Colares and Coronavirus – UFO Epidemic Revisited

So now it’s the Delta variant working its havoc.  It fills ICUs.  It evokes dismal recollections of the time nearly a year and a half ago when we first struggled to understand what was happening to our once-familiar world.  It confronts us once more with the question: how many times do we got to do this? 

And the mind of this old UFOlogist turns, as did the mind of one distinguished epidemiologist at the pandemic’s beginning, to a plague of a rather different sort–the 1977-78 siege of the Brazilian island of Colares and the nearby town of Belém by hordes of malignant UFOs.

The epidemiologist in question was Dr. Thomas Glass, whom I blogged about a little over a year ago.  Glass, by his account, was listening to a podcast from March 9, 2020, in which Micah Hanks spoke at length about the strange and unsettling incidents at Colares, when he felt a sense of deja vu to Wuhan at the start of the pandemic.  A massive assault on our world had been set in motion, and no one quite grasped what was going on.

Now we’re reeling from a fresh assault–“At no point in this ordeal has the ground beneath our feet seemed so uncertain,” Apoorva Mandavilli wrote six days ago in the New York Times–and Colares is once again a focus of attention.  My friend Luis Cayetano has called my attention to a video posted on July 23 to “Destination Declassified” YouTube channel, and on August 5 to the “Top5s” channel.  So far, it’s garnered some 160,000 views.  It’s entitled Operation Saucer: Brazil 1977, and billed as “The Most Violent Extraterrestrial Incident Ever Documented.”

The parallels are limited.  COVID-19 spread from Wuhan to engulf the world; the UFO invasion stayed limited to a tiny, neglected corner of Brazil more than 43 years ago, and has given no trouble since.  Yet something really happened at Colares, strange and so far unexplained, that certainly did not originate in response to our 21st-century woes yet has the potential, in retrospect, to serve as mirror for them.  Its latest iteration deserves at least a passing glance.

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The video is just over 18 minutes long.  It retells a story that I’ve known since my two blog posts (here and here) last summer: of strange entities that appear in the sky, often from the direction of the sea, and go after their arbitrarily chosen prey with beams of light.  These light-rays inflict injuries, sometimes but not always long-lasting.  The villagers, helpless before the invaders, are reduced to such traditional remedies as lighting fires to drive them away.  In vain.

Eventually the Brazilian Air Force intervenes, tries without much success to persuade the locals that what they’re experiencing is “mass hysteria.”  And, as 1978 wears on, the assaults fade, never (apparently) to recur.

At the time, it might have been just barely possible to interpret the Colares incidents as the vanguard of an extraterrestrial invasion.  43 years later, it’s plain that, however they’re to be accounted for, space visitors can’t be held responsible.  Assume for a moment the ETs were hostile.  Given their apparent super-powers, they could have found far more effective and dramatic ways to menace the human race than  terrorizing a small Brazilian fishing village.  (Why not use their killer rays against Chicago or New York City?)  And if they weren’t hostile–just what were the torments that they inflicted supposed to accomplish?

As I remarked in one of last summer’s posts, the incidents were obviously UFO-related.  Just as obviously, they were rooted in older, more traditional manifestations of supernatural evil, specifically vampires.  (One of the names given them was chupa chupas, “suckers” who drain their victims of blood.)  They belong to collective legend, transmuted into individual experience and collective memory; and the process by which this happened is the real mystery of Colares.

The story is told in the video, in a voice-over narration that’s mostly a sober recounting of the Colares/Belém events as we know them from other sources.  But a video can’t be solely its narration.  Most of Operation Saucer is devoted to visual re-enactments of the encounters described, and the filming of these re-enactments leaves vast space for the creative imagination.  How is this space filled?

“UFOs appeared in the skies above a small Brazilian city and discharged lights that caused injuries to many men, women and children.”  Along with these words, we’re shown a luminous blue globe floating through the sky, its spherical surface radiating what seem to be at least a dozen spidery arms.  The light-rays strike; the victims collapse.  This is the opening of the video, and the blue globe recurs again and again, side by side with more conventional UFO images.

These conventional images include a domed disk sailing above the clouds, and later a triangular craft with three lights at each of its corners and a larger light at its center.  (As in Belgium, 1989-90.)  We’re bound to come away with the impression that this is what the people of Colares saw, when in fact it’s the filmmaker who has imposed it upon their testimony, incorporating that testimony into the currently standard narrative of what a UFO is supposed to be and to do.

And what the beings are who pilot it.

Where the witnesses speak of “figures,” the video shows them as the conventional Grays.  An evil face that might have appeared on the cover of Whitley Strieber’s Communion–but prior to Communion‘s publication in 1987 was entirely unknown—lifts itself to glare at the viewer.  And the story of Francisco Enrique de Souza’s attempted abduction by a UFO is retold:

De Souza “was approached by a light in the sky.  As it got nearer, he could see that the light was part of a much larger UFO.  The object was cylindrical in shape, 15 feet across and at least 25 feet in diameter.  Spellbound, Francisco was rooted to the spot as he stared up at the craft.  Once it was directly overhead, a door dropped open, emitting a great deal of light.  He could see two people sitting in the craft, as though it was a car.  They looked to be a male and a female, and sat completely still, never moving.”

The narration leaves out a crucial detail of De Souza’s story: that the woman–De Souza seems to have spoken of “a man and a woman,” not a male and a female–“looked like she was wearing a dress.”  (Micah Hanks comments dryly, at about 1 hour 21′ of his podcast: “Just the kind of thing you’d expect an extraterrestrial to be wearing.”)  And the video shows the beings to be–in accord with the current image of the Gray, and contradicting its own narration–naked and indistinguishably sexless.

Clearly, De Souza originally reported an encounter with UFO pilots who were not “humanoid” but essentially human (“people”), the woman wearing a dress, the couple sitting like a driver and a passenger on the front seat of their car.  But this can’t possibly be forced into the conventional UFO narrative that the video was created to promote.  So, although the voice-over gave at least a nod to the original account, the accompanying images were made to override it, to cancel it out.

Of the video’s 160,000 viewers, I wonder how many noticed this.

Or, a bit later, when the witness describes the UFO pilots as having had “large ears” and the video shows them–again, in accord with Communion and the image that’s been canonical ever since its publication–with no ears at all.

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But what of that airborne, spider-legged blue globe that runs as a leitmotiv through the video, from its beginning to close to its end?  (Including one place where the accompanying narration, incongruously, speaks of the UFO as “cylindrical.”)   It conforms to no standard image of a UFO, yet for me it’s the film’s most effective image–my flesh crawls when I see it.  I invite you to watch the video for yourself, see what it evokes for you.

It looks like a coronavirus to me.