Paulo Eduardo Pilon and Kentaro Mori (kentaro.mori@gmail.com)
First draft: Jan 29, 2009, rev. Feb 3
PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THE CONTENTS OF THIS PRELIMINARY RESERVED REPORT UNLESS AUTHORIZED
An area of flattened vegetation, consisting mostly of cattail plants (Typha dominguensis) appeared along with reports of a "reddish UFO", with the sound of "an electric drill" and an electrical blackout around a neighborhood in Peruíbe, Brazil in August 18, 2008. Further investigation of the site has shown that the flattened areas reappeared at least two other times in the next months around the same marsh in larger patches, but seemingly not affecting cattails in neighbor marshes. The uniformity and the brute force necessary to flatten the almost two-meters high cattail is intriguing, and the phenomenon may be related with several other cases worldwide. All are commonly suggested as involving "crop circles" or even UFOs, and they may at the very least involve unusual weather phenomena, though no clear conclusion is apparent to these authors. The evidence seems to suggest that they are not hoaxes, and are thus worthy of further attention.
On Monday, August 18, 2008, at around 1:30 AM, C.M.F. (witness name withheld) reportedly heard dogs shrieking loudly, and an electrical blackout affected the neighborhood for a couple of hours. She then heard a noise that she compared to "a drill working on wood" and saw an "intense reddish light that shone for a few seconds" through the translucid glass of her window. In the morning, from the top of her two-story house F. then noticed a wide area of flattened vegetation just at the side of her house on "rua" Itália , "bairro" São José, around 350 meter from Padre Manuel da Nóbrega highway in Peruíbe, São Paulo, Brazil. (-24° 16' 21", -46° 58' 39" - Google Maps aerial view)
This is a composite image taken by Paulo Pilon a few days later, on August 21, from the top of F's house of the flattened vegetation (click for the full 4MB image):
Pilon illustrated the scene:
The site was visited by several ufologists and many curious people for the next two weeks, receiving some coverage by the local news and many claims by different groups that it was a "UFO landing". Though no anomalies were found in some of the few basic tests conducted (microscopy and some crude radiation detectors), with the news coverage and the ufologists' inquiries alleged eyewitnesses emerged that claimed to have seen UFOs both at that night and the nights before and after the event.
Clemente Teles, who maintains a bar at his house that is situated in front of F's residence and at a few dozen meters from the site, also reported being "scared" by the unusual shrieking of his dog, and also used the exact same analogy to describe the sound of the alleged UFO that he also claims to have seen: "an electric drill". He reports seeing a column of reddish light over the flattened area, associated with the UFO (illustration below). Clodoaldo Souza, a common drinker at Teles' bar was at the site drinking and also claims to have seen the reddish UFO.
Despite those reports, "skeptics", including this co-author, Kentaro Mori, suggested the case was either result from the weather or a plain hoax.
It was through discussion and the kind cooperation of engineer Paulo Eduardo Pilon, one of the first on the site and one of the few to investigate the site for the next months, that we were able to compile this report with a great amount of new evidence and hope that the readers will be able to contribute for its analysis. Because the evidence and the case didn't stop here.
On October 18, exactly two months after the first event, Paulo Pilon returned to the area. Whilst taking new pictures of the original flattened area, where new vegetation was already growing green, Pilon was surprised to notice that a few meters to southwest there was a new, smaller flattened area in a perpendicular direction. It was also composed of flattened cattail plants.
Unfortunately by this time witness F was no longer cooperating with the investigations, and no high view of the second flattened area from her house was possible. Pilon measured the area and captured photos of the original and the new flattened areas (click for a photo gallery, higher resolution versions are available on request).
On October 22, given that he couldn't get higher views of the area, Paulo Pilon rented an airplane and flew over the neighborhood hoping to photograph the original and the new smaller circle-like flattened cattail. To his great surprise he found that much larger patches of cattail were now flattened -- in the same direction as the second smaller patch, and perpendicular to the first flattened area.
Click on the photo for the original hi-res 2.41MB version:
Below is a highlight of the different flattened areas:
Further aerial images taken on October 22 (click to enlarge, higher-resolution versions are available on request):
On October 26 Pilon once again returned to the area to take measurements of all the larger flattened cattails. Simple measurement found that almost all plants made up a uniform level of 40 cm in height, in approximately the same direction. The stalks were mostly broken on heights going from the soil up to 40 cm high.
Following are photos detailing the height measurements, broken and bent stalks (Pilon cut and opened some holed to better photograph the stalks near the ground), as well as the varied plants in the area. Only the long cattails were broken/bent.
Higher resolution versions are available on request.
The first tentative explanation for the flattened cattail is simple hoax. It would be mostly pointless, however. A group of hoaxers could have flattened the plants on August 18 (or even before), the "A" area, and all the eyewitnesses reports of UFOs could be result of confabulation or mere coincidence from unrelated phenomena.
But would they have guessed Pilon would visit the site again two months later, on October 18, and shortly before that create the "B" area? Would they have guessed that Pilon would then four days later fly over the area and then flatten area "C", in highly irregular shapes (C3 and C5), as well as small patches that are not easily accessible in the middle of the dense cattails, that could have gone unnoticed from the ground (C2 and C4)? They could have done better.
It must also be noted that the cattails are up to more than a couple centimeter in diameter each (see DSCN0022 and DSCN0026), and a considerable amount of force would be necessary to bend and brake them. It would be a difficult job. Hoax cannot be completely discarded, but better hypothesis are available.
* * *
Very similar phenomena were reported in Brazil in the beginning of 2008 (and may in fact have contaminated both the witnesses reports and the investigations of this Peruíbe case). Those were chronicled in the "Forgetomori" article "Sugarcane Signs". As the title implies, large patches of sugarcane were found flattened in more or less uniform fashion in Riolândia, Araraquara and other regions (for the next couple of months), often associated with reports of UFOs. The bottom-line:
"Many factors can make the sugarcane lie down, naturally, such as strong winds from microbursts, or even problems with the fertilization of the soil."
Flattened sugarcane areas in Riolândia, Brazil, January 20 2008
Interestingly, 2008 seems to have been the year for such flattening. On September 12, large flattened areas were found on corn in Bedford, Indiana, USA. An informative report with links and several photographs can be seen in the ICCRA website:
http://www.iccra.org/news.htm
In the end of October, in Chicoana, Salta, Argentina, wheat was flattened in several different fields in very similar fashion.
http://www.taringa.net/posts/offtopic/1702153/Ovnis-en-Salta-(lo-que-no-te-mostraron).html
In Peruíbe, Riolândia, Araraquara and even in Bedford it was raining shortly before the flattened plants were found. I have no information about the Argentinean flattened crop (see comment further below).
Strong winds, even micro bursts, were also suggested as explanations for the flattening both in Araraquara and Bedford.
"The owner of the field [in Araraquara], who thinks the sugarcane was indeed affected by the wind, as he had already seen such things many times before in the 16 years he has been working in the area. Two sugarcane specialists also assured [Rodolpho] Gauthier that flat sugarcane areas are very common after heavy rain." [Forgetomori]
"The farmer in [the Bedford] case attributes the downed crop to weather damage, weather reports covering the night prior to the discovery do not indicate either intense rain or high winds. This was also the case in the very strangely-downed maize field BLT investigated a few weeks ago in Missouri. We are hearing the term "microburst" mentioned in regards to both of these situations; whether this is really what happened is not yet clear." [Nancy Talbott quoted on CropCircleConnector - http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/inter2008/worldrumours2008.html ]
All evidence seems to suggest weather as the explanation for all these flattened plants. Further research suggests that these small patches of flattened crop in one direction in Peruíbe, Riolândia, Araraquara and Bedford are burst swaths from a microburst, itself a scale down from a downburst.
from: Fujita, T. and R. Wakimoto, 1981:
Five scales of airflow associated with a series of downbursts on July 16, 1980
(PDF). Mon. Wea. Rev., 109, 1438-1456.
Crude representation of the direction of the flattened cattails (click to
enlarge)
The scale, appearances and meteorological conditions, at first glance, all seem to match a microburst explanation.
The Argentinean, Chicoana flattened wheat on the other hand, may have been caused by tornados, given it's more chaotic flattening.
Left: Tornado damage, Right: Microburst damage
Below, "hundreds of trees in Sawyer county blown down by the northern Wisconsin downbursts. Photo by Dr. Ted Fujita, "The Downburst."" (source)
Note how standing trees are suddenly flattened after a point. This puzzling effect suggests at first glance some artificial intervention, but is in fact result of the complex air vortices.
Of special interest is the description of a burst swath:
"They can last two or three minutes. This type of microburst behaves like a tornado with a horizontal vortex axis. It usually creates a narrow, but severe, damage path. It's also frequently accompanied with a rotating sound and is often misidentified as a tornado. In 1981, Fujita called this rotor microburst swath a 'burst swath'". [ "Aircraft Safety" By Shari Stamford Krause ]
That would easily explain the "electric drill" sound reported by the witnesses. Dogs could also have been affected by such weather, thus the shrieking. It's also possible such strong winds (or the storm, including lightning) could have interfered with the electric cables and thus account for the coincidental blackout.
Other aspects of the reports and evidence are slightly more difficult to account for. First and foremost, the reports about a "reddish UFO". Could it have been produced by short circuiting electric cables? CMF, the main witness, didn't see the "UFO" directly: the window she has is not transparent, and she thus only saw the reddish glow. Clodoaldo Souza's claims to have seen the UFO directly, unfortunately as he was probably under influence of alcohol, his report is not very reliable. Clemente Teles actually saw the UFO directly and referred to a "column of red light".
It may be possible even the reddish glow may have been some lightning or other even more prosaic phenomenon -- nobody saw the UFO or its glow actually flattening the plants, and any phenomenon happening in that night, before or after the actual burst swaths occurred, could have been mistaken for a cause.
On the other hand, what would have been the appearance of the actual burst swaths to any eyewitness? Could it have been mistaken for a UFO, if it was also accompanied by lightning? Below are some photographs of microbursts (click for their sources):
Compared, again, to an illustration of Teles' sighting of what he understood as a "UFO":
An actual UFO is in fact not such a preposterous idea, co-author Pilon still defends it as an hypothesis given that burst swaths doesn't seem to explain the phenomenon completely. Most importantly, Teles' was interviewed soon after the first event if there were strong winds before or after the event. He denied such extreme weather and claimed that, living in the area for more than ten years, he has never seen plants bent that way. No reports of reddish lights, shrieking dogs or "electric drill sounds" were made relating to the other flattened areas, which were, as Pilon emphasize, a surprise discovery.
The burst swaths apparently only affected that block. Aerial imagery from Google Maps doesn't seem to show that microbursts damage the area, as well as the aerial photos taken by Pilon, and we would expect that a phenomenon that repeated itself at least in three occasions over three months (August 18, then shortly before October 18 and again on 22) would have been more widely known to the locals.
And yet, if these swaths are not common in Peruíbe, they not only occurred three times last years, but assuming a meteorological explanation, then we must also assume it was a great coincidence that exactly when Pilon visited the site again, these rare burst swaths affected the area. If the area had been affected many times before between August and October, we would expect many irregular flattened patches of dead cattails and then new, green plants growing again, just as seen on area "A". It was not the case. A meteorological explanation must assume that when Pilon finally had time to visit the site again two months later the burst swaths had recently occurred again, and then once more days afterwards. All due to sheer coincidence.
Finally, and this is perhaps the most interesting aspect, plants on the borders of the crops are usually not flattened. That is: large areas of flattened plants point in one direction, and then end with some standing plants near a border, usually along an adjacent road. This is the aspect that probably led most people to suspect some artificial intervention, and can be seen clearly on Peruíbe and Riolândia. It's not very apparent -- if at all -- in burst swath photos of forests that we could find.
We suggest that perhaps this may be due to the flexibility of the cattails (Peruíbe) and sugarcane (Riolândia). Originally, all plants were indeed flattened, including those in the countours, but perhaps because they are on the borders they were not broken nor heavily bent and somehow returned to their standing position. Another possibility is that these border plants may be stronger, due to their roots or some other characteristic. We couldn't find a clear explanation to this aspect.
We presented evidence collected from large flattened areas of vegetation in Peruíbe, Brazil, that were originally attributed to UFOs or due to some vague, intense, meteorological phenomena. Upon consideration of the evidence and comparison to similar events worldwide, we suggest these cases are not hoaxes. A review of meteorological literature suggests that burst swaths (or rotor bursts) could account for almost all the evidence not only in Peruíbe, but in many of the other events referenced.
Study of microbursts, however, is fairly recent, being around for three decades and, due to the danger associated with them, still not fully understood. Assuming these meteorological phenomena as cause to the Peruíbe case, we must also assume some very curious coincidences in the repeated occurrences over a small area and the further investigations made by engineer Paulo Pilon, as well as some characteristics of the flattened areas, such as the seemingly intact, erect plants in the borders, are yet to be convincingly explained. Witness testimony seems only slightly supportive of a meteorological explanation, being on the most part contradictory and favoring more exotic considerations.
Given that it was raining shortly before all events, and in summary, burst swaths would perfectly explain:
They could possibly explain:
Contrary to burst swaths, however we have:
Of interest is the fact that these burst swath "mysteries" were very common worldwide in the last year, and that though microbursts were mentioned in two of them, no one seems to have delved in detail as to the mechanisms or even collecting evidence from the sites, which we hope to have accomplished with this report about the Peruíbe case. Perhaps the "Fortean" literature may have many more similar cases, and these areas of seemingly regular flattened crops by burst swaths certainly pre-dates the contemporary "crop circle" fever, which started in the 1970s in the United Kingdom. They are certainly more akin to the contemporary and man-made crop circles than "fairy rings" caused by mushrooms, and may be at the origin of the famous medieval Mowing Devil pamphlet.
We greatly thank all of you who are reading this before publication and would be grateful for any comments, corrections and additions.