“Unidentified Viral Objects” – the Pandemic and the UFOlogist

A tale of two podcasts, Part 1.  (I’ll post Part 2 in another two weeks.)

Both podcasts aired, two weeks apart, on the “Micah Hanks Program,” where I had the honor of being interviewed several weeks afterward.  Their dates were March 9 and 23, straddling that awful week when the coronavirus storm broke upon us and our world changed, I won’t say forever, but for the long term.

Appropriately, the March 23 podcast was entitled “Outbreak: The Disease Detectives.”  It featured an interview with a distinguished epidemiologist, Dr. Thomas Glass–now retired, formerly of Yale, Harvard and Johns Hopkins–who came to speak about the exploding pandemic and to float an intriguing idea.  Namely, that the work of the epidemiologist and the UFOlogist turn out to be much the same.

“As epidemiologists,” said Glass, “we often describe ourselves as disease detectives.  We go into a situation, we gather data, we do interviews, we collect samples, and we put together all these clues and try to unravel the mystery or the puzzle of what it is that’s going on.  And so much of this is resonant with your descriptions of what happens in a UFO investigation.”

Glass maintains a website, https://thomasglassphd.com/, devoted to understanding what’s going on with COVID-19.  I check it out nearly every day, although I normally come away fairly discouraged–I can’t suppress the hope that somehow or other this is going to be over before very long, and Glass is too much the realist to nourish that illusion.  “Many people still wish that this would be a sprint when it’s clearer everyday that it is a marathon,” he says in his June 25 post, and I have to admit that I’m one of those “many.”  In the same post, he reiterates what he told Micah:  “Disease detectives are driven by the prospect of solving puzzles and unraveling mysteries.”

But how did UFOs appear, if you’ll forgive the expression, on this hard-headed scientist’s radar screen?

Partly, it would seem, due to a childhood experience.  On March 27, Micah posted an additional interview with Glass (available only to subscribers), in which Glass described what he’d seen as a boy, sometime around 1970, while camping out in his back yard.  It was a plain white bright light crossing the sky, which Glass at first took to be an airplane.  But then it stopped, hung motionless for a minute or two, then streaked across the sky and out of view.

“It remains super-clear in my memory,” Glass told Micah.  “It ignited in me what will certainly be a lifetime feeling of wonder and curiosity about bright lights in the sky that we can’t explain.”

At some point before his interview, Glass heard the March 9 podcast, “Operation Saucer: Incident at Colares.”  It gave him (in his words) a feeling of deja vu, and seems to have prompted him to reach out to Micah, emailing him that “I have some unique ideas about the UFO phenomenon” and that they ought to talk about these ideas.

What was the “incident at Colares”?

Actually, it was a string of bizarre incidents, beginning in August 1977 and continuing into the spring of 1978, that took place on the island of Colares and the nearby town of Belém along the northeastern coast of Brazil.  Micah, describing the incidents–he had no guest for this podcast–speaks of a “surge” of reports and “hotbeds” of activity, which is not quite the same as “hot spots” but close enough.

No wonder Glass had a sense of deja vu.

If the Brazilian reports from 43 years back are to be trusted, which I would not swear to, the the weird goings-on threw the local residents into a state of panic.  Strange things were seen coming from the north, the direction of the ocean.  (Also the direction from which Ezekiel saw his fantastic vision emerge; Ezekiel 1:4.)  Some claimed to have seen them actually rising out of the sea.  Often the objects were likened to umbrellas, and their standard feature was a beam of light that might have been called a searchlight except that it seldom had to “search” for anything.  Rather, it zeroed in instantly on its victim, leaving him or her burned or with pockmark scars, temporarily paralyzed, more lastingly weak or benumbed.

This was the recurrent theme of the encounters: their medical effects on the bodies of the victims.  Jacques Vallee, who deals with the Colares incidents in his 1990 book Confrontations, lists some of these:

“A feeling of weakness; some could hardly walk.  Dizziness and headaches.  Local losses of sensitivity.  Numbness and trembling.  Pallid complexion.  Low arterial pressure.  Anemia, with low hemoglobin levels.  Blackened skin where the light had hit, with several red-purple circles, hot and painful. … Two puncture marks inside the red circles resembling mosquito bites, hard to the touch.”

This last symptom is surely connected with the Portuguese nickname the locals gave to their unwelcome visitors: “chupa chupas, “suckers.”  This, and that the victims felt that their blood had been drained–a perception for which the doctor who examined many of them, a young woman whose name Vallee gives as Wellaide Cecim Carvalho de Oliveira, claimed to provide medical confirmation.

I’ll have more to say in my next post about this Dr. Carvalho and her role in the strange drama.  For now, I’ll come back to Thomas Glass and his take on the events at Colares.

Not that he had any explanation for them.  On the contrary:  “One of the things that makes investigating UFOs and epidemics so similar is that at the heart of it is a real uncertainty about what is going on.”  The stories on Micah’s podcast reminded him of the situation in Wuhan province at the beginning of the pandemic, when no one knew what the pathogen was or grasped the nature of the spreading disease.  “All novel pathogens, when they explode in a population, are in a sense ‘unidentified viral objects,” UVOs if you will.”

So shall we speak of an “epidemic” of chupa chupas, vampire-like “suckers” that rise from the sea and attack from the sky?

And if so, what could the nature of such an epidemic possibly be?

(To be continued in my next post.)

by David Halperin
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