Antônio Vilas-Boas abduction

Antônio Vilas-Boas abduction

Type	Case (alleged abduction)
Also known as	Villas-Boas case, Vilas-Boas abduction
Date	Night of 15 October 1957
Place	Family farm near São Francisco de Sales, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Witness	Antônio Vilas-Boas (1934–1991), then a 23-year-old farmer
Investigators	João Martins (O Cruzeiro), Dr. Olavo Fontes

The Antônio Vilas-Boas abduction is the claim by Antônio Vilas-Boas (1934–1991), a young Brazilian farmer who later became a lawyer, that on the night of 15 October 1957 he was seized by small humanoid beings while ploughing a field near São Francisco de Sales in Minas Gerais, taken aboard a landed egg-shaped craft, examined, and made to have sex with a female being. Though similar stories had circulated before, his became one of the first alien abduction stories to receive widespread attention, years before the 1961 Betty and Barney Hill case, and it set a pattern — capture, medical examination, a sexual encounter — that many later reports followed.^[1][2][3]

Vilas-Boas kept to his story for the rest of his life. Skeptics have suggested he borrowed it from magazine stories and contactee literature published shortly before, and the investigators who first heard it were themselves doubtful enough not to publish it for years.^[1][2]

Background

Antônio Vilas-Boas was born in São Francisco de Sales, Minas Gerais, the son of Jerônimo Pedro Vilas-Boas (1887–1963) and Enésia Cândida de Oliveira (1897–1963). In 1957 he was 23 and worked on the family farm, often ploughing at night with the family tractor to avoid the heat of the day.^[1]

He was not the first in his family to report strange lights. According to the researcher Pablo Villarrubia Mauso, who interviewed his relatives, Vilas-Boas and one of his brothers saw a strange light over the farm on 5 October 1957, and two days before the abduction he and another brother, José, saw a disc-shaped object about 10 metres across; José said he ran away as it approached his brother's tractor.^[3]

The account

The landing

According to his story, on the night of 15 October 1957 Vilas-Boas was ploughing when he saw what he described as a "red star" in the night sky. It came towards him, growing larger until it could be seen as a roughly round or egg-shaped craft, with a red light at the front and a rotating dome on top. It began to come down in the field, putting out three "legs" as it landed. Vilas-Boas tried to drive away on his tractor, but after a short distance its lights and engine died, so he set off on foot.^[1][2]

He was caught by a humanoid about 5 feet (150 cm) tall, dressed in grey coveralls and a helmet, with small blue eyes, which made sounds like barks or yelps rather than speech. Three similar beings joined the first, overpowered him and dragged him into the craft.^[1]

Aboard the craft

Inside, Vilas-Boas said, his clothes were taken off and he was covered from head to foot in a strange gel. He was led through a doorway with red symbols written above it — which he said he memorised and later reproduced for investigators — into a large semicircular room, where the beings took blood samples from his chin. He was then taken to a third room and left alone for about half an hour, during which a gas was pumped in that made him violently ill.^[1][2]

Soon afterwards he was joined by another being, this time a naked woman. She was as short as the others — about 1.35 metres by one account — with a small pointed chin and large, cat-like blue eyes; the hair on her head was long and almost white, like platinum blonde, while her underarm and pubic hair were bright red. Vilas-Boas said he was strongly attracted to her and they had sex; she did not kiss him but nipped him on the chin. Afterwards she smiled at him, rubbed her abdomen and pointed upwards. He first feared this meant she would come back for him; Dr. Olavo Fontes later suggested she meant she would raise their child in space. Vilas-Boas said she seemed relieved their "task" was done, and he felt angry, as though he had been used as "a good stallion".^[1][2][3]

His clothes were returned and he was given a tour of the craft. He tried to take a clock-like device as proof, but the beings caught him and stopped him. He was then taken outside, climbing down the same ladder he had been taken up, and watched the craft glow brightly as it left. When he got home he found that four hours had passed.^[1][3]

Investigation

After the encounter Vilas-Boas said he suffered nausea, weakness, headaches, loss of appetite, burning eyes and skin lesions that appeared at the slightest bruise and went on appearing for months — small, hard, reddish lumps that were painful to the touch and leaked a thin yellowish fluid.^[1]

In 1957 the Brazilian writer João Martins had begun a series in the magazine O Cruzeiro titled "Flying Saucers' Terrible Mission", describing people in isolated places being attacked by small alien beings, including two Venezuelan teenagers who in 1954 said they had fought off small hairy creatures. Martins asked readers to write to him with their own experiences. From hundreds of replies he picked one from the young farmer in Minas Gerais and exchanged several letters with him. In February 1958 — during Carnival, according to Villarrubia — Vilas-Boas travelled to Rio de Janeiro, at Martins's expense, where he was interviewed and examined by Dr. Olavo Fontes of Brazil's National School of Medicine, who was also in contact with the American UFO group APRO.^[1][2][3]

Fontes concluded that Vilas-Boas had been exposed to a large dose of radiation and was suffering from mild radiation sickness. Vilas-Boas said he remembered every detail, and no hypnotic regression was used. Fontes sent a detailed report to APRO, but according to the Argentine researcher Luis Gonzalez the group judged it too fantastic to publish, and either Martins or Fontes suspected the farmer had made it up — which is why they did not publish it themselves. The story nonetheless circulated among researchers.^[1][2]

How the story spread

According to the researcher Peter Rogerson, the story first came to light in February 1958 and certainly circulated between 1958 and 1962, but the earliest definite printed reference is in the April–June 1962 issue of the bulletin of the Brazilian UFO society SBEDV. That year Walter Buhler of SBEDV — a follower of the contactee George Adamski — visited Vilas-Boas in his home town. SBEDV published a report in English whose account matched Adamski's earlier descriptions of aliens and their ships, and in January 1965 the international journal Flying Saucer Review reproduced Buhler's report worldwide. By then the Betty and Barney Hill abduction of 1961 was about to become public: it appeared in the Boston Traveler on 25 October 1965.^[1][2]

Later life

Vilas-Boas became a lawyer, married and had four children, and he kept to his story for the rest of his life. In a 1978 telephone interview with the television presenter Flávio Cavalcanti of TV Tupi, he spoke of having suffered a high level of radioactive contamination and said he intended to write a book with unknown details of his experience. He died on 17 January 1991; some sources wrongly give 1992.^[1][3]

In 2000 Villarrubia met one of Vilas-Boas's sons, then a lawyer in Palmas, Tocantins, who said his father had been taken to the United States in 1958 to be questioned by officials linked to the military and NASA, including with a polygraph and "truth serum" drugs that he believed damaged his father's health. In 2002 Villarrubia and the historian Cláudio Suenaga visited São Francisco de Sales and Fernandópolis and interviewed his sister Ordércia and brother José for the first time. The sister said he had been taken to California, accompanied by military personnel and a journalist with a "foreign name" who interpreted, had been shown flying saucers in a hangar, and had received two property titles in California as compensation, which he never visited; military and NASA visitors, she said, came to see him over the following decade and brought him books in English. Vilas-Boas's son told Villarrubia he ruled out the radiation explanation. None of these family claims has been documented.^[3]

Skepticism

Peter Rogerson doubted the account. He noted that several months before Vilas-Boas first told his story, a similar story had been printed in the November 1957 issue of O Cruzeiro, and suggested he had borrowed details from it and from Adamski's contactee stories. Rogerson also criticised the assumption that a farmer from the Brazilian interior must be an illiterate peasant who "couldn't make this up": as Eddie Bullard pointed out to him, owning a tractor put the family well above the peasant class, and Vilas-Boas was an ambitious young man studying by correspondence who became a lawyer — at which point, Rogerson noted, ufologists switched to arguing that he was too respectable to have made it up.^[1][4]

Luis Gonzalez argued that Martins's magazine series about small beings attacking people, published just before, seems to have triggered the first abduction claim. The paranormal investigator Kentaro Mori pointed to details that suggest invention, such as the advanced aliens' use of rope ladders, and noted that Vilas-Boas's original sketch of the three-legged craft closely resembled drawings of Sputnik 1, the Soviet satellite that was the talk of the time in 1957, often drawn with three of its four antennas visible. Mori also stressed that Vilas-Boas was a cultured, creative man who reportedly made models of the craft he described. Writers have also traced earlier abduction-like themes in science-fiction comics of the 1940s and 1950s.^[2]

The CIA theory

Another theory holds that the abduction was staged by the CIA. It began with a 1978 conversation between the ufologist Richard Reynolds and Bosco Nedelcovic, a Yugoslav-born American who had been an interpreter at the Inter-American Defense College and claimed to have worked for the CIA in Latin America under cover of USAID. Nedelcovic said the CIA had staged UFO appearances in several countries between 1953 and 1966 as part of the MK-Ultra programme, and that in October 1957 a team flew from Uberaba in a helicopter disguised as a flying saucer, found a farmer ploughing at night using infrared cameras, sedated him with a gas, took blood from his chin and set him up with a woman. In 2019 Jacques Vallée wrote in Forbidden Science volume IV that he had seen documents saying the CIA had simulated abductions in Brazil and Argentina as psychological warfare experiments, but he did not produce them.^[3]

Villarrubia found many inconsistencies in Nedelcovic's version: a helicopter large enough would have been very noisy, while Vilas-Boas described a quiet craft almost 20 metres long, and his nephew João Francisco de Queiroz, then 16 and asleep in the tractor cab a few hundred metres away, heard nothing; Vilas-Boas said he was conscious and climbed down the ladder himself; his captors were short, about 1.5 metres; the earlier sightings by his brothers did not fit a single flight; and it was Vilas-Boas himself who went to Rio to tell his story. Suenaga called the idea nonsensical. Villarrubia concluded that the abduction was not staged, though he suspected U.S. agencies may later have taken an interest in him, and left the CIA hypothesis open only as an unconfirmed possibility.^[3]

Legacy

The case added a new element to abduction reports — sexual contact between humans and supposed extraterrestrials — which became more common from the 1980s, along with the idea of human–alien hybrids. Villarrubia counts it among the cases with the greatest impact on ufology worldwide, alongside the Varginha case and Operation Saucer (Operação Prato). A similar case was reported in 1979 by a security guard, Antônio Carlos Ferreira, in Mirassol, São Paulo.^[2][3]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Antônio Vilas-Boas”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.