A UFO in Curitiba! (ufology is hilarious)

Unconscious man, by Richard Tennant Cooper

I've had a joke-hobby for a few years now, which is following ufology in the US (and in Brazil, which basically repeats the same points). It's hilarious. And scary. You see cases of fathers with higher education and good careers killing their own children because they think they are reptilian hybrids, and other shit that's not far from this. Anyway, why am I bringing this up now? Because I predicted that, at one time or another, videos of Brazilian São João balloons would circulate on the American internet as if they were UAPs — a new term for UFO, but which means the same crap. While UFO means Unidentified Flying Object, UAP means Unidentified Atmospheric Phenomenon, but it could be Anomalous instead of Atmospheric, since not even those who coined the new term know how to define it correctly. Well, it happened. American UFO believers have been obsessing over a video of a São João balloon made in the city of Curitiba, in the Brazilian state of Paraná.

Any Brazilian knows that around mid-year, sometimes even earlier, the skies begin to fill with balloons and lanterns, especially at night. As awful as it may be for various reasons (they sometimes cause forest fires), I confess it's pretty to look at at night. And a good portion of those lanterns are huge and made to release sparks that flash around in the night sky. All this is done with pyrotechnics known for decades, centuries even. But we're talking about idiots who are easily fooled. Last year, in New Jersey, hundreds of people began filming planes approaching to land or taking off from airports and claiming they were UFOs. Some, more cautious, called them drones. Serious investigations showed they were just planes. But, of course, the gullible idiots refuse to believe it. Similarly, the fools think the American Air Force shot down exotic craft in broad daylight last year. But they were just balloons. One, in fact, was a research balloon made by a high school science club. They spent tens of millions on a single missile in order to shoot down a high school balloon. This is American decadence laid bare for all to see, ladies and gentlemen.

But, going back to the video of the São João balloon in Curitiba. The video is filmed at night and shows the classic luminous points, some flashing, emanating from a main point, which is the balloon itself. Any Brazilian who hasn't lived holed up inside a windowless house their entire life knows what it is. But foreigners apparently don't. Some, less stupid, but still very stupid, are saying that the video shows Elon Musk's Starlink satellite network. Many recent UFO videos do show the Starlink satellite constellation passing quickly through the night sky. But there are already some evangelical ufologists saying those lights are biblically accurate fallen angels. Yes, my friends, evangelical ufology exists, and it's as bizarre as it is funny. Meanwhile, the Brazilians who initially posted the video are laughing their asses off at the stupidity of these people. And rightly so. But we shouldn't be jokers all the time. We need to be cautious. We are talking about people capable of murdering their own children because they believe they are hybrid beings.

Regarding evangelical ufology, there's a famous meme that's been circulating on the internet for years, which is the cover photo of a 1990s VHS tape. The video is a "course" given by none other than pastor Silas Malafaia, a famous multimillionaire Brazilian preacher. In it, Malafaia talks about, and here I'm quoting the VHS cover: "homosexuality, abortion and moral depravity, flying saucers and extraterrestrials." If Malafaia, who is an evangelical preacher from the Assemblies of God, which is a denomination created in the United States, was saying this in 1990, then you can be absolutely certain that American preachers were talking about it in 1980 or even earlier. And they were. At this point, associating flying saucers with angels and demons is a topic older than me, and I'm 43 years old. Since they are fundamentalists, and since all biblical fundamentalism is madness, as it attempts to follow literally a series of books that lack logical harmony among themselves, in addition to following grotesque and immoral rules from the Bronze Age, they take UFO and abduction cases seriously, but interpret these cases through the lens of the Frankenstein monster that is the religion promulgated by the Assemblies of God.

It's not surprising, either, since before the craziest Christians of all appropriated the modern folklore of flying saucers, the mystical religions of the so-called "new age" had already done so in the 1960s. Raëlism and Scientology are two of the biggest examples of ufological religions still alive today. These had a less troubled relationship with extraterrestrials. They even embraced the ETs as benevolent messengers from the stars. It's funny how what is basically just modern folklore without any real foundation ends up becoming a topic of debate in the US Congress. Aliens and flying saucers are part of a folklore fueled since the era of black and white photography and home VHS tapes, through blatant hoaxes that used hubcaps and ceiling lights as "visual proof" that we are being visited by beings from other planets — or, if you are into mystical or evangelical ufology, angels, demons, etc.

And when I talk about ceiling lights and chandeliers, their use to deceive fools continues to this day. Luis Elizondo, a former Pentagon employee who for years has presented himself as a propagator of truth and even testified before the dumb United States Congress, tried last year (or the year before that) to promote a photo that was nothing more than a reflection of a hotel room chandelier in a glass window as a "mothership materializing in the skies of Romania." I'm serious, those were his words. Part of the chandelier is covered by what is clearly the head of a person with spiky hair. Curiously, this is the same hairstyle used by Elizondo. His book on UFOs, a bestseller, even appeared at the Rio de Janeiro book fair in 2025. It's laughable. In addition to attempting to present this ridiculous photo of a reflection in a window as a mothership materializing in the sky, more recently he presented to gullible American congressmen a photo of two irrigation circles taken from an airplane as being, in fact, a photo of a huge flying saucer and its shadow projected on the ground.

 

There's no way to take this crap seriously. But it's the world we live in today. And a good part of the American Congress, including a good part that supports the current Trump administration, believes in and propagates this shit. Some even believe in evangelical ufology, as in the case of Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, a first-rate Trump supporter. It's no surprise that Aldo Rebelo, our former communist minister and current fan of Nazi-Bolshevik apologist Alexandr Dugin, is conducting interviews and meetings with American ufologists and congressmen, talking about how the Varginha ET case really happened, even though the main investigator of the case admitted that he made gross errors during the investigations, asking biased questions to the witnesses, and that in fact the so-called ET was certainly the town wanderer known as Mudinho, who was crouching in the bushes at the end of the afternoon relieving himself of the digested food he ate earlier. Yes, the witnesses who saw the ET most likely saw poor Mudinho taking a shit. By the way: Aldo Rebelo was a minister in the Lula and Dilma governments, more than a decade after the event in Varginha, which occurred in 1996.

A real disgrace what was done to Mudinho. The guy who most deserved to gain from the story continued living on the streets of the city. It seems he still does, in fact, 30 years later. For those who don't know, in 1996 three girls saw what they thought was the devil one afternoon crouching in the bushes in the city of Varginha, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. Later, UFO investigators crowded the place, asked leading questions to the girls and others who never even witnessed anything, and created an entire myth about falling spacecraft. Some investigators were even exposed as offering payments so that people would make up stories from whole cloth. Today, the main investigator of the case at the time states unequivocally that he was totally wrong, that he handled everything very poorly, asking leading questions to the girls and other people. He's the same investigator who sketched the famous crouching alien image based on the girls' report. Today, he is certain it was Mudinho, the town wanderer, that they saw. Poor Mudinho.

by Fernando Olszewski