Funil Dam guard blinded after shooting at a UFO (Almiro Martins de Freitas)

The Funil hydroelectric plant sits on the Paraíba do Sul river, at a place known as Salto do Funil, between Resende and Itatiaia in the south of Rio de Janeiro state. It started operating in 1969. By August 1970 it was a new strategic installation, in a Brazil under military rule. Almiro Martins de Freitas worked there as a night patrol guard. He was 31, married, with three children.

Sunday, 30 August 1970. About 9:45 pm. Almiro had just left the power-house when he heard an explosion. The lights went off for a few seconds. And then he saw the object, about 50 to 60 metres away. At least fifteen blue and yellow lights, shining from elliptical apertures like portholes, each about 40 inches across. Behind them, a rectangular form. A "flying wing." It hung over the dam.

His first impulse was to run. But he thought of what lay downstream. If the dam broke, four villages and thousands of people would be lost. So he walked toward it, to about 50 feet, and drew his .38 revolver. He fired. The lights in the rectangle grew brighter, and the object began to make a noise that reminded him of a jet engine's turbine. He fired again. Then "a bluish-silver ray shot out of the object." He felt great heat on his body and a prickling like "pins and needles." He could not move. When he opened his eyes, he could not see.

Other guards heard the bullets ricochet "from something." In later retellings, they also saw the object and ran to find him paralysed and blind. No source describes how the object left.

Almiro was taken to hospital. Irene Granchi's report names the Aeronautics Hospital and the Red Cross Hospital. He stayed 14 days. His sight returned following hypnotic treatment. Dr. Orlandino Fonseca diagnosed psychosomatic blindness, "but nevertheless caused by a real experience."

At the dam, the object had hovered over newly poured, wet cement. The cement hardened with a dry circle around that spot. Days later the concrete had gone powdery, with holes no one could explain.

On 4 September 1970 the Brazilian Ministry of Aeronautics announced an investigation, citing several similar reports from the same period. SIOANI, the Air Ministry's UFO investigation system, took an interest. According to APRO, Almiro also received a questionnaire from NASA, which Brazilian military authorities were completing. No formal finding was ever published. Granchi filed the case for the APRO Bulletin from Rio de Janeiro, and in 1975 Ted Phillips catalogued it as case #441 in Physical Traces Associated with UFO Sightings, published by the Center for UFO Studies.

No hoax allegation has ever surfaced. Dr. Fonseca's diagnosis is the only expert explanation on record. It accounts for the blindness while accepting that something real set it off.

Two months later, the story took a strange turn. Almiro told physician and ufologist Walter Karl Bühler, head of SBEDV, that the front of the object carried a perfectly legible inscription: "USA." The detail is absent from the 1970 APRO report. Claudio Suenaga says it places the case in a gray zone: secret terrestrial or military technology, a Cold War psychological operation, or something else. Other English-language versions describe a hump-shaped object with red and orange lights on a small hill, at odds with the original account.

Suenaga calls it one of the most complete medical records linked to a close encounter. Some catalogues file it under Itatiaia, others under Resende. Either way, it stands among Brazil's beam-of-light cases, beside the Fort Itaipu sentries of 1957 and Operação Prato in 1977.