The answer, in my opinion, is no.
The question, in case you’ve forgotten, is the one I posed at the end of my blog post two weeks ago. “Shall we speak of an ‘epidemic’ of chupa chupas, vampire-like ‘suckers’ that rise from the sea and attack from the sky,” as a model for understanding the spate of bizarre events that afflicted the Brazilian island of Colares in late 1977 and early 1978?
After all, the comparison was not something I came up with out of my own febrile imagination. It was offered to Micah Hanks, in an interview on his podcast last March 23, by no less an authority on epidemics than Dr. Thomas Glass, who spoke of having experienced a sense of “deja vu” upon listening to Micah describe the Colares incidents in an earlier podcast. They reminded him, he said, of the situation in Wuhan province at the beginning of COVID’s assault on the world, when no one quite grasped what was going on. This uncertainty, said Glass, is “one of the things that makes investigating UFOs and epidemics so similar.”
Is the “epidemic” analogy useful in understanding a UFO wave, especially one as weird and fantastic as that at Colares? I don’t think so, and as this post unfolds, I’ll give my reasons for disagreeing.
And I’ll pose the question that really intrigues me: what led a prominent, credentialed scientist like Glass, whose website on the current pandemic displays his hardheaded and often heartbreaking commitment to sober realism, to compare of his respectable science of epidemiology with, of all things, UFOlogy–and to suggest that beneath the surface they’re not all that different? Was there something about Colares, not quite so amenable to rational analysis, that called out to him? And if so, what might that have been?
Before I speculate, let’s take a closer look at Colares and at one of the principal figures in the Colares story: a woman of medicine, Dr. Wellaide Cecim Carvalho de Oliveira.
The incidents reported from Colares, and from the nearby town of Belém, were obviously UFO-related. Just as obvious are their overtones of older, more traditional manifestations of supernatural evil, specifically vampires. If there’s any truth at all to the accounts, they had the people of Colares and Belém in a panic. Men built large fires to ward off the terrifying incursions of the chupa chupas, the “suckers” that came from the sea and, as their name suggests, drained their victims of blood.
They did other things to the body as well, as Carvalho could attest. “I don’t know what it is,” she told Brazilian UFOlogist Carlos Mendes, “but I know it’s real.”
Her interview with Mendes was published in Brazilian UFO Magazine. A translation from the Portuguese by one Paulo Santos, inelegant and often less than lucid, is posted to the www.ufoinfo.com website. I owe this reference, as well as all of those cited in the next few paragraphs, to Micah Hanks, who was kind enough to discuss with me by email some of the issues raised by his podcast.
The Brazilian Air Force, which launched its own investigation, found a more sophisticated way to ward off the chupa chupas than by building fires. They declared them to be a mass hallucination. This was impossible, Carvalho told Mendes. “The psychiatry proves it didn’t happen. It may happen mystic collective problems when people commit mass suicide. But nobody can have the same delirium, the same visual, sonic and synesthetic hallucination at the same time and in different places.”
Who exactly was–is–this Dr. Carvalho? Her Facebook page describes her as a native of Belém who studied at Colégio Dom Amando and did her medical training at Universidade Federal do Pará. She figures prominently in a 42-minute video, labeled on YouTube “Hostile-ufos Encounters in Colares 2017” but which internal evidence suggests was made around 2007. According to the video, she was 24 years old in 1977, director of the health care unit on Colares. In the Mendes interview–in which her age is reduced, somewhat implausibly, to 22–she’s addressed as a psychiatrist and lays claim to psychiatric expertise. But it would appear from her Facebook bio that her psychiatric training, in the form of postgraduate work at Universidade Federal do Pará, came only in 2015, long after the events on Colares.
By her own account, Carvalho co-authored a book that appears in the Mendes interview as Vampires and extraterrestrials in Amazonia, but is cited on one website as Extraterrestrial Vampires in the Amazon. Am I being too prejudiced by suggesting that this doesn’t exactly sound like the work of a dispassionate woman of science?
Eventually, according to the Mendes interview, she had her own UFO encounter.
“There was a ship at 50 meters of altitude, above the city’s main street. Inside of this ship there was a being, 1.20 or 1.30 meter high. This happened when I was driving to help a child with broken clavicle, I was going to immobilize her. They were flying so low that I was completely unable to react. I could see the UFOs bright metal and it wasn’t a dish-like object, but much more like a cone or a cylinder. Its course was elliptical. 5 o’clock in the afternoon your eyes can’t play tricks on you. You may have visions, hallucinate, but, like me, many others would have to.”
Some ten years after the event, Jacques Vallee spoke with Carvalho about her experience. In his 1990 book Confrontations (page 224), he reports on what she told him. “We asked Dr. Carvalho to tell us about her own sighting, which occurred one day at 6:00 P.M., and she told us it was the most beautiful thing she had ever witnessed. Even today, if she closes her eyes, she can make the image appear again. ‘I have forgotten a lot of things in ten years,’ she stated, ‘but I will never forget this!’
“It was a brilliant, large cylinder with a purple light at the top and at the bottom, shining in concentric rings. It flew low over the street, dancing in majestic circles as it moved. There were no doors or windows. Her maid fainted and fell when she saw the object, but Dr. Carvalho ignored her and followed the object in a state she described as ‘almost ecstatic,’ so beautiful the vision was. She hoped it would land and take her.
“A group of people rushed out from the town, beating on drums and saucepans, shooting fireworks. The object went on dancing, higher and higher, and it flew away.”
The two accounts have their points of contact: a precise hour of the late afternoon (whether 5:00 or 6:00), the description of the UFO as “elliptical.” Yet they’re so inconsistent that it’s impossible they could both be accurate. Was she at home, with her maid on hand, or out driving to help an injured child? If she’d seen a diminutive being (some four feet high) inside the UFO, it’s impossible she wouldn’t have mentioned that to Vallee. And if she was overwhelmed, irresistably drawn by the thing’s beauty, how could she have neglected to mention that to Mendes?
Normally, the Colares incidents depict attacks on helpless humans by wanton, destructive invaders. The story Carvalho told Vallee is in a different category altogether. Here the atmosphere is religious awe, ecstasy, longing, as if at the epiphany of a powerful, beautiful, essentially benevolent god. And I wonder: are we to see the fireworks, the drum-beating and the saucepan-banging as efforts to ward off a feared and hated “extraterrestrial vampire”? Or as a religious procession in honor of a numinous entity making its gracious appearance, like the cavorting sun at Fátima in 1917?
(Three years before the Colares events, the ex-Beatle John Lennon and his girlfriend May Pang had similarly encountered a numinous entity in the sky over their Manhattan penthouse, and Lennon’s response to it was much like Carvalho’s. “Wait for me, wait for me!” His arms were outstretched, Pang remembered, “as he yelled at the UFO to come back and take him away.”)
How could Carvalho have told two such disparate stories, of something she’d supposedly witnessed with her own eyes? It won’t do to say, well, she was making it all up. If she’d fabricated a story of her encounter with the alien, wouldn’t she have taken care to repeat that same story over and over?
It all has the feeling of ancient religious legend, of something you might find in the Bible, where two versions are told of some supernatural event that seem to be unrelated stories yet are bound together by links that point to some common origin, far far back in the development of the tradition. (Like Luke 16:19-31 and John 11:1-44, bound together by the name Lazarus–have you ever wondered why, in Luke’s parable, the beggar has a name but not the rich man?–and by the motif of returning from the dead.) But these are no ancient legends, but reports of personal experience by a woman modern enough to have her own Facebook page.
Are the Colares incidents legendary? They have to be–they describe events that couldn’t possibly have happened in the real world. The implausibility is not that UFOs have physiological effects, even severe effects, on their witnesses. This is well documented, and open to explanation along psychological lines: I think of the Cash-Landrum incident of 1980, the circle of warts in Barney Hill’s groin nearly 20 years earlier. But when a man describes his attempted abduction by a “huge dark apparatus” piloted by a man and a woman sitting in seats as if in a car, the woman “wearing a dress”? (Quoted by Micah in his podcast, about 1 hr 21′. “Just the kind of thing you’d expect an extraterrestrial to be wearing,” Micah comments on the woman’s dress.)
Creative imagination is clearly at work here, as in dozens of other instances. The real mystery of Colares may be: how is imagination transformed into memory, and then into collective memory?
And how does it work on the bodies of those who “remember” it?
Which is why I don’t think that an epidemic is a particularly illuminating comparison for a rash of events like that at Colares. Yes, the symptoms of the UFO encounters may spread like those of an illness; we can speak, figuratively, of an “epidemic” of sightings. But it isn’t, not really.
In his fascinating (and depressingly timely) book The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, John M. Barry remarks on the chasm that separates traditional Hippocratic-Galenic medicine from modern medicine. To Hippocrates and Galen, disease had no independent existence. It was a by-product of imbalance among the body’s natural “humors”; the physician’s task was to restore that balance. The idea of disease as a microbial invader, originating from outside the body, would have been unthinkable to the classical physician.
An illness like COVID is indeed an assault from outside, spreading from body to body according to principles that have nothing to do with the psychic processes, conscious or unconscious, of its victims. Whereas a UFO encounter is something from within, which has everything to do with the subject’s inner processes–no less than the “humors” of the classical medical thinkers. The chupa chupas of Colares may have come from the sea, as they were sometimes observed to do. But this was not the physical ocean but the “sea” of the unconscious.
Whereas the coronavirus did indeed cross the sea to attack us; and after four months the attack has not let up.
And the question remains: if the analogy is as flawed as I think it is, why did Dr. Thomas Glass–who can’t possibly have been unaware of the differences that set Colares island in 1977-78 apart from Wuhan province at the beginning of 2020–find it so appealing?
Is it possible that what called out to him, what gave him his sense of deja vu, was not the scientific but the mythic and religious aspect of the UFO phenomenon? “Mythic,” in that the vampiric ETs of Colares provided a perfect if ghastly mirror for the storm that was about to burst upon us, of alien assailants at whose touch we sicken and sometimes die. But also religious, in that the visitations at Colares were not pure malevolence, not pure horror. They could also represent the numinous in all its beauty and awe, as it lodged itself in Carvalho’s memory. “I have forgotten a lot of things in ten years, but I will never forget this!”
Glass also had, or at least remembered–“it remains super-clear in my memory”–an encounter with the numinous, one night in 1970. We can differ over whether or not to call this encounter “religious.” “It ignited in me what will certainly be a lifetime feeling of wonder and curiosity“; these, to me, are religious words. Speaking of an experience which, 50 years later, would prompt the man of science to listen to Micah Hanks’s UFO podcast.
And see there something he knew he’d already seen before.
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
Connect to Journal of a UFO Investigator on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/JournalofaUFOInvestigator
Now ready for ordering from Stanford University Press–my book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO.
Don’t have time to keep checking my blog? (Now listed among the “Top 75 UFO Blogs and Websites about Unidentified Flying Objects.”) Sign up for my monthly email newsletter, with summaries and links to the past month’s posts, plus oldies-but-goodies from the archive.
[…] piece by Andy Shipley. The range of CIA interest in matters Scottish is instructive. For A UFO “Epidemic”? – “Extraterrestrial Vampires” and the Coronavirus it’s helpful first to review David Halperin’s previous blog post “Unidentified […]