Enemy Unknown

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Story 1.

Drawn by conflict.

When the movie Predator released in 1987, audiences were captivated as they watched an unseen, extraterrestrial interloper stalk and kill a highly trained team of US special forces.

Little did we know that during the Vietnam War, the militaries on both sides had been attacked by something just as frightening and just as bizarre.

A true-to-life enemy unknown.

Wherever humanity is engaged in large-scale warfare, the combatants have found themselves involved in strange incidents that defy conventional and rational explanation.

In the aftermath of these unresolved occurrences, explanations usually point towards enemy action.

It is only when hostilities have finally ceased, and the opponents on both sides maintain that they were not responsible, that it becomes apparent that another mysterious participant may have intervened in the conflict.

From the unsolved disappearance of Caesar's 9th Legion during the invasion of Britannia, to the alleged abduction of the Royal Norfolk Regiment during the Dardanelle Campaign, and the encounters of British and US bomber crews with mysterious Foo fighters over Nazi Germany, very few sizable conflicts have ever passed without producing testimonies and accounts of inexplicable, supernatural, and unearthly events.

In the overwhelming majority of cases where people have come forward to describe such experiences, their accounts are easily dismissed due to a lack of physical evidence or third-party witnesses.

This is much harder to discredit when similar stories arise during times of war, as the reports that are filed are usually supported by written documentation or the corroborating testimony of other soldiers who are involved.

When the Vietnam War eventually came to an end in 1975, It had been raging for the best part of 20 years, claiming the lives of nearly 60,000 US military personnel and changing the lives of countless others.

It devolved into a political debacle that divided and nearly broke American society, and such was the vehement public outcry against the conflict that the unexplained actions which had occurred during that period were suppressed until many years later.

Over the summer of 1968, US commanders witnessed a significant increase of reported Vietnamese air activity in and around the area of the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ.

Incidents were logged by both Army and Air Force units, claiming they had been engaged by significant deployments of enemy aircraft, who are observing their movements and actively disrupting their patrols by flying towards them at high speeds.

As a result of the reports, United States Air Force patrols were stepped up, and an order was issued that whenever possible, photographs were to be taken of the new enemy planes for intelligence and evaluation purposes.

A number of frantic aerial engagements followed, but the American pilots involved in them maintained it was impossible to capture the Vietnamese craft on film due to their superior speed and maneuverability.

Matters came to a head in June when an Australian ship, HMAS Hobart, was attacked near Tiger Island.

The guided missile destroyer had been tracking the movements of a number of unknown aerial targets when she had been attacked.

As other destroyers and US planes raced to her aid, the Hobart was rocked by a number of catastrophic explosions that killed two sailors and wounded eight more.

The official report into the engagement designated it as a friendly fire incident, stating that American warplanes were responsible.

Witnesses at the scene gave conflicting testimony.

Some claimed the mystery targets that the ship had been tracking were the ones that had caused the damage.

Others claimed that the missiles fired by the Americans had been unable to lock onto the enemy aircraft and had mistakenly hit the ship instead.

This would be far from the last such encounter.

Not long after the Hobart was attacked, patrol boat PCF-12 under the command of Lieutenant Pete Snyder was travelling along the Takan River.

They were about 10km south of the DMZ when the crew's radio operator overheard a garbled transmission coming from another patrol boat, PCF-19.

PCF-12's sister sister vessel had been positioned further up along the tributary and was reporting that it was under attack from unidentifiable lights in the sky.

Snyder immediately ordered his men to action stations and the small craft surged upriver in the direction of PCF-19's allocated patrol zone.

As they powered through the muddied waters, The flurry of radio transmissions from the other boat became more and more frantic and less coherent.

It sounded like they had engaged two enemy aircraft and were now taking heavy fire, which had affected their ability to manoeuvre.

Minutes later, the horizon was illuminated by an eerie red glow.

When Snyder's crew finally caught sight of PCF-19, the boat was aflame, lazily turning in a wide circle with her rudder apparently jammed to starboard.

Her main armament was stubbornly silent, but small arms fire was still being sporadically directed towards two unidentifiable objects, which were repeatedly overflying the beleaguered vessel.

As PCF-12 battled forward to assist, Snyder scanned the two attackers for any recognisable features.

They were both moving at tremendous speed, and through the binoculars, he could make out little other than large balls of what looked like solid light.

As they again passed over PCF-19, the American boat suddenly exploded in a hail of debris.

The bright lights immediately disengaged and sped off back up the river in the direction of the DMZ, fully disappearing from sight within a few seconds.

The crew of PCF-12 were able to fish two badly burned sailors from the water before Snyder quickly ordered the ship about, heading for the safety of the nearby Quavir Marine Corps base.

The survivors managed to explain that they had first noticed the two objects shadowing them in the far distance, apparently mirroring their patrol movements.

As the lights had steadily drawn closer and closer to the patrol boat, her captain had ordered a warning burst from the ship's main.5 caliber armament.

The objects had immediately split up and started to buzz the boat at high speed.

There had been no sounds of gunfire or rockets being launched, but explosive detonations had peppered the hapless vessel and the waters around it.

The helmsman had been trying to bring PCF-19 around when a further explosion had struck her stern, locking her in the fatal turn that Snyder and his crew had witnessed on their arrival.

A shout of alarm from the rear of PCF-12 pulled pulled Snyder back into the present.

The two objects were now back in view and were following the ship downriver at enormous speed.

The young lieutenant ordered full ahead and as the ship's pace crept up to its maximum 30 knots, he fired off a short and urgent radio request for assistance from any nearby units.

When the lights closed to within 300 yards of the speeding patrol boat, Snyder's crew opened fire.

Unable to bring their main gun to bear, the crew hammered away using the rear 50 cal and two side-mounted machine guns.

It was difficult to aim effectively as the boat pitched and bucked through the uneven water, but Snyder was sure he could hear rounds impacting the surface of the two pursuing orbs of light.

Suddenly, he and his men were soaked by a torrent of freezing water, as angry detonations erupted in the river that surrounded them.

The frightened sailors could neither see nor hear anything being fired by the pursuing craft, but the explosions that were impacting around them were terrifyingly real.

Just as Snyder had resigned himself to the likelihood that he and his crew would be sharing the same fate as those aboard PCF-19, there was an ear-splitting roar in the skies overhead as a pair of F-4 phantoms screamed past in pursuit.

As the Phantoms overshot and began to turn back and engage, the two pursuing lights broke away and then shot off upriver, allowing the patrol boat to head onto safety.

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It had largely been assumed that these mysterious new weapons were being supplied to the Vietnamese forces by foreign backers.

But later that same summer, an incident occurred that directly contradicted this assertion.

A reconnaissance unit of the Army Rangers were camped out in an area of the DMZ called North Country, tasked with observing a Viet Cong position to the north of the American lines.

One morning at about 0200 hours, the team spotters became aware of a brilliant blue light in the sky that was approaching from the west of their position.

It came hurtling towards the area where the Ranger team were hidden and then pulled up about a quarter of a mile away, hovering completely motionless overhead.

A foreboding silence descended on the valley, prompting the US servicemen to reach for their nearby weapons.

Almost simultaneously, a volley of trace arounds erupted from the Vietnamese positions, followed by a wave of heavy machine gun fire.

The Rangers stared in astonishment as the hovering ball of light remained completely motionless.

Then it suddenly took off, hurtling through the night skies towards the enemy encampment.

All the American soldiers could do was watch in horror as brilliant white beams of light emanated from the hovering craft, strobing back and forth across the Vietnamese forces.

Wherever they touched the ground, they left explosions or raging fires behind, and the night was punctuated by screams of wounded and dying men.

This continued for a few minutes, until all the guns had fallen silent, and then the object hurtled back towards the west, in the direction it had come from.

The following morning, when a recon platoon cautiously ventured into the Vietnamese camp, all around them lay charred and twisted bodies.

Weapons were melted, supplies reduced to ash.

The officer in charge of the unit seized whatever useful items could be found for for evaluation and also took a number of photographs of the destruction before ordering a quick retreat back to their own lines.

The descriptions of the strange objects and their manoeuvring capabilities provided by the witnesses during both of these incidents are virtually identical and also match similar accounts given by a number of other units deployed in the region at the same time.

But as frightening as they are, they are nowhere near as haunting as an incident that would take place two years further into the conflict.

The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bomber remains one of the largest military aircraft ever constructed and is still in active service to this day, despite having first flown back in the 1950s.

With a wingspan of 56 meters and able to carry an explosive payload of 70,000 pounds, each individual aircraft is capable of levelling a small town or village in a matter of seconds.

The B-52 was the primary offensive weapon of the US forces during the conflict, and the aircraft were used to fly over 125,000 separate bombing missions over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

Due to their high ceiling of operation and reliable weapon systems, only 17 of them were lost during that entire period.

During the summer of 1970, Captain William English was in charge of a 12-strong detachment of Green Berets, stationed in Saigon.

His unit was one of the Army's designated Alpha teams, which were special forces units tasked with carrying out aggressive covert operations against high-value Viet Cong targets.

In June of that year, English and his men were ordered to locate a B-52, which had reportedly been lost over Laotian airspace.

They were briefed that the pilots of the bomber had reported visual contact with an unknown aircraft, which did not leave a signature on their radar screens.

They had described the target as odd-looking and covered in bright lights, before their radio transmissions had then abruptly ceased.

The Alpha team were tasked with with locating the missing aircraft, retrieving anything deemed operationally sensitive on board, and then rendering it inoperable to the enemy once they had finished.

They were subsequently deployed by helicopter 160 miles from the Laotian border, and started to conduct aerial reconnaissance in and around the B-52's last reported position.

It did not take long to locate the downed aircraft, which was found to be lying about a mile across the border, but the canopy around the wreck was too dense to allow for a helicopter insertion.

The team therefore readied their equipment and hiked through the jungle towards their objective.

Within minutes of arriving at the crash site, the soldiers were unsettled by what was presented to them.

The plane was virtually intact and was sat upright on the jungle floor, surrounded by unbroken trees and foliage.

The only obvious signs of damage were located on its undercarriage, as if it had impacted the ground with no landing gear deployed.

The Green Berets took time to ensure that they were not walking into an enemy ambush, and then fanned out to establish a defensive perimeter, before moving in for a closer inspection.

They found all of the external doors and hatches still fully secured, and eventually had to resort to using explosives to blast open an entry point.

When they ventured into the B-52's dark and foreboding interior, nothing could have prepared them for what they found.

The lifeless bodies of the flight crew were still buckled into their seats.

All six corpses were horribly disfigured, their skin shredded and bones broken, but English noted that there was nowhere near the amount of blood loss he would have expected for such violent injuries.

The plane's payload lay secured and ready to deploy down in the bombays, with the crew's flight equipment and instruments all arranged in a neat and tidy manner, as if the aircraft was still in flight.

English and his men were usually unperturbed by whatever the war had to throw at them, but they would describe what they saw as eerie and truly disturbing.

The men resolved to do their job and get back across across the border as rapidly as possible.

English divided his men into two teams.

Whilst one group ventured down to the bombay and rigged it for detonation with satchel charges, the other collected papers, codebooks and dog tags from the dead crew.

As they hurried about their assignments, English documented the scene and took photographs for intelligence analysis.

Their task complete, The team sped back towards Vietnamese territory and were visibly relieved when they heard the dull crump of their explosives detonating in the distance behind them.

When they arrived back in Saigon, the report that English submitted to his superiors pulled no punches in highlighting all the things that made little to no sense regarding what he and his men had found.

The Green Beret officer would later comment that in the aftermath of his detailed and highly speculative submission, he was treated like a pariah by his senior officers.

He was removed from command of his unit and redeployed to a desk job at an Air Force base back in the United Kingdom.

Several months after his departure, he was informed that his entire team had been wiped out in an enemy attack.

Three years after the incident, English was discharged from the military and sent back to the United States.

Angry at the way he had been treated, he sent copies of his photos from inside the bomber to a number of prominent ufologists, including Dr.

J.

Alan Hynek.

They told him that the circumstances surrounding the Down B-52 were eerily similar to an incident that had occurred in Russia back in 1961.

A Soviet AN-2P cargo plane had disappeared from radar screens, only to be found landed perfectly intact in the middle of dense woodland in Siberia.

No trace of her four crew members were ever found.

English states that after he made contact with the ufologists, a number of attempts were made on his life.

One of these included a visit from two men on motorbikes in the middle of the night, who riddled his house with machine gun fire.

He later settled in rural Virginia, changing his name and taking a quiet job at a local TV station.

The US government has never publicly commented on reports of UFO activity during any of the conflicts it has been involved in, including the Vietnam War.

They maintain that such matters described by their servicemen and women are in some cases utter fabrication, and in others, an exaggeration or misunderstanding of something far more mundane in nature.

In viewing the available evidence, for some of the reported incidents, they are clearly correct in this assertion.

In times of warfare, those involved are placed under unimaginable levels of stress and anxiety, which can push them far beyond the point of normal thought and understanding.

Things happen that are so difficult and traumatic for soldiers to contemplate, that their minds manufacture additional memories to help bridge the gaps in the fragmented information they have received, in an effort to try and rationalise what has taken place.

Our understanding of the effects of mental illnesses such as PTSD and Gulf War syndrome are constantly developing and evolving, and it is entirely reasonable to assume that some of the airstrikes and aerial attacks witnessed by infantrymen during the summer of 1968 were indeed perpetrated by perfectly conventional military aircraft.

That said, It can conversely be argued that the US government cannot simply ignore the testimony of so many of its soldiers, spread across so many different locations and reported in so many different accounts.

These are men and women who have received some of the highest levels of training available, and whose judgment up until the point they reported these incidents was unquestioned by their commanding officers.

When the war in Vietnam eventually ended, it was immediately clear that the Viet Cong never possessed any advanced technology or wonder weapons.

Their eventual victory in Vietnam had instead been achieved by using sheer weight of numbers and guerrilla warfare techniques as old as warfare itself.

Furthermore, the characteristics of the aircraft described by witnesses, such as anti-radar capabilities, are comparatively recent achievements in military technology.

Soldiers such as Army Rangers and Green Berets know of innumerable ways to incapacitate and end the life of another human being.

When they therefore present a report in which they state they cannot explain or account for how somebody was killed, then surely that is something that would give these accounts additional weight.

Taking all of this into account, it seems plausible that in the fog of war, simple mistakes were made by some of the soldiers and pilots reporting alleged UFO encounters, but at the same time, there are simply too many witness testimonies to ignore, indicating that someone, or perhaps something, in the Vietnamese theatre of war was in possession of technology far in advance of what is publicly divulged.

whether you believe them to be terrestrial or otherwise.

As we will go on to detail in future episodes, the history of warfare has always been a focal point for supernatural and otherworldly activity, including the ongoing military operations in the Middle East.

Our closing thoughts go out to the brave men and women who put their lives on the line every single day to keep our society safe and secure.

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Story 2.

The Burning Man of Brazil

The men and women who devote their lives to working in hospitals across the world quickly become accustomed to treating the worst injuries that a human being can sustain.

But every so often, a case comes along that is so gruesome that it succeeds in shocking even the most hardened of medical professionals.

This week, we look at the haunting tale of the burning man of Brazil.

Since the mid-1940s, the South American country of Brazil has been the setting of a staggering number of unsolved mysteries and inexplicable occurrences.

We have already covered some of these often horrifying tales in previous episodes.

These have included the unexplained deaths of two electrical technicians on a remote hillside in Rio de Janeiro in 1966, and the horrifically mutilated human remains that were discovered on the banks of a San Paulo reservoir one afternoon in September of 1988.

A large percentage of these strange occurrences have involved sightings of, or human interactions with, unidentified flying objects.

In the overwhelming majority of these reported cases, such such encounters have been relatively peaceful in nature, with the people involved having come to either little or no harm.

Such incidents include the alleged abduction of Antonio Villas Boas whilst he was working in the fields near his farm in October of 1957, and the high-profile wave of alleged extraterrestrial encounters that were reported across the municipality of Vargina in 1996.

There are, however, a minority of reported occurrences where the entities involved have behaved in a far less benign manner towards those who crossed their path.

In August of 1962, a family living in Giamanchinu were awoken by strange noises coming from outside their address.

When the head of the household, Hivilino Mafra de Silva, went outside to investigate, he was suddenly enveloped in a strange yellow mist.

which was emanating from a mysterious black object hovering nearby.

As his terrified children watched on in horror, the mist became thicker, until their struggling father could no longer be seen.

When the yellowy fog eventually cleared, both the object and the silver had vanished, never to be seen again.

As upsetting as the circumstances surrounding this disappearance are, they quickly pale in comparison to a similar incident which had taken place 35 years earlier.

at a small town named Arasari Guerma in the southeast of the country.

The victim victim on that occasion was an unassuming local farmer and fisherman, and the fate which befell him remains one of the strangest and most harrowing in Brazilian history.

On the early evening of Monday the 4th of March 1946, the population of Arisariguerma were to be found lining the streets of Santerna Japadnaiba, merrily participating in the city's annual carnival.

One resident who was not amongst their number was 44-year-old Joo Precias Filio, who had earlier said goodbye to his wife and five young children, before heading out to spend the rest of the day fishing with some friends at the nearby Tiete River.

His day had been successful, having pulled in a sizable catch, but with darkness now descending, he bid farewell to his companions and then made his way back the short distance towards the village.

As his horse-drawn cart re-entered the settlement, there was little movement to be seen, aside from the branches of trees swaying gently in the night air.

The streets were completely deserted, as everyone was still out enjoying the festivities.

Arriving back at his front door after stabling the horse, Joa was disappointed to find that, in their haste to leave for the festival, his family had accidentally left him locked out.

and so he was forced to gain entry via an open window.

When inside, he put some of his catch in a pot to boil, and had just filled the wood burner in order to heat some water for a bath, when he was overcome by a peculiar feeling of being watched.

The curious fisherman walked back over to the window he had climbed through only moments before, and through the opening, spotted a bright light hovering in the sky some distance away.

No sooner had he laid eyes on it, than a beam of brilliant light shot in his direction, and the room he was standing in was suddenly bathed in a warm yellow glow, which washed over his entire body.

The effects of this beam were both instantaneous and agonising for the unfortunate Joo, with areas of his exposed skin immediately affected by a searing, burning sensation.

As he fell to his knees, desperately trying to cover his eyes from the blinding light, The fisherman could already feel all the hair on his face and head starting to smolder.

Within moments the beam diminished, and the room was once again reduced to the ambient light of the burning stove, leaving the suffering Joo writhing in agony on the floor.

Whilst the burning beam of light had now faded, the horrendous pain it had inflicted upon him only seemed to intensify.

It took all of his strength to haul himself up to his feet and stagger uncertainly across the room towards the main door.

It was here that he found his hands had effectively been rendered useless.

The nerve endings in his fingers were completely shot, resulting in a numbness that had left them paralyzed.

He had to resort to opening the door latch with his teeth, before stumbling out into the street to cry for help.

As he shambled haphazardly across the village, shrieking out in a desperate bid for assistance, Joo could feel a strange wet sensation underneath his feet.

When he looked down, He was horrified to see in the dim moonlight that he had left a trail of bloody footprints behind him.

With each step he took, the skin on the soles of his feet, which was usually as tough as leather, was gradually deteriorating as it came into contact with the ground.

Eventually, Joo's shrill and pain cries brought the town's few remaining residents to his aid, and he was carried directly to his sister's house.

When the district police chief eventually arrived, he initially thought he was looking at a corpse, so extensive was the damage to the victim's face and upper torso.

Family members who were interviewed after the event described how their relative's skin was dark and bloated, like meat that had been over-boiled or left out in the sun.

Overcoming their amazement that Joo was even still alive, let alone able to describe to them what had taken place, the police acted quickly and drove him directly to the hospital at Santerna Zhapadnaiba.

Even with their years of experience, the medical staff who treated the dying man were bewildered and deeply shocked by what they were seeing.

The clothes Joo was wearing were completely unaffected by what had happened to him, but were also quickly becoming saturated with blood and fatty tissue, as the skin beneath them literally started to fall away into messy piles on the tiled hospital floor.

Members of the nursing staff had to move away to gag and wretch.

as sizable chunks of Joo's seared flesh simply separated from his body, exposing glistening muscle underneath.

In some areas, the degradation was so pronounced that sections of bone now protruded from what remained of the dissolving epidermis.

Whilst all of this was happening to him, Joo continued to sit in his bed, steadily recounting what had transpired, even as his lips, nose and ears gradually fell away from his face.

In his final hours, he seemed almost serene and told of how the pain had completely subsided.

Eventually, the soft tissue of his jawline deteriorated to the point where he no longer had the ability to form any more words, rendering him unable to speak to his loved ones.

Although singed and clearly affected to a small extent by the incident, much like his clothes, Joo's hair and beard had inexplicably remained intact.

When he finally passed away a few hours later, He had seemed oddly at peace with the tragic fate that had befallen him.

The cause of death recorded by the attending physician was extreme cardiac collapse due to unknown stimuli.

When the authorities returned to the Philio residence the next day, they found nothing out of the ordinary and no sign of any heat or fire damage.

The window remained open from where the victim had crawled in, and the wood burner he had stocked in order to warm his bath water remained unlit.

As one investigator would later be quoted as saying, it was as if the man had suddenly melted away from from existence, with no conceivable reason as to why this had happened to him.

The majority of modern-day investigators cite this tragic and haunting case as a textbook example of a close encounter of the second kind, as identified by ufologist J.

Alan Hynek in 1972.

Such an incident is defined by the fact that the UFO which had been sighted left behind some form of definite physical or physiological evidence for its presence, but that there was no actual interaction with its controllers or occupants.

At the time of the incident, however, not one person involved believed that the cause of this unfortunate man's death had anything to do with extraterrestrials.

It would not be until a year later, in the summer of 1947, that the world would become obsessed with the phenomenon of UFOs.

That year, Kenneth Arnold's widely publicized report of seeing skipping sources making their way across the skies above Mount Rainier would captivate the imaginations of millions.

As with many of its South American neighbours, Brazil is historically a deeply religious country, but simultaneously also possesses a rich culture of alternative superstition and folklore.

It was into such traditions and fables that the family and friends of João Prestias Filio retreated.

in the search for a justification behind the loss of their loved one.

In their subsequent case reports, the police investigators recorded that the family members would repeatedly claim that this was not the first time that he, or indeed other relatives, had encountered similar deadly fireballs.

Joo had previously confided to his wife that he had been pursued on a number of occasions in the past by mysterious flying lights as he had tried to go about his daily business.

When he had been much younger and working as a cattle driver, he claimed to have been forced to seek refuge in a local chapel after having been chased by up to 12 red glowing balls of light that had rapidly descended upon him from the skies above.

His younger brother Emiliano had also reported seeing such fireballs, which he stated would explode if they ever made contact with the ground.

He had said that on one occasion, six of the orbs had pursued him to the very edge of a nearby cliff.

As he had knelt there praying for his life, they had slowly descended to surround him, before mysteriously vanishing.

These incidents had led some members of the family to believe that their bloodline was cursed somehow and that the lights had been sent by the devil himself to claim the souls of their menfolk.

Tales of similar occurrences can be found in the historical records of cultures from all across the world, with Europeans traditionally referring to the phenomenon as the Will-O-the-Wisp.

In Brazilian culture, such manifestations are known as Batata, which translates as fiery serpent.

They are widely believed to be some form of playful spirit that delights in tormenting travellers who have become lost.

In the Arasari Guerma case, it has also been suggested that the lights may have been something far more malicious rather than mischievous in character.

The owners of the nearby Moro Valio gold mine claimed that production at the facility had been interrupted for years by malevolent ghosts known as the Sombrasoes.

These vengeful spirits would manifest themselves as floating orbs, with lashing tongues of burning flame, and would chase the mine workers away from the gold seams.

So disruptive were these attacks that the mine would eventually be closed down and blocked up, despite still being filled with rich deposits of the precious metal.

Observers of a far less paranormal persuasion have suggested that Joo's injuries may well have been sustained by more mundane or accidental means, possibly whilst he was trying to light the fire he needed for his bath, and that the story of the floating orbs was manufactured by his family for reasons known only to themselves.

Others have theorised that the horrific injuries may have been the result of a rogue lightning strike, which had occurred whilst Joo had been making his way home from the river.

There is also the possibility that this may actually be a classic case of spontaneous human combustion.

This is a little understood medical concept, where the victim dies as a result of horrendous injuries sustained after having caught fire, but with no apparent catalyst for either how the fire began or continued to be sustained.

These incidents are also typified by the absence of any lasting damage to furniture or carpeting in the immediate vicinity of the victim.

The only difference in this case is that spontaneous human combustion is said to occur rapidly, with the victim perishing within mere minutes.

It was stated in various medical reports and statements given by the family that Thilio remained alive for many hours before his eventual passing.

One intriguing line of investigation since the incident has been to try and compare the symptoms sustained by the victim to other instances of severe traumatic injury.

In particular, the fact that the only cells affected by the alleged attack were living cells, and not the lifeless ones in the victim's hair and clothing, indicates that the burns may have been caused by exposure to a high level of radiation, as found in the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb blasts.

The mystery of how an average and unassuming rural worker in the middle of a neutral country would be exposed to such radiation has yet to be answered.

The fact that the police chose to demolish the house where the incident occurred in the aftermath of the attack, thus making it more difficult to search for any traces of radioactivity, has in turn led to accusations of a cover-up by the local authorities.

The troubling and unique nature of the injuries sustained by João Prestier's Filio Filio make the manner of his demise distinctive, even by the standards of the other mysterious deaths that have occurred in the region, and the intervening 70 years have brought investigators no closer to discovering the means by which he met his sad and untimely end.

There are those who point to the fact that Joo may have taken far longer to succumb to his injuries, and that the speed with which he passed away is something that has been exaggerated and embedded into the story over the years, as it has been passed from person person.

But even when you peel away any of what may be considered the more outlandish theory surrounding the incident, what we are left with is a man who literally burned to death in his own home with no sign of a fire ever having taken place.

Whatever the cause of Joo's death, be it paranormal or supernatural, No human being deserves to die in such a painful and traumatic manner.

We can only hope that the peace which he displayed in his final moments is the manner in which his soul has been preserved since his passing.