Forbidden Science Dispatches #2
Dr. Olavo T. Fontes and Paranoia in Brazilian UFO Research
Read Forbidden Science Dispatches #1 here.
Dr. Olavo Fontes was an eminent UFO researcher in Brazil throughout the 1950s and 1960s, integral to exporting the country’s most fascinating events to the United States’ flying saucer subculture. Fontes was “a most remarkable personality” who juggled a “thriving medical practice” as a gastroenterologist along with a working relationship with Jim and Coral Lorenzen’s Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO).1 One facet of particular interest to Getting Spooked is his role in the Villas-Boas affair, the strange abduction of a farmer in the Minas Gerais region of Brazil by barking, diving-suited ETs culminating in a sexual encounter with one of the entities. Fontes “was very hesitant to have” the story published due to the outlandish nature of Villas-Boas’ claims and possible repercussions to Fontes’ own medical career, but he eventually released it and shared the story with the Lorenzens at APRO.2 It did not reach the broader UFO community until 1965, but—combined with the sensational Hill abduction—it soon took the culture by storm.
As those who have followed my series “The Bosco in Brazil” know well, it was alleged by the titular USAID employee that the Villas-Boas abduction was a misconstrued kidnapping by the CIA who ran a battery of psychological tests on the farmer. Adding strangeness to Villas-Boas’ encounter was his family’s later claim that “a group of five uniformed men ‘from NASA’ came and escorted him to the United States against his will, where they subjected him to questioning and a lie-detector test.”3 The relationship between Villas-Boas and these “NASA” men was odd—they supposedly gave him deeds to properties in the Bay Area so he could stay nearby for these procedures. “They kept visiting several times over eight or ten years,” Odercia Villas-Boas relayed. “They would always give my brother books written in English as gifts.”4 In addition to these gifts, these men gave him information of shocking significance: The American government was aware of extraterrestrials visiting Earth. Further than that, they showed him partially and fully intact flying saucers. As researcher David Booher writes: “It appears as if they were attempting to fortify an illusion they had already staged for Villas Boas.”5 Indeed, the abductee was not the only person who had the ET explanation reinforced for them by shadowy government forces.
Covered in Mark Pilkington’s Mirage Men, Dr. Olavo Fontes too found himself victim to a remarkably similar campaign by government representatives shortly after his first interactions with Villas-Boas. In February 1958, after Fontes had given the Brazilian Department of Mining Production samples of material from an alleged crash in Ubatuba—“unusually pure” pieces of magnesium, according to Pilkington—the doctor “was visited by two Brazilian Naval Ministry intelligence officers.”6 As the supposed “NASA” representatives did with Villas-Boas himself, these military intelligence people informed Fontes of “everything they knew about the secret UFO cover-up.”7 He was enlightened to the fact that many of the world’s governments were “aware of the extraterrestrials presence on Earth” but keeping the public ignorant. Again, like Villas Boas, Fontes was told of numerous crashed saucers and that the occupants “had no interest in contacting humankind and were to be considered extremely hostile.”8 While confused about these revelations, it appears from later statements that Fontes bought some of this routine, which must have seemed highly official. But it is through this meeting that Villas-Boas incident was further securely bolted to the realm of UFOs and ETs as opposed to American military intelligence, despite circumstantial evidence and testimony to the contrary.
Jacques Vallée met Olavo Fontes several times during the span of his first volume of diary entires from 1959 to 1969. Catching up with him during a layover in 1966 Chicago, Vallée describes the doctor as an “energetic man with intense gray eyes, dynamic and serious, sincerely concerned.”9 The impression one gets from Vallée’s recollections of Fontes is of a man whose worldview may have been inexorably altered by his meeting with intelligence agents. Seemingly terrified by “the apparent relationship between the objects and power failures in urban centers,” Fontes hypothesizes that the ET’s ultimate plan is “control of energy.”10 When Vallée asks him to clarify these beliefs, Fontes claims: “They are not necessarily hostile in nature, (...) only they don’t allow us to interfere with their plans; they use violence if necessary, whenever a witness stands in their way.”11 This claim could be referring to Villas-Boas directly whose abduction was not the calm, gentle absconding that later abductees would report, but instead a physically violent incident requiring multiple abductors that left Villas-Boas with an injured chin. The concerns that Fontes expresses with regard to “disquieting (…) correlations in the data” pointing to the UFO occupants’ interest in earthly power sources likewise could be misplaced suspicion.12
The United States’ interest in Central and South America has always been over material gains and natural resources, often employing military or counterintelligence agents to certify access or leverage in the region. Even in the present, another alien scare was stirred in the Peruvian jungle by alleged illegal gold miners “using advanced flying technology to terrorize the (indigenous) community.”13 It then becomes interesting that the intelligence agents passing along UFO secrets to Fontes steered him away from any human explanation to the phenomena. Despite the fact that he acknowledges that the supposed ETs are essentially doing reconnaissance missions, Fontes instead finds his data collection pushing him into believing in science-fictional hostiles from another planet, not an earthly imperialist project. I am left wondering if his visit from the curiously loose lipped authorities led him to not only discount Villas-Boas as a military operation, but other incidents that were potentially tests and operations by the American military as well.
Later in 1966, Vallée met with Fontes again who was “convinced we are living in the last few years before the revelation that a space invasion is in progress.”14 Vallée, skeptical of this view, nevertheless notes that he “cannot prove that (Fontes) is wrong.”15 In a meeting with John Keel during this same trip to the United States, Fontes expressed the extraterrestrials’ apparent colonial interests further. In a story published in contactee Daniel Fry’s journal Understanding, Keel wrote:
Dr. Fontes is particularly concerned with the reports of unidentified flying objects over military bases, power plants, reservoirs, and fresh water sources. “These objects,” he noted grimly, “have systematically visited and perhaps examined three areas most vital to our civilization. Our water supplies, our power systems, and our military resources. During a flurry of sightings in Brazil, they appeared almost simultaneously over 33 important centers of communication, railroad junctures, and key highways.”16
With much of his UFO dataset coming prior to a US-backed coup, it seems that many of these surveillance or reconnaissance missions by supposed alien spaceships could have been US or Brazilian military authorities gaining intelligence crucial to overthrowing the local government in 1964. Nevertheless, Fontes apparently retained his position that the craft were of otherworldly origin and indicated a foreboding future. This opinion had ratcheted up to near-paranoia by the time he met with Jacques Vallée in 1966. The French scientist seemed to respect Fontes’ judgement but certainly did not share his concerns of imminent invasion. Olavo T. Fontes would pass away from cancer less than two years later, on May 9th, 1968. The well-regarded doctor and UFO researcher was only a month shy of his 33rd birthday.17
Thank you for reading Getting Spooked. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support this research and gain access to archived posts. My sincere thanks to everyone who has done so. Shout out to The Anomalist and Anomalist Books for continual coverage of this publication and for releasing several books referenced in this article. Reach out to me at gettingspooked@protonmail.com with any questions, comments, recommendations, requests, spooky stories, etc. You can find me on Twitter at @TannerFBoyle1 or on Bluesky at @tannerfboyle.bsky.social. Until next time, stay spooked.
Granchi, Irene. UFOs and Abductions in Brazil. Madison: Horus House Press, 1992. Page 31. (Thanks to @bpleasies for gifting me a copy of this book.)
Ibid., page 32.
Booher, David. No Return: The Gerry Irwin Story, UFO Abduction or Covert Operation? San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2017. Page 143. Available here.
Mauso, Pablo Villarrubia. “Antonio Villas Boas: Total Abduction.” The UFO Chronicles. 5 November 2007. https://www.theufochronicles.com/2007/11/antonio-villas-boas-total-abduction.html.
Booher, David. No Return: The Gerry Irwin Story, UFO Abduction or Covert Operation? San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2017. Page 143.
Pilkington, Mark. Mirage Men: A Journey in Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs. London: Constable, 2010. Page 106.
Ibid., page 106-107.
Ibid., page 107.
Vallée, Jacques. Forbidden Science 1: A Passion for Discovery – The Journals of Jacques Vallée 1957-1969. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 1992. Page 190. Available here.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Janowitz, Nathaniel. “‘Flying Aliens’ Harassing Village in Peru Are Actually Illegal Miners with Jetpacks, Cops Say.” Vice. 14 August 2023. https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkazgy/peru-aliens-illegal-miners-with-jetpacks.
Vallée, Jacques. Forbidden Science 1: A Passion for Discovery – The Journals of Jacques Vallée 1957-1969. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 1992. Page 249.
Ibid.
Keel, John A. “An Interview with Olavo T. Fontes.” John Keel: Not an Authority on Anything. 2 May 2021. https://www.johnkeel.com/?p=4649.
Clark, Jerome. The UFO Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition. Detroit: Omnigraphics, 2018. eBook. Page 1153.
Great article and I respect anyone who digs around for additional sources to establish links. One thing though. It ought to be on the table that Villas-Boas fabricated his original encounter and what followed was more gravy. It's the nature of these incidents that we must accept the original premise at face value. I like to entertain both possibilities at once.