The José Higgins Encounter at Goio-Bang, Paraná

July 1947. A wave of saucer reports was under way, one that NICAP would later catalogue in detail. José Carlos Higgins, a surveyor born in Curitiba in 1907, was at work with a crew in the forested interior of Paraná, near the colony of Goio-Bang. At the time it was part of Pitanga municipality. Today it belongs to Luiziana, some 430 km from Curitiba.

The workers heard an extremely sharp sound. Something "like a medicine capsule" came down from the sky. It was a disc of white-grey metal, about 30 meters across in the Portuguese accounts, crossed by tubes running in different directions. It traveled in a closed circle on the ground, then landed gently on curved metal legs, about 50 meters away. The crew ran.

Higgins moved closer. In the English translation, he saw two figures watching him through a black glass window. There was a door beneath the rim. Three beings came out.

They stood about 30 centimeters taller than Higgins, who was 1.80 meters. They were thin, with long legs and large round heads. He described "huge round eyes without eyebrows, having, however, eyelashes, and very pronounced baldness." A transparent coverall covered each of them completely, head and all, with metal boxes on their backs. Underneath he saw T-shirts, shorts and sandals. Not cloth. Shiny paper.

One pointed a metal tube at him and waved him toward the open door. Higgins asked by gesture where they came from. The leader drew a dot in the ground, ringed by seven circles. He pointed to the centre and said "Alamo". Then to the seventh circle. "Orque". Higgins would not go. He showed them a photograph of his wife. They accepted it.

He withdrew into the bush and watched. For about half an hour they jumped in the air and threw enormous stones, "playing like children." Then they went back inside. The craft rose with the same hiss, heading north, until it disappeared into the clouds.

The Diário da Tarde of Curitiba carried the story on 5 August 1947, and newspapers in Bauru followed on 8 August. On 15 August A Noite put it on its front page as "Marcianos descem no Paraná", Martians land in Paraná, though Higgins never said the beings came from Mars. In 1954 João Martins revived the case in O Cruzeiro. Olavo Fontes translated it for the APRO Bulletin in May 1961. Flying Saucer Review followed, and Ted Bloecher later listed it in NICAP's report on the 1947 wave.

No photographs exist. No radar. No official investigation. Translation took its toll. The site drifted to "northeast of Pitanga" and even to Bauru, São Paulo, and the craft grew to 150 feet.

Commentators read "Alamo" as the Sun and "Orque" as the orbit of Uranus. Pablo Villarrubia Mauso wonders whether "Alamo" echoes Los Alamos, and draws on Jacques Vallée's "control system". Historian Cláudio Tsuyoshi Suenaga calls it a "classic protocol case of contactism". Sceptics point to the absence of photographs, physical traces or independent testimony. No hoax confession has ever surfaced.

Yet the man was real. In February 2021 archivist Rodrigo Moura Visoni found his birth certificate. And in 2010, when Mauso and Carlos Alberto Machado visited Luiziana, residents still remembered. Some said people once came from far away to see the landing spot.