All fields of human activity have their practical jokers. Elaborate hoaxes have been perpetrated in music, art, literature, history, religion, science—and in the world of flying saucers. Although the motives for such swindles are not always obvious, the trickster is usually trying to promote a cause, to gain fame and/or prestige, to make money, to satirize a folly, or just to have some fun at the public’s expense. Some hoaxes, such as Mark Twain’s petrified man, produce only harmless amusement. Others, planned as serious deceptions, can cause long-lasting damage. The celebrated Piltdown man was fraudulently created from an ape’s jawbone, a stray tooth, and a few chemical staining agents; it gained fame for the scientists involved but threw the study of human evolution into a confusion that lasted more than twenty years, until the forgery was revealed in every detail[X-1].

A few hoaxes live on and on even after they are exposed, apparently because people enjoy believing in them. The Jersey devil, described as a fire-breathing monster with huge wings and a long tail, was first mentioned in the columns of a small-town newspaper in New Jersey in 1906. Within a few days inhabitants of rural areas all over the east coast were reporting glimpses of the frightening demon and on one particular night it allegedly terrified citizens in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. The panic finally reached such heights that some towns closed their factories and theaters. This fantastic monster was quickly found to be a hoax, the brain child of the publicity manager for a Philadelphia museum of freaks; his sole purpose had been to drum up customers for the museum. Nevertheless many persons rejected this explanation and continued to believe that the creature really existed. It was reported again in 1926, in 1930, in 1932, and may reappear again at any time. Obviously the Jersey devil, though admittedly the product of a hoax, has become a permanent part of the local fauna[X-2].

Flying-saucer hoaxes are rarely submitted to the Air Force as bona fide sightings. Of 1500 UFO reports, only forty-two proved to be deliberate frauds or the delusions of unstable persons. The hoaxer may give his tale to the newspapers, to a lecture audience, or even publish it in a book, but he carefully avoids Air Force scrutiny. His story will not hold up under close investigation, and he knows it.

Earthlings and Extraterrestrials

The fantasies of the obviously deluded are a problem for the clinician and will not be discussed in this book. Typical is the case of “Dr. X” who writes to strangers, inviting them to accompany him on his next visit to the “Brothers” in space and to “join the side of righteousness.” Although Dr. X has several times set a date for the excursion, he has always had to postpone it for some reason. He himself, he says, has made more than sixty journeys on flying saucers and mother ships, and has often taken his automobile along—just why he needed it he does not explain.

Peculiarly hard to classify are the “contact” reports, in which a witness affirms that he has had one or more personal encounters with a spacecraft and that he has communicated with its occupants, who range in type from ordinary specimens of Homo sapiens to hairy dwarfs and elephant-faced little men in space suits. He gives a more or less detailed account of the incident and sometimes offers “proof” in the form of alleged photographs or fragments of the vehicle. Ostensibly inspired by religious or humanitarian motives, these “contactees” wholeheartedly support the theory that flying saucers originate in worlds beyond the earth.

In general the contactees tell essentially the same story, with minor variations: Earthling (the witness) sees a flying saucer; saucer lands. Extraterrestrial occupant emerges, extends friendly greetings, confides his wish to help the human race solve its problems, takes Earthling for a cruise to another planet, brings Earthling back. After promising to maintain a sort of guardianship over the earth, the visitor says farewell and flies back to his home planet.

Although these stories are told in the first person, purportedly as fact, they perhaps should not be called hoaxes, for they can deceive only the credulous who want to believe that supermen from other worlds are hovering near to save our troubled planet. With no suspense, little characterization, and ludicrously bad science, these naïve accounts are fiction of such poor quality that they would be rejected by even the most hard-pressed editor of fantastic tales. Whether from Venus, Mars, Saturn, or the planets of other solar systems, these gods from the machine all look just like human beings and either speak the colloquial language of the contactee or communicate by thought transference. Their physical appearance, clothing, tastes in food, habits of thought, and ethical values usually seem indistinguishable from those of the citizens (whether American, French, or Brazilian) who report the visitors.

The “Contactees”

One man who supposedly was privileged to make contact with visitors from space was Daniel Fry who, while strolling in the New Mexico desert on the evening of July 4, 1950, noticed a flying saucer that had apparently just landed. When he approached and started to touch the ship, he suddenly heard a voice speaking in friendly caution: “Better not touch the hull, pal, it’s still hot.” The voice, he discovered, belonged to an extraterrestrial being in a mother ship that was hovering some 900 miles above the earth. The craft on the ground needed no crew, for it was a “remote-controlled cargo carrier,” sent down to collect samples of the earth’s atmosphere. Communicating by mental telepathy, the spaceman revealed that, although he came from a remote planet, his ancestors had been earthmen who had migrated from the island of Lemuria in ancient times (see Chapter II). Strangely enough, although the visitor’s first remark had shown a remarkable command of contemporary English, he did not know what a roller coaster was! He took such a fancy to Fry that he invited him to enter the cargo craft and treated him to a quick flight to New York and back, a round trip of 4000 miles completed in half an hour![X-3]

A contactee whose experience offered variations on the basic theme was Truman Bethurum, a construction worker. According to his story, he happened to be looking for sea shells in the Nevada desert sometime before dawn one morning in July 1952 when he encountered a flying saucer and its friendly crew. The captain was a female, a “queen among women,” whose attractive costume included a bright-red skirt, a black-velvet short-sleeved blouse, and a black beret with red trim[X-4]. Though the grandmother of two, she was so beautiful that at their first meeting Bethurum was speechless. Obviously trying to put him at his ease, she smiled and said encouragingly, “Speak up, my friend, you’re not hexed.” During the following months, he says, they had several meetings and eventually, at her invitation, he accompanied her on an enjoyable visit to the saucer’s home base, the planet “Clarion.” Being placed directly behind the moon and apparently moving in a parallel orbit, this heavenly body has entirely escaped the notice of earthly astronomers[X-5].

George W. Van Tassel, operator of a commercial airport, resort, and guest ranch in California (for some reason most of the better-known contactees seem to be Californians), allegedly made contact with space beings of a more ethereal type. Their saucers traveled on power produced by the “transmutation of hard light particles into soft light particles,” and a typical vehicle was 1500 feet in diameter, 300 feet thick, and carried a crew of 7200. Why they needed so much room—more than 70,000 cubic feet per spaceman—remains a mystery, for both the ship and its occupants were made of pure light. The mother ships remained thousands of miles above the earth at substations from which they sent out their “ventlos,” or flying saucers, to patrol the earth and try to improve conditions here. Speaking through Van Tassel, the visitors sent many messages such as that of June 28, 1952:

“Salutations. My identity is Qel, 72nd projection, 15th wave, realms of Schare [a saucer station in space]. We are passing over your cone of receptivity, 172 thousand miles above you. Our center requests that I inform you. You will see more of us if you watch the skies.”

Several times the spacemen threatened, if opposed, to launch thousands of saucers per second against the earth. In January 1953 they warned that they had three substations in space ready to release 500,000 saucers each; two months later, in March, they informed Van Tassel that they now had 3½ million saucers in operation around the earth. Somehow or other, this armada of UFOs seems to have remained invisible to both the United States Air Force and the public[X-6].

Whether such tales are delusions, fantasies, or hoaxes may be impossible to determine. Some contact cases, however, undoubtedly contain elements of fraud. At worst, the witness may be deliberately inventing the whole story from start to finish; at best, he may feel so certain of the reality of his experience that he feels justified in manufacturing evidence to convince possible skeptics. No matter what his motives, when he tries to add verisimilitude to his narrative by fabricating proofs, he joins the company of hoaxers[X-7].

In the Maury Island case (see Chapter II), the witnesses offered alleged fragments of a disabled spaceship, which turned out to be chunks of slag. The scoutmaster in Florida exhibited singed hair on his arm and a scorched cap to prove that he had suffered from the heat rays of a landed flying saucer (see Chapter VII), and the grain salesman in Nebraska bolstered his tale of the Saturnian ship by pointing to shallow cracks in a dry river bed and oil smudges on the grass (see Chapter IX).

A contactee who provided “proof” of his story was Howard Menger, who specialized in describing visits to the moon. In the moon cities, he said, he met many earth scientists who enjoyed a delightful, relaxed existence. The lunar natives use no money, are born without appendixes, and for entertainment play a game very much like baseball. In science they are way ahead of us: using saucers equipped with “self-contained gravity” and propelled by “processed free energy,” they transported him from earth to moon in only two hours[X-8]. As a trophy of his visit, Menger brought back a lunar potato. This remarkable vegetable was supposed to have five times the protein content of an ordinary American potato, but unfortunately it was not available for analysis. As soon as he returned, he said, he had turned it over to the United States Government, and the government was keeping it top secret[X-9].

Adamski’s Travels

Perhaps the best known of the contactees is George Adamski, who on the night of November 20, 1952, in the desert of Southern California, supposedly met and talked with the pilot of a vehicle that had just arrived from Venus. Conversation was no problem; both men simply used telepathy and sign language when words failed[X-10]. In the years since then Adamski has reported many other pleasant chats with visitors from Mars and Saturn as well as Venus, and has allegedly made several journeys in their spacecraft, including an aerial tour of the moon. On this trip he observed with surprise that the moon’s hidden side contained fertile country abounding in lakes, rivers, vegetation, and prosperous cities with people strolling along the sidewalks[X-11]. He was not at all disconcerted when the Russian photographs of the moon’s far side showed no trace of these delightful features. Obviously, said Adamski, the Russians had simply retouched the pictures before releasing them to the world, in order to deceive the United States and to conceal the vegetation, trees, and buildings of the space people who had their bases there[X-12].

Clearly aware of possible skepticism, Adamski did not ask the public to accept his experiences on his unsupported word; as evidence, he offered various photographs showing cigar-shaped objects, a rocky hillside with a white blob on the horizon, and the drawing of a person apparently clad in coveralls—without the book’s explanation no one would ever suspect that he came from the planet Venus. One of the best-known pictures he published showed a bell-shaped “spaceship” with circular openings near the top and three large balls on the bottom for landing gear. By an interesting coincidence, this craft closely resembles a well-known type of chicken brooder, whose three infrared bulbs at the base look very much like the “landing gear” of the alleged spacecraft (see Figure 15). When skeptics doubted Adamski’s claim that he had traveled from Kansas City, Missouri, to Davenport, Iowa, by flying saucer, he displayed one of the most unusual items ever called upon to prove the existence of spaceships: his uncanceled railway ticket, for which he requested a refund![X-13]

Photography and the UFO

Those who believe in flying saucers have long hoped to obtain a good clear photograph that would establish their existence once and for all. Many “UFO” pictures show vague specks and blurs whose interpretation is limited only by the imagination of the viewer. Of the many pictures taken in good faith and offered in evidence, none shows an indubitable spaceship. Most of them are genuine photographs showing indistinct images of jet planes, birds, balloons, and other objects normally in the sky. They are puzzling only until they are compared with similar photographs of known jet planes, birds, balloons, and other normal objects; then their identity becomes obvious.

Trick photography has often been called upon to prove the reality of the incredible—fairies, ectoplasm, ghosts—and it has also played a part in the history of flying saucers. While the most detailed contact stories have usually come from the United States, for some peculiar reason the best of the faked pictures have come from Europe and South America. A widely publicized photograph supposedly taken at Taormina, Sicily, in 1954 shows four men standing on a bridge and apparently gazing at two UFOs soaring overhead [X-14]. The deep shadows cast by the men and the bridge railing show that the sun was shining brilliantly, but the objects in the sky, which look like the inverted covers of teapots or sugar bowls, show only faintly shadowed areas. Stranger yet, the shady side of one UFO is on the left, that of the other UFO on the right. The men on the bridge have their heads tilted at such an angle that they could not possibly have seen the objects pictured, but are obviously looking at the hill in the background instead of at the sky. Even a casual inspection exposes this picture as a crude fake (see Plate VIa).

An even cruder fake was offered as evidence to Dr. Menzel in South Africa in the summer of 1962. The optimistic photographer insisted that he had snapped a genuine saucer on the wing, even though the circular object shown in the print was an unmistakable hubcap, the Chevrolet trade-mark clearly legible.

The Isle of Lovers Hoax

Some photographic hoaxes are more cleverly executed. In May 1952, a few weeks after Life magazine had alarmed the world with its article “Have We Visitors from Outer Space?”[X-15], the Brazilian weekly picture magazine O Cruzeiro published startlingly clear photographs of an alleged flying saucer[X-16]. According to the accompanying story, a reporter and a photographer on the staff of the magazine on May 7 had visited Ilha dos Amores, an island not far from Rio de Janeiro, to do a feature assignment. Late in the afternoon, at a moment when the photographer just happened to have his camera pointed at the sky, the reporter suddenly called his attention to a passing UFO. During the minute or so the object was in view he obtained five pictures which, along with the reporter’s eyewitness story, were released to the public on May 17. If the editors actually believed in the reality of the saucer, the ten-day delay before informing the world of its visit is remarkable. The magazine has never admitted that the photographs were a hoax, but they inspired doubt even in sympathetic investigators[X-17].

The UFO appears in a dull sky above a mountain peak. In the first picture the object looks like a jet plane surrounded by an exhaust haze and, with a little imagination, might be called a Saturn-like object. In succeeding pictures it resembles the lid of a teapot, or the bottom view of a rubber stopper for a sink. A study of the shadows quickly reveals the fraudulent nature of these photographs: the dome on top of the “saucer” casts its shadow to the right, while the trees and mountains in the foreground cast their shadows to the left. The picture could be authentic only in a peculiar world in which the sun shone from the west on objects on the ground, but shone from the east on objects flying in the sky!

The Trindade Island Saucer

The most famous of all purported photographs of a UFO, the Trindade Island saucer, also came from Brazil. First published in Brazilian newspapers on February 21, 1958, the pictures showed dark mountain crags looming against an overcast sky. Above one peak appeared a startling image (much like the O Cruzeiro saucer of 1952) resembling the planet Saturn—a flattened sphere banded round the middle by a dark line that extended like a platform beyond the curved sides. According to the accompanying news stories, the UFO had flown over the island of Trindade and had been observed by the officers and crew of a ship of the Brazilian Navy. The pictures, taken by a photographer on board, had been examined and supposedly pronounced genuine by Navy experts before being released to the press. Since a responsible military organization and a major world government thus seemed to accept the photographs as proof that flying saucers actually existed, the incident raised a storm of official inquiry both in Brazil and abroad. Then, within a few weeks, the storm abruptly subsided. Although no explanation was given, the object in the pictures was obviously considered no threat to our planet’s security (see Plate VIb).

Although saucer enthusiasts regard these pictures as genuine evidence for the reality of UFOs, careful study of the facts strongly suggests that this case, which rocked the Brazilian Government and created a short-lived but world-wide saucer scare, was merely an unusually skillful hoax[X-18].

At first glance, the circumstances of the sighting seemed to be entirely clear and straightforward[X-19]. Trindade is a barren, mountainous island of about six square miles, about 600 miles from the coast of Brazil. Abandoned after the end of the Second World War, the island remained deserted except by sea gulls until October 1957, when the Brazilian Navy established an oceanographic post and a meteorological station there to carry out its research for the International Geophysical Year (IGY). To facilitate the oceanographic studies, the Navy also converted a training ship, the Almirante Saldanha, into a floating laboratory equipped with scientific apparatus and photographic darkroom. With a crew of about 300, the ship routinely traveled between Rio de Janeiro and Trindade Island on its duties for the IGY.

A major function of the meteorological station was the launching and tracking of weather balloons; they were painted red, inflated with hydrogen, and carried radio transmitters. Launched each morning, they were tracked by radio and optical devices to show the movements of the winds in the upper atmosphere. At a certain point (when the balloon burst, or at a prearranged signal) the balloon released a bag of scientific instruments which, attached to a parachute, floated to the ground to be retrieved.

The Trindade station began operation in November 1957. Almost immediately, UFOs were reported over the island. (Brazil had not been immune to the flying-saucer epidemic that had begun in Texas early that month [see Chapter IX], and sentries at Itaipu Fort, near Santos, on November 4 had reported a UFO that knocked out the lights and electric plant.) With weather balloons going up daily, parachutes floating down at odd times, and sea gulls cruising over the island, the advent of other “saucers” was inevitable. During November and December several UFOs were reported by workmen, none of whom were trained observers. Although neither Captain Bacellar, the commanding officer at the station, nor his officers saw any unidentified objects, he radioed Rio to report the incidents and investigated each story. Some he found to be false, some were based on mistaken identification of gulls and balloons, and in others the evidence was inconclusive.

Early in January 1958, when the Almirante Saldanha arrived on schedule at Trindade, it had on board several civilian guests who were to collaborate in various aspects of the research. Among them was Almiro Barauna, a professional photographer. After several days at the island, the ship prepared to leave for the return trip to Rio on January 16. Shortly after noon Barauna was on deck with his camera, waiting to film the departure. The sky was thinly overcast, the sea was rough, and waves dashing against the ship and the rocky shore created a noisy background.

According to the news accounts printed several weeks later, Captain Viegas, of the Brazilian Air Force, suddenly shouted “Olha o disco! [Flying saucer!]” Hearing the shout, Barauna peered at the sky and saw a luminous oval object moving swiftly toward the island. Officers and crewmen on deck also observed the UFO, he said, and interfered with his aim as they ran about excitedly. Nevertheless he managed to take six shots of the UFO as it approached the island, disappeared behind a mountain peak, reversed direction and reappeared at a lower altitude, retraced its course, and vanished with incredible speed against the horizon. The unknown had arrived and departed in a period of about twenty seconds.

According to the news stories, the photographer had retired to the ship’s darkroom under the supervision of an officer to develop the negative, and found that four of the six exposures showed the mysterious object. He was not able to make prints, he said, because the darkroom supplies unfortunately did not include any photographic paper. However, he did exhibit the negative, and the officers and crewmen who examined it allegedly agreed that it showed the same Saturn-like UFO that had flown over the island. After the return to Rio he made prints and enlargements and turned them over, together with the negative, to the Brazilian Navy.

The question of authenticity arose immediately. Called down to Intelligence headquarters for an interview, Barauna underwent a four-hour interrogation concerning the pictures. During the questioning he was asked, “If you were going to make a flying saucer appear on a negative, how would you proceed?” He replied, as he later told a reporter, “Comandante, I am an able photographer, specialized in trick photography, but I could not produce one that would withstand close and accurate examination.”[X-18]

In spite of this modest disclaimer, some of the photographic evidence clearly suggested fraud, and a strong difference of opinion developed among government officials. Some accepted the pictures as a genuine record of a flying saucer; others pronounced them fakes. For several weeks the incident was kept secret, but when eventually someone took the prints to the President of Brazil, further concealment became impossible. Yielding to the persuasion of certain military advisers and newsmen, and against the advice of the Naval Ministry, he released the pictures to the press.

The Brazilian Naval Ministry

The photographs were published on February 21, five weeks after they were taken. Since the President had apparently accepted them at face value, the Naval Ministry was obviously in a difficult position; through an unofficial spokesman it issued a statement notable for its lack of enthusiasm:

“On the morning of January 16, 1958, over the island of Trindade, the crew of the school ship Almirante Saldanha sighted an unidentified aerial object for a few seconds. A civilian who was aboard the ship took some pictures of the object. The Navy has no connection with the case, and its only connection with the occurrence was the fact that the photographer was aboard the school ship, and came back with the ship to Rio.”[X-20]

On the same day another Navy spokesman released a similar unofficial statement to O Globo:

“The news about a flying saucer sighted over the Island of Trindade was received here with utmost reserve. There will be an investigation to verify the authenticity of the sightings and photos. No officer or sailor from the N.E. Almirante Saldanha witnessed the event.”[X-20]

Immediately an international furor broke out. Were these pictures indeed proof of extraterrestrial spaceships, or were they a hoax, with the Brazilian President and the Brazilian Navy as victims? Who were the witnesses, and exactly what did they report? In the United States, high officials asked for copies of the pictures. An editor of Look magazine asked Dr. Menzel to fly to Brazil to evaluate the evidence, but later canceled the plan when the Rio office advised that the photographs were generally considered fraudulent. Public excitement in Brazil became so great that on February 23 the Naval Ministry released an official statement, distinguished by its air of caution, which concluded:

“Clearly this Ministry will not be able to make any pronouncement concerning the reality of the object seen because the photographs do not constitute sufficient proof for this purpose.”[X-18]

The day after the pictures were published the Almirante Saldanha, which had been lying outside the harbor at Rio, received orders to sail. Not until February 24, when the ship docked at Santos, did newsmen have a chance to interview the officers and crewmen who allegedly had observed the Trindade saucer and could support Barauna’s story. None of them, it turned out, had actually seen the object.

The Assistant Naval Attaché of the United States, who was then in Santos in connection with the visit of the U. S. Coast Guard cutter Westwind, visited the Brazilian ship to collect information about the Trindade saucer, but with little success. The commanding officer stated that he had not seen the alleged UFO; he had seen the pictures but refused to express an opinion on their authenticity; he stated that his secretary might have seen the UFO but the secretary, when questioned, preferred not to discuss the matter. The executive officer said that he had not been on deck at the time of the sighting, but that other persons might have seen the object.

During the next week arguments for and against the authenticity of the photographs filled the Brazilian papers, and O Globo published deliberately faked views of a “flying saucer”—a china plate tossed into the air. A federal deputy in an official note to the Naval Ministry deplored their amazing failure to procure sworn statements from the officers and crewmen who were reported to have witnessed the UFO.

In spite of the widespread and increasing skepticism, the weekly magazine O Cruzeiro used the Trindade pictures for its lead story in the issue of March 8. “Once bitten, twice shy” apparently did not apply to its editors, who seemed instead to adopt the principle, “In for a penny, in for a pound.” The photographs, they remarked editorially, not only proved the existence of flying saucers, they also established the authenticity of the Ilha dos Amores pictures published several years earlier. As though to emphasize this point, the magazine assigned the Trindade story and the interviews with witnesses to the same staff reporter who had described the Ilha dos Amores saucer in 1952. The Naval Ministry refrained from further comment and, since the military authorities showed no alarm about the possibility of extraterrestrial patrols, public interest in the pictures quickly died.

The report sent home by the U. S. Naval Attaché included the comment:

“There appear to be only two explanations for this peculiar incident, and the peculiar handling of it by the Brazilian Government: (a) Some overwhelming power has told the Brazilian Navy not to verify this incident officially (which they should easily be able to do, if it actually occurred) or to deny it (which they should easily be able to do if it is a fake). I personally do not believe that anyone has told the Brazilian Navy to keep quiet about it because there has been no hint of such suppression in either Brazilian or United States circles. I also doubt that their control of the individual officers and men would be good enough to hold the line in any event. (b) The whole thing is a fake publicity stunt.... This seems more likely....”[X-18]

The Icarai Submarine Hunting Club

The accounts originally printed in the Brazilian papers and in O Cruzeiro contain a number of significant details that have been glossed over or ignored by UFO enthusiasts, both in Brazil[X-19] and in the United States[X-21], who apparently accept the Trindade saucer at face value. A study of the available news stories, facts gathered by Intelligence officers, and of the photographs themselves leads inescapably to the conclusion that the Trindade Island photographs were almost certainly a hoax.

Almiro Barauna was a free-lance photographer. A professional of unusual skill, he had long been interested in flying saucers and, some time before the Trindade incident, he had published a purposely humorous magazine article entitled “A Flying Saucer Hunted Me at Home” and illustrated by admittedly faked photographs. He had also published trick photographs of “treasure chests” lying on the ocean bottom. In addition, Barauna specialized in underwater photography and was a member of the Icarai Submarine Hunting Club, a group interested in skin diving and the study of life on the ocean floor.

When the Almirante Saldanha left Rio for its historic January visit to Trindade Island, the ship had on board, as guests of the Navy, five members of the Icarai Club. Among the five, in addition to Barauna, were Amilar Vieira Filho, captain of the group, and José Teobaldo Viegas, a retired captain in the Brazilian Air Force[X-22]. On January 16 when the ship was getting ready to leave Trindade, these three friends were on deck, Barauna with his loaded Rolleiflex camera, the other two standing some distance away. Suddenly Vieira remarked on a big sea gull in the sky. Looking up, Viegas immediately shouted, “Flying saucer!” and Barauna snapped his pictures.

No other eyewitnesses have been found, even though the deck was crowded with sailors. The ship’s dentist has been listed as a witness (in one document he appears as two persons, under two different versions of his name) but no newspaper yet examined mentions his story. Captain Bacellar, returning from his post as commander of the Trindade station, has also been listed as a witness but, according to his statement, he was not on deck when the incident occurred.

Vieira, the first man to sight the object, had called it “a big sea gull.” When interviewed five weeks later, in the midst of the saucer excitement, he had changed his mind about its being a sea gull, but he was no longer certain just what he had seen. He stated that the unknown had been in view for twenty seconds at most, and had disappeared too quickly for him to note any details; it was simply an oval gray object that seemed to flash briefly before it vanished. He did not mention the Saturn-like bands around the middle that are a conspicuous feature of the photograph.

The Trindade Photographs

Accounts of the Trindade affair often remark that the photographs must be genuine because no opportunity for fraud occurred. On the contrary, there were ample and repeated opportunities. Since Barauna was not under observation when he loaded his camera, he could easily have inserted a prepared film, with no one the wiser. With the type of camera used, the operation would have been simple. He was again free from observation when he developed the negatives. Captain Bacellar escorted him to the door of the darkroom but remained outside, on guard at the door. The only person to accompany Barauna inside (to help by holding a flashlight) was his friend Viegas—the same man who had cried “Flying saucer!”

When Barauna emerged with the dripping film, Bacellar examined it but what he expected to find is a question, since he had not observed the UFO. The witnesses allegedly agreed, however, that the negatives showed the object they had seen in the sky—an amazing feat when we remember that the Rolleiflex film frame is small, only about 2.25 inches square.

In the print of Frame 3 shown in O Cruzeiro[X-22], the UFO is slightly more than ¼ inch long and less than ⅛ inch thick. Assuming an enlargement factor of a little more than three, we find that the UFO on the negative would have appeared merely as a pale blur about 1/16 of an inch in length and no thicker than a pencil line. Miraculous eyesight would have been required to distinguish a “Saturn-like” or any other shape.

The Navy’s officers on board showed astonishingly little interest in the film and did nothing to prevent the possibility of fraud. All during the homeward trip the photographer had both the camera and the negative in his own possession. When the ship stopped at Santos, he and his fellow club members were allowed to debark (with camera and negative), and they completed the journey to Rio by bus. The ship had been anchored at Rio for two days before Captain Bacellar, of the Trindade station, finally called on Barauna and asked to see the prints so that he could show them to the Navy. Thus the photographer had been free of supervision for days. In that time he could have produced pictures of little men from Mars, if he had wanted to.

The pictures themselves raise many questions. The three witnesses had emphasized the brilliance of the UFO, yet the prints show merely a gray shape with no suggestion of luminosity. Barauna had used a Rolleiflex camera, 2.8 Model E, f/8 lens, set at 125. Finding that he had overexposed the film, he said, he had treated the negative with silver salts after development in order to increase the contrast. (During this procedure he was, again, without official supervision.)

The prints used in O Cruzeiro have obviously been cropped since, unlike the film frames, they are not square. Frame 1 shows the UFO above the sea, some distance from the island; Frame 2 shows the UFO above rocky crags, at the right of a peak. Frame 3 shows it at the right of the peak but at lower altitude. Frames 4 and 5, not reproduced, did not show the object, and in Frame 6 the UFO is a mere speck low on the horizon.

Frame 3, the only one showing the Saturn-like shape, deserves special attention. In the published print the mountains in the foreground are quite clear, while the UFO is little more than a dark line with an indistinct beginning and end, with a faint suggestion of rounding at top and bottom; without the dark line the curves would scarcely be visible, so completely does the object merge into the background of overcast sky. The picture widely distributed by news agencies is a further enlargement of the section containing the UFO. In the enlarged section, the foreground rocks are a mere black blur, but the UFO has gained greatly in clarity. The central band is darker, particularly at the left, and the outlines of the object are no longer vague.

The Navy’s study of the negatives revealed several dubious features. The details of the land in the foreground were very sharp but the UFO disk was hazy, showed little contrast, and was essentially without shadows. The object in Frame 2 seemed to have been inverted, as compared with Frames 1 and 3. From the reported high velocity of the saucer and the fast shutter speed, some lateral haziness might have been expected, but no such blurring appeared.

Exactly when and how the fraudulent images were produced—if they were fraudulent—cannot be known. Experienced photographers can easily think of a dozen possible devices. The probability that they were faked is overwhelming and, but for the embarrassing fact that the Brazilian President had seemed to sponsor them publicly, the Naval Ministry would undoubtedly have exposed the entire hoax.

In summary, the facts are these: The man who made the Trindade pictures had no connection with the Brazilian Navy; he was a professional photographer noted particularly as an expert at trick photography. No officer or crewman of the Brazilian Navy reported seeing the UFO; in addition to the photographer, only two persons are on record as actual eyewitnesses; both of them were personal friends of the photographer; neither of them had any connection with the Brazilian Navy. The photographer had ample time and many opportunities to fake the pictures. A Rolleiflex camera can easily be used for double exposures. A series of pictures of a model saucer against a dark background could be rerolled and exposed a second time to provide the background, an old and well-known photographic trick. The pictures themselves show internal inconsistencies. The Brazilian Naval Ministry never accepted the pictures as authentic records of a flying saucer.^[C]