Part 20

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]

[C] During a visit to Rio de Janeiro in February 1963, Dr. Menzel discussed this case with some of Brazil’s leading astronomers; they concurred in the view that the Trindade saucer was a hoax.

The final paragraph from a United States Intelligence report provides perhaps the most appropriate comment on the affair:

“It is the reporting officer’s private opinion that a flying saucer sighting would be unlikely at the very barren island of Trindade, since everyone knows that Martians are extremely comfort-loving creatures.”

_Project Ozma_

Astronomers have found no evidence suggesting that intelligent life exists on any of earth’s sister planets. Most scientists would agree, however, that life of some kind probably does exist in other parts of our galaxy and in other galaxies. Even if this probability were certainty and space travel were possible over the vast distances we measure in light years, the chance that earthman and alien will ever establish physical contact remains infinitesimally small. An explorer (whether from earth or from a planet of another sun) would have to begin by locating, among the millions of stars in the heavens, a particular star that had a family of life-bearing planets. If he were able to identify one of these needles in the cosmic haystack, he would next have to find out which of the planets supported living, intelligent organisms. If he could find the planet and set down his spaceship, the explorer would then have to try to identify and to communicate with creatures that might be unimaginably strange--so strange that he would not recognize them as either living or intelligent.

At present, only light waves and radio waves can bridge the immensities of space. Physical travel to other star systems is not now and may never be possible. Nevertheless, men are making attempts to find out whether other intelligent beings do exist outside the solar system and, if so, where. The earliest effort, known as Project Ozma, started a few years ago at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia. As the first step in a systematic search, the astronomers began to listen for possible radio signals from the neighborhood of certain stars. Tau Ceti, Epsilon Eridani, and 61 Cygni were chosen as the first targets because they lie within range of our radio telescopes--ten to eleven light years distant--and because they resemble our own sun in age and type and therefore might have planetary systems not unlike our own. So far, the radio telescopes have detected no phenomena that might be interpreted as artificial signals.

The problems involved are incredibly difficult. A background of radio noise--“swishes,” “whistles,” “tweeks”--comes in constantly from the universe at large. Deliberate signals, if they occurred, would be hard to distinguish from the random noise. Even if signals came in and were detected, they might still be indecipherable just as the written records of some early civilizations on our own planet remain a mystery. Egyptian hieroglyphs were meaningless pictures for millennia until the Rosetta stone provided the key, less than 200 years ago. The many pages of text and pictures left by the Mayan Indians cannot yet be read, except for some dates and a few astronomical symbols. Hundreds of inscriptions exist in the Etruscan language, written in an alphabet that resembles the familiar Greek, but scholars have deciphered only a few words.

If we are not able to interpret the records devised and set down by human beings like ourselves, we will not easily understand signals that might possibly be broadcast by aliens from the planets of other suns.

[X-1] Wiener, J. S. _The Piltdown Forgery._ London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1955.

[X-2] MacDougall, C. D. _Hoaxes._ New York: Ace Books, 1958.

[X-3] Fry, D. W. _The White Sands Incident._ Los Angeles: New Age Publ. Co., 1954.

[X-4] Redondo Beach (Calif.) _Daily Breeze_, September 25, 1953.

[X-5] Bethurum, T. _Aboard a Flying Saucer._ Los Angeles: De Vorss & Co., 1954.

[X-6] Van Tassel, G. W. _I Rode a Flying Saucer._ Los Angeles: New Age Publ. Co., 1952.

[X-7] Cahn, J. P. “Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men,” _True_ magazine (September 1952).

[X-8] Menger, H. _From Outer Space To You._ Clarksburg, West Virginia: Saucerian Publications, 1959.

[X-9] Peterborough (N.H.) _Transcript_, Oct. 30, 1958.

[X-10] Leslie, D., and Adamski, G. _Flying Saucers Have Landed._ New York: British Book Centre, 1953.

[X-11] Adamski, G. _Inside the Space Ships._ Abelard-Schuman, 1955.

[X-12] ---- _Flying Saucers, Farewell._ Abelard-Schuman, 1961.

[X-13] _UFO Investigator_ (June 1959).

[X-14] Michel, A. _The Truth about Flying Saucers._ New York: Criterion Books, 1956.

[X-15] “Have We Visitors from Outer Space?” _Life_ magazine (April 4, 1952).

[X-16] Rio de Janeiro: _O Cruzeiro_, May 17, 1952.

[X-17] Civilian Saucer Investigations _Quarterly Bulletin_ (September 1952).

[X-18] Air Force Files.

[X-19] _UFO Critical Bulletin_ (March-April 1958).

[X-20] Fontes, O. T. “The Brazilian Navy UFO Sighting at the Island of Trindade,” _Flying Saucers_ (February 1961), p. 27 ff.

[X-21] Maney, C. A., and Hall, R. _The Challenge of Unidentified Flying Objects._ Washington, D.C., 1961.

[X-22] Rio de Janeiro: _O Cruzeiro_, March 8, 1958.

_Chapter_ XI

ANGEL HAIR, PANCAKES, ETC.

If thousands of aircraft from other planets have indeed been patrolling the earth for many years (according to some authors, for centuries), they have achieved an incredibly perfect safety record. Disabled or wrecked flying saucers have occasionally been reported, but the debris and bodies to be expected from such incidents have never been located.

A “mummified man,” sometimes referred to as proof of such a catastrophe, may be seen at Caspar, Wyoming. Found in the Rocky Mountains in the autumn of 1932, this little creature measures 6½ inches high in a sitting position and weighs three-quarters of a pound. Paleontologists recognize it as _Hesperopithecus_, an anthropoid denizen of earth during the Pliocene period. The mummified body of another such creature, supposedly found in Arizona, has also been called the remains of “a little green man.”[XI-1] In 1952 four spaceships were supposed to have crashed in the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, carrying the bodies of thirty-four “little men”[XI-2], but the only evidence offered for this disaster was a chunk of “unknown metal” that proved to be ordinary aluminum, and the entire drama was shown to be the work of a known hoaxer[XI-3]. Although a few flying-saucer organizations regard such “humanoid” evidence with some doubt, others, such as the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) are less skeptical of the reality of “little men.”[XI-4]

UFO publications have reported the finding of various substances alleged to have been produced by UFOs. The offices of Air Force investigators at Dayton house a small museum of such “pieces of saucers”--old batteries, meteorites, parts of primitive radios, rocks, corroded lead pipe, tangles of wire, strips of tin foil. Although a few of these specimens have been sent in by optimistic hoaxers, most of them have been submitted by genuinely puzzled citizens. When analysis shows the normal origin of such an object, the finder usually accepts the verdict calmly, whether he is disappointed or relieved, but occasionally he rejects the identification and indignantly accuses the Air Force of theft, substitution, or plain lying to suppress the “truth.” Nevertheless, not a single fragment studied so far--animal, vegetable, or mineral--shows any evidence that it grew or was constructed on an alien world.

_Angel Hair and Spiders_

Some centuries ago the primitive inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands, observing the feathery, hairlike threads of volcanic glass left on the ground from ancient eruptions, accounted for the substance by the legend that the goddess Pelee had once stopped somewhere in the neighborhood to comb her hair. “Angel hair,” a term in UFO parlance used to describe any unfamiliar fibers, strands, threads, liquids, granules, and powders found on the earth and supposedly deposited from flying saucers, offers an interesting analogy.

_Fils de la Vierge_--the hair of the Virgin Mary--is the usual French phrase for gossamer or cobwebs, whose origin was long a mystery. Similarly the English “gossamer” commonly means cobwebs. According to one source, the word may be derived from _gaze à Marie_--the gauze of Mary. According to legend, cobwebs were formed from threads that fell from the shroud of the Virgin Mary on her Assumption. UFO enthusiasts in France began to use _fils de la Vierge_ in 1952, to describe the cobwebby material that allegedly fell from flying saucers. Translators of the French UFO publications, instead of using the English equivalent “gossamer” or “cobwebs,” chose to create the new term “angel hair” which, unlike the French, implies an entirely strange substance, one that has no apparent connection with such ordinary earthly phenomena as spiders.

Two remarkable falls of angel hair were reported in France on October 17 and 27, 1952. In both incidents, witnesses observed in the sky a strangely shaped, cottony cloud at a height of several thousand feet. Above it was a long, narrow, cylindrical object trailed by a white plume, moving slowly across the sky and accompanied by twenty or thirty smaller objects that looked like puffs of smoke. Following a broken path, they made rapid zigzag motions, and left a broad ribbon of white substance that slowly drifted to the ground and clung to trees, telephone wires, and roofs of houses. These masses of white threads were described as like wool, nylon, or Fiberglas. When rolled into a ball they became gelatinous and disappeared within a few hours; set on fire, they burned like cellophane.

One witness was able to disentangle a single strand more than ten yards long. None of the material, unfortunately, was preserved for study.

Students of UFOs pondered the unusual phenomenon: “If the observers really did see what they described, and if all these objects were machines guided by a single intelligence, then what mysterious experiment were they performing? What purpose was served by the strange ballet of paired saucers? What was the meaning of the whitish streak appearing between two saucers on separation? What, finally, was the ‘angel’s hair’ that sublimed so readily in the air?”[XI-5, p. 150] UFO enthusiasts have suggested various theories of the nature and origin of the mysterious substance. According to one hypothesis[XI-5, p. 149], angel hair might be produced in the wake of a spacecraft moving in a force field; ionization of the atmosphere would produce ultraheavy particles which would react with ordinary air to form a kind of precipitate-angel hair--which would disintegrate as ionization decreased (see _Chapter_ IX). Another theory suggests that angel hair might be a chain polymer of cellulose containing radioactive carbon 14 (the carbon 14 being produced by the action of cosmic rays on atoms of nitrogen in the atmosphere), hydrogen, and oxygen from moisture in the air, the three elements combining under the action of ultraheavy particles produced by ionization[XI-6]. This theory overlooks the fact that cellulose is not formed from a combination of carbon dioxide, oxygen, and hydrogen in air. Rather, it is made by living organisms in a series of complicated enzymic reactions. Even if cellulose could be made by the hypothetical reaction suggested, it would contain no more carbon 14 than does the ordinary carbon dioxide in the air.

To French entomologists, the angel hair seen in October 1952, was no mystery at all. The objects dancing the strange ballet were not spaceships, but spiders. Far from performing a mysterious experiment, they were merely carrying out the well-established routine of migration.

Each year the young spiders of most species leave the nests of their infancy and prepare to establish their own homes. Crawling by the hundreds or the thousands to the tops of fence posts, walls, or trees, they spin long silken webs which, inflated by the air, carry the tiny emigrants up from the ground. These gossamer parachutes drift up and along on rising air currents, sometimes to great heights; they may soar for a few yards or for many miles over hills and valleys. These migrating balloonists have been observed as high as 14,000 feet, and at sea 200 miles from any land. Eventually drifting back to earth, the spiders detach the now useless parachutes and move off to build new nests for the coming year, while the abandoned gossamer may pile up in great masses on trees, fences, telephone wires, and ground, to decay and vanish in a matter of hours. These gossamer showers sometimes include so many outworn webs that the filmy blankets of fine silk may be several inches deep and may cover an entire landscape like snow.

These migrations occur in spring or, more frequently, in autumn--but only when the weather is exactly right. Spiders may sit patiently for days, waiting for a calm, clear, windless day. On such days the steady upward currents of air from the sun-warmed ground carry the spiders gently aloft[XI-7]. The association of angel hair with UFO sightings is completely natural. The drifting patches of gossamer reflect the sun brilliantly. A whole armada of saucers can appear overhead and then vanish as the gossamer cascades to earth.

The description of the material and the date of the fall both indicate that the angel hair observed in France in October 1952 was of arachnid origin. Even the weather was exactly right--“superb, with a sky of cloudless blue”--for the migration of a smother of spiders.