The Hermínio and Bianca Reis Abduction (Caso Karran)

January 1976. Hermínio Reis and his wife Bianca, whose real name was Maria Aparecida de Oliveira, left Rio de Janeiro at about 6 pm. They were driving to Belo Horizonte to sell or trade their 1965 Karmann-Ghia. Brazilian sources give the date as 12 January. Other catalogues say 21 January.

Near Matias Barbosa, in Minas Gerais, Hermínio pulled onto the shoulder of a highway section that had not yet been inaugurated. He was tired. He fell asleep. Bianca stayed awake, watching the sky.

Around 11:30 pm she saw it. A red-orange light, moving slowly from side to side, passing in and out of the clouds. It came toward the car. It became motionless and directed a beam of light at them. Everything went completely dark. Then overwhelmingly bright. A strange humming filled the air, and with it a strange feeling of weightlessness.

The car, they said, was drawn up inside a small craft. It was "absorbed as if through a chimney" into "a kind of circular garage, intensely lighted." The small craft then rose into an even larger ship.

Two very tall beings came to the car. About 2 m tall, alike as twins, with skin the colour of jambo fruit, large green eyes and straight dark hair. They wore seamless white jumpsuits. They smiled and politely helped the couple out. A staircase led to a large room full of instruments, like a laboratory.

The couple were fitted with a helmet with many wires, a translator connected to a computer. A voice spoke in Portuguese. "I am Karen, calm down." Brazilian sources spell the name Karran. Bianca's skin, ears and eyes were examined. She was placed in a box-like device that turned red, and briefly lost consciousness. Both drank a thick green liquid. In one version it was meant to make them forget, and they begged to keep their memories. The beings agreed.

Karran spoke of religion, human origins and contact with the cosmos. When Hermínio quoted a religious text, he reportedly answered: "There is no God, we have no God, there can be no God … only the Energy Of Creation." After about 48 hours the couple were back in their car on a dirt road, not far from where everything began. They had been told not to speak of it.

They spoke anyway. In 1978 they appeared on several Sunday episodes of Programa Flávio Cavalcanti on TV Tupi, and the case became famous across Brazil. Bianca reported further contacts, arranged telepathically. In January 1977 a second being, Zir, was said to have appeared, with two hearts. During a later contact Hermínio is said to have photographed the craft leaving the ground. Alberto Francisco do Carmo presented his analysis at the First Brazilian Congress of Ufology in March 1979, with J. Allen Hynek attending. The pictures reportedly show shapes of light, not a disc.

Hermínio later left his church and taught yoga in São Paulo. Bianca wrote two books and taught a technique for the conquest of self-awareness. She died on 8 April 2021.

No official investigation of the January 1976 encounter is on record, and no physical evidence was reported. The versions disagree on the date, the car, the colour of the light, the being's name and how long the couple were gone. The cataloguer Patrick Gross summed it up: "Extraterrestrial beings or hoax. Insufficient data." Robert E. Bartholomew and George S. Howard listed it in a book that explains contact stories through imagination and fantasy-prone personalities. Wendelle Stevens and Rodolfo R. Casellato went the other way, publishing a book that named the beings' home world Klermer. No hoax finding has ever been published.