The case of alleged contactee Urandir Oliveira in Corguinho, Brazil, has pitted two eminent UFO researchers on opposite sides. Linda Moulton Howe, an Emmy-award winning filmmaker, author and UFO researcher, says hard scientific evidence supports Urandir’s story that he was taken aboard an alien craft. On the other side, Ademar José Gevaerd, editor of Revista UFO magazine and national director of the Brazilian Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), claims Urandir is a confirmed hoaxer and UFO cult leader bent on duping people to make money.
Howe ran a six-part investigation of the case with drawings and pictures on her website Earthfiles. The most dramatic photos are of a scorch-like “body print” on the bedsheet and wooden ceiling in Oliveira’s bedroom where he claimed to have been beamed aboard a UFO in Sept. 15, 2002. The photos show discolored areas in the partial shape of legs, arms and torso on the sheet and ceiling as if some sort of energy had transformed Urandir’s body and transported it through the ceiling.
Howe sent specimens of the affected areas of the sheet and control samples to biophysicist W.C. Levengood of Pinelandia Biophysical Laboratory, Grass Lake, Michigan. Levengood said the samples, examined under a 40X photomicroscope, showed “astounding” effects he could not explain.
Levengood says the polyester fiber in the mixed polyester-cotton sheet had been transformed to a vitreous state as if melted while the cotton fibers next to them were unaffected. Polyester melts at 500 degrees F. while cotton scorches at 300 degrees F. “That’s the astounding thing. The cotton threads are totally undisturbed,” he said.
He said it would be impossible to create such effects with a laser or torch. “You can't transform the molecules in a polyester fiber by heating it with a match …. (Whatever the energy is), it has to fingerprint the actual molecular structure of the material itself. … The cotton threads are lying right on the vitreous polyester fibers, over and under. But there is no apparent heat transfer here between the polyester fibers and the cotton fibers. That's what makes this so unique because there is no known method that I know of where you can control electromagnetic radiation, and that's what this is here, to that fine tuned degree in a spatial frame of reference. … It's astounding, yeah!”
Through interviews with Urandir, Howe describes his life as highly unusual from an early age. He claims that by age eight he developed the ability to bend and twist metal utensils like the famous psychic Uri Geller and recalls being abducted into extraterrestrial craft at the ages of 13, 23, 27, 35 and 39.
At the age of 23, while making a living by displaying his alleged mental powers in Sao Paulo, he claims to have miraculously healed two victims of an automobile accident by the laying on of hands. Shortly thereafter, tall blond beings approached him and said, 'Now you know what to do with the light energy,'” Howe writes.
In 1996, Urandir bought 209 acres of farm land in Corguinho where many UFO sightings had been made over the years. Howe said that in 1998, “Brazil Verade TV traveled to his Corguinho farm because Urandir informed the station that the blond beings were coming back to get him again. The crew was videotaping when six lights in an arc appeared in the night sky and descended toward the ground. As the arc of lights seemed to lower toward Urandir, he walked through them into a small beam of light that lifted him into a disc-shaped craft while the Brazil Verade television camera rolled. Howe says some of that video was broadcast in Brazil and the tape was sent to CNN for international broadcast, but apparently CNN never aired any of it and the tape.”
While inside the craft, “Urandir claimed the tall, blond humanoids showed wall screens containing moving images of Earth destruction by nuclear missiles and nuclear power reactors. Urandir understood that the destructions will be caused by changing Earth magnetic fields which affect the electronic systems in the missiles and reactors. The blond beings also showed Urandir that three ‘fully functional’ pyramids currently covered by sand will be uncovered for the world to see,” Howe writes.
Gevaerd, however, presents a totally different picture of Urandir. In a
“dear colleague” letter to UFO groups dated Nov. 28, 2001 that appeared in Diario Las Ultimas Noticias, Gevaerd says Urandir “was publicly exposed five years ago as probably the all-time most successful 'UFO hoaxer' in the world.”