Immediately an international furor broke out. Were these pictures indeed proof of extraterrestrial spaceships, or were they a hoax, with the Brazilian President and the Brazilian Navy as victims? Who were the witnesses, and exactly what did they report? In the United States, high officials asked for copies of the pictures. An editor of Look magazine asked Dr. Menzel to fly to Brazil to evaluate the evidence, but later canceled the plan when the Rio office advised that the photographs were generally considered fraudulent. Public excitement in Brazil became so great that on February 23 the Naval Ministry released an official statement, distinguished by its air of caution, which concluded:
“Clearly this Ministry will not be able to make any pronouncement concerning the reality of the object seen because the photographs do not constitute sufficient proof for this purpose.”[X-18]
The day after the pictures were published the Almirante Saldanha, which had been lying outside the harbor at Rio, received orders to sail. Not until February 24, when the ship docked at Santos, did newsmen have a chance to interview the officers and crewmen who allegedly had observed the Trindade saucer and could support Barauna’s story. None of them, it turned out, had actually seen the object.
The Assistant Naval Attaché of the United States, who was then in Santos in connection with the visit of the U. S. Coast Guard cutter Westwind, visited the Brazilian ship to collect information about the Trindade saucer, but with little success. The commanding officer stated that he had not seen the alleged UFO; he had seen the pictures but refused to express an opinion on their authenticity; he stated that his secretary might have seen the UFO but the secretary, when questioned, preferred not to discuss the matter. The executive officer said that he had not been on deck at the time of the sighting, but that other persons might have seen the object.
During the next week arguments for and against the authenticity of the photographs filled the Brazilian papers, and O Globo published deliberately faked views of a “flying saucer”—a china plate tossed into the air. A federal deputy in an official note to the Naval Ministry deplored their amazing failure to procure sworn statements from the officers and crewmen who were reported to have witnessed the UFO.
In spite of the widespread and increasing skepticism, the weekly magazine O Cruzeiro used the Trindade pictures for its lead story in the issue of March 8. “Once bitten, twice shy” apparently did not apply to its editors, who seemed instead to adopt the principle, “In for a penny, in for a pound.” The photographs, they remarked editorially, not only proved the existence of flying saucers, they also established the authenticity of the Ilha dos Amores pictures published several years earlier. As though to emphasize this point, the magazine assigned the Trindade story and the interviews with witnesses to the same staff reporter who had described the Ilha dos Amores saucer in 1952. The Naval Ministry refrained from further comment and, since the military authorities showed no alarm about the possibility of extraterrestrial patrols, public interest in the pictures quickly died.
The report sent home by the U. S. Naval Attaché included the comment:
“There appear to be only two explanations for this peculiar incident, and the peculiar handling of it by the Brazilian Government: (a) Some overwhelming power has told the Brazilian Navy not to verify this incident officially (which they should easily be able to do, if it actually occurred) or to deny it (which they should easily be able to do if it is a fake). I personally do not believe that anyone has told the Brazilian Navy to keep quiet about it because there has been no hint of such suppression in either Brazilian or United States circles. I also doubt that their control of the individual officers and men would be good enough to hold the line in any event. (b) The whole thing is a fake publicity stunt.... This seems more likely....”[[X-18]]
The Icarai Submarine Hunting Club
The accounts originally printed in the Brazilian papers and in O Cruzeiro contain a number of significant details that have been glossed over or ignored by UFO enthusiasts, both in Brazil[[X-19]] and in the United States[[X-21]], who apparently accept the Trindade saucer at face value. A study of the available news stories, facts gathered by Intelligence officers, and of the photographs themselves leads inescapably to the conclusion that the Trindade Island photographs were almost certainly a hoax.