Who Are the Real Abductors?

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WHO ARE THE REAL ABDUCTORS?

Rich Reynolds has been on the UFO scene for many years—decades, actually. Refreshingly, Reynolds is someone who is not driven by Fox Mulder’s “I want to believe” approach to ufology. Rather, he solely goes where the evidence and the facts take him. In February 1978—exactly twenty years after Antonio Villas Boas gave his statement to Dr. Olavo Fontes—Reynolds found himself immersed in the story.

It all began when Reynolds was approached by a mysterious, and perhaps even Machiavellian, character named Bosco Nedelcovic. He was born in Yugoslavia, but had moved to the United States decades earlier with his family. Nedelcovic carved quite a career for himself in the United States, working with the CIA and the Department of Defense, and securing a prominent position with the US Agency for International Development (AID). At least a part of his clandestine work in the 1960s was directed toward destabilizing prominent figures in the growing civil rights movement. There was also the matter of what Nedelcovic knew about the Antonio Villas Boas story.

Drugs and Mind Control

When Bosco Nedelcovic told Rich Reynolds what he—Nedelcovic— claimed was the truth behind the Villas Boas legend, Reynolds didn’t know what to make of it. But he instantly realized that if what Nedelcovic was saying was true, it was destined to wreak havoc among the true believers in ufology. It’s an established fact that at the very time Villas Boas was abducted, Nedelcovic was working for AID . . . in South America. Specifically in Brazil, which is where Villas Boas lived, worked, and encountered something incredible. According to Nedelcovic, Villas Boas was not abducted by aliens at all. Rather, Nedelcovic maintained that the entire event had been planned and executed by US intelligence—the CIA and several other agencies—and with additional help from AID. It was, Nedelcovic claimed, an operation that was born out of the CIA’s notorious mind control program MK-Ultra, which began in the early 1950s. It was created to determine how the human mind could be altered and manipulated by hallucinogenic substances, psychedelics, and chemical cocktails, all designed to alter and control perception.

If the story told to Reynolds was nothing but a hoax or disinformation, it was certainly an intricate, well-thought-out tale, as the following demonstrates.

Seeking Out a Test Subject

Nedelcovic told Reynolds that late one evening in October 1957, his superior officer in AID told him to get to Aeroporto Santos Dumont— located in the heart of Rio de Janeiro—where a US Army–owned helicopter would be primed and ready to take him to destinations new. Puzzled by the fact that he had been told very little about the operation, Nedelcovic did as he was told and headed out to the airport. Sure enough, the large helicopter was ready and waiting when he arrived. Aboard it were several members of the US military, a few guys from AID, a doctor, and a senior officer in the Brazilian navy. They first headed out to a facility in the approximately

1,100 kilometers-long Espinhaço Mountains, staffed by both American and Brazilian military personnel. After a short period, the helicopter was airborne again, this time for Pico da Bandeira, the third tallest mountain in Brazil.

Nedelcovic said: “Various apparatus was tested during the flights but the three men from AID did not participate directly in the testing. They had been briefed on the mission and their function was outlined as auxiliary in nature. The briefing indicated that the men were participating in new forms of psychological testing that would eventually be used in military contexts.”

About seventy-two hours later, the team was airborne again. After a brief trip back to the Espinhaço Mountains, it was time for the next part of the mission, which was to collect a wealth of technologies and contraptions, including what Reynolds called a “chrome-like Cubicle,” which may well have been one of those compact rooms that a mind-warped Villas Boas recalled being pushed into. Further flights were made to collect various items for the mission, which had still not been clearly explained to Nedelcovic, although he would soon know the full story. It was on the next night, however, that the operation reached its peak: a young farmer was about to be used and manipulated in just about the strangest way possible.

Chased and Captured

It was while the helicopter crew made passes over various parts of Francisco de Sales—where Villas Boas lived at the time—that someone onboard saw a man on the ground, “a person below who had been discovered by heatsensing devices on board.” The unfortunate soul—who really was in the wrong place at the wrong time—was Villas Boas. The team had found what they had been ordered to find: a human guinea pig, in a remote area, who wouldn’t be missed for a few hours. The helicopter pilot swooped low, spraying the area with what was described to Reynolds as “a chemical derivative” in gas form. The CIA had developed a specific agent which had the ability to alter perception and affect a person’s ability to walk, run, or

put up a fight—which sounds very much like the position that Villas Boas found himself in, as the “UFO” came close to him.

The pilot brought the helicopter to a careful landing, and a number of the team exited and raced toward the immobilized Villas Boas. In his weirded-out state, Villas was not in a position to do anything about it. Getting Villas Boas on board the helicopter proved to be a relatively simple task. The next step could have been tricky, but as fate would have it, it ran smoothly. Rich Reynolds told me, “The story from Nedelcovic was that after Villas Boas had been subjected to various drugs, the part with the woman was literally acted out. So, there may have been a real woman. But in Villas Boas’s case, it could have been manipulation-induced. It gave me visions of the CIA employing people of an Asian kind of demeanor and look. It’s in the realm of possibility that someone was concocting a scenario in that way.”

Notably, the Freedom of Information Act has shown that in the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA used prostitutes in so-called “sting” operations. They were situations in which the agency needed information on a particular target—usually Russian. The hookers were used to place those same Russian targets in compromising sexual situations that were secretly filmed by CIA personnel, something all but guaranteed to convince the targets to talk or even defect. Remember how Villas Boas said the alien woman looked Asian? Intriguingly, some of those prostitutes employed by the CIA were Asian, too. In return for performing a sexual act in the name of national security, they would quietly be given a nice fee and residency in the United States. It was a deal which worked well for everyone—except, that is, for the targeted individual. In this case, Villas Boas.

When the operation was over, said Nedelcovic, a still-drowsy Villas Boas was carefully taken out of the helicopter and placed on the grass, next to his tractor. The helicopter then took to the skies for a final time, leaving a groggy Villas Boas to wonder what had just happened and what that strange thing in the sky really was.

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

If the revelations made by Bosco Nedelcovic to Rich Reynolds in February 1978 were the literal truth, then an important question most definitely requires answering: why would the US government, military, and intelligence community spend their time faking alien abductions? Rich Reynolds gave me an answer which may well get right to the crux of things. He said that while he is absolutely sure that a number of UFO cases reported in the early to mid-1950s were 100-percent bona fide, he suspects the US government didn’t know what was going on, were unsure what the public should be told, and were concerned about how the public—whether on a local or worldwide scale—would react to the true UFO phenomenon. So they came up with a brainwave of a type that is undeniably mind-blowing.

Reynolds explained to me that after a series of very credible encounters with alien humanoids in France and Italy in the early 1950s, “the CIA didn’t know how things might go from there, with the Italian and French cases and other ones, and how they should deal with it if there might have been an invasion. So, they set up people, like Villas Boas, in a UFO contrivance and studied the witness response, and probably studied the public and the media’s response too.”

We might also want to consider the distinct possibility that the sexual aspect of the Villas Boas incident was deliberately inserted to make the whole issue of alien abduction look ridiculous. To keep the press away from the subject—unless, that is, the media covered the controversy from a tongue-in-cheek perspective, which would have been perfectly fine for those in government who were secretly manipulating the abduction scene.

From a Flying Saucer to a Helicopter

For those who may still be doubtful of all this, take a look at Villas Boas’s description of the UFO that he thought he saw, but which he probably did not. He said that the craft resembled “a large elongated egg” and that “[o]n

the upper part of the machine there was something which was revolving at great speed and also giving off a powerful fluorescent reddish light.” He added that the craft took to the skies slowly “until it had reached a height of some 30 to 50 meters. . . . The whirring noise of the air being displaced became much more intense and the revolving dish [that sat atop the object] began to turn at a fearful speed. . . . At that moment, the machine suddenly changed direction, with an abrupt movement, making a louder noise, a sort of ‘beat.’”

The reference to the “revolving dish” atop the craft was, clearly, a description of the helicopter’s rotor blades seen by a man whose mind was radically altered by an aerosol-based chemical agent. As for the “beating” noise, well, is there a better word to describe the classic sound of a helicopter? No, there is not.

So, what we have here is an incredible story, of equally incredible proportions that reveals something so amazing that it’s practically unfathomable: there are two kinds of alien abductions. There are the all-too-genuine alien abductions, and then there are the US government’s fabricated abductions. Both real, both terrifying to the witnesses, but both with radically different agendas. No wonder abductees find themselves in states of confusion, anxiety, and paranoia after their experiences—as did Antonio Villas Boas, for a short time. Although, in the long term it didn’t affect him: he went on to become a respected attorney, who died in 1991 at the way too young age of fifty-six.

Two final things: It should be noted that AID—the agency for which Bosco Nedelcovic worked—states on its website that its primary role is to support “the foreign policy goals of the United States.” Perhaps one of those foreign policy goals is to confuse overseas nations about the real nature of alien abduction.

And a question to ponder: were Bosco Nedelcovic and “Mr. Bosco,” in the Karl Hunrath–Wilbur Wilkinson kidnapping-from-the-skies saga of 1953 one and the same? After all, Nedelcovic was Yugoslavian and Hunrath’s Bosco had a noticeable European accent.