a guess that Fort Itaipu is one of them.

Boaventura said that he had searched for years in national and local newspapers and in magazines for the original story. The best he could do was a paragraph in O Cruzeiro magazine on February 22, 1958. Again the information is confusing, but it seemed to say, “On November 2, 1957, another ‘unidentified aerial object’ evolved over Fort Itaipu, in Sao Vicente (Sao Paulo), for more than five minutes seen by officialdom. The commander ordered a secret report on the case.”

On May 24, 1958, the magazine apparently reprinted those few lines and added that the case “would have been witnessed by officers and the Commander of the fort itself, can not be described in detail, since it was not officially confirmed by those authorities. Informed sources assure that the captain ordered preparation of a secret report about [it]. They also say that electric devices suffered interference, having been paralyzed. For our part, though, nothing we can say because we have not authorized statement that support us, restricting us, so that to declare the incident as it was reported including the press of Sao Vicente (Sao Paulo).” Yes, the translation is confusing but seems to suggest, at least to me, that they have no authorized statement from the fort and no confirmation of the story.

This seems to be the only references to anything at the fort until the publication of the report in the APRO Bulletin. Fontes is the author of it, with all the added details with which we are now familiar. Other than additional writers and researchers repeating the story as told by Fontes, it seemed that no one else attempted to learn anything new about it or even tried to verify it. The mention in Flying Saucer Review, for example, can be traced back to Fontes who was, at the time, the APRO representative in Brazil.

Several years after the turn of the century, or in other words, some fifty years later, Boaventura began searching for the soldiers who had been in the fort on the night of the attack. Eventually he would receive a list of some four hundred soldiers who were there.

He interviewed Captain Galileo Ramos, who had served for 30 years at the fort, and who said that one of the soldiers burned had not survived. He also said that due to the intensity of the heat, the barrel of one of the rifles was twisted. The critical question asked by Boaventura was if Ramos knew the names of the burned soldiers but he said that he didn’t. He had heard the story told by others. What had seemed to be important information added by an officer who might have been there (it is not clear from the story if Ramos had been at the fort in 1957) turned out to be something that had been told to him by another soldier. He had not witnessed the event.

Boaventura interviewed a sergeant who told him of another soldier who had been there on that night, but the soldier had only seen a UFO. That object descended to the horizon, made a number of zigzag maneuvers and then disappeared at high speed. Apparently he did not witness the burning of the soldiers but did search for “some logical explanation for the fact, but was not successful.”

On January 25, 2008, Boaventura talked with Lieutenant Azevedo, who apparently was currently one of the public affairs officers at the fort who confirmed the story. He also said that rifle with the twisted barrel was in the History Museum of the Rio de Janeiro Army. He said that there had been a blackout and that one of the soldiers was burned, rolling on the floor while the other was unconscious. He said, “I’ve never seen, but several cases have happened in the fort [There is a record of UFO sightings around the area in November 1957 but these are merely sightings]. About the soldiers report that both were treated at the clinic of the Unit that is currently not located in the same place.” Of course, in the confusing translation of the story, it seems that Azevedo was saying that he hadn’t witnessed any of this and that he did not know the names of any of the soldiers involved. He was repeating something he had heard.

Boaventura attempted to follow the trail of the rifle with the twisted barrel. He visited the museum but didn’t find it on display. He wrote to the museum about that and asked for a picture of it and on March 17, 2008, he learned that no evidence was found after a search by those in the museum but they would continue to search and if anything was discovered, Boaventura would be informed. If the rifle ever existed, it was nowhere to be found and the logical conclusion is that it never did given the way the information appeared in the story decades later.

Boaventura found others who had served at the fort and while some of them had heard the details of the case, it was never clear when they heard them. He found no one who had actually witnessed them. The son of one of the commanding officers said that his father had mentioned a UFO sighting but didn’t say a thing about soldiers who were injured. The son hadn’t seen anything himself.

Specifically, the son of the commander told Brazilian researchers on June 13, 2016 and in an email provided to me, “I can say, without a doubt that this fact is true, because I am the son of Adston Pompeu Piza, at the time commander of Fort of Itaipu. This sighting occurred at the beginning of November 1957, reported by my father to me, my brother and my mother. My sister at the time was a baby. This was related by my father to us numerous times and out relatives and friends who frequented our house. The repair to be done was never heard, and I heard hundreds of times this account, is that never heard my father talk about the soldiers suffered burns.” Or, in other words, there had been a UFO sighting, but all the additional details, about the burned soldiers and melted rifle barrels was not confirmed. In fact, Mundo Ilustrado lists several sightings in the Sao Paulo area and near various Army installations in November and December, 1957, which might account for what the son had been told.

Boaventura didn’t find anyone who had been in the fort on the dates in question who had witnessed the event as described by Fontes. He wrote to nearly two hundred of the soldiers whose names he had and universally, none could report anything on a first-hand basis. He wrote, “Unanimously, all contacts I got from April [which is to say the first batch of responses he received] from these former soldiers were to report they knew nothing…”

One of the contacts, Jose Castello who had served in the Army for 37 years wrote, “Unfortunately, I could not have any real information about the case, despite having talked to several friends who served with me at that time. In 1957 I was a soldier at Fort Itaipu and served in Battery Command and we’ve heard this rumor and we took it in jest. Unfortunately, there is nothing real in this story.”

In an unfortunate twist that sparked the controversy here, Boaventura quoted an unidentified source about the case or rather Fontes’ investigation of it. According to Boaventura, in April 2008, he spoke with this unidentified researcher (though I do now know who it was, I’ll respect his request as well which means you all are free to reject it because there is no name attached) in Brazil who said, “First, I ask that you keep me anonymous because it is not pleasant what I’m talking about… Dr. Fontes invented the story to make his name in the United States, as he was well connected with the American investigators of APRO, one, [though this is not clear in the translation] forged document embassy in English. So much so, that he neither signed the alleged official document. So he made up other cases too, to satisfy [his] ego and gain notoriety. As for other classic cases he researched I cannot give my opinion, but the case of Fortaleza Itaipu is invented for sure. Why nobody knows the name of the soldiers! You are wasting your time.”

Boaventura did contact one of the former commanders at the fort, Colonel Erasmo Antonio Dias, who said that he knew nothing about it but suggested Boaventura contact another officer who also had commanded at the fort. Lieutenant Colonel Osman Ribeiro de Moura. He was old, infirm, but did confirm a UFO sighting at Duque de Caxias, the city in which the fort is located which is a suburb of Sao Paulo. But… “could not remember details of the episode and could not inform about the burned soldiers, neither knew the name of them.”

This could be, I suppose, a hint that the story is true because of the way the sentences are phrased. I would suggest it means that there were no burned soldiers so there were no names to be remembered. However, and again we run into translation problems. It seems that in April 2008, Boaventura received a telephone call from Colonel Erasmus Days [which is, of course, the English translation of Dias] who said, “Actually, I was commander of Fortaleza Itaipu and I am a living witness of the history of our country, but never heard of this case. It is absurd and should be a legend.”

What he is confirming here is that there had been UFO sightings in the area, which included a suburb of Sao Paulo where the fort stands but that there was no incident that involved sentries who were burned or blackouts and failures of equipment at the fort. We have something seen in the air which might have approached the fort, but we do not have the other elements that were introduced by Fontes.

So, here’s where we are in this case. All the information seems to trace back to the short, vague magazine articles which only seem to mention a sighting and the more robust information supplied by Fontes. While some of the soldiers interviewed said that they had heard of the case, not one of them said that he saw anything personally, though some were stationed at the fort at the time. The names of the injured soldiers have never been learned, there is no documentation about the case other than those magazine articles that are vague at best, refer only to UFO sightings in the area and suggestions by those in Brazil who investigated that the case is a hoax.

There are hints that Fontes had been less than candid in his reporting. Boaventura reported on a telephone call with a colleague who said that Fontes had invented the case for his own aggrandizement. But we don’t have the name of that researcher. We do, however, have the names of three other Brazilian UFO investigators, Simoes, Periera and Faria who were contemporaries of Fontes and who said that he was “enthusiastic” about his UFO cases. That can be interpreted in many ways, such as suggesting he didn’t follow negative leads to his introducing hyperbole into a tale to make it more exciting. However, it does seem that Fontes’ reputation in Brazil was not the best and there are multiple, named witnesses to that.

The alleged physical evidence can’t be located. Although Boaventura attempted to find the twisted rifle, he did not see it on his tour of the museum where it was supposedly housed. While everyone knows that the vast majority of the items in a museum’s collection are not on display, Boaventura did work with the archivist who would have had access to everything, and according to the documentation available, the rifle was not housed there. He said he would alert Boaventura if he found anything, but that has yet to happen.

No military records have been found to even confirm a UFO sighting at the fort on any of the dates offered though there were UFO reports in the area on a number of days near the fort and in the city associated with it, which might explain the multiple dates. The magazine articles are generic with few details, multiple dates for the sighting and no hint of any sort of power blackout or injuries to soldiers at the fort, which is no real corroboration for the tale.

Normally I would suggest that such a case like this be reduced to a footnote, but even that might be misleading. The evidence is so thin as to be nearly nonexistent and the only witness testimony is second hand at best and is based on what others might have said. We have no idea how much circulation the tale had in Brazil after Fontes reported it to Coral Lorenzen at APRO and the rumors heard might have originated there. This case is so poor, it should be erased from the UFO literature, but, naturally, it is too late for that. It will live on simply because it was widely reported in UFO books around the world. We should listen to our colleagues in Brazil who are suggesting that there is nothing to it… but, of course, that will never happen. 

Olavo Fontes and Injured Soldiers

Since it was brought up in the comments section of another post, I thought I would published this segment on the Fort Itaipu injury case as it was reported first by Dr. Olavo Fontes and later by the Lorenzens. The following report first appeared in UFO Dossier.

Doctor Olavo Fontes Teixeira, known as Olavo Fontes in the United States was the

Doctor Olavo Fontes
Teixeira

one who originally “investigated” the sighting and provided the information to his American colleague, Coral Lorenzen. Although he provided the preliminary information to Lorenzen within weeks of the event, it would not be mentioned in the UFO literature until 1959 in the APRO Bulletin.

According to that article published in September, 1959, and written by Fontes:

On November 4^th, 1957, at 2:00 a.m. … something sinister took place at the Brazilian Fortress Itaipu…. It was a moonless tropical night. Everything was quiet. The whole garrison was sleeping in peace. Two sentinels were on duty on top of the military fortifications… Then a new star suddenly burst into searing life among the others in the cloudless sky, over the Atlantic Ocean, near the horizon. The sentries watched the phenomenon. Their interest increased when they realized it was not a star, but a luminous flying object. It was coming toward the fortress. They thought at first it was an airplane but the speed was strange – too high… there was no need to alert the garrison, however. In fact, so tremendous was the object’s speed that the two soldiers forgot their patrol just to observe it…. 

In just a few seconds the UAO [APRO’s term for a flying saucer which is Unidentified Aerial Object] was flying over the fortress. Then it stopped abruptly in mid-air and drifted slowly down, its strong orange glow etching each man’s shadow against the illuminated ground between the heavy cannon turrets. It hovered about 120 to 180 feet above the highest cannon turret and then it became motionless. The sentries were frozen on the ground, their eyes wide in surprise, the Tommy guns hung limply from their hands like dead things. The unknown object was a large craft about the size of a big Douglas [aircraft], but round and shaped like a disk of some sort. It was encircled by an eerie orange glow. It had been silent when approaching, but now, at close range, the two sentries heard a distinct humming sound coming from it. Such a strange object hovered overhead and nothing happened for about one minute. Then came the nightmare…

The sentinels were startled, unable to think what to do about the UAO. But they felt no terror, no premonition, no hint of the danger. Then something hot touched their faces (one of them thinks he heard a faint whining sound he could not identify at that same moment). In darkness this would have been horrifying. But the UAO was bright and they could see that nothing had changed. Then came the heat. Suddenly an intolerable wave of heat struck the two soldiers. 

One of the sentries said later that, when the heat wave engulfed him, it was like a fire burning all over his clothes. The air seemed to be filled with the UAO’s humming sound. Blind panic yammered at him. He staggered, dazed, heat waves filling the air around him. It was too hot… He went stumbling and lurching, his whole conscious purpose that of escaping from that invisible fire burning him alive. He fought, and gasped and beat the air before him. He was suffocating. Then he blacked out and collapsed to the ground – unconscious. 

The other sentry got the horrible feeling that this clothes were on fire. A wave of heat suddenly enveloped him. Horror filled him and he lost his mind. He began to scream desperately, running and stumbling and crying from one side to another, as a trapped animal. He did not know what he was doing, but somehow he skidded into shelter, beneath the heavy cannons of the fortress. His cries were so loud that he awoke the whole garrison, starting an alarm all over the place.

Inside the soldier’s living quarters everything was confusion. There was the sound of running footsteps everywhere, soldiers and officers trying to reach their battle stations, their eyes wide with shock. No one knew what could explain those horrible screams outside. Then just a few seconds later, the lights all over the fortress collapsed suddenly as well as the whole electrical system that moved the turrets, heavy cannons and elevators. Even the ones supplied by the fortress’ own generators. The intercommunications system was dead too. Someone tried to switch on the emergency circuits but these were dead too. The strangest thing, however, was the behavior of the alarms in the electric clocks, which had been set to ring at 5:00 a.m. – they all started to ring everywhere at 2:03 a.m.

The fortress was dead, helpless… Inside it, confusion changed to widespread panic, soldiers and officers running blindly from one corner to another along the dark corridors. There was fear on every face – fear of the unknown – hands nervously grasping useless weapons. Then the lights came on again and every man ran outside to fight the unexpected enemy who surely was attacking the fortress. Some officers and soldiers came in time to see an orange light climbing up vertically and then moving away through the sky at high speed. One of the sentinels was on the ground, still unconscious. The other was hiding in the corner, mumbling and crying, entirely out of his mind. One of the officers who came first was a military doctor and, after a brief examination, he saw that both sentries were badly burned and ordered the men to take them [the injured soldiers] to the infirmary immediately. They were put under medical care at once. It became clear that one of them was a severe case of heat syncope; he was still unconscious and showing evident signs of peripheral vascular failure. Besides this, both soldiers presented first and deep second-degree burns of more than 10 per cent [sic] of body surface – mostly on areas that had been unprotected by clothes. The one that could talk was in deep nervous shock and many hours passed before he was able to tell the story.

 The nightmare had lasted for three minutes… 

The next day the commander of the fortress (an army colonel) issued orders forbidding the whole garrison to tell anything about the incident to anyone - not even to their relatives. Intelligence officers came and took charge, working frantically to question and silence everyone with information pertaining to the matter. Soldiers and officers were instructed not to discuss the case. The fortress was placed in a state of martial law [which, of course, would be a natural state for a military installation anyway] and a top-secret report was sent to the Q. G. (at Rio or Sao Paulo). Days later, American officers from the U.S. Army Military Mission arrived at fortress together with officers from the Brazilian Air Force, to question the sentries and other witnesses involved. Afterwards a special plane was chartered to bring the two burned sentinels to Rio. It was an Air Force military aircraft. At Rio they were put in the Army’s Central Hospital (HCE), completely isolated from the world behind a tight security curtain. Two months later they were still there. I [Fontes] don’t know where they are now.

 Three weeks after the incident, I was contacted by an officer from the Brazilian Army, a friend who knew about my interest in UAO research. He was at the Fortress of Itaipu the night of the incident. He was one of those who questioned the two sentries. He told me the whole story exactly as it was described above. His name was suppressed from this report in order to protect him. The reasons are obvious; he told me something he should not tell. As a matter of fact, this officer has asked me to forget his name and he wasn’t laughing. He was too frightened. 

I was aware, however, that the information was not enough despite the fact that it had come directly from one of the witnesses. The case was too important. On the other hand, to get more information through the security ring built by Army Intelligence would be an almost hopeless task. The only way was to attempt to break the secrecy around the two soldiers under treatment in the Army’s Central Hospital. As a physician, I might perhaps contact some doctors from the hospital and even examine the two patients if possible. However, all my attempts failed. The only thing I was able to determine was the fact that two soldiers from Fortress of Itaipu were really there under treatment for bad burns. Only that. 

The case remained in my files [Fontes] until two months ago [July 1959], when the final proof was finally obtained. Three other officers from the Brazilian Army who had been at the fortress on the night of the UAO were fortunately localized and contacted. They told the same story. They confirmed the report transcribed above in every detail. 

Looking at the testimony offered here, there are many problems. There are no names associated with any of these statements. The sentries are not identified, Fontes’ source, that first officer is not identified and neither are the three others who apparently corroborated the sighting.

Since Fontes did not have the opportunity to interview the two men who were so badly burned, his speculations about their reactions upon sighting the UFO are just that, speculations. He is suggesting that they panicked, that their terror overwhelmed them, and they were unable to function as sentries. Their duties were forgotten because the orange disk hovered above them. This is a little difficult to believe and it seems to be more hyperbole than actual fact.

Secondly, the same could be said about the reactions of the other soldiers in the fort. Both the officers and soldiers awoke confused, dashed about without a thought of what should be done, and panicked when the lights all went out. This too seems to be hyperbole to increase the suspense in the story, rather than actual details found through interview.

This story has since been widely circulated in the UFO literature, but nearly every bit of it originated with the same source, that is, Dr. Fontes. No one seemed to

Coral Lorenzen

question the accuracy of his statements about what went on in the fort, nor in his failing to mention the name of a single witness. In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, most of those engaged in UFO research and reporting didn’t bother with worrying about such things. Instead they relied on the credibility of those who were reporting the sighting. Fontes was deemed credible by Coral Lorenzen, who herself was deemed credible by nearly everyone in the UFO community.

And there was one document that seemed to lend credibility to the case. It came from the Office of the Air Attaché, Brazilian Embassy in Washington, D.C. There is no date on it, but it uses zip code which means it came about after the US Post Office stared using them. It said:

At two o’clock on the morning of November 4, 1957, in Fort Itaipu, located in the vicinity of Santos, Sao Paulo [Brazil], according to a Report by Dr. Olavo Fontes, two guards where [sic] on watch duty at the top of the highest lookcout [sic] tower facing the ocean. Suddenly an orange color light appeared and quickly positioned itself at approximately 50 meters about the guards. With inoperable automatic weapons, they watched the starange [sic] glow and high pitched noise emerging from the strange object. Suddenly the two guards were hit by an intolerable heat wave, knocking one of the guards unconscious. The other thought himself to be in flames, and screamed to alert the others. The troops in the Fort quickly became alarmed due to a failure of all the power systems, including lights, elevators and weapons. Three minutes later the power returned with many officers claiming to have seen the strange object rapidally [sic] climb towards the sky. The two guards sustained first and second degree burns over 10% of their bodies. The alarm system and the automatic electric clocks where were originally set for 5 am, went off at 2:30 of the same morning. After the incident the Fort was shut down and investigations by the Brazilian Secret Police and afterwards by North American Officials was conducted. The results were not made available.

This statement added nothing new to the tale, except for the mention of the Brazilian Secret Police. The story is the same as told by Fontes, but does not corroborate Fontes because he is the source. Had the document suggested someone other than Fontes, this would have been valuable confirmation of the tale, but as it is, it seems to be little more than a summation of the case by a Brazilian official, based on information that came from Fontes.

The Project Blue Book files for November 1957, mentioned this case as “Other reported sightings (not cases).” This meant they had information about it but hadn’t investigated it and given it was in Brazil, that isn’t surprising. They had received a news clipping about, but that clipping was missing from the file. Nothing could be learned about when they received the case, what they knew about it, or where they got the clipping. It is just another dead end.

But that isn’t the end of the story. Thiago Luiz Ticchetti, a Brazilian UFO researcher and a co-editor of Revista UFO and Coordenador da Revista UFO Brasil: www.ufo.com.br, investigated the case. According to him:

It was recorded [that there was] a blackout, but there may have been a momentary power interruption, which characterize the case as being CE-2 [a close encounter of the second kind, that is in which the UFO manifests some sort of effect on either an animate or inanimate object such as causing a power failure]. 

However, I found no evidence so far to say that there was indeed a blackout or power outage during the episode. Thus, considering only the sighting of an enigmatic light by the military and even witnessed by the commander of the fort, one would classify this as a simple case of CE-1. All sources consulted and statements obtained discard the information that “soldiers were burned by the heat wave caused by [the] UFO.” And the testimony of [a] veteran UFO researcher this confirms information, making it clear that Dr. Olavo Fontes Teixeira added fraudulent data to an authentic narrative and even mounted an “official” document to the American Embassy…. 

Unfortunately, over 50 years, many told and published this partial lie so often in books journals, conferences in various countries of the world that [it] became true. I suppose after the news have returned from aboard to Brazil, years later, in the form of books, websites, etc., the military ended up adding new details untrue… Both military [officers] did not know the provenance of that information, just repeated it because they have heard from others the same story. 

What is being said is that there had been a UFO sighting but it was of a somewhat distant object. There was no close approach, no heat ray or microwave radiation that burned the soldiers, and no blackout of the fort. In fact, it is difficult to think of a way that a mechanical weapon, whether a rifle or submachine gun could be rendered inoperative by the close approach of a UFO. Other than the sighting, the other elements of the case seem to have been manufactured by Fontes.

There is one interesting coincidence that might explain the added details. On November 2, 1957, there was the sighting of an object around the Levelland, Texas area that caused car engines to stall and radios to fade. On November 4, 1957, James Stokes reported that he, and several others watched a UFO maneuvering near Orogrande, New Mexico, and after the sighting, Stokes had a mild “sunburn.” While there is nothing to suggest this speculation is true, it seems that Fontes, who was a close friend of Coral Lorenzen, might have embellished the case to make it conform to the reports she was investigating in and around Alamogordo, New Mexico. It was a case with some corroborative detail.

The one fact that seems to stand out, based on the documentation available in The A.P.R.O. Bulletin, is that Fontes communicated this information to Lorenzen not long after it happened, but nothing was reported until September, 1959. And while he said that he investigated, he never spoke with the injured soldiers, never was able to identify them, and didn’t name any of the other witnesses or the officers who supplied him with the information. Those facts seem to suggest that part of the tale is not true.

Fort Itaipu and Footnotes

I’ve been working on my new book, which is sort of a follow up to Government UFO Secrets (notice that I’ve slipped the name of my last book into this) and I have been doing something that I don’t think is being done very much. I’ve been chasing footnotes again. This means as I research a case, looking for all the information available on it, I attempt to return to the original source as much as possible. One way of doing that is look at the footnotes in other books to see where they gathered the information.

The case in question here is the attack on Fort Itaipu, Brazel on November 4, 1957. According to all those other sources, two sentries on duty saw a “new” star blossom in the distance, over the Atlantic Ocean, fly toward them, hover and then slowly descend. It was an orange disk that was humming slightly. There was a blast of heat that caused the sentries to panic. One fell to the ground unconscious and the other torn at his clothes screaming. That alerted the garrison, all of whom apparently reacted to the UFO.

About the same time, as the confused soldiers attempted to find out what was happening, the lights failed, as did their communications ability, their generators and even their weapons.  The electricity came back quickly and the clocks, set to ring at 5:00 a.m., began at 2:03 a.m.

The injured soldiers were removed, first to the infirmary, and later to an Army hospital. The fort commanding officer ordered an information blackout, telling the soldiers not to discuss the case with anyone, not even their fellow soldiers. Someone did talk, and Dr. Olavo Fontes, APRO’s representative in Brazil learned of the case some two or three weeks later. Though he tried to interview the soldiers, using his contacts as a medical doctor, he failed. His information came from some of the officers at the fort, but he never mentioned their names, nor did he identify the soldiers.

This is the bare bones of the sighting. As I was conducting my research, I looked to see what others had written about the case. In The A.P.R.O. Bulletin of September 1959, Fontes’ tale was published apparently as it appeared in his book Shadow of the Unknown. Later, in 1962, Coral Lorenzen, in her 1962 book, The Great Flying Saucer Hoax: The UFO Facts and Their Interpretation, repeated the information supplied by Fontes but in her own words. She suggested that Fontes had talked to an officer who was at the fort, but she didn’t supply his name or that of the sentries.

Jacques Vallee, in Anatomy of a Phenomenon, quotes from Lorenzen’s book, and adds nothing new to the case. Donald Keyhoe, in Aliens from Space, reports on the case in his own words, but there is nothing in that report that is new or different. He does speculate about alien motivations and their worries about our first tiny steps into space. Keyhoe wrote, “It would also mean that the burnings were intended as a demonstration of superior weapons they could use against aggressive explorers from Earth.”

But the point is that everything comes back to the article by Fontes in The A.P.R.O. Bulletin. I could find no new information about the case that wasn’t traced to Fontes. I did email Thiago Luiz Ticchetti, a Brazilian UFO researcher and a co-editor of Revista UFO and Coordenador da Revista UFO Brasil: www.ufo.com.br, who did update the case for me. He wrote that he had been unable to verify the tale of the injured soldiers, and unable to verify the power outage whether it was momentary or something a little longer. According to what he told me, most Brazilian UFO researchers believe that there had been a UFO sighting, but the details of what would be a Close Encounter of the Second Kind, meaning a sighting in which there are some sort of physical effects, remained unverified.

Fontes, according to his own writings, never got the chance to talk to the sentries, so much of what he wrote about their reactions had to come from the officers that Fontes said he had interviewed. The problem is that he never identified them. The tale then is based, at best, on second-hand testimony and we have no way to verify the information supplied by Fontes. We must trust him based solely on the trust that Coral Lorenzen had in him and if we have no faith in that, then almost everything he wrote about the Fort Itaipu case must be carefully scrutinized. In the end, the best we can say, based on what we know, is that there was a UFO sighting and the other elements are yet to be verified.

The Ubatuba UFO Sample

For those who are interested, here is a quick rundown on the latest on the Ubatuba sample. I am assuming here that those visiting this blog have a basic knowledge of this case so that I don’t have to recap everything.

The very first problem is that the magnesium samples that allegedly came from an exploding UFO cannot be traced to the beach in Brazil where they were recovered. Instead, they can be traced to the columnist in Brazil who first reported the case in the newspaper and that alerted Dr. Olavo Fontes (seen here), the APRO Brazilian representative to the crash. No one has ever come forward, nor has anyone been located, who can corroborate the tale told in the letter to the columnist nor who actually saw the explosion or the UFO. The metal appears in the columninst’s hands and from there goes to Fontes, then to Jim and Coral Lorenzen (seen below)at APRO and then to various others. The chain of evidence is severed before we reach the beach in Brazil and that is a real problem.

Secondly, the claims of purity have not held up to scrutiny. When the early lab reports suggested no sign of contaminates, Fontes inferred this to mean that the metal was 100% pure, which is not quite the same thing. It meant that the labs conducting the tests had not found anything other than magnesium, not that there weren’t other compounds present. It would seem that subsequent tests have shown that the metal, while extremely pure, was not 100% pure.

Yes, I’m aware that the sample tested in Brazil was lost during the testing so it could be argued that this sample was that pure, but it seems that a more logical conclusion is that it suffered from the same contaminates as those other samples. The problem was in the technology available in 1958 as opposed to that even eight or nine years later.

Third, the samples have been handled in a fairly cavalier fashion. Once they arrived in the United States, no one had kept track of them and it could be argued that the chain of custody was broken here as well. The Air Force destroyed a small sample given them for testing without obtaining any results. The Lorenzens loaned various samples and pieces of samples to any number of people and some of those samples have been lost. In the end, it might be nearly impossible to say that the samples as they exist today are in any way related to those that were first sent to APRO. Dr. Fontes died decades ago, as did the Lorenzens. That is another stumbling block.

But then we come to interesting conundrum. While magnesium of a purity equivalent to the Ubatuba metal was available, and that the testing done to date, regardless of the quality of the equipment or competency of the researchers, no one has been able to identify a source of the original sample. It is unlikely that it is of extraterrestrial origin, but no one can rule that out.

Analysis of the Brazilian sample was made by Dr. Roy Craig of the Condon Committee, who has given a narrative account of his experiences with the Colorado Project. The results of his investigations into the Brazil magnesium are summarized in the Condon Report on pages 94 – 97 of the paperback edition.

According to the information published by Dr. Peter Sturrock, Craig said he had been informed that Dow had, for about 25 years, produced a number of batches of very pure magnesium by the process of repeated sublimation, and provided him with a specimen of triply sublimed magnesium. Craig was advised that the most sensitive tests for impurities would be neutron activation analysis. He therefore arranged to take a specimen of the Brazil magnesium and (for comparison) a specimen of the Dow triply sublimed magnesium, to the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Laboratory, Washington, D.C. This visit took place on February 5, 1968, and the specimen was analyzed by Mr. Maynard J. Pro, whose report on the analysis was mailed to Craig on February 29, 1968.

The results of Pro’s analysis of the Brazil specimen and of the Dow specimen are included in the Condon Report. Clearly, this specimen of the Brazil magnesium was not "100% pure." In fact, it was not as pure as the triply sublimed Dow specimen.

Condon then commented, "...the magnesium metal was found to be much less pure than the regular commercial metal produced in 1957 by the Dow Chemical Company at Midland, Michigan. Therefore it need not have come from an extraterrestrial source, leaving us with no basis for rational belief that it did."

But this wasn’t quite accurate either. First is the point that the magnesium created at Dow was not a commercial grade but a piece of triply sublimed magnesium. It was, you might say, magnesium created to see how pure they could make it, but not something they created for commercial application.

The analysis also reported on a high content of both strontium and barium in the Ubatuba sample. Neither is an expected impurity in samples made under normal circumstances but Dow, in their experimentation with ways to improve the "hardness" of the magnesium had used the strontium as an alloy.

So, the Condon Committee didn’t actually discredit the Ubatuba sample, and their discussion of the Dow metal is more of a red herring than scientific analysis. That said, we are left with a couple of samples of metal that have no provenance, that have not been found to represent a technology that didn’t exist when the metal was discovered, and with no real way of knowing if the samples of today are related to those samples found in 1957.

In the end there are several samples of magnesium that seem to be unique. There is nothing in them to suggest the extraterrestrial, yet there is a hint that these samples might not have been made on Earth. This, I think, would be the classic definition of "unidentified." But even with that, it is not proof that some UFOs are from other planets in other solar systems. In the very end we are only left with questions that might have no answers.