He Swore Aliens Experimented On Him?But an Altered State of Consciousness Could Be to Blame

One night in 1957, Antônio Vilas Boas was plowing his field in rural Brazil when he saw mysterious red lights flying through the sky. What he presumed was a spacecraft landed in a nearby field. According to the farmer’s account, he was approached by short humanoid creatures and taken back to their ship despite his attempts to escape. There, Boas claimed his captors experimented on him by taking samples of his body tissue and exposing him to noxious gas.

Nearly 70 years later, Boas’ extraterrestrial encounter is still one of the most famous abduction reports in history, along with other storied accounts from Barney and Betty Hill in 1961 and Travis Walton in 1975; in each case, the alleged victims recalled details similar to Boas’ story, like bright lights and probing. Since that fateful night in 1957, several thousand more alien encounters have been reported, according to the National UFO Reporting Center, a research foundation based in Washington state. But are aliens actually abducting hundreds of humans each year, or even at all? Experts suggest there might be a simpler explanation—one that lies on the operating table.