The Sagrada Família Cyclops Encounter, Belo Horizonte

In 1963 the Sagrada Família neighbourhood sat on the edge of Belo Horizonte, in Minas Gerais. The Gualberto family lived at Rua Conselheiro Lafaiete 1533. Fernando Eustáquio Gualberto was 12. His brother Ronaldo was 7. José Marcos Gomes Vidal was 7 too.

August 28, 1963. Between 19:00 and 19:30, the three boys were in the backyard by a cistern and a water drum. The yard light was off. Their father, Alcides Gualberto, was at a nearby bar. Their mother, Maria José, was in the front bedroom.

Over an avocado tree floated a sphere, about 3 to 3.5 metres across. It was lit from inside. Its transparent walls were divided into little squares, with a V-shaped antenna on top. It hung motionless, about 5 metres up. Inside were four figures, each with a single eye. Three were bald. One had long blonde hair. Then two parallel yellowish beams reached the ground. Between them, one of the men came down, upright, as if floating.

He was more than 2 metres tall. Completely bald. His skin had a strong red tint. His one eye was large, round and dark, with no white. He wore a kind of diving suit with a round transparent helmet. He walked toward José Marcos and held out an arm. Fernando crept up behind him with a piece of brick. The being spun round. A jet of yellow light from his chest hit the boy's hand. The hand shook. The brick fell.

Then he tried to talk, in a strange language and an extremely deep voice. He pressed his palms together beside his head, as if miming sleep. He pointed at the Moon and raised his hands, as if showing a flight that way. José Marcos asked, "Will you come back?" The being nodded. He pulled a plant from a flowerbed and rose between the beams. The sphere glowed and climbed silently toward the east.

The boys ran inside, screaming for their mother. She had seen only a strong, brief flash at the bedroom window. Family and neighbours met the story with complete disbelief. "One day they'll see what we saw," Fernando said, "and then it'll be proven we weren't lying!" But Alcides found several small triangle-shaped marks along the man's path. They were quite deep, about 1.5 cm a side. A neighbour, Jamil, saw them that night.

The story stayed local until 1965. That year a neighbour, Dona Zita Ianni, reported a large flying cylinder over the Cemig substation. O Diário ran the story "Tripulante de Disco Voador desceu em Belo Horizonte?" Alberto Francisco do Carmo of CICOANI, a civilian investigation centre, interviewed the boys and their parents at the site. Its leader, Prof. Húlvio Brant Aleixo, a psychologist and reserve Brazilian Air Force aviator-officer, held more than 15 interviews. The SBEDV published his report in 1968.

Carmo followed the witnesses into adulthood and concluded his study on January 24, 2005. All three insisted they would never profit from the case.

No hoax claim or conventional explanation has been published. The doubts came at the time, from family, neighbours and Aleixo's cross-checks. How could the boys see detail with the yard light off? "The light from the 'ball' lit everything up," Fernando replied, "and there was some moonlight too."

The Argentine researcher Fabio Picasso grouped such one-eyed entities as "Cyclopeans". José Marcos was interviewed again in 2005 by Pablo Villarrubia Mauso, and in 2023 by Cláudio Suenaga, sixty years on. The documentary Alien Cyclops: The Extraordinary Case of Sagrada Familia retold the story on film.