The Antônio Villas Boas Abduction

The Villas Boas family farmed near São Francisco de Sales, in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Antônio was 23. The family owned a tractor. In the heat of October 1957 the sons ploughed at night.

The lights came first. On 5 October, Antônio and his brother João saw "a silvery fluorescent reflection, lighting up the whole ground." On 14 October he was ploughing with his brother José. He saw a light "so bright that it hurt the eyes." Each time he walked toward it, it moved. Then it seemed to vanish, "as though it had been turned out."

The night of 15 to 16 October. Antônio was alone on the tractor. A "red star" became "a very luminous, egg-shaped object, flying towards me at a terrific speed." It stopped and came down to perhaps fifty meters above his head. It lit the ground "as though it were daylight." He saw an enormous red headlight, little purplish lights and a dish-shaped cupola turning slowly in a greenish glow. The tractor stopped working. Three metal supports came down. The craft landed.

Four humanoids about 1.5 m tall dragged him inside. They wore grey suits and helmets that showed only small blue eyes. They made barks or yelps instead of speech. He was stripped and covered in a gel, and blood was taken from his chin. A gas made him violently ill. Then a naked female came in. She had white or platinum hair and large, catlike blue eyes. They had intercourse. Afterward she rubbed her abdomen and gestured upward. At about 5:30 a.m. he watched the craft rise and dart off "like a bullet."

He reported pains, nausea, headaches and burning eyes. Skin lesions kept appearing for months. On 22 February 1958, in Rio de Janeiro, he gave a deposition to journalist João Martins of O Cruzeiro and to Dr Olavo Fontes, APRO's Brazilian representative. Fontes concluded he was suffering from mild radiation sickness. Hypnotic regression was never used. He said he remembered every detail himself.

No government investigation is documented. The account first appeared in print in the SBEDV Bulletin in 1962. Gordon Creighton's translations ran in Flying Saucer Review from 1965 to 1967. In 2002 Cláudio Suenaga and Pablo Villarrubia interviewed the family. His brother José described the light of 14 October as a disk about 10 m across.

In Magonia in 1993, Peter Rogerson argued that the account could have been shaped by a similar story in O Cruzeiro in November 1957 and by George Adamski's contactee tales. David Halperin saw a shared cultural mood with the 1958 film The Astounding She-Monster. In 1978 Bosco Nedelcovic claimed that a CIA "Operation Mirage" had staged the event with a disguised helicopter and a gas. Critics replied that a helicopter would have been loud. His nephew was close by and heard nothing. Fontes made his radiation diagnosis about four months after the event, and no other doctor ever confirmed it.

Villas Boas became a lawyer, married and had four children. He spoke on TV Tupi in 1978 and kept to his account all his life. He died in Uberaba on 17 January 1991. His night on the tractor is usually called the first widely publicised modern abduction story. It was also the first to suggest aliens wanted to breed with humans.