Photo: César Julio Aires

The research that we are going to present was practically imposed when we were informed of the existence of ufological events observed throughout the 1970s, involving a small population that inhabited João Donato Island, located in a natural reservoir in the municipality of Palmeirândia, in the interior of Maranhão State.

We were on the island in 2016 and 2017. Also in 2017 I communicated the beginning of this field research at the XVIII Ufology Congress, in Curitiba.

The maturation of the study of this casuistry leads us today to publish its deepening.

In the 70s João Donato Island was completely isolated from the solid ground. It had no electricity, gas, or running water. The living conditions of that time still persist, with very few development, such as  electric light, which drove off the UFOs from there. Today the island is connected to the land by two grounded paths.

About fifteen families inhabited the island at that time, in a relative genetic and cultural isolation,

configuring the situations that we will develop in this article and that interested, for ten years, one or more than one, supposedly extraterrestrial intelligences, present in the daily lives of those people at that time. Much rarer events these days.

The ufological events that caught our attention occurred on the island, and consisted of sightings of a luminous manifestation

that the witnesses call “Star”, “Apparatus” or “Torch”, to describe what always seems to be the same type of device with an intelligent behavior: a star, more star than the others observed, and that seems to be permanently living in the island’s sky.

It is the matriarch of the Abreu family who will tell us about the proximity of the light on herself and her husband, Silvino:

Iris Abreu: “I will tell you only what I know. … at the kitchen door there was a pond with fish … I went to wash the dishes at the edge of the pond. When I got there, I looked like that, the star was passing by, and I thought “look at the star that everyone says”. I’m there washing the dishes. When I finished washing the dishes, I raised my head, a torch of fire came over me, I shouted, those in the kitchen shouted “what happened, what happened ???” Guys, it was a fire coming at me! It was certainly a star I saw!

Felipe Marcel: As if it were fire? Was it hot?

IA: No, not at all! I screamed, people screamed, then it vanished.

Lallá Barretto: Did you feel anything in your body with the proximity of that light?

IA: No, I didn’t feel anything in the body. When it came over me I thought “will this animal eat me?”, But I looked at that big light, coming over me, then I screamed. I screamed, it went away.

LB: Was that the first time you saw it?

IA: It happened to me only this time. But, after a few days, my husband had another tank at the front door. He he used to see the fishes in the tank every night. When he went he saw the star, but he didn’t believe it, because we had said to him and he didn’t believe us. He was going with his head down. When he raised his head, that fire torch came. ”

Unlike the frequent reports all over the world of lights that materialize into spaceships, on João Donato Island the observed crew members came inside the light. Rosa Abreu was still a child and never forgot what she saw 40 years ago:

Rosa Abreu: “Sara was about six to seven years old, Sonia was about nine. On the island we used to get water from the well. But we did the dishes at the edge of the tank. Usually it was me, who was older, and the other smaller ones, we were going to wash the dishes. It was the story of the Apparatus, that they were drawing blood, and I was watching to see if the Apparatus was coming. The girls were doing the dishes, and I was looking. Then when I saw, a light was coming from afar. The light was like a ball. Inside this ball, it was the first time in my life that I saw a dwarf. There in my backland, there was no dwarf: he was a white man, bald, this little big. There was another, I know there were two, the one I remember for sure was that little guy, inside that fireball. Only it didn’t get hot. He stayed at a close height. Inside that fireball were two little dwarfs. It was also the first time that I saw an aluminum ladder, because in the backland there were only wooden ladders. The little dwarf was taking a ladder from the inside to go down. Then I started to scream: the Apparatus, children, the Apparatus! And Dad was in the habit of finishing dinner, the coffee was ready there, he kept talking. There was a jirau (kind of an indoor suspencion open cabin, in indian architecture). Sonia was bigger, older, but Sara fell, and I started screaming “look at the device!” I believe, I think, right ?, that it was going to take us. ”

Rosa made the following drawing of the vision she had at the age of ten:

There is much debate in Ufology about the influence of the witnesses’ imagination in the reports, an aspect of human psychic functioning that would even lead to invalidate any witness report. We have another position on this. We start from the clinically proven fact that the witness of a terrifying fact tends to keep detailed and clear memories of the traumatic situation, most of the time for the rest of his life. This is also demonstrated by the great reports of the ufological casuistry, such as Travis Walton, to name just one, who never varied his account, as well as the people who witnessed his abduction. We asked Leonel Abreu about the witness’s memory of na ufological manifestation:

LB: “When Felipe asked if you could have any memory failure, you said no, very  firmly. Why do you think it is so marked in your mind?

Leonel Abreu: Because I lived that since I was seven, since I was a child. There on the island we worked since we were children, at the age of five children already started working in the plantations.

LB: Do you think then, it was a very impressive thing as to be recorded in your memory?

LA: It was and it is.

The “Star”, “Torch”, or “Apparatus” presence was permanent for ten years, as Leonel Abreu tells us:

LB: Did that happen for a long time, throughout your childhood? How much time?

LA: It was from 1974, from 70 to 80.

LB: All of that ??? Almost ten years ???

LA: It was. All of it. Almost ten years.

Felipe Marcel: Was it every day, once a year?

LA: It wasn’t every day, because we didn’t go out every day. But it was always, all the time. ”

The witnesses are convinced that the behavior of the lights is intelligent, that they are observing and studying the island population, and that they are from extraterrestrial origin and foreign to our world. Being an object of study of an extraterrestrial intelligence, Anthropology can be called upon, for us better understand what human aspects this intelligence would be studyng for more or less ten years.

The relative genetic isolation we identified on the island was a consequence of the geographic isolation and life contingencies of the Abreu Family. This isolation, we think, was the main target of the studies by the ufological manifestations.

The island was known by the name of its buyer, João Donato Araújo, who settled there around 1880, where he had children. The family has no information on the number of children of João Donato, believing that they probably dispersed, since they do not keep the memory of these relatives.

Our story begins with one of João Donato’s sons, Mariano Bruno Araújo who, when starting a family, moved from the island to the place called Rumo, where he had five children. At the end of his father’s life, or after his death, he became a squatter on the island, where he returned to settle with his five children: Silvino, Estrina, Assunção, Martinho, and another son that the family also did not keep the memory. They think that perhaps he died as a child.

Mariano granted land possessions to some people who were not, at any degree, related to him. These people ended up mixing by alliance with his family, which means that the entire population of the island has some degree of kinship with each other, being “all cousins”, in the words of Sara Abreu, family historian. We can then consider that the island’s population may have been seen as a relatively preserved genetic microcosm.

But it is the family that his son Silvino Sodré Araújo formed with Dona Iris Abreu that will interest us the most, as it involves a large number of testimonies from one same family, and is perhaps the family most targeted by the objects that terrorized the island, such as we’ll see later.

The special characteristics of family relationships and the predominance of the O + blood type in the family, suggest that something about human behavior, related to the blood type, was the object of the continued interest of a supposedly extraterrestrial intelligence.

João Donato Island and Anthropology

The multiple and varied manifestations of the Ufo phenomenon impose on human knowledge an object to be known that cannot be assimilated by our scientific rationality, as it is rebellious to the protocols of science: we do not have even the prerogative to provoke the object, that is, to provoke an ufological event to study it, nor to repeat it in the laboratory. These general characteristics of the ufological object require different and broader approaches, ranging from physics, passing through all sciences, to spirituality!

Ufological research that seeks scientific rationality needs to use the methods and concepts of the sciences already established to develop knowledge about an object that insists on presenting itself as totally atypical.

Our background and scientific reference for approuching the UFO phenomenon is Anthropology, which, like other Human Sciences, participates in the same scientific difficulty: the phenomena and manifestations of the human and social object cannot be provoked or repeated in laboratory, their protocols therefore have great affinity with the ufological object.

The witnesses in João Donato Island are convinced that they were being observed by the “Star” or “Apparatus”. Bearing in mind that the whole region was the scene of some violent manifestations of the ufological phenomenon at the same period of time, everyone heard that the “Apparatus” wanted to suck people’s blood, like in Colares, in the neighboring state of Pará.  But the contact there was much more continuous, it lasted throughout the 70’s, and there is no news that anybody  had been attacked by the the luminous objects that frequented the island every day.

The interpretation of the witnesses, that they were being observed, has for us the value of a hypothesis to be deepened from the scientific reason proper to Anthropology. Some concepts and methods of Anthropology will be put into perspective with the information we have collected about the events on João Donato Island, in order to continue developing the ufological knowledge.

The first thing that strikes you, and in a surprisingly way, is that Silvino’s family experienced the Freudian myth of Totem and Taboo, which is the theoretical foundation of Freud’s Anthropology.

What would Freud’s anthropology be?

As we know, Freud was the discoverer of the unconscious, another human dimension that coexists and interferes in our everyday conscious actions and thoughts. With this discovery, man once again loses his privileged position as a creature. The first time was with Copernicus, when from the center of the universe the Earth became just one more celestial body revolving around the sun.

With Freud’s discovery, man was once again stripped of his position of control, since his conscious actions were under suspicion, affected by unknown motivations for being unconscious, and over which he has not the slightest control. It was the advent of a new knowledge about man, which needed the elaboration of a new Anthropology.

A new paradigm has emerged with this new Anthropology: man has ceased to be all conscious and master of all his actions, to become a being of two psychic dimensions, the conscious and the unconscious.

One of the great enigmas of Anthropology is to know how and when man stopped being an animal to become a human being. Investigating this is equivalent to knowing when and how his double psychic nature, object of the new Anthropology, was formed.

Anthropology understands today that the human exists from the moment that man starts to produce culture, thus differentiating himself from animals: producing language, dominating the environment for his own benefit, producing weapons, objects and social institutions.

Studying mankind’s oldest religions, habits and customs, Freud realized the importance of communitarian meals and the character of ritual sacrifice that these events took in all ancient cultures.

In the impossibility of reconstructing the history of humanity very remotely until the moment when man stopped being an animal to become human, Freud found himself obliged, to elaborate his new Anthropology, to compose a history, a myth, combining the anthropological knowledge available in his time, with his patients’ reports about their psychic lives.

The story resulted in the following myth, called Totem and Taboo:

Prehumans would live, like the great apes, in hordes of one or two dozen individuals. This horde would be dominated by an all-powerful chief, with life and death power over all individuals in his group, and would be the only male to have the enjoyment of all women. Male children, when they reached adolescence, were removed from the horde, living promiscuously among themselves. Until one day, the male children came together and murdered their father. This primordial act resulted in unbearable guilt and the need for the first social rules, so that one of the male children would not take the place of the horde’s father, restarting the animal cycle. Guilt also brought a kind of nostalgia for the children, which was at the origin of the sacrifice banquets observed in most ancient cultures. The children would have consumed the horde’s father at a banquet, in a desperate attempt to appropriate his attributes, and he became divinized, giving way to the idea of ​​God. In most ancient cultures we find the ritual banquet that commemorates this mythical time.

In this psychic situation, the first social rules had to be created to regulate the relationship among the children freed from the yoke of the horde’s father. It was absolutely necessary that none of them give in to the temptation to overcome the others, assuming the domination of the group. The first rule that governed human societies was religious, since the father was deified by the guilt of his children, and thus placed as a guarantee of the necessary social rules.

ETs, Freud readers?

Returning to João Donato Island, we were surprised by finding there a reissue of the father of the Freudian horde in the person of Silvino Sodré Araújo.

With our anthropological background, the particular situation of Silvino Sodré Araújo’s family and his wife, Mrs Iris Abreu, soon caught our attention. With some humor, we thought that the intelligence operating on the island should have read Freud to plan his studies on the human race. We will see that this idea, no matter how funny, clarifies the particular situation of this family in interaction with the UFO phenomenon. Did the intelligence that operated on the island, which we suppose extraterrestrial, read Freud to observe the social and genetic behavior of that human population?

Silvino Sodré Araújo was a man with a very strong personality and extremely paradoxical. While he had a great positive influence on the people’s lives around him, he was a wicked and violent tyrant with his own family. Indeed, the island’s neighbors and relatives keep the memory of a solidary and generous man, and for some witnesses he was the only one to reach out in times of extreme difficulty.

We are not going into details of the absolute power and the physical and psychological abuses that he daily inflicted on all members of his family. Suffice it to say here that Silvino had absolute authority over everyone, imposing a discipline on his relatives with perversity and cruelty refinements, a behavior rarely found in psychiatric literature.

Silvino was also a great breeder. Being a peddler, he left children all over Maranhão State , during the long absences required by his work.

They say that Silvino impregnated women even on top of a horse’s cell, which makes him a respectable father of the Freudian horde.

This evident presence of a father of the Freudian horde leads us to investigate more closely the family that Silvino formed with Mrs Iris Abreu, as well as other aspects of anthropological interest, which were revealed throughout the testimonies that we have collected, and that, according to our hypothesis, it was the greatest interest of the intelligence working on the island.

Silvino Sodré Araújo’s family situation

Silvino had numerous descendants: 15 children of Mrs Iris lived on the island.

In addition, he raised all the children he knew he was the father, from different women throughout Maranhão.

He used to bring these children to be raised by Dona Iris. Thus, in the 70s, about 25 Silvino’s children lived on the island.

The “Star”, “Apparatus” or “Torch”, seemed to monitor Silvino’s comings and goings in his commercial activities. His children say that the “Star” used to stand over the house when Silvino was about to arrive. Although there is no news of any “Apparatus” attacks on the island, not least because, as Mrs Isaltina said, the thing was unable to catch anyone! it’s approach caused terror. The “Torch” had been above Mrs Iris and Silvino, on different occasions, as above three daughters of the couple,Who were still kids at the time, with the apparition of beings, suggesting abductions, that were erased from their memories.

In the next generation, Rosa’s cousin, Domingos Balbino Sodré, had an equally striking sighting of the “apparatus”, with the two dwarfs and their little aluminum ladders.

Both were pre-adolescents, about ten years old, at the respective sightings, which occurred in an interval of twenty years, between one episode and another. Domingos and his brother are married to two sisters, who had, as recently as in 2016, impacting sightings on the island.

The genetic ties between the majority of the island’s population, which at the time of the events consisted of Silvino’s family and about 15 families that gradually became relatives, allow us to define João Donato Island as a sufficiently isolated microcosm, in the seventies, to preserve a certain number of genetic and social relationships, very practical for observation and study.

The interfamily behavior suggests the observation of relationships that were inferred by Freud to explain the psychic mechanism of passage from nature to culture. It seems logical and intelligent to study this fundamental aspect of human nature.

The blood type and HR pattern of the Abreu family, O + for the vast majority of the family, is the same that was revealed as the common denominator among the witnesses of dormitory visits through the research by Liliana and Eduardo Grosso, presented at he UfOZ 2012, in Buenos Aires. In this interesting research there are indications of interest in mitochondrial DNA, that is, the transmission of genetic characteristics through the mother.

The Interfamily behavior was entirely dominated by the absolute power that Silvino imposed on everyone, exercised over his wife, with physical and psychological abuse, and absolute power also over all his children, with the same physical and psychological refinement abuse, given to his wife. If we admit the hypothesis that an intelligence was studying the social behavior in relation to the genetics of João Donato Island inhabitants, we can think that the lights may have exacerbated Silvino’s natural perversity, making it unbearable for his family.

Wide observation of the human context: probable study of the island nature and night activities that did not admit witnesses

Other mysterious and unknown things used to happen on the island, suggesting that the intelligence at work observed the wider context of human life. One of the behaviors of the light was to invest against people who were circulating at night: beams, querosene lamps, cigarettes, every fire lit at night signaled the human presence, forced to take refuge at home. This behavior led to the witnesses’ conviction that any fire attracted the torch and that they were forced to return to take shelter at home. Fear ended up determining that no one could leave home after nightfall, changing local customs, as Dona Isaltina Mendes (nickname Dona Zeca) says:

Isaltina Mendes: “Look, this apparatus is a long story. At that time, no one here on the Island had energy, everyone walked with a kerosene lamp. When this apparatus looked at the lamp, the fire that we made, then it was going down to draw the blood of the human being who was looking at it. It was facho (twigs on fire), it was everything we put on the street, because there was no electricity, it was facho. When it looked at that light of fire, it used, as if, about to come down and the person left the street because of it.

One day there was a prayer at Caitina’s house (?) My mother went. It was this bush path and we went with some lamps. Not even flashlight, it were kerosene lamps, and it walked over because it couldn’t look at the fire.

Lallá Barretto: Couldn’t the apparatus look at fire?

IM: No it used to come down wanting to kill the person and drink the blood, that’s what he was doing.

LB: Did he ever do that here?

IM: No, because it never succeeded in grabbing a person.

The intelligence working there was not to attack anyone. It made it very clear that it did not want anyone to be walking around the island at night. Was there also something flammable that made the presence of fire undesirable? The first idea is that they did scientific experiments studying the island nature, or even the acclimatization of the little dwarfs in our environment, not wanting any human interference. Some witnesses report seeing glares of light at night in the distance, in the woods.

Everything indicates that they are still present in the bush, in a strange and visible way. Sara Abreu and Joãzinho reported the recent presence of a palm tree specimen, from a common species in the island’s ecosystem, which showed an unusual behavior for about a year, also requiring, due to its strangeness, a change in the population’s behavior: people stopped passing by it, as Sara tells us:

Sara Abreu: “It was a small palm tree. What is the astonishment, what is the difference between so many palm trees? Why did this make such a difference? I will show you a path where people pass. So many people pass on top, it is marked, there is no way to grow a plant, because you step a lot and then kill any being or little plant. But this palm did not die! It was born there in the middle of the path, and it didn’t stop growing! It had a jolt, a different swing. It wasn’t like the wind swing. Whether it was windy or not, it had this movement, and in this way, and very, very, very, very fast. It shook too much, too much, too much. “

Lallá Barretto: Did it always shake?

SA: It kept shaking all the time. I live in São Luís, I was born here, but I have lived in São Luís for a long time. That palm took about a year. It was already a little like that the last time I saw it. About this size. One of my children with my nephew, Anderson and Pablo, we came to look at that palm tree. As it didn’t stop, Pablo tried to hold it to see what was going to happen. If he did, maybe it would stop shaking. The boys were scared, “don’t touch it, don’t touch it, it is not messing with us”, but he touched the palm tree. He held the leaf for a few seconds. When he stopped, it just kept shaking, shaking in this direction. It was not jerking back and forth like a normal leaf. It was shaking very, very fast.

LB: It was a rhythmic thing.

SA: It was making a noise, Lallá !! Zip, zip, zip, zip, zip. The boy got it and held it and when he released the bug it started again, all the time.

LB: And then it was gone?

SA: Then she vanished from the path.

Probable observation of survival strategies related to the ecological environment

Within the context of human life on the island, we still have to highlight the material living conditions on João Donato Island, which were and are still very precarious. If the electric energy chased away the UFOs and the tap water made everyday life easier, even today the basic diet is limited to fishing for the fish called “Jabiraca” during the summer, when it is very abundant in the weir. The fish is put to dry in the sun and stored to guarantee food during the winter. This dried fish is still fried on babassu (a palm tree) charcoal when it is consumed. Coal continues to be obtained manually and homemade from babassu.

This fish is consumed with porridge made with water flour (this flour comes from manioc), and is called tiquara, and the diet is reinforced by the consumption of bananas.

Babassu oil is homemade, in a hell of a lot of work that was explained to us by Dona Cotinha.

The religious customs of the population also seem to have interested the supposed extraterrestrials, since the light appeared when there was a gathering of people to pray, the population is Evangelical.

Other social customs were object for the light approximation, such as “doing sentinels”, that is, the neighborhood would meet at the home of someone who was sick or on the verge of death. Everything indicates that the intelligence responsible for the ufological events was interested in observing the most elementary aspects of human culture on the island, associated with the behavioral and genetic aspects of Silvino Sodré Araújo’s family. Relic of the Brazilian patriarchy, the family captured in the wedding nets the other families that settled there, being “all cousins”, in the words of Sara Abreu, family historian. A genetic microcosm relatively well preserved by the island’s isolation. Would there be a social behavior due to blood type, or mitochondrial DNA?

Probable study of the imaginary human structure: a particular situation of the relationship between folklore and the appearances on the island

Freud said that folklore is the peoples’ unconscious, and the folkloric manifestations bring all the human unconscious experience. Folklore is a way of accessing the unconscious and for this reason it is one of the most important studies for the knowledge of humanity.

The great ufologist from Minas Gerais, Antônio Faleiro, was the first to unveil the ufological reality transvestited in the manifestation of figures of Brazilian folklore. Let us say that it was a kind of discovery, of recognition that mental formations were superimposed on a ufological reality that could not be assimilated by rural populations, due to their technological strangeness, much less revealed as extraterrestrial objects acting in our world. Folk figures would be a kind of filter, of mental defense against the radically different.

The island population makes a very marked difference between what is an apparition and what is an ufological event. The apparition is linked to the vision of the spirits world, and the ufological event is considered a reality, something that actually happens.

We collected three folk figures on João Donato Island, between apparitions and ufological reality:

– Curacanga belongs to the folklore of the Maranhão Downland, and is present throughout Brazil as a figure linked to the folklore of ufological probes, the so-called Mãe do Ouro (Gold’s Mother) in other regions.

– Cabra Rouca (Hoarse She-Goat) is described as a apparition on João Donato island. It would be a ghostly black she-goat that makes a hoarse and terrifying sound, causing panic. Its strangeness suggests that witnesses are dealing with something else in disguise. As we did not find this figure in Maranhão folklore, we hypothesized that precisely the folkloric reading of an ufological event was underway on the island. Our research led us to the popular tale “A goat and the seven kids” that is part of Portuguese oral culture and was certainly disseminated in Northern Brazil. The goat had seven little goats, and when it went out to work it put its cubs on guard as to the artful way the wolf would try to eat them. In effect, the wolf, in order not to be recognized, presents itself in a hoarse voice. We can see that the voice is used to deceive. Cabra Rouca has a hoarse cry that does not belong to goats, being an ambiguous being, perhaps some extraterrestrial device that circulated on the island scaring its inhabitants so as not to be surprised.

– Curupira is the third folkloric figure. He is a small being, with backward feet.  He uses his backward feet to create footprints that lead to his starting point, thus making hunters and travelers confused.He guards the bush, causing people who are malicious with nature to lose their way, get confused in the middle of the bush, or lose consciousness for a while, falling a few hours into a deep black sleep. We think that Curupira may be the consequence of some kind of contact that is totally out of consciousness.

Contact: establishment of a symbolic pact, beginning of human language

From the anthropological point of view, the most important form of contact that took place on the island was the establishment of a zero point of communication, the establishment of a significant convention that makes possible the emergence of language, as one of the consequences of the passage from nature to culture. Human language arises when an unconscious agreement is made between men. For example, in our language we are all agreed that the emission of a thought in a sentence must follow the law subject + verb + predicate. To understand each other, we have to follow this rule, which is transmitted unconsciously, when we learn to speak. It is the symbolic pact of Anthropology.

The “Star”, “Torch”, or “Apparatus” established an tacit agreement, a symbolic pact with the witnesses, which comes to comfort the hypothesis that gives title to this article, the interest mainly in cultural anthropology combined with the genetic interest. Leonel Abreu tells us:

Leonel Abreu: “It all started around 1970, 74. We lived in João Donato Island, which is between the two municipalities, São Bento and Palmeirândia. Over there, there wasn’t interference from light or noise, none. It was an island, a deserted field. Always some lights used to appear, as it were a star. We called it “Apparatus”. If we said “there goes the Apparatus”, it would disappear. And if we didn’t say anything, it   would lower that light. This has appeared several times, for many people, everyone saw it. We always worked with two, at night, doing some work, because we were afraid. ”

Then there was the establishment of a zero point of language, a significant first pact, and it does not seem there were cases in which this pact was not observed.

This same symbolic pact was also established in the Colares region in Pará State and served for the target populations to develop strategies for getting along with the lights. It is even astonishing to have such an elementary degree of communication for civilizations that we suppose much more advanced than we are, that they should totally master these issues. But maybe they don’t master and are here just to learn how human language works. But, precisely, this immeasurable technological advance can mean an incommunicability between cultures, which will need the development of a proper language.

The events keep going, but with an other modus operandi

Since electric power arrived on the island, and landfills linked the island to solid ground, the ufological events have become more distant, being seen in the sky, but no longer investing agaisnt people.

Lallá Barretto: What about today?

Isaltina Mendes Sodré: Nowadays a little apparatus goes by, but it doesn’t go down anymore. It is no longer those big torches that we used to see saw passing by.

LB: What color was it?

IMS: Fire, red! Almost like a car headlight, when it looked at fire.

However, with the interval of twenty years, Domingos Balbino Abreu had the same sighting and close contact with the same beings as his cousin, Rosa Abreu had.

Domingos Balbino Sodré: It is like this: a long time ago, we used to take the mesh, at night, in the field, take the canoe and embark. We went, me and two friends of mine. Between 9 and 10, at night, in this field of ours, right here, it was not very dark, the moon was lighting up. Then we saw that torch going down into the canoe where we were. As we saw that the torch was going to drop even inside the canoe, which was small, we threw ourselves into the water. We stayed like that, not far away, half immersed, just with the head out, covering the head with the bush to be able to see what was inside that torch, which was an apparatus. And we saw it. Two people went down, only they weren’t big people, they were little dwarfs, tiny people, but, all equipped, like those people who go into space, with that clothes, that’s how it was. They were small people.

They got out of the apparatus, were searching inside the canoe, as they found no one, within ten minutes, they went back into the apparatus and it started to go up. It was a big torch, just like a ball. At that same time we went to call the companions. Everyone scared!

We took the small canoe with the mesh and left.

Domingos and his brother Hélio are married to two sisters. These two couples are of a recent generation, in their thirties. Domingos had the ufological experience above. The two sisters also had contact with the torch five years ago and as recently as in January 2016. These facts indicate that the genetic combinations in João Donato Island keep being observed.

Considerations about an ongoing research

The presence of a psychological situation that underlies the transition from the state of nature to the state of culture in Freudian Anthropology, with a reissue of the father of the horde, generating a family situation within the patriarchal molds of the interior of Brazil, most atypical, however, due to the perversity and violence to which the Abreu family was subjected, seems to have been one of the main interests of the intelligence working in the place.

Everything indicates that João Donato Island was a laboratory for anthropological studies for one or more intelligences, that we suppose to be extraterrestrial. That this Intelligence planned its activities on the island taking into account the human self-understanding. That the “Apparatus’s” function was more of observing than collecting human biological material. Although the witnesses say that the purpose of the “Apparatus” was to draw blood, never, for ten years, was anyone hit, leaving marks and sequelae as in Colares. This aspect is interesting, since the witnesses of ufological manifestations are subject to imagination. The whole Maranhão State was infested with “Apparatuses” in the 70’s. Silvino himself always came by telling impressive stories about people affected by technological objects. The island’s witnesses had a lot of material for imaginating attacks, but that didn’t happen.  They report exactly the particular experience they lived on João Donato Island.

The establishment of a significant convention, a zero point of the symbolic pact, indicates the recognition of language as a factor that makes us humans, different from other animals.

The island population was observed by the “Star”, “Apparatus” or “Torch”. Its closeness to the witnesses suggests that they may have been abducted. However, we did not collect any report that tell us of an abduction.

The witnesses attest to having lived in a double reality: their own as a human being, and the daily contact with radically different and incomprehensible realities, with the incursion of technological objects and change of the island’s habits and customs. The ufological manifestations forever marked the collective memory, the personal lives of the witnesses, with the Abreu family being the most significant social and genetic network and probably the most affected by the consequences of an Ufo phenomenon of such an amplitude.

After talking to a lot of people, we had the measure of this double night reality, of this coexistence with the unknown supernatural.

We noticed in the witnesses something like a nervous fracture that remains alive in the reports, even after forty years of the narrated facts.

The mistreatments and abuses that Silvino Sodré Araújo imposed upon his family raises many questions due to the refinement and permanence of the violence. It would not be too much to suppose that Silvino could have had his psychic life affected by the interest that the “Apparatus” showed for his person and that his behavior may have been heightened for the purpose of observing family anthropology.

It is also clear the “Torch” interest in the nature of the island and that it developed night activities that did not admit witnesses. The horrible Cabra Rouca (Hoarse She-Goat) was in charge of chasing away the humans who passed through the island. Some measuring instrument, disguised as a palm tree, still forced the inhabitants to change their path, around 2015 , demonstrating that the intelligence is still there, but that the most important work was done until the electric light arrived in the early 1980s.

It is interesting to note that João Donato Island and the entire Colares region have two common patterns that they share with other states in the North and Northeast:

– coincidence of time, 1970s for João Donato island (Maranhão State), and 1977/78 for the events registered by the Brazilian government in Colares (Para State) and its region;

– geographical coincidence, two neighboring states in the North and Northeast of Brazil, within a context of manifestations that covered all other states, with the highlights of permanent ufological activities being the Barroso case, in Ceará State in 1976, the Caranguejo Island case, also in Maranhão, in April 1977. The “Star”, “Torch” or “Apparatus” was the only type of object that appeared and still appears today in João Donato Island, unlike Colares, where nine types of different objects were counted and engaged in diferent experiments, even directly on the witnesses’ bodies. They seem to be complementary approaches to the study of humanity and our planet.

The casuistry already mentioned shows a broad project of an unknown intelligence, with different approaches, from the extraction of biological material, which characterized the contact in Colares and its region, through the socio-genetic observation on  João Donato island, to a varied casuistry that when explored it should reveal other aspects of a broad project supposedly extraterrestrial, where the entire North  and Northeast Brazil was considered representative of humans and planet Earth.

As we wandered around the island, we were wondering what we were doing in the middle of the interior of Maranhão, moved by this will of knowledge of those passionates about Ufology, but without ever having seen anything in the sky. What if none of this is true? We returned home at nightfall. In a little while the cameraman, César Aires, starts shouting calling us urgently. Arriving at the garden, he showed us the Star! He said he was looking at it when he saw it grow up towards him. When he called us, signaling its presence, it withdrew waiting for everyone in the house to answer the call of our cameraman. We then observed the small star, more star than the others, which started to move in an erratic way, until it went out like a lamp, as if to say yes, that they exist, yes there are.

Thanks: Mrs. Iris Abreu and their wonderful children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, all the family Abreu.

*English version – Francisco de Assis Barretto.