What happened
In mid-September 1957 the Rio de Janeiro society columnist Ibrahim Sued opened an envelope holding a letter and three small chips of grey metal. The writer, whose signature could not be read, said he had been fishing near the beach at Ubatuba when a flying disc streaked in at tremendous speed, banked sharply and blew apart in a shower of burning fragments, some of which fell into shallow water where he scooped them up. Sued published the letter. The fragments passed to the physician and ufologist Olavo Fontes, who had them tested at a Brazilian government mineral laboratory, which reported very pure magnesium. The samples then travelled through the hands of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, Dow Chemical, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service's analytical lab and the Air Force-funded Colorado UFO Project. For decades the Ubatuba chips were the most famous piece of claimed UFO hardware on Earth: the rare case where believers could hand a scientist something to put under a beam.
The official explanation
The Colorado project's Roy Craig had a sample analysed by neutron activation at the IRS laboratory and compared it with triply sublimed Dow magnesium. The Ubatuba metal proved less pure than the commercial product, carrying hundreds of parts per million of zinc and strontium. Dow's records showed magnesium with similar strontium content had been made experimentally as early as 1940, and the grain structure showed no sign of being worked into a fabricated object. Craig concluded the metal could easily have been made on Earth before 1957 and that its connection to any flying disc rested only on an unauthenticated letter. Later isotope work cited by Peter Sturrock also found ordinary magnesium ratios.
The anomalous case
Defenders point out that the Condon analysis did not overturn the first finding so much as change the comparison. Fontes reported that the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture's Mineral Production Laboratory found the original fragments exceptionally pure, and the samples tested in the United States years later had been handled, cut and corroded in between. The strontium itself is odd: Dow's research director told the Condon team he knew of no one who deliberately added strontium to commercial magnesium, and the only matches were small experimental batches. Craig's metallography found large, elongated grains formed directly from liquid or vapour, which proponents read as consistent with metal that solidified in flight rather than a machined part. Physicist Peter Sturrock judged the samples worth a dedicated isotope study decades later. The anomalous case therefore rests on an unusual alloy of uncertain origin that has never been traced to any specific terrestrial source, delivered by a witness who has never been found.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Condon Report, Case 4: Magnesium Fragment report, mail.project1947.com
- Inventory of the Olavo Fontes Ubatuba file (Sign Historical Group) official, project1947.com
Sources
- Condon Report, Case 4: Magnesium Fragment Sign Historical Group / Project 1947 (text of the Colorado UFO Project report)
- Olavo Fontes file inventory: Ubatuba magnesium Sign Historical Group / Project 1947
- UFO sightings in Brazil Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
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