UFOS, Occultists, Murder Schemes: The Deaths of Miguel and Manuel
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On a stormy night on Veentame Hill, two men slipped raincoats over their suit jackets. They perched on a pile of leaves as if they planned on stargazing. But instead, they put on metal eye masks, blocking their vision. At least, their vision of this world. At some point soon after, both young, healthy men went into cardiac arrest.

As police investigated the mysterious deaths, they quickly realized that the men were following instructions, handwritten directions, including directions to take various pills at specific times. Theories ran rampant. Was the scene an elaborate criminal cover-up? Was it a spiritual ritual gone wrong? Or did these two men, who professed an interest in UFOs and the occult,

Leave their bodies behind and ascend to an alien dimension. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. New episodes come out every Wednesday. You can listen to the audio everywhere and watch the video only on Spotify. And be sure to check us out on Instagram at TheConspiracyPod.com.

Today, we're covering the lead masks case, the mysterious 1966 death of two men. They were found near Rio de Janeiro without a scratch, each wearing a lead eye mask. Though Brazilian police uncovered plenty of clues, the case still baffles. Theories include an occult ritual gone wrong, a long con robbery, and an extraterrestrial encounter.

Stay with us.

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It was another rainy August evening in Rio. All through the summer of 1966, downpours had lashed the Brazilian city. Jorge da Costa Alves looked up at the roiling clouds as he trudged through Niterói, a suburban neighborhood just outside of the city. It was not a good day to be outside. So it struck him as odd when he looked up at the steep mound of Vintame Hill and saw two men seated at the precipice.

Why would anyone sit outside in the middle of a storm, let alone at the top of a mountain? As Georgia scurried for cover, the image stuck with him. A few days later, on August 20th, the rain gave way to sunshine and wind. For Georgia, that meant one thing, kite flying. And there was no better place than Veentame Hill.

Clear blue skies framed his glider high above his head until a strong breeze tugged the kite out of his hands. The kite crashed into thick, overgrown brush. Georges marched over to retrieve it. As he reached the kite, a foul smell wafted through the air. He considered turning around, but curiosity got the better of him. He followed the scent up Vingtame Hill to the summit.

There, a dense layer of leaves covered a barren patch of earth. Next to that lay two men, side by side on a pile of leaves, hands under their heads. They looked like they were napping in the sunshine, except they were the source of the stench. Georgia could see crisp suits beneath their matching raincoats.

Their faces were expressionless, their eyes obscured by shining metal. Even so, something about them seemed familiar. Then it hit him. These were the same men he'd seen three days ago, sitting atop the hill in the pouring rain. But now they were dead, unnerved. Georgia ran to the neighborhood police station. By the time he spoke to an officer, the sun had already set.

Authorities decided to hold off until morning when there'd be enough light to conduct a real investigation. The next day, the detectives walked up Veentame Hill and began an extremely bizarre investigation. It looked like the bodies were wearing wraparound sunglasses, but when officers peered more closely, they realized they were made of lead.

The eyewear seemed homemade, like the two men took a sheet of metal and cut it into sleep masks. Nearby, there was a newspaper, flipped open to an article about smuggling. And according to author Jacques Vallée in his book, Confrontations, they also found cellophane soaked in a chemical substance. It's unclear if these belonged to the men or were just random litter.

Inside the men's pockets, officers found a monogrammed handkerchief and a few pages of notes, including seemingly random strings of numbers and equations. Others included instructions. They were in Portuguese, so we'll translate.

It reads like a doctor's note, but it gives no indication what the tablets are. Instead, it reads,

The directions get more specific. "4:30 p.m. be at the determined place. 6:30 p.m. swallow capsules after effect, protect metals, wait for mask signal." It's important to note that these pages are handwritten, so the instructions probably came from a book or a conversation.

Still, it sounded like the men were following some kind of drug regimen. In detectives' guess, the determined place was Veentame Hill. Naturally, the next step was to examine the bodies. While they'd begun to decompose, there was no obvious cause of death. So police brought them down to the medical examiner. He noted, "No signs of violence, no bruises,

Though the men's skin appeared pinkish, possibly burned, the coroner concluded that the men died of cardiac arrest. One sudden cardiac arrest? Sure, happens all the time. Two at the same time? Right next to each other? Not so much. Especially because both men were in their 30s. Unfortunately, the coroner didn't have an explanation for his unnerving diagnosis.

But he was able to identify the deceased. Manuel Pereira de Cruz and Miguel José Viana. Both were electronic specialists from Campos, about 140 miles northeast of Vintame Hill. They specialized in TV signal transmission equipment. Each man was married. Miguel, the older of the two, had children. And after interviewing their wives and local shop owners...

Police pieced together a timeline of their last day. At around 9 a.m. on August 17th, 1966, Miguel and Manuel told their families they were headed to Sao Paulo. They planned to buy a car and some electrical equipment. They took an estimated 3 million cruzeros in cash. Well, that sounds like an obscene amount of money, but according to the New York Times,

Brazil's inflation was 45.4% in 1965, on top of rising 86% the year before. So by 1966, a single cruzeiro didn't have much buying power. The economy was struggling, and that may have been a factor in the men's deaths back to the day they died. That morning, Miguel and Manuel packed their cash and boarded a bus. They arrived five hours later.

but not to Sao Paulo. Instead, they stepped off the bus in Niteroi. They bought rain jackets because it had started to pour. From there, the men walked to a small bar. Miguel and Manuel ordered a bottle of water and took it to go. Around 3:15, they climbed up Vientame Hill. They reached the summit and sat down. That's when Georgia spotted them from below.

Sometime shortly after that, Miguel and Manuel. The police didn't know what happened between the time Georgia first saw the men and their deaths, so they focused in on the bodies. They suspected the two sudden cardiac arrests in the same place at the same time were caused by poison. So they ordered a second autopsy to reinvestigate. The coroner examined the victims' digestive systems.

and apparently didn't find any poisons. But as far as our research can find, he didn't file a toxicology report. Whatever happened, it sent investigators back to the drawing board. A week passed with little progress until August 25th. That day, a socialite named Gracinda Barbosa Cochino de Sosa approached the police with a story. It turned out

Georgia wasn't the only one who saw something strange on Vintame Hill. Gracinda's eyes had been glued to the sky above the mountain, watching a UFO. Here's what she told police: On the evening of August 17th, Gracinda drove her three children along a major boulevard near Niterói, Brazil. She tried to focus on the bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic, but her seven-year-old cried out from the back seat.

The little girl pointed out the window toward Veentame Hill and told her mother to look up at the sky. Grisinda followed her daughter's instruction and pulled over for a better look. A bright orange oval object floated in the sky overhead, bobbing up and down like a yo-yo. Its edges appeared to be ringed with fire.

Crescinda and her kids watched for about four minutes as the bouncing craft fired off blue rays of light. It didn't seem to be targeting anything, just emitting beams. Baffled, she eventually piled everyone back into the car and drove home. There, she recounted the bizarre experience to her husband. A few days later, Miguel and Manuel's strange demise hit newsstands.

When Grisinda's husband saw the reports, he realized they died at the same place on the same evening his wife saw the UFO. He wondered if the two incidents were somehow linked. He contacted the police, who immediately brought Grisinda in for questioning. It's likely she was reluctant to testify. She belonged to Brazil's upper class. Her husband was a stockbroker.

She was married with children and came from a respectable family. She knew flying saucers and aliens weren't the kind of topics you discussed publicly if you wanted to keep your reputation intact. But she had no doubt about what she saw. The next day, the prestigious newspaper Jornal do Brasil published the details of Grisinda's encounter. Suddenly, calls flooded the precinct.

One after another, citizens reported seeing the same strange object flying over Veentame Hill the night of August 17th. A number of callers explained that they hadn't reported the sighting earlier because they were embarrassed to share a possible UFO sighting. It took Rescindus stepping forward to embolden them. Now, the floodgates were open.

Throughout 1966, there was a rash of UFO sightings across Rio. Months before, in March, an industrial technician had even seen several spheres hovering over Niterói, the same neighborhood where Miguel and Manuel were later found dead. Many believe the sightings and the lead masks' deaths had to be connected.

Perhaps Manuel and Miguel had somehow captured the attention of a UFO and the occupants murdered them. Or their deaths were an accident on the part of extraterrestrial visitors who didn't understand human biology. As wild as it sounds, the public took this idea somewhat seriously, but the police refused to pursue any possible explanation related to outer space.

One detective simply said, we don't believe in saucers. As dismissive as that might sound, authorities were dealing with and ruling out all sorts of bizarre theories. The same week Rescinda shared her story, investigators briefly explored a possible witch-doctor connection. But the extraterrestrial theories just wouldn't stop. It soon came out that, shocking as the case was,

this wasn't the first time it had happened. A 1967 article in the extraterrestrial journal Flying Saucer Review noted that another man had mysteriously died in 1962 on a Brazilian hilltop while wearing a lead eye mask. And that man was also reportedly a TV technician.

According to this article, he was found a couple hours drive away from Niteroi on a hilltop called Morro do Cruzeiro. That's cruzeiro like the currency. One translation of the name is "hill of the cash bill." Meanwhile, Veentame Hill translates to "hill of the penny coin." When this happened back in 1962, people believed it was an isolated case, a random death,

According to one theorist, this first man intended to use psychedelics to open up his mind, which he thought would enable him to pick up TV waves with his brain. And the lead mask was somehow part of it.

Bear in mind, this was during the same time that the US government was conducting its own experiments on drugs, the human brain, and ultra-sensory abilities, all under Project MK-ULTRA. So while the idea might seem out there in 2025, it wasn't so fringe in the 1960s. Naturally, police investigating Miguel and Manuel's case looked into this prior incident

But before that could go anywhere, they got another lead that would connect drug-induced telepathy with UFOs. Meghan Trainor, laundry retrainer. Meghan Trainor? You're tossing out my gunky laundry detergent bottle? It's got that booty, that juicy boom boom, that gunk right up. Arm & Hammer Power Sheets? Toss like this? Cause I toss like this, I wash like this. Send no mess, laundry bliss.

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I'm saving so much! Burlington saves you up to 60% off other retailers' prices every day. Will it be the low prices or the great brands? You'll love the deals. You'll love Burlington. I told you so. In 1966, two corpses were found on a hill overlooking Rio de Janeiro. A strange set of clues surrounded them. Handwritten instructions, electrical equations, and eye masks made of lead.

Detectives were confounded. Their only leads included tales of UFOs and men receiving TV signals with their minds. And the case was only getting stranger. At some point, Manuel's widow remembered how, in the days leading up to his death, her husband had an argument with a former associate named Elcio Correa da Silva Gomez. This wasn't exactly a smoking gun.

But the police were desperate for any earthly explanation. They arrested Elcio Gomez on August 27th and brought him in for questioning. As soon as he sat down in the interrogation room, Elcio told investigators he knew exactly what happened to the two men. He believed Miguel and Manuel were killed while trying to contact aliens from Mars.

Not what the police were hoping to hear, but they listened to Elcio's story for any possible leads. Elcio explained that he, Manuel, and Miguel belonged to a movement called "Scientific Spiritualists." According to the United States Spiritist Federation, people who observe this philosophy believe spirits and other religious or supernatural entities exist.

Members can attempt to contact these beings via mediums. LCO said most of the electronics technicians in the city were involved with the movement, operating in total secrecy. They dabbled in the occult and they tried to commune with spirits using machinery. This sounds eerily similar to the explanation for the other lead mask death.

Going off of Elcio's testimony, the authorities searched Manuel and Miguel's homes. In Manuel's workshop, they found sheets of the same lead he and Miguel had used to cover their eyes, lying beside texts that specifically referenced masks and the supernatural. And they found books by Bezera de Menezes, an important author who promoted Spiritist doctrine.

Part of this doctrine involves the belief in extraterrestrial life, like on Mars. It also states that extraterrestrial life forms have spirits that live on after their death. So, in theory, the spiritists could perform a seance and contact the ghosts of Martians, or even the spirit of a living alien.

Miguel's copy of the book was annotated, and according to author Jacques Vallée, he, or someone, had marked up passages about, quote, masks. Elcio's testimony suggested the men combined techniques outlined in the books with their electronics expertise. A few months ago, they'd built an elaborate contraption in Manuel's garden. Before they could use it, the device exploded.

Later, Manuel found some kind of powder spread over his garden, and rather than take this as debris from the explosion, he interpreted it as a sign from the spiritual realm. Family members confirmed the men made the machine, but denied they were trying to contact an alien race. They insisted the friends had just been playing around making homemade bombs.

Whatever the explanation, their actions were certainly risky and the explosion may have been a wake-up call. They moved their next project to a more remote location and this time, Elcio joined them. Elcio explained to the police that months before his death, Miguel talked about his plans to conduct an extremely important experiment soon.

Without elaborating, he and Manuel traveled to the beach town of Atafona about an hour away. Elcio met them there. According to Elcio, Manuel and Miguel may have been using radio signals to try to communicate with extraterrestrials. He said the pair ran an illegal radio station out of a nearby town, so they had expertise and equipment to create these signals.

And at the same time as Elsio claimed the men were setting up, a nearby naval ship received odd messages from three unknown radio communicators. The transmitter IDs didn't line up with any of the stations on the government's registry. Soon after that, an unidentified aircraft flew over the shoreline. It was brilliantly colored, just like the orange UFO Grisinda saw a few months later.

The saucer hovered for about five minutes. Then, suddenly, a massive explosion obliterated the machine. It was powerful enough to knock the flying ship out of the air. The craft plummeted into the ocean and sank out of view. Afterwards, Miguel and Manuel found more odd powder around the area, perhaps a sign from the same aliens.

Elcio said he wasn't with Miguel and Manuel on Vintame Hill, but he thought another experiment went awry that day, leading to their deaths. All of this together led some to suggest Manuel and Miguel were attempting to use a combination of electronics and psychedelics to pick up alien frequencies when they died.

This theory could explain the capsules and tablets referenced in the notes found with their bodies. Tablets, or tabs, may refer to LSD, which is often dried on sugar tablets or squares of paper.

It's possible the men were microdosing LSD in the days leading up to their big trip, believing it would slowly open their minds and prepare their brains and bodies to communicate telepathically with aliens. Then, on the appointed day, they'd take a larger dose in the quote-unquote capsule. Others suggested the men took mescaline for a similar effect.

According to early theorists, the men overdosed and that led to a cardiac arrest. The only problem is, it would be extremely rare for LSD or mescaline to cause a fatal overdose. A few people have died from accidents while hallucinating. But again, neither Miguel nor Manuel seemed physically harmed beyond a deadly cardiac event.

LSD can elevate the user's blood pressure and heart rate, not to the point of danger, but it could exacerbate another cardiac event like stress cardiomyopathy. That's the medical term for a heart attack caused by a sudden physical or emotional shock. You may have heard it called "broken heart syndrome."

It's not outside the realm of possibility that something spooked the men and combined with their already elevated heart rates caused a cardiac arrest. But if that's the case, the next question is, what scared them? Well, alien or not, unidentified flying objects were reported in the sky in Brazil in the 1960s.

And they were causing explosions. Local fishermen confirmed the Atafona Beach UFO sighting just as Elcio described it. And a month before Elcio claimed this explosion happened, the newspaper Correio da Manhã wrote about a blast at the beach. The story notes buildings shook as far as 20 miles away. Plus, there's the testimony of Gracinda and dozens of other Brazilians.

More recently, theorists have proposed an earthly explanation for these kinds of moving, exploding balls of light: ball lightning. If you're watching on Spotify, you can see a video of the phenomena on screen. Ball lightning is a natural phenomenon that looks like a glowing, colorful orb. It may be blue, red, yellow, or orange.

In other words, it sounds a lot like the colorful and luminescent oval Grisinda described to police. In the right conditions, the glowing sphere of lightning can float through the air, resisting the strongest winds. Sometimes, this fiery orb can even launch through panes of glass, killing people.

Given the stormy conditions, it's possible ball lightning formed on the night Manuel and Miguel died. It likely would have struck high ground, like the hill the pair were laying on. In theory, this could have been the shock that induced stress cardiomyopathy. But ball lightning is incredibly rare. For a long time, scientists weren't even sure it actually existed.

Over time, enough video and anecdotal evidence has emerged to prove it's not just an urban legend. That said, it's highly unlikely there were so many ball lightning occurrences in the same area within a short period of time. And even more unlikely for both witnesses to experience a sudden, deadly cardiac event in reaction to it. Most people who see ball lightning live to tell the tale. That's how we know about it.

And ball lightning doesn't explain the radio signals picked up by a naval ship. You'll recall there were three signals. Let's say Manuel and Miguel created one. Maybe another spiritist created another. That leaves one signal unexplained. At the end of the day, the Nidoroy Homicide Department had two dead bodies and they couldn't exactly press murder charges against a Martian.

They pressed Elcio Gomez for more information, especially about Elcio and Manuel's alleged disagreement. But unfortunately, Elcio wouldn't provide details on what they fought about. And as much as the police might have wanted to peg him as a murder suspect, Elcio had an airtight alibi. He was in Campos, over 100 miles away. So the police dismissed Elcio immediately.

and officially closed the case. But there was one piece of testimony they seemingly overlooked. In between the Atafona beach explosion and his death, Miguel told his sister he had to go conduct another experiment. Then, the day he died, Miguel had a chat with his cousin. The cousin didn't think Miguel should go to Sao Paulo and buy a car. Surprisingly, Miguel agreed.

He confessed he and Manuel had no intentions of buying a car. The trip was related to spiritism, and when he returned, he'd know whether or not he believed in it. But if he was going to a spiritual quest and not a used car sale, what was the money for? If you believe the next theory, it's because the men weren't talking to aliens. They were talking spirits.

to con artists who covered up a murder and a few years later one of them started talking

That's right.

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In February 1969, three years after police closed the lead masks case, a new lead came knocking. An inmate at a Sao Paulo prison claimed he knew how Manuel and Miguel had died. Apparently, he was there when it happened.

Pedicar thief and smuggler Hamilton Bazzani told authorities he was one of four career criminals included in a plot to assassinate the men. Bazzani wasn't the architect of the crime, but was hired by other criminals to assist with the job. He explained how he and his accomplices drove Manuel and Miguel to the hill,

There, Bazzani waited in the car as the three other men robbed them, taking most of the three million cruiseros they'd carried. After grabbing the cash, the men allegedly marched Miguel and Manuel to the top of the hill at gunpoint, then made the pair swallow poison capsules and left them for dead. Notably, they were killed by the police.

Bazzani didn't say why the criminals specifically targeted Miguel and Manuel for murder and robbery, but this confession lines up with a theory the police had previously explored. The two men were already mixed up in the criminal underworld long before their deaths.

Author Jacques Vallée notes that Vingtame Hill was a popular meeting place where "lovers or smugglers meet where strange deals are made." During the economic downturn, foreign electronics were hard to come by in Brazil. If the technicians knew how to get their hands on a hot technology, they may have started selling it illegally for extra cash.

Especially if they were able to repair foreign electronics like TVs. After all, TV equipment was their day job. And remember those papers full of equations found on the hill? They turned out to be electrical formulas. And the newspaper found nearby? It was flipped open to an article about smuggling. Perhaps the pair crossed the wrong criminal and their deaths were a message to other smugglers.

There's one other memorable detail from Bazzani's confession. He reportedly told police the men were picked up from a spiritualist center. Their killers knew the men were exploring the occult, and perhaps that made them marks in a long con.

Author Jacques Vallée spoke to both a professor and a detective who suggested the men were being manipulated before their deaths. The detective was convinced the handwritten instructions were transcribed by Miguel but had been dictated or pulled from a book. The professor suggested the powder Manuel found was part of a hoax and Manuel may have even suspected it. Apparently,

He told a witness this trip was about confirming his belief. He had doubts. And when he voiced those doubts, they killed him and his friend.

If the men were targets of a hoax, robbery becomes a clear motive. Remember, Miguel and Manuel were found missing money, and perhaps the men had been handing over their cruzeros to spiritual leaders for months, hoping for help contacting aliens. Miguel and Manuel wouldn't be the first believers to be robbed.

especially in an economic downturn when scams historically increase. The criminals may even have been working off a successful prior attempt. The first lead mask man. His death was and is still unsolved. Maybe he was conned for months, robbed and killed when he too voiced his doubts. There was no way to confirm Bazani's story,

By the time he came forward, the bodies were too decomposed for another autopsy, and the original tests found no signs of poison. Still, the police believed it. Without questioning Bazzani further, they announced their plans to arrest his co-conspirators. They'd suspected all along someone else was pulling the strings. Now they had them in sight.

Newspapers worldwide declared the infamous lead masks case had been solved. But just as fast as it had reignited, investigation ground to a halt. Detectives discovered Bazzani was up for a transfer to a minimum security prison. Helping the police break a major case made him much more likely to get that transfer approved, so he had a motive to lie.

And investigators quickly realized Bassani's motives weren't the only fishy part of his confession. For example, when asked where he and his accomplices supposedly left Miguel and Manuel's bodies, he named another mountain, not Veen Tame Hill. He also had no explanation for the coded notes in their pockets or the lead masks.

Police quietly dropped the investigation and didn't grant Bazzani the transfer. But the news coverage of the potential solution reignited public interest. Before long, it seemed every amateur sleuth, conspiracy theorist, and UFO enthusiast was conducting their own investigation. Many came back to the UFO theory.

One group of spiritualists insisted Miguel and Manuel weren't just trying to speak with otherworldly beings. They wanted to board their ship. Reportedly, the repairmen were supposed to connect with the extraterrestrials the night they died. Overeager, they rushed forward before receiving the proper signal and were killed on the spot. Though that version overlooks a key element of spiritism.

According to both Elcio Gomez and their book collection, Manuel and Miguel were investigating communication with aliens through the spirit world. That didn't require their earthly bodies. So maybe they did exactly what they intended to do. They entered the spirit world. They left their bodies on the hill. And for three days in the open woods...

No predator touched them. The men might have intended to return because when they stopped for water, they saved the receipt. At the time, customers could receive a small refund for returning the empty bottle along with a proof of purchase. Why take the receipt if not to return to town for their deposit? One last thing.

Fourteen years later, Jacques Vallée noted that despite the bushes and trees surrounding the area, nothing was growing in the spot where the men died. All of this leads us back to what we do know for sure. In the days leading up to their deaths, both men hinted they were about to embark on an otherworldly experiment with the unknown. And at a certain point, we have to take them at their word.

Skeptics may debate whether they were visited by UFOs, if they were dabbling in drugs, or if they were victims of a hoax, but it's clear Miguel and Manuel were probing the limits of their reality.

Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. If you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts or email us at conspiracystories at spotify.com. For more information on the lead mask's mystery, amongst the many sources we used, we found Jacques Vallée's book Confrontations extremely helpful to our research.

Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story. And the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written by Thomas Dolan Gavitt, edited by Natalie Pertsofsky, Angela Jorgensen, and Maggie Edmire. Researched by Bradley Klein, fact-checked by Kevin Johnson, and video edited and sound designed by Spencer Howard. I'm your host, Carter Roy.