rigorousintuition.ca

What makes this case great is that it’s so beautifully bizarre. It’s like a harmonic convergence of weirdness – any given explanation will account for one or two of the details, but the incongruity of the other facts renders those explanations incomplete and unsatisfying. And yet we’re stuck both with the fact that something really did happen on Vintém Hill that day, and with the sneaking suspicion that, considering the aggregate eeriness of the clues we have before us, we may not want to know what exactly that something is.

Among the facts, anecdotes and supposition, the simple truth is that we don’t know what happened that day in August 1966 on top of Vintém Hill, and we likely never will. Author Jacques Vallee, who profiled this case in his book “Confrontations,” wrote that, even years later, grass refused to grow at the location where the bodies were discovered. Though it seems reasonable to assume that the investigators who worked the scene sprinkled formalin around the area to aid in masking the smell of decomposition, and that this likely contaminated the soil, many remain unconvinced. They believe that something sinister, something perhaps even truly out of this world, was up there that day.

The case was first publicized outside Brazil in UFOlogist Jacques Vallée's book Confrontations, and there is some evidence the two men were themselves UFO buffs who had stopped at the Morro de Vintern because of its reputation as a hot spot for sightings. Vallée considered it a "close encounter," other theories involve speculation about a failed attempt to purchase radioactive materials or simply a double suicide with esoteric motives (via Reddit comments).
posted by kewb (40 comments total) 67 users marked this as a favorite

0_0 » 19 Dec 2013 21:54 wrote:Hey Elfismiles, yeah Vallee discussed this in one of his books. I don't think this was discussed here before. Do you have any idea what happened? It's one of those stories that give me goosebumps, and i shouldn't read about before going to sleep.