extraordinary%20encounters

64 Close encounters of the third kind
ment attesting to what they had seen that
night. At 6 P.M. the next day, the original
UFO and its crew returned. At one point during
the observation, Gill and others waved to
the occupants, who waved back. The objects
showed up for the last time the next night,
though no beings were visible.
Interviewed in 1973 by J. Allen Hynek, native
witnesses stuck by the story. Gill, who left
the country in September 1959, stands by the
report even today. It remains among the most
impressive and puzzling of CE3s.
Far stranger and much harder to believe
was the testimony of a young Brazilian, Antonio
Villas-Boas. Villas-Boas came to the attention
of ufologists in November 1957, when he
wrote a letter to a journalist who had written
about UFOs. Soon afterward, the journalist,
Joao Martins, brought Villas-Boas to Rio de
Janeiro, where he and physician/ufologist
Olavo T. Fontes, of the National School of
Medicine of Brazil, interviewed and examined
him. The young man claimed that in the early
morning hours of October 16, occupants of a
UFO took him into the ship and left him
alone in a room. A naked, essentially humanlooking
young woman soon joined him there,
eventually engaging with him in two sex acts.
Before leaving, she made a gesture that led
Villas-Boas to believe she would bear his child
on another world.
Martins and Fontes judged Villas-Boas to
be sane and sincere. His intelligence and refusal
to speculate on the incident made a positive
impression. “In spite of this,” Fontes
wrote, “the very substance of his story becomes
the heaviest argument against it”
(Lorenzen and Lorenzen, 1967). In 1962 two
representatives of a Brazilian UFO group
went to Villas-Boas’s village to speak with
him. Though desiring no publicity, he spoke,
if reluctantly, about the experience. The investigators
published an account of the interview
in an English-language version of their bulletin,
but it attracted little notice. Fontes’s
1958 report circulated privately among a few
English-speaking ufologists, but because of its
sexual nature no one would publish it. For
Antonio Villas-Boas being medically examined following
his abduction by a UFO in Brazil, October 15, 1957
(Fortean Picture Library)
most ufologists, the Villas-Boas episode was
only a vague rumor, if that, until England’s
widely read Flying Saucer Review carried a series
of articles on it, beginning in its January/February
1965 issue.
The Villas-Boas case anticipated an escalation
of the strangeness quotient of the CE3
phenomenon. On April 18, 1961, Joe Simonton
of rural Eagle River, Wisconsin, was eating
lunch when, so he would assert, a flying
saucer landed on his driveway. He went outside
just as a hatchway opened. A short, darkfeatured
man, dressed in a black, two-piece
suit and wearing a tight-fitting cap on his
head, held a jug. From his gestures Simonton
inferred that he wanted the jug to be filled
with water. He complied. As he handed the
filled jug back to the man, he glanced inside
the ship and saw two other men. One was sitting
in front of a flameless grill, cooking
something. When Simonton asked if they
were eating, the man with the jug handed him
four fresh “pancakes,” and then the flying
saucer departed. Simonton took a bite of one