JANÚNCIO SOUZA – ATTEMPTED ABDUCTION: Janúncio was the patriarch of a large family and the owner of a thirteen-hundred-acre ranch near Santa Cruz in the state of Rio Grande do Norte.

He was seventy-eight when I talked to him in February 1979. He wouldn’t go outside at night anymore because a UFO had tried to take him away.

Janúncio had visited a neighbor one night and as he was walking home in the dark, he lit a ciga­rette. Within seconds something huge swooped down out of the sky and stopped about three meters above him. A round door opened on the bottom and he could see a man and a woman sitting inside.

"A lot of light came out and I felt like I was being pulled up into the object,” he said. “The light was very hot and I was terrified.”

Janún­cio grabbed a small palm tree and wrapped his arms and legs around it. I interviewed him four weeks after this happened and after we finished talking he reenacted the scene for me (left).

He said he hugged the tree as tightly as he could but the pull from the UFO was so strong that he was dragged up the trunk until his feet left the ground. Then gravity would pull him back down.

This happened five times, up and down, again and again, scraping his chest almost raw. By now Janúncio was crying because he was hurting and the light was so very hot.

“Then,” he said, “when the man and woman saw I wasn’t going to let go they dropped something like drops of hot oil on me. It burned my arms and hurt very much but I was too afraid to let go of the tree.”

The entire incident lasted less than two minutes. Janún­cio was convinced he would have died if it had gone on any longer because it was so very, very hot. But when he still wouldn’t let go of the tree, the door closed and the UFO disappeared, shooting straight up into the sky.