The “Duas Pontes Case”: UFOs sightings and a fatal abduction in Diamantina-MG [1962]

THE “DUAS PONTES” CASE 

TRANSLATION OF THE REPORT: 

“In August 1962, the report of a poor, illiterate and shy boy caused a huge stir in the city of Diamantina, with repercussions throughout the state of Minas Gerais and beyond its limits.

Raimundo Aleluia Mafra, 12 years old, motherless, helped her father Rivalino Mafra da Silva with his hunting and mining activities, also taking care of two of his younger brothers.

Located in Duas Pontes district of Diamantina, State of Minas Gerais, the Mafra family residence was a completely isolated hovel. For dozens of times, the boy repeated his report to Lieutenant Wilson Lisboa, the city’s police chief, the Judge of Law, doctors, journalists and countless people, who, despite refusing Raimundo’s version, were impressed by his consistency and quiet conviction.

He claimed that Rivalino, his father, had disappeared before his eyes, surrounded by a swirl of yellow dust raised by two small objects, posted at the door of the hovel. And he wept softly, convinced that his father would never return

Soon after his father’s disappearance, Raimundo looked for traces of himself in the neighborhood and went to call Mr. João Madalena de Miranda, employee of a distant factory. When this friend arrived at the place of the disappearance, a clearing of dirt, he noticed what he seemed to have been carefully swept, in an area whose radius measured 5 meters.

The searches, already under the direction of the Diamantina police, began on the same day, and would continue for a long time. The military Police trained dogs arrived from Belo Horizonte, but found no trace of the ‘garimpeiro’/gold miner. The flights of the birds of prey were closely monitored as a possible clue to the location of Rivalino’s body.

Mr. José Ávila Garcia, the vicar of Diamantina, despite not believing in the boy’s version, revealed that in the week prior to the disappearance of Rivalino, an employee of the Post and Telegraph department, Mr. Antônio Rocha, spotted two fireballs flying in circles at great speed and low altitude, exactly over the location of DUAS PONTES, where the ‘garimpeiro’ resided. Mr. Antonio Rocha confirmed this communication to the Diário de Minas reporter.

After a clinical examination of the boy Raimundo, the doctor Dr. João Antônio de Oliveira revealed that he had discovered nothing unusual, just the state of malnutrition. The boy appeared to be in good mental condition.

With the initiative of the juvenile court, Raimundo was taken to Belo Horizonte by Commissioner Antônio Cruz. In this capital, he repeated the story with the same details, including for CICOANI. Before admitting him to “João Pinheiro”, an Institute for the protection and instruction of underprivileged minors, the Court provided psychiatric examination and psychological tests. The results did nothing to resolve the issue.

Testimony of the young Raimundo Aleluia Mafra to CICOANI, on August 30th, 1962 – summary:

Raimundo says that around 8 pm on August 1st of that year, 1962, he met his father Rivalino in a room in his residence, where two of his four younger brothers slept. He and his father were around a small fire that they made on the dirt floor in the bedroom, next to one of the doors leading to the kitchen. His father drew his attention to a dark, undefined shadow, which slid silently across the kitchen, towards another room. This silhouette was described as having four legs, but the boy could inform more, merely stating that it had some resemblance to a crawling man.

Recalling the story, the boy described a “tuft” in that shade, meaning some projection, which would have turned towards the room when passing through the door, giving Raimundo and his father the impression of having been observed.

Then Mr. Rivalino got up, going to the door where the shadow had shown itself, or a little further, unable to see anything. The boy admited that fear could have prevented his father from conducting a complete search in the rest of the dark house, but he ensures that the internal locks – of the only two doors, one in the kitchen and the other in the living room – were frimly closed.

Returning to the room, Mr. Rivalino found himself unable to sleep, as did his son. At one point, they both heard human voices, “thick and coiled” quoting Rivalino’s name and saying that ‘they would kill him as soon as he left home’. They also heard a noise similar to an alarm clock coming from the outside of the house. The gold digger and his son went through the night without sleep.

At 6 am in the following morning, August 20th, Monday, Raimundo was about to leave the house and prepare his father’s horse from the attached tereno. He opened the kitchen door leading to the grounds, and found two small and strange objects lying on the ground, a few meters away. Differing in color, they were identical in shape and size. Both were oval in shape and measured between 40 and 50 centimeters in the largest diameter. The existence of a small appendix at one end of each object, combined with their shape, reminded Raimundo of the armadillo figures. These finger-sized appendages were tubular in shape, according to the boy’s description. And, like “little tails”, they protruded from the backs of the objects, which were slightly suspended from the ground. At the moment when Raimundo noticed them, that addendum pointed to the door, where he was.

Then, when Mr. Rivalino arrived at the door in response to his son’s call, the tubes pointed in the opposite direction, indicating that the objects would have overturned. One of the objects was entirely black, matte; the other was streaked in white and black, with stripes equal in width, and drawn across the larger diameter of the object. This description was made patiently with the aid of a “sketch”.

When Mr. Rivalino noticed the two objects placed side by side, one meter from each other, he marveled by releasing the phrase: “What is this?”. He recommended to his son not to go out the door, and still holding the knife and the tobacco with which he prepared his straw cigarette, Mr. Rivalino approached the objects slowly, and his son said that he did not seem to show fear. With the approach of Rivalino, the two objects joined laterally, with a dull sound and began to rotate together, quickly and immediately raising a swirl of “yellow dust”, which enveloped Rivalino without reaching his son.

The boy had declared that, in addition to the dull noise during the collision of objects, the only noise he heard was the hum of the wind that raised the dust spiral, which prevented Raimundo from seeing both the objects and his father, who did not reappear when the swirl stopped.”

BELOW – Sketch of the house of Rivalino and Raimundo:

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Cf. ARQUIVO NACIONAL (Brasil). Sistema de Informações do Arquivo Nacional (SIAN). Fundo ‘Objeto Voador Não Identificado (OVNI)’. Código de Referência BR DFANBSB ARX.0.0.7. “Caso Duas Pontes, em Diamantina, Estado de Minas Gerais”. Brasília, DF. 1952 a 2015. Último acesso realizado em 27/05/2020.

The BRAZILIAN UFO ARCHIVES website is a private initiative and IS NOT endorsed or sponsored by the Arquivo Nacional do Brasil [see our ‘Info’ page]. *THE ORIGINAL FILE WITH THE CASE REFERRED TO IN THIS TEXT CAN BE FOUND IN THE DOCUMENTAL COLLECTION OF “ARQUIVO NACIONAL DO BRASIL, LOCATED IN THE “OBJETO VOADOR NÃO IDENTIFICADO (OVNI)” FUND, UNDER THE REFERENCE CODE [“Código de Referência”] MENTIONED ABOVE. HERE IS THE LINK TO SEARCH THEIR WEBSITE <