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| As with all things in Rio that evening, it was magic |
I clearly remember the night of April 25, 2010. I had finished the dishes and put away the food. It was nearly 11:00. I went out on the veranda of a house in Jardim Botanica. Often I went out to breathe in the cooler air and watch the stars and planets, which seemed much closer in Rio.
The heavenly sights always stirred me in a way as to make me sleepy. On that particular night the moon was 93% full gibbeous and the huge lights shone over Christo's shoulders and washed across the Corcavado. But on this night, two red lights blinked above against the clear black sky.
These new brighter lights were much the same in scale and distance of Venus. I had to crane my neck. They were certainly not aircraft. They were stationary, not darting around or zooming here and there. But they blinked.
Below these lights I saw a new array of blinking white lights going in a circle under the initial blinking red lights. Then they began to whirl around like a sparkler in a fireworks display. I called to my girlfriend to come out to the veranda. She had lived in the house for nearly 30 years and often star watched from here. She confirmed what I was seeing and she broke out laughing and calling her friends on the phone.
Just then the lights began to criss-cross and turn more rapidly in a circle. This was followed by three more blue\white lights appearing below the red lights. The earlier white lights now blinked furiously. Then this display was followed by stationary white lights appearing one …two…three…four…five….all the way down to nine… at the end of a chain. The entire formation was in a straight line and neither moved laterally nor vertically. By now it was evident we were watching something beyond human.
We stood on the veranda breathless and enchanted, in awe and aware of something marvelous. We dared not take our eyes away. At 11:10, the white light on the very bottom of the cosmic necklace went dark. Then one by one each of the white lights slowly went dark from bottom to top. The white circling fireworks stopped. Each of the rapidly blinking red and white lights went out, and finally only two, the original red lights remained. Then they, too, went dark. Then it was over.
Later we scoured the Internet to see if there were any other sightings around Rio -- and there are hundreds of new UFOs captured on film each week in Brazil -- but nothing similar to what we had encountered.
We looked for news reports. We had seen something inexplicable, and the impact was eerie. We needed confirmation. Over the next week there was a meteor shower from the Pleiades but this display was feckless, distant and cold compared to what we had seen. Helicopters flying over at night seemed rather puny to what we had seen.
Ironically, it was the same week that Stephen Hawking’s documentary on alien life appeared on television. He discounted the idea that we will one day make contact with aliens. He said that a superior life form would simply not recognize us as anything but inferior life forms. Or worse, they might think we were a food source.
Also, that day, Arthur C. Clark was quoted in a documentary as saying that making contact with aliens would be made more difficult for us because their advanced technology would be so superior that we could not possibly perceive their advanced technology as anything "indistinguishable from magic".
And magic it was.
