On the morning of June 24, 1999, in the town of Santa Isabel, near São Paulo, Brazil, 25-year-old Sonia Aparecida da Rocha entered the room of her elderly mother-in-law, Alzira Maria de Jesus, to bring her some coffee.
Alzira, who was 70 years old, had long been ill and in need of special care, barely getting out of bed. Sonia took care of her every day.
That morning, at eight o’clock, Sonia saw that the old woman lay in bed completely motionless, as if dead. She called her name several times, but there was no response, which frightened Sonia, prompting her to run and call her husband, Manuel Edvaldo da Silva, who worked as a journalist.
Before leaving the house, Sonia took her little daughter with her and securely locked the door. It took Sonia about 40 minutes to reach her husband and tell him about her mother-in-law’s death, after which Sonia, her daughter, and her husband returned home.
When Manuel entered Alzira’s room, he froze in shock: the old woman’s body still lay on the bed, but her face had been stripped of all flesh, along with her nose, one ear, and eyeballs. Only small shreds of flesh remained on the bones.
Photos taken by the police at the scene, even when desaturated, still provoke astonishment.
It appeared as though the flesh had been cut off with a very sharp instrument, almost surgical in nature, yet there was not a drop of blood on the pillow or sheets.
The arriving police examined the body, transported it to the morgue for inspection, and soon reached a verdict: the old woman died from bilateral pneumonia and septic shock, and her face had been gnawed on by rodents, most likely rats.
However, few believed this version, including many police officers and especially Sonia:
“For three years that I’ve lived in this house, I haven’t seen a single rat or mouse. I thought it could be acid or something from another world,” she said.
Neighbors also claimed that there were not enough rodents in the area capable of gnawing a person’s head to the bones in 40 minutes.
Here’s what the chief investigator of Santa Isabel, Velsias Nogueira Paranaguá Filho, had to say about the case:
“There were no traces of blood on the bed or pillow. Moreover, there were no traces on the white blouse she was wearing. This is very strange. I rule out the hypothesis of murder. But I don’t rule out the supernatural.”
He also stated that he didn’t buy the rat theory:
“A rat leaves traces, but her face looks like it was cut with a scalpel. And how could the body still be warm when we arrived, if several hours had passed since the pensioner was found dead?”
The report stated that the woman died around 2:10 a.m., so her body couldn’t have been “still warm” by the time the police arrived. At least according to all known laws of postmortem decay.
But the fact that the old woman’s body was indeed unusually warm was confirmed by other police officers. And it remained so for about two more hours.
Interviews with neighbors revealed some curious details. On the night Alzira, the 70-year-old, died, all the animals in the surrounding houses, from dogs to geese, behaved unusually restlessly: barking, making noise, honking, as if frightened by something. They started making noise around one o’clock in the morning and didn’t stop until 8:30. That is, roughly the same time Sonia returned with her husband and saw the mutilated body of the old woman.
Further investigation revealed that 15 days before Alzira’s death, a dead dog with its head severed was found just 2 km from her home. The wounds were inflicted with an unknown but very sharp instrument, and the cuts were surgically precise.
Some people claimed that animals were frightened by flying “light orbs” on that night, leading to the theory that the wounds inflicted on Alzira were connected to the phenomenon of cattle mutilation, often suspected of being the work of extraterrestrial beings conducting experiments.
In UFO archives, there are very few cases where UFOs were suspected in human deaths or mutilations, but they do exist. Examples can be read here and here. Moreover, the second case occurred near the same São Paulo.
