Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman – “Descent into Hell” and the Bebedouro Abduction

In my last post, in honor of my old friend Jerome Clark and the forthcoming third edition of his monumental UFO Encyclopedia, I spoke of the Bebedouro UFO abduction and the Jungian interpretation of it that he and Loren Coleman published in their 1975 book The Unidentified.

Jerry has since disavowed The Unidentified and the speculations he and Coleman set forth in it.  I don’t think he should have.  Their take on Bebedouro impressed me terrifically when I first read it, and continues to do so.

The Bebedouro abduction will be 50 years old next May.  It’s long fallen into obscurity, partly because it’s so weird, partly because it squares so poorly with the abduction narrative that’s taken hold over the past several decades–particularly with regard to the physiognomy of the abductors–and indeed with any theory of UFOs as extraterrestrial spaceships.  I admit I’d never heard of it before I read The Unidentified, and I imagine the same is true of many of my readers.

So I will try to summarize it, drawing on the account in chapter 5 of The Unidentified, supplementing it with the article “Bebedouro Abduction Case” in the second edition of The UFO Encyclopedia.  I’ve done no independent research on it, and although I will throw out one or two ideas of my own, mostly I will reproduce the interpretations of Clark and Coleman.

The incident began on May 4, 1969, when a 24-year-old Brazilian soldier named Jose Antonio da Silva was fishing in a small lagoon at a place called Bebedouro, about 30 miles north of Belo Horizonte, Brazil.  (Not the town of Bebedouro that you’ll find if you Google the name.)  He was alone, and about mid-afternoon he felt himself dozing off.  He perceived figures moving around him; he felt himself shot with something that paralyzed his legs.  Two small human-like beings, joined by a third, dragged him off “into a strange machine shaped like two saucers joined together by a thick, vertical cylinder.”

So far, this sounds more like the “hairy humanoid” assaults reported from Latin America in the 1950s than the classic abductions of the later 20th century.  The machine lifted off, and after a long interval it landed.  Da Silva was carried by his armpits into a large quadrangular room, where he found himself with his original three captors and a fourth being–also humanoid, with red hair and beard that came down to his waist–who seemed to be their leader.

He remembered afterward that all four had mouths that “looked like fishes’ mouths,” and I think the detail is significant: the fisherman has himself been fished for, by beings that have at least one feature in common with fish.  Something similar was to happen in the much better-known abduction at Pascagoula, Mississippi, in October 1973.

The room was made of stone; Clark and Coleman speak of it later as a “cave,” which makes sense but is not totally self-evident from the description.  In it, Da Silva saw “an incredible and terrifying sight.  One a low shelf, seemingly fashioned out of stone, lay the bodies of four human men stretched out side by side.  Naked, rigid, and positioned on their backs, the bodies bore no visible wounds but it was obvious that they were dead.  One was a well-built Negro and another had light brown skin.  Two others, more slightly built, were Caucasian, one of them very blond, ‘like a foreigner.'”

The beings didn’t speak any Portuguese but, using pictures, the leader managed to convey to Da Silva that they wanted him to be their guide and weapons-provider, for what he supposed was a subsequent invasion of Earth.  He refused, fingering his crucifix, which the angry leader ripped from his hand.  Then:

“Out of nowhere Jose Antonio saw appear in front of him a human figure who stood motionless, gazing at him in friendly fashion.  The figure, about five and a half feet tall, was Caucasian, slender, bearded with long fair hair, and dressed in a friar’s cassock.  Amazingly, the little men seemed totally oblivious to his presence.”

Speaking in Portuguese, the figure gave Da Silva certain “revelations” which he afterward insisted on keeping secret.  (Shades of the “Three Secrets of Fátima”!)  He apparently knew who the figure was but he wouldn’t reveal that either, saying only that he wasn’t Jesus.  The figure vanished, and the beings who’d abducted Da Silva started quarreling among themselves.  They carried Da Silva back to their machine; there followed another flight, another landing.

And Da Silva awakened in the dawn of what turned out to be May 9, four and a half days after his abduction, some 300 miles to the east of the place from which he’d been taken.  He supposedly bore the physical marks of his ordeal–wounds on his neck, lameness in one leg–for days afterward.

It’s hard to know what to make of this story.  A dream?  A fantasy?  An episode of the rare condition called “dissociative fugue,” the gaps in the wanderer’s memory filled in from his unconscious?  I’d be reluctant to speculate, and it makes me uneasy that we seem to be entirely dependent for our knowledge of it on the Brazilian UFOlogist Hulvio Brant Aleixo and his articles in the British Flying Saucer Review (1973, 1975).  We don’t know to what degree Aleixo’s own agenda shaped the narrative.

Two things I’m quite convinced of:  First, that it can’t literally have happened as described.

Second, that what it describes is essentially a religious experience.

Clark and Coleman:  “What appears on the surface to be a tale (whether hallucination, hoax, or actual experience) of a kidnapping by possibly hostile spacemen proves, on more careful analysis, to be something quite different.”

The little men, they point out, never identify themselves as spacemen.  Their craft seems to take off and to land, but not necessarily on another planet.  Indeed, if Clark and Coleman are right, their destination is a cave somewhere underground–and the authors cite folklore parallels, along with the Shaver Mystery of the 1940s, in which humans are kidnapped by dwarfish creatures from beneath the surface.

(I think of the strange story told by Gray Barker in his “Chasing the Flying Saucers” column in the June 1957 issue of Ray Palmer’s Flying Saucers magazine.  “Long John [Nebel, New York City radio personality] startled many listeners by relating some information about an apartment house in Chicago where an elevator was said to stop conventionally at the basement level, but which would also go down, down, down to a much lower level, when the ‘down’ button was pushed in a certain coded manner.  Presumably there was a subterranean passageway at the bottom of the shaft, and Long John hinted it was indeed an entrance to the caves that Shaver swore existed.”  Da Silva’s “thick, vertical cylinder” does sound a bit like an elevator shaft.)

(Barker’s Flying Saucers columns are reprinted in the three volumes of Rick Hilberg’s A Gray Barker Reader; the one I just quoted is from volume 1.  To purchase a copy, write to Rick at 377 Race Street, Berea, OH 44017.)

Clark and Coleman:  Da Silva’s story “from the religious standpoint symbolizes the journey into hell.”  And:  “In common with many others who have been swept away into the otherworld, Jose Antonio found himself among dead mortals.  As befits this materialistic age, here the dead were really dead. …

“Jose Antonio, in refusing the commander when the latter asked him to amass terrestrial weapons for the humanoid soldiers, may have saved himself from the fate of the four whose bodies he saw in the cave.  It was not by coincidence that the saint appeared just at that crucial moment when Jose Antonio had resisted temptation at what seemed to be great personal peril; when, moreover, the commander had attempted to force the courageous young man to believe that the religious faith that sustained him was worthless and ineffectual. …

“We can also unravel the psychological meaning of the story.  In the psyche’s language, J. E. Cirlot writes (A Dictionary of Symbols), ‘the Journey into Hell symbolizes the descent into the unconscious, or the awareness of all the potentialities of being–cosmic and psychological–that are needed in order to reach the Paradisiac heights.” …

“That Jose Antonio’s experience was in fact a ‘descent into the unconscious’ is implied in the curious persistence of certain archetypal symbols in his story.  Once again we have the motif of three ufonauts to notify us that this will be a spiritual adventure; with their captive [or with their “commander”–DH] they make a quaternity, thus taking on ‘”corporeity” and a form adequate to physical creation,’ i.e., the possibility of effecting action in the outside ‘conscious’ world. …  But they come wearing ‘masks’ (space helmets) to shield themselves from the light of conscious reality–just as contents of the unconscious come to consciousness garbed in symbolic disguise.  Jose Antonio is shielded from an opposite reason: to protect him from psychic injury as he descends into the unknown depths of the unconscious.”

Even dyed-in-the-wool Jungians (a category which doesn’t quite include me) will no doubt feel that Clark and Coleman are a good deal too sure of their interpretations.  That’s all right.  It’s better to go out on a limb, to take a clear and explicit stand even if it’s wrong, than to be vague and cagey.  As I used to tell my students: being wrong is the embryonic stage of being right.

Agree or disagree with its details, this lucid, provocative analysis of a perplexing episode in UFO history should give you a sense of the treasures to be found in the Clark-Coleman book.  Long out of print and unavailable, it was reprinted in 2006 by Anomalist Books.  I hope many will read it.

by David Halperin
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