Antonio Villas Boas - Investigation

Investigation

Following this alleged event, Boas claimed to have suffered from nausea and weakness, as well as headaches and lesions on the skin which appeared with any kind of light bruising. Eventually, he contacted journalist Jose Martins, who had placed an ad in a newspaper looking for people who had had experiences with UFOs. Upon hearing Boas' story, Martins contacted Dr. Olavo Fontes of National School of Medicine of Brazil; Fontes was also in contact with the American UFO research group APRO. Fontes examined the farmer and concluded that he had been exposed to a large dose of radiation from some source and was now suffering from mild radiation sickness. Writer Terry Melanson states:

Among symptoms were 'pains throughout the body, nausea, headaches, loss of appetite, ceaselessly burning sensations in the eyes, cutaneous lesions at the slightest of light bruising...which went on appearing for months, looking like small reddish nodules, harder than the skin around them and protuberant, painful when touched, each with a small central orifice yielding a yellowish thin waterish discharge.' The skin surrounding the wounds presented 'a hyperchromatic violet-tinged area.'

According to Researcher Peter Rogerson, the story first came to light in February, 1958, and the earliest definite print reference to Boas's story was from the April–June 1962 issue of the Brazilian UFO periodical SBESDV Bulletin. Rogerson notes that the story had definitely circulated between 1958 and 1962, and was probably recorded in print, but that details are uncertain.

Boas was able to recall every detail of his purported experience without the need for hypnotic regression. Further, Boas' experience occurred in 1957, which was still several years before the famous Hill abduction which made the concept of alien abduction famous and opened the door to many other reports of similar experiences.

Researcher Peter Rogerson, however, doubts the veracity of Boas's story. He notes that several months before Boas first related his claims, a similar story was printed in the November 1957 issue of the periodical O Cruzeiro, and suggests that Boas borrowed details of this earlier account, along with elements of the contactee stories of George Adamski. Rogerson also argues:

One reason why the story gained credibility was the prejudiced assumption that any farmer in the Brazilian interior had to be an illiterate peasant who 'couldn't make this up'. As Eddie Bullard pointed out to me, the fact that the Villas Boas family possessed a tractor put them well above the peasant class ... We now know that AVB was a determinedly upwardly mobile young man, studying a correspondence course and eventually becoming a lawyer (at which news the ufologists who had considered him too much the rural simpleton to have made the story up, now argued that he was too respectable and bourgeois to have done so).