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The first reports of the "vampire light" over Mosqueiro came from Tapiapanema, a small, isolated community on one of the arms of the Rio Pratiquara (river). The inhabitants, mostly fishermen, began to get terrified after the experiences of some of their members. Journalists from the newspaper O Estado do Pará (no longer in existence) reported:
"It was late in the evening of last Saturday (October 29, 1977). At Tapiapanema, Benedito Campos (24) and his wife, Sílvia Mara (17), were reclining in their hammocks after the day’s labours, and they were alone. The rest of the folk living in the house had gone to Mosqueiro, a little town 16 km distant, and reachable by boat."
Shortly after 6.00 pm they spotted an oval, silvery object emitting a greenish beam like a searchlight towards the room where they were lying. Filled with curiosity, they approached a small window and, as they did so, the beam shot in through it and made straight for Sílvia, throwing her into a sort of benumbed trance-like state. Concerned for his wife (she was pregnant) Benedito at once tried to protect her and move her, but she fell down on the floor in a swoon.
But there was more to it than that. Benedito says two "people" then entered the house from outside, with a golden colored object (like a battery torch) probing all the openings of the house, and once again the beam struck Sílvia, this time hitting her left arm at the level of the wrist. Her veins seemed to "rise up out of the body", so swollen were they by the beam striking them. Distressed and screaming loudly for help, Benedito picked her up and carried her into the sitting-room and hid her behind a partition.
At that point, his neighbour, José do Nascimento Sobral, had heard him shouting and had run in, with a shotgun, into the room where the two beings were and had evidently managed to drive them away. (His immediate pre-occupation was to see how Benedito and wife were, so he did not actually see the departure of the entities).
Benedito and Sílvia were taken over to Sobral’s house, some 500 m. distant. The two men, Benedito and Sobral, tried to calm Sílvia, fearing she was about to suffer a miscarriage, and whilst they were thus engaged the UFO appeared again, this time flying very low. Benedito ran out of the front door to get a good view of it, and the beam struck him too, paralyzing him for a while, Sílvia was not molested by this second "strike", (See article, "Flying Saucer Attacks Woman: Terror on Mosqueiro Island," in newspaper O Estado do Pará, Nov. 1, 1977, page 7).
Benedito and wife were immediately taken by their relatives to the Mosqueiro Medical Clinic. They went there by boat, by night, and a UFO accompanied them on the entire journey. At one moment during the journey the UFO shone a vivid beam down onto the river. According to the newspaper O Estado do Pará this was accompanied by a tremendous noise. Then the UFO vanished.
The couple remained at the clinic for three days receiving medical treatment. Sílvia was soothed and calmed down, and a miscarriage averted. As for Benedito, he was in a state of severe depression for some days, his motor functions disturbed and, as his mother reports, weeping frequently. The hospital staff maintained great reserve about this case and only members of the family were allowed in to see the couple. The newspaper O Estado do Pará commented:
"The doctors were unwilling to express an opinion about the affair. However, on the morning of October 31 (yesterday) a very tall fair-haired man was at the clinic and requested that there should be no talk about the happenings."
The members of Sílvia’s family, learning of this, asked the Mosqueiro Police authorities for assistance. The local official in charge, Orlando Pantoja, explained the difficulties that there would be in attempting to take any measures against the "vampire light" and the strange craft, and stated that he would of course send a "confidential" report on the matter to the Central Police Headquarters in Belém, asking for advice as to how to proceed in such cases.
Later, from May 1977 until June of the following year, 1978, came the Baía's second UFO wave.
The Jornal do Pará sent a reporter, Biamir Siqueira, and a photographer, José Ribamar, to cover the situation, and a summary of their findings was published in the newspaper over the days from June 25 to June 29, 1978.
They later explained to UFO investigators in 1984:
"We remained in the inland districts of Pará, investigating,, for 41 days, especially on the Island of Mosqueiro, and we saw several UFOs and managed to photograph them. At first nothing much happened, but from the moment that we put a red and black and white stripe on the bonnet of our car we had more luck in our sightings. This question of the colored stripe was pointed out to us by an acquaintance of ours who was at the time working with the Air Force teams who were investigating the phenomenon. According to him, these colors had been seen on some UFOs. When we had our first encounter with a craft we were in a car belonging to the editor of the newspaper O Estado do Pará. I remember that Biamir and I were having a nap when we were suddenly awakened by an intense flash of bluish - verging towards greyish - light. We felt a powerful impact, as though it had a force behind it. We at once got out of the car and saw a craft flying overhead. It must have been at a height of 20m or so. Then it switched off its beam of light and vanished. On that occasion we didn’t manage to photograph anything owing to our surprise and shock."
"We would at this point mention that at no time during our own investigations did we ever secure any confirmation, from either the Military or from any of the other agencies involved in the investigations, that three-colored beams of light had been seen. On June 25, 1978, the Estado do Pará published certain details which require correction. It said:
"On May 24, 1978, the unbelievable happened on the sloping waterfront at Baía do Sol township. The night was dark, with no stars visible in the sky. At 2.00am as they were sitting in their car sheltering from the heavy rain, the Estado do Pará’s reporters were awakened by a powerful beam of light which - however unbelievable it may seem - passed through the metallic structure of the roof of the vehicle. Alarmed, they rapidly got out of the car. Then, when already a small distance from the car, they saw that a tube-shaped light beam, about ten inches in diameter, was coming down from above onto the roof of the car and passing through the metal paneling. All of this went on for about two minutes. When they started taking photographs, the craft, which was emitting the light beams and hanging silent and stationary in the air, at once lit up all the tree-tops all around."
"We managed to photograph the UFOs on another night. I think that altogether during those night-watches we managed to take more than 200 photos. To begin with, we lost a lot of pictures. We were using very high sensitivity film, and a NIKON camera fitted with a telescopic lens. I didn’t keep any of the photos, and later on, on orders from the office of the newspaper, the entire collection of our photos was sold to a North-American group - I don’t know for how much."
"Funny things happened during those watches. At first, the craft used to appear at night, after high tide. Their arrival was announced by means of repeated flashes, averaging from 7 to 9. At that moment, we would start to feel very drowsy, and I particularly began to feel unwell —a sort of nausea. Not long after that, the craft started appearing. We never heard the slightest sound from them during their manoeuverings in the sky, which were usually very rapid."
A testimony given by the journalist Biamir Siqueira is confirming Ribamar’s statements:
"One of the features that at once aroused my curiosity was the luminous signals that foreshadowed the arrival of the craft. Those beams of light crossed the sky horizontally and were repeated between 7 and 9 times, during an interval of 10 to 45 seconds. The UFOs always appeared from precisely that direction ie North)."
"In particular, it is my belief that the purpose of the light beams is to prepare the route of the mother-craft, in as much as the latter never produced any sound during its passage - such "flashes" being designed maybe to remove all matter existing along the intended trajectory of the craft."
"We saw the mother-ships several times, and some of them had a row of lighted windows. The smaller craft were released from them via a sort of cockpit which would open up in the lower part of the larger craft."
"In addition to the intense brightness of the machines, another interesting detail was the fact that it was impossible to use a flash to photograph them - so we were informed by a colleague in the Air Force."
