The Man Who Melted: João Prestes Filho, Araçariguama, 1946

Monday, 4 March 1946. Carnival week in the interior of São Paulo state.

João Prestes Filho was 44, a farmer and labourer from Araçariguama, about 70 km from São Paulo city. He spent the day fishing on the Rio Tietê. His wife, Silvina Nunes Prestes, and their children were away at the Carnival in São Roque. Several accounts say he found the house locked. He climbed in through an open window.

Near the bedroom window, the room filled with light. His cousin Vergílio Francisco Alves told it this way: "Suddenly a yellowish ray lit up the whole house, and João instantly felt his body burned." The nurse Araci Gomide relayed João's own words, a brightness "that came in, in the form of light, through the window." His nephew Luis Prestes remembered something like a "torch of fire."

It lasted seconds. In Pablo Villarrubia Mauso's telling, a wave of heat forced him to sit down. No craft appears in the family's accounts. Only the light. Then he set off, reportedly barefoot, for his sister Maria's house, more than 2 km away.

Gomide attended him about two hours after the injury. His skin was "blistered like a pig singed over a fire," worst on the hands and face. Yet "nothing was scorched by fire, not the hair, the body hair or the clothes." There was no smell of kerosene or alcohol. He stayed lucid and said he felt no pain. About two hours before death, he lost the ability to speak.

The death certificate, signed by Dr. Luiz Caligiuri, records the death at 22:00 on 4 March. Cardiac collapse. Generalised first- and second-degree burns.

Police chief João Malaquias looked into the death, and a police scientific examination found nothing burned in the house. In September 1971, Irineu Silveira presented the case as UFO-related at the II National Symposium on Extraterrestrial Life in São Paulo. That December, Felipe Machado Carrion wrote it up after speaking to the fishing companion, Salvador dos Santos, who said the weather had been clear.

On 28 September 1974, Fernando Grossmann and Dr. Luiz Braga of APEX recorded Gomide on tape. They concluded it was "an intense, flameless source of thermal energy striking the victim directly, probably brief." Jacques Vallée later put the case first on his list of deaths in Confrontations. In 1997 and 1998, Cláudio Suenaga and Pablo Villarrubia Mauso found the surviving relatives and the death certificate itself.

Walter Bühler, a leading Brazilian ufologist, blamed an accident with an oil lamp, but there was no fuel smell and the hair and clothes were intact. Lightning and ball lightning were raised, yet the weather had been clear. Spontaneous human combustion has been suggested too, and Antonio Ribera proposed accidental harm from an extraterrestrial propulsion system. Folklore offers another reading: the Boitatá, the fire-serpent of Tupi legend. The story also grew in the retelling, as later English versions added a craft overhead and third-degree burns. Even the testimony splits. Gomide described flesh coming away from the bone. The relatives described roasted, darkened skin without it.

No source calls it a hoax, and no explanation has closed it. In 1947 his brother Emiliano Prestes was reportedly attacked by a similar light. Around 2024, the documentary O Homem que Derreteu, by Fabiana Matias and Henri Baudichon, told the story again. He is remembered as the man who melted.