The latest declassified files under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) reveal an investigation into reports of a dead astronaut. In November 1963, an intelligence investigation was carried into a mysterious metallic sphere carrying a dead astronaut that had crashed in Brazil. For weeks, the US State Department, NASA, and the Department of Defense researched the possible causes of this crash. Most explanations focused on an alien spacecraft or a secret military device.
What is the “metallic sphere” incident?
On 8 November 1963, a Portuguese radio broadcast from Rio de Janeiro’s Radio Tupi claimed that a massive metallic sphere from the sky had crashed. The sphere apparently had glass-covered windows, through which a human-like body dressed in a specialized uniform was visible. The pilot’s uniform was also marked with strange symbols and inscriptions that the locals could not recognize.
The reported crash site was in the centre of Conde, a small municipality in Brazil’s Bahia state. The radio broadcast claimed that the crash had left a crater measuring up to nearly 4 meters. The broacast immediately attracted attention, and six days, the U.S. Embassy in Rio de Janeiro alerted the State Department. The occupant of the metallic sphere was described as a “dead crewman”.
The unsealed files explain that the US State Department did not immediately attribute the object to extraterrestrial activity. Officials expected the object to be an unidentified foreign surveillance asset such as a rogue top-secret deep-atmosphere weather balloon. Case files were immediately routed to the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA for verification.
The reality
The investigation ceased just six days later. On November 20, 1963, American Consul Harold Midkiff confirmed in official correspondence that the incident was completely fabricated. When investigators, journalists and local military attachments landed in Conde, they found no evidence of the sphere or the 13-foot crater. The files also contain records of a formal denial issued by Brazil’s Ministry of Aeronautics. Moreover, the Brazilian military also ran an internal radar and airspace sweep and confirmed that there had been no airspace violation.
The declassified files provide an interesting insight into how misinformation was historically handled. Without satellite imagery or the internet, the global intelligence community relied on fragmented chains of communicated.
This incident took place at the height of the Cold War and the Space Race, when paranoia ran high. The US and the Soviet Union were constantly developing and deploying secret technologies against one another such as secret satellites, spy balloons, and experimental capsules.
