Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

“One of the most highly celebrated and controversial series of photos in the Blue Book files are those taken by an official photographer aboard the Brazilian Navy survey ship, Almirante Saldanha, off Trindade Island, some 600 miles east of Rio De Janeiro”.
[J. Allen Hynek, The Hynek UFO Report]

Hynek criticizes the mocking remarks by the reporting officer regarding Martians and the harsh criticism of the Brazilian government and military. I don’t know much about Martians and tend to agree the sarcasm was undue on an official report, but as an ongoing many years research on the Trindade Island case has shown to me, the Blue Book report is right on the target and fully justified in all of its other conclusions.

Regarding the photographer, for instance, the report mentions that:

“This gentleman has a long history of photographic trick shots and is well known for such items as false pictures of treasure on the ocean floor. Another time he prepared a purposely humorous article, published in a magazine, entitled "A Flying Saucer Hunted Me at Home," using trick photography.”

Amazingly, these hoaxes by the photographer have been downplayed by supporters of the case. For more than half a century, most people didn’t even see these hoaxes. In 2008, thanks to historian Rodolpho Gauthier, we finally publicized Barauna’s joke with flying saucers, and now, through the pages of Tim Printy’s SUNlite, and again thanks to the work of Gauthier, we reveal the details and images of his treasure chest hoax.

The article is embedded above and can also be downloaded.

Once presented with Barauna’s trickery of flying saucer photos, believers claim the joke was in fact a serious, responsible public service promoting critical thinking in which the photographer took part. Very well. It could be so. His treasure chest hoax, however, was part of a deliberate play to deceive, and we have Baraúna first lying, denying the hoax, and decades later, finally confessing “it was indeed a trick”.

That the man who captured one of the few authentic photos of real UFOs was a lying hoaxer of treasure chest tales and proud creator of flying saucer images cannot be downplayed. It’s a serious problem for the case that automatically leads to considerations of how he could have hoaxed the Trindade Island case.

Believers would then mention that the Trindade Island case is not supported solely by the photos or the photographer’s character and that he could not have hoaxed all of the other corroborating evidence.

About that, our still ongoing research may give a different perspective. It will be published soon, but meanwhile I recommend the readers to our already published analysis, and I repeat the statement that all of our research has led us to conclude that the Blue Book report is right on the target and fully justified in all of its conclusions.

Except for Martians, of course.

Fellow Emps from Damn Data has commented on a MUFON talk by Butch Witkoski made available by Joe Capp regarding… Human Mutilations. The idea that evil aliens kill people around in horrid circumstances, as in the more known cattle mutilations, with “surgical incisions”.

Be sure to read Emps comments on the first cases mentioned by Witkoski:

The Todd Sees case who “wasn’t actually mutilated … There does seem to be something fishy going on (at least according to the way this is commonly described in the Ufological community) but there is little proof that it is a cover-up of a "human mutilation" case;

And the Sgt. Lovette case, which “is eye-opening but sourcing it seems tricky”.

I don’t know those two cases in detail, but “the most disturbing case”, as Witkoski classifies it in his talk, well, I kind of know it because it is the Guarapiranga case in Brazil.

This is indeed a terrible case, much more so because the photos from the corpse circulate around. The man was found in September 29, 1988, without his eyes, ears, lips, scrotum, anus nor guts. It had small perforations in the shoulders, the left calf, abdomen and feet. The case was publicized in Brazil some years later, mainly by Encarnación Garcia in the Brazilian UFO magazine around 1993.

Garcia concluded, from the photos, the autopsy report and interviewing many people, including the coroner, that the man had been mutilated by aliens. Much like Witkoski, the case was presented as a horror story, a terrible turn of events, the first and then only known case of human mutilations.

But if I’m writing about it, you may guess I probably know things weren’t exactly like that.

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The story received more attention when the Georgian Ufological Association (GUFOA) published stills from a videotape. All pictures circulating in the Internet come from the GUFOA website, now defunct. The story went that:

“an alien body was retrieved by the Russian State Security Service in 1996. An old woman from the village of Kashtim in the Ural mountains, so the report claims, found a dying little creature on the road.

After two weeks, the woman got sick and was hospitalized. The creature stayed home alone… and died. Probably because the woman told someone in the hospital the Kashtim Police Department entered the woman’s home and found the dead body on August 13, 1996. The corpse was filmed with a VHS camera -standard equipment of the Russian police these days- when a preliminary investigation (including the use of a Geiger Counter) was undertaken. According to the measurements of the Police, the being was only 21 centimeters (8 1/2 inches) in length. The corpse was later confiscated by the State Security (Ex-KGB).”
[Patrick Gross, The Ural Alien]

Exactly as in the other tales of alleged alien corpses, there are several versions to the story, though in this case there is not so much variation as in the Salinas case. Almost all of them mention the old woman, Tamara Velikopolskyana Prosivirina. But they differ from how and when she found the creature.

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“In 1978, a former Naval photographer released a series of photographs of the charred remains of a head and torso, which he claimed were extraterrestrial. He said that the photos were taken in 1948, when he was flown to Mexico, south of Laredo, Texas, to document the crash of 90-foot diameter "flying saucer" and its dead pilot.”
[Ron Schaffner, “TOMATO MAN REVISITED: The Alleged Alien Body Photographs”]

Schaffner’s investigation of these two photos is a very nice work which deserves to be read in full. This is simply a summary.

Several inconsistencies were noted in the original story from an unnamed source, including F-94 fighter planes scrambling the flying saucer in 1948, a year before the F-94 was even a prototype, from an Air Base that didn’t exist under its referred name; travelling in an aircraft that wasn’t built before 1950 and had no room for the number of people claimed and, “probably the largest gaff in the entire scenario: If one takes all the information given and does some simple calculations, the object should have crashed in Oklahoma or Kansas. In order to reach Mexico, our ‘spaceship’ would have had to make another 90 degree turn and fly south by southwest.”

The analysis also noted that:

“1. Upon closer examination of photo #1, what appears to be two conductor cable, probably "earthly" in origin, can be seen..
2. Near the right shoulder we find the frames of some type of eyeglasses. It was our opinion that this was the remains of flight glasses used by pilots.
3. Close scrutiny of the structural remains look man-made. You can see a six-sided hex nut, tubular piping, angle iron and many welded areas. The welds conform to all standard procedures indicative of that time.

Photograph #2 was cropped to reserve web space. The original picture we have on file shows what appears to be three individuals standing behind the body. The legs of the person you are seeing is definitely military since his fatigues are bloused above his field boots. The others seem to be wearing raincoats. If one of these persons is an Officer, he is wearing low quarters and a class "A" uniform (Greens). According to the Air Force, the class "A" uniform with the black stripe down the side of the pants did not come into use until 1957. This uniform is only worn during the winter months.”

All very earthly. And human. In the course of the investigation, they contacted the “Burns Institute (Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children, Cincinnati, Ohio). This hospital is world known for its work with burned patients. We interviewed the Chief of Staff and allowed him to study the photographs. It was his expert opinion that the photos represented an incinerated body of a human. The swelling of the head would be caused by extreme heat flash.”

Which all leads to the conclusion that:

“This was a photograph of a light aircraft crash and its dead pilot. Whether it was military or not is still an issue open for debate.”

This thorough analysis was conducted by Schaffner in 1981, just three years after the photos were initially circulated. It didn’t stop the photos from being promoted as mysterious in the literature, with little regard for the crash victim. [with thanks to Luis Ruiz Noguez]

“Concepción, Chile – On October first of 2002, while vacationing in the Southern Chilean city of Concepcion, a group of family members found what appeared to a small humanoid creature. The miniscule being measures about 7.2 centimetres long. It has a relatively large head, two arms with longs fingers, and two legs. (…) The child allegedly picked it up and wrapped it with a piece of paper. The child claims that it stayed alive for about eight days, and in some instances, it even opened its eyes.

Nevertheless, after supposedly being dead for a few days, the small creature displays signs of advanced decomposition; it even appears to be in a strange state of mummification. Specialists from the University of Chile pointed out to a possibility that it might be a foetus from local wild life, such as a wild cat. However, they have not reached a conclusion to determine the exact species the supposed foetus could be scientifically associated with. They expect to carry out DNA testing in order to come up with a conclusion.”
[Ufocasebook: Tiny Alien Found in Chile?]

The child is Armando Henríquez Carreño, then 15-years-old. His uncle, Julio Carreño, was also involved in the promotion of the creature, which was named “Toy”. Yes, it was named Toy.

Shortly after the media exposure in the local cable TV, came the first “specialists”: some ladies who claimed they had special powers and who could talk telepathically with the creature. Not even Armando’s mother, Luisa, was able to believe them.

Then came the local ufologists.

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