Santa Maria, Brz being encounter — March 1954

Rubem Hellwig, a rice planter near Santa Maria, said he encountered a small craft while driving home at about 5 p.m. one day in March 1954. He stopped and approached an object roughly fifty metres away, comparing its shape to a rugby football or melon and its size to a Volkswagen car. Two slender men, around 1.6 metres tall, were reportedly present. They had brownish complexions and no helmets. One remained inside while the other collected grass and passed it inward. In a fuller version, the outside man carried a bottle of reddish liquid and asked where ammonia could be obtained. Hellwig said he understood the request despite the unfamiliar speech and directed him toward a nearby town or drugstore. The object then allegedly brightened with blue-yellow light and departed almost instantaneously, with small tubes and flame described in one version. This is the first of Hellwig’s two consecutive-day contact claims; the following day’s different crew belongs to a separate atlas entry. The known publication trail begins with Diário de Notícias in August 1965 and Gordon Creighton’s later discussion, roughly eleven years after the supposed event. Some catalogues assign March 15, but the underlying dating is broader. A Hatch hoax code is preserved as provenance, not treated as a documented confession or established explanation.