The record
On the night of October 15 to 16, 1957, Antônio Villas Boas, a 23-year-old farmer, was plowing his family's land near São Francisco de Sales in Minas Gerais, Brazil, working at night to avoid the heat. He said a red light came down into the field and turned out to be an egg-shaped craft with a rotating dome. His tractor engine died. Four small beings in gray suits and helmets, he said, dragged him aboard.
Inside, by his account, he was stripped, washed with a thick liquid and had blood drawn from his chin through a tube. He was left in a room where a gas made him vomit. Then a woman, small and human-looking, came in and they had sex. He said that before leaving she pointed to her belly and then to the sky. He was walked off the craft and watched it rise and fly away. He put the time aboard at a little over four hours.
Villas Boas did not go to the police or the army. In early 1958 he answered a newspaper notice from journalist João Martins, who was collecting UFO reports. Martins brought him to Rio de Janeiro, where on February 22, 1958, physician Olavo Fontes of Brazil's National School of Medicine questioned and examined him, about four months after the night in the field.
Fontes recorded that in the weeks after the encounter Villas Boas had nausea, headaches, burning eyes, loss of appetite and lesions on his skin. He noted marks on the chin where Villas Boas said the blood was drawn, and small wounds and scars on his body that took months to fade. Fontes concluded the symptoms fit mild radiation sickness. He did not run any test that measured radiation, and the marks were not photographed for the record.
Fontes sent his notes to APRO, an American UFO research group. The story was first printed in a Brazilian UFO bulletin in 1962, and Fontes and Martins's statement appeared in English in Flying Saucer Review in 1966. Villas Boas later studied by correspondence, became a lawyer, married and had four children. He told the same story until he died in 1991 and never took it back.
Brazil has a second famous case with physical claims. In January 1996 in Varginha, Minas Gerais, three young women said they saw a strange creature, and rumors spread that the army had captured one and that a military police officer died of an infection after touching it. An army inquiry said the creature was a local man with a mental illness, crouching in the rain. The Varginha story has no medical exam of the kind Fontes wrote for Villas Boas, so this page leads with the 1957 case.