Ubatuba, Brazil, 1957: Pieces of a UFO?

[lpetrich]

Ubatuba UFO Fragments-1957, UFO Casebook Files
Condon Report Section III, Chapter 3: Direct Physical Evidence

On September 14, 1957, columnist Ibrahim Sued for Rio de Janeiro newspaper O Globo, published a letter that he received about a UFO incident. Olavo T. Fontes, M.D., a society columnist, wrote "A Fragment From a Flying Disc":

We received the letter: "Dear Mr. Ibrahim Sued. As a faithful reader of your column and your admirer, I wish to give you something of the highest interest to a newspaperman, about the flying discs. If you believe that they are real, of course. I didn't believe anything said or published about them. But just a few days ago I was forced to change my mind. I was fishing together with some friends, at a place close to the town of Ubatuba, Sao Paulo, when I sighted a flying disc. It approached the beach at unbelievable speed and an accident, i.e. a crash into the sea seemed imminent. At the last moment, however, when it was almost striking the waters, it made a sharp turn upward and climbed rapidly on a fantastic impulse. We followed the spectacle with our eyes, startled, when we saw the disc explode in flames. It disintegrated into thou sands of fiery fragments, which fell sparkling with magnificent brightness. They looked like fireworks, despite the time of the accident, at noon, i. e. at midday. Most of these fragments, almost all, fell into the sea. But a number of small pieces fell close to the beach and we picked up a large amount of this material - which was as light as paper. I am enclosing a sample of it. I dont know anyone that could be trusted to whom I might send it for analysis. I never read about a flying disc being found, or about fragments or parts of a saucer that had been picked up. Unless the finding was made by military authorities and the whole thing kept as a top-secret subject. I am certain the matter will be of great interest to the brilliant columnist and I am sending two copies of this letter - to the newspaper and to your home address."

From the admirer (the signature was not legible), together with the above letter, I received fragments of a strange metal.....

This metal was magnesium, and according to some Brazilian government agencies and others, it was much purer than any magnesium that Earthlings could make. Or so some UFOlogists claimed.

However, local UFO groups were unable to track down any witnesses to the Ubatuba UFO. According to  Ubatuba, that city is a favorite tourist destination with some 100 beaches and several surfing competitions each year. If a UFO blew up there over one of its beaches around local noon, then one has to ask why that event did not have numerous witnesses among that city's numerous beachgoers.

The discoverers also could have asked some scuba-diving enthusiasts to search the offshore water for more fragments, but they don't seem to have done so.

In the mid 1960's, the US Air Force hired physicist Edward Uhler Condon to investigate several notable UFO cases in detail. Among the cases was the Ubatuba one. The investigators got some samples of magnesium from the Dow Chemical Company for comparison, and they did neutron-activation analysis on both samples.

In parts per million,
[table="class: grid"]
[tr][td]Impurity[/td][td]Dow[/td][td]Ubatuba[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Mn[/td][td]4.8±0.5[/td][td]35.0±5.[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Al[/td][td]not detected (<5)[/td][td]not detected (<10)[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Zn[/td][td]5.±1.[/td][td]500.±100.[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Hg[/td][td]2.6±0.5[/td][td]not detected[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Cr[/td][td]5.9±.12[/td][td]32.0±10.[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Cu[/td][td]0.4±0.2[/td][td]3.3±1.0[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Ba[/td][td]not detected[/td][td]160.±20.[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Sr[/td][td]not detected[/td][td]500.±100.[/td][/tr]
[/table]
Looking at isotope fractions,

The quantity of Mg-27 isotope produced by neutron activation [Mg-26 (n, gamma) Mg-27], as determined by gamma spectrometry after activation, showed that the Brazil sample did not differ significantly in Mg-26 isotope content from other magnesium samples.

From  Isotopes of magnesium, that element's three stable isotopes are Mg-24 (79%), Mg-25 (10%), and Mg-26 (11%).

The the Condon investigators turned to the issue of strontium, with its unusually high abundance in the Ubatuba samples.

Microprobe analysis confirmed the presence of strontium and showed it to be uniformly distributed in the sample (see Case 4). In all probability, the strontium was added intentionally during manufacture of the material from which the sample came. Metallographic examinations show large, elongated magnesium grains, indicating that the metal had not been worked after solidification from the liquid or vapor state. It therefore seems doubtful that this sample had been a part of a fabricated metal object.

A check of Dow Metallurgical Laboratory records revealed that, over the years, this laboratory made experimental hatches of Mg alloy containing from 0.1% - 40% Sr. As early as 25 March 1940, it produced a 700 gm. batch of Mg containing nominally the same concentration of Sr as was contained in the Ubatuba sample.

The Condon investigators concluded

Since only a few grams of the Ubatuba magnesium are known to exist, and these could have been produced by common earthly technology known prior to 1957, the existence and composition of these samples themselves reveal no information about the samples' origin. The claim of unusual purity of the magnesium fragments has been disproved. The fragments do not show unique or unearthly composition, and therefore they cannot be used as valid evidence of the extra-terrestrial origin of a vehicle of which they are claimed to have been a part.

That and the absence of Ubatuba-beachgoer witnesses makes me conclude that this case was a hoax. Someone tried to pass off some samples of magnesium as pieces of an exploded UFO -- one that was not seen by anyone who would have been in a position to see it. Someone's idea of a practical joke, maybe.

But it shows how one has to be VERY careful of the provenance of some putative example of extraterrestrial technology. The Ubatuba case fails miserably, and the Ubatuba material was not distinct enough from Earthling-made materials.

-

What might be good physical evidence? Something that is not made by typical natural processes and something that would be VERY difficult to fake with our technology.

A computer chip, for instance. Especially a CPU chip, because CPU chips have to be able to interpret and execute computer-program instructions, thus giving them a lot of complexity. Furthermore, an ET CPU chip would very likely have a lot of details different from any Earthling ones, and Earthling ones themselves have a lot of variation in them.

 

[bilby]

The problem is that if you can specify what would qualify as 'ET' technology, you are in doing so providing a specification fakers can follow to defraud you.

To qualify as 'ET', an artefact needs to be something no human could have thought of - but how can we possibly know what the limits of human thought are? We push those limits constantly. A person who developed a novel refining method that can make ultra pure metals is a far better explanation than aliens, if a sample of super pure metal were to be found. A person who developed a new and completely radical CPU design is a far better explanation than aliens, if a new and completely novel chip is unearthed.

Whatever you find, no matter how advanced or wondrous, can always be better explained as being of human origin than of alien origin.

 

[lpetrich]

Or else we might be able to recognize an object as manufactured even if we would have great difficulty manufacturing some of its features. Like microscopic structure or isotope composition. The latter I find especially interesting, since some isotopes vary in abundance across the Solar System very noticeably. Isotopes like deuterium, H-2. Here are some numbers:

• Jupiter, Saturn: 2*10^(-5)
• Uranus, Neptune: 6*10^(-5)
• Earth: 1.6*10^(-4)
• Asteroids: 1.5 - 3 * 10^(-4)
• Oort-cloud comets: 2 - 4 * 10^(-4)
• Comet C-G: 5*10^(-4)
• Enceladus: 3*10^(-4)
• Mars atmosphere: 10^(-3)
• Venus atmosphere: 1.6*10^(-2)

So something manufactured from materials elsewhere in the Universe could easily have some very different deuterium fraction.

 

[lpetrich]

To see what I mean, consider this. You come across a clear plastic bottle that is full of water and that is allegedly of extraterrestrial origin. Both its water and its plastic have about 4 times the concentration of deuterium of Earth water and Earth plastic, like some outer-Solar-System material. What would be easy to fake? What difficult to fake?

Here is what I think.

The water would be very easy to fake. One can easily get heavy water, and one can mix it with ordinary water to get whatever excess of deuterium one might want.

The bottle would be very difficult to fake. Looking at common plastics, they require some complicated chemical syntheses, and to get extra deuterium into them, one has to start from scratch. Electrolyzing heavy water, using the heavy hydrogen to make hydrocarbons with the Fischer-Tropsch process, and then some more steps to extract the monomers' starting materials, to make the monomers from them, and to polymerize them to make the plastic.

The bottle could also have some raised lettering on it. If the lettering looks continuous with the rest of the plastic with no signs of having been added, then it would have been a result of the manufacture of that bottle.

Other possible giveaways may be different size conventions, different shape conventions, and the like. Like left-handed rather than right-handed screws.

So I think that an extraterrestrial manufactured object could be recognized if it had features that are exotic enough.

 

[bilby]

Or else we might be able to recognize an object as manufactured even if we would have great difficulty manufacturing some of its features. Like microscopic structure or isotope composition. The latter I find especially interesting, since some isotopes vary in abundance across the Solar System very noticeably. Isotopes like deuterium, H-2. Here are some numbers:

• Jupiter, Saturn: 2*10^(-5)
• Uranus, Neptune: 6*10^(-5)
• Earth: 1.6*10^(-4)
• Asteroids: 1.5 - 3 * 10^(-4)
• Oort-cloud comets: 2 - 4 * 10^(-4)
• Comet C-G: 5*10^(-4)
• Enceladus: 3*10^(-4)
• Mars atmosphere: 10^(-3)
• Venus atmosphere: 1.6*10^(-2)

So something manufactured from materials elsewhere in the Universe could easily have some very different deuterium fraction.

For sure. But so could something manufactured in Argentina.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water

If your options are 'complex hoax' or ET, the smart money's on the hoax.

 

[lpetrich]

This alleged UFO magnesium brings to mind a cosmochemical curiosity. Summary of the rest of this post: magnesium is more common than aluminum in the Solar System and likely in the rest of the Universe. But on the land surface of an Earthlike planet with a well-differentiated crust, aluminum will be more common.

So if the Ubatuba UFO was built from asteroid-belt material (say), then magnesium would have been a good choice for it. Even on an Earthlike planet, it may be convenient to mine its oceans -- all one has to do is pump water from them into a tank, then boil off the water. If the Earth's oceans are any guide, one will first get lots of NaCl settling out, but one will get less common solutes as one continues. One will eventually get MgCl2 that way, and one can make magnesium metal from it.

It is related to a certain feature of the chemistry of Earth igneous rocks. They can roughly be split into two types:

• Granitic or felsic -- feldspar + silica
• Basaltic or mafic -- magnesium + Fe

Here is a more detailed classification, from Igneous Rocks Classified by Composition

• Ultramafic rocks are dominated by olivine and/or pyroxene.
• Mafic rocks are dominated by plagioclase and pyroxene (even if you can't see them with the naked eye) and smaller amounts of olivine.
• Intermediate rocks are roughly even mixtures of felsic minerals (mainly plagioclase) and mafic minerals (mainly hornblende, pyroxene, and/or biotite). There is little or no quartz.
• Felsic rocks are mostly feldspar (especially K-feldspar), at least 10% quartz, and less than 15% mafic minerals (biotite, hornblende).

[table="class: grid"]
[tr][td]Location[/td][td]Subsurface[/td][td]Surface[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Presence[/td][td]Intrusive[/td][td]Extrusive[/td][/tr]
[tr][td][/td][td]Plutonic[/td][td]Volcanic[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Ultramafic[/td][td]Peridotite[/td][td]Komatiite[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Mafic[/td][td]Gabbro[/td][td]Basalt[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Intermediate[/td][td]Diorite[/td][td]Andesite[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Felsic[/td][td]Granite[/td][td]Rhyolite[/td][/tr]
[/table]
From the pieces of them that we've been able to study, Venus, the Moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt are all well on the (ultra)mafic side, like the Earth's mantle and oceanic crust. It's only the Earth's continental crust that departs in a big way, due to sorting out in melted form over geological time.

 Abundances of the elements (data page) has some numbers and  Nucleosynthesis an overall diagram for the Solar System.

I'll do the aluminum / magnesium ratio.
Upper continental crust: 6
Continental crust: 3
The Sun and the Solar System: 0.08

So there is much more magnesium than aluminum in most of the Solar System's rocky material.

From  Semi-empirical mass formula and  Nuclear shell model, the most stable atomic nuclei have even numbers of both protons and neutrons. The next most stable ones have an even number of one and an odd number of the other. The least stable ones have odd numbers of both.  Even and odd atomic nuclei has more details. There are only four stable odd ones: H-2 (deuterium), Li-6, B-10, and N-14.

This means that we can expect magnesium to be more abundant than aluminum outside the Solar System, except on the surfaces of planets with differentiated crusts, planets that have a crust like the Earth's.

There's also the interesting curiosity that there is much more magnesium dissolved in the Earth's oceans than aluminum, and that's due to various chemical properties.

 

[skepticalbip]

Given that the world is and has been full of hoaxers, it seems to be a waste of time to try to figure out how difficult it would be to for one of them to produce something that is clearly obvious could have been hoaxed. Now, if someone found something that can not be produced here on the face of the Earth, that would be worth considering. An example would be like something that would actually be quite useful for interstellar visitors such as foamed magnesium or even foamed steel. Smelting such metals in zero gravity would allow for introduction of fine bubbles into the metal. This would produce a strong structural material with vastly reduced density - great for reducing the energy required for acceleration of a interstellar ship. This would be something that a hoaxer could not produce unless they had the means to get themselves and their equipment off the planet.