The Elias Seixas Abduction on the Guaraí Road

Elias Seixas de Mattos was 38, a truck driver from Rio de Janeiro, heading home from a long trip to Belém, where a cargo of oil cans had been delivered. Beside him rode his friend Guaraci Fernandes de Sousa, 47, and his cousin Alberto Seixas Vieira. The next leg ran 143 km from Conceição do Araguaia toward Guaraí, then in northern Goiás and today in Tocantins. They expected to arrive at about 23:30.

September 25, 1980. About 10:28 p.m. The headlights began blinking on and off. The engine ran irregularly. Elias felt something like "cold liquid" touch the nape of his neck. Guaraci and Alberto saw a blue ray come down from the sky toward the vehicle.

Then, straight ahead and about a mile away, a fire with no smoke. A cigar shape, one meter high and six long. "It was a fiery red, and approximately every second emitted a white flash of light." Elias filmed it for 8 seconds on his new Super-8 camera. They set out to investigate. Fear turned them back.

Guaraci's straw hat, wedged behind his back, suddenly flew out onto the road. There was no breath of wind. They stopped to fetch it. That is where memory ends. They reached Guaraí at 4:30 a.m. on the 26th. The truck had used only 1 liter of fuel. A cyst Elias had carried for a long time on the back of his hand was gone.

The story surfaced after a UFO lecture in Rio de Janeiro by Irene Granchi, APRO's representative in Brazil. She interviewed all three men, viewed the film and arranged regression with Dr. Silvio Lago in Niterói. Guaraci hit a blockage. Alberto stayed fearful. Only Elias remembered.

He was floating weightless, upside down, inside an egg-shaped metal craft. Red-carpeted steps led to a circular hall with a domed ceiling. Through a window, "balls or spheres of several colors crossing the space beyond the window." His captor stood about 2 m tall. Lilac eyes with no pupil. A long, fine nose. A large mouth with no lips. A yellow overall with coloured lights, and exaggeratedly long arms. It spoke without words. It put a hand on his shoulder, and his thirst went away.

In Granchi's 1995 account there was more. A second, friendlier being who spoke Portuguese without moving its lips. A narrow street with small grey beings about 1 m tall. A chrome object placed on his chest. A painful sperm extraction.

At home, Elias did not recognise his daughter. He reported impotence for about four months and a lasting mark on his chest. APRO ran the case as the cover story of its March 1982 Bulletin, and Granchi, pointing to the large number of E-M effects, called it a major UFO event. In 1995 came her long article in Revista UFO, and Elias told his story to Jô Soares on television.

No hoax claim has surfaced. Neither has a sceptical study. Still, nothing aboard the craft has a second witness, and all of it came through regression about a year later. The story also grew. Later retellings added a height of 2.10 m, a home star in Ursa Minor, a base on Mars and a skull implant. The fuel figure and the drive times were never independently checked.

And the film? Granchi saw it: a fiery circle and four white flashes. Where it is now is unknown. For Brazilian ufology the case endures because of the sheer quantity of detail one truck driver brought back from a missing night.