Post by Catsmate on Jul 17, 2022 11:41:40 GMT
In The Men in the Lead Masks soultaker666212 raised the idea of a UNIT (or similar) team operating in South America. So here are my collated and mostly coherent notes on odd happenings and interesting events in Brazil.
The Matter of Brazil.
Politics and general history.
1. Keeping the Emperor.
One of my favourite alternate history ideas is a surviving Brazilian Empire with the Republican coup being stopped and Emperor Pedro II surviving. If someone meddled and convinced Pedro that it was his duty to remain in power rather than capitulating to an unpopular coup might his programme of reforms have continued? What would Brazil be like a century later?
2. The death of Vargas.
In 1954 Getúlio Vargas, the popular president of Brazil, 'commits suicide' and is succeeded by João Café Filho. There have always been doubts about the circumstances of his death; was he murdered? And what if someone intervenes to save his life, might the right-wing military have been faced down?
3. The Other Pedro.
Then there is Pedro I, a key figure in Brazilian and Portuguese history, who fostered liberal ideals and enabled both nations to change from absolutist monarchies to representative forms of government.
Might his tuberculosis be cured?
4. The Flight of John VI.
In 1807 facing the advance of Napoleonic forces during the Peninsular War, John VI of Portugal and the Portuguese Court fled Lisbon to Brazil. In all around fifteen thousand people, including Queen Maria I of Portugal, Prince Regent John, and the Braganza royal family and its court, left Lisbon. The Portuguese crown would remain in Brazil from 1808 until the Liberal Revolution of 1820 led to the return of John VI of Portugal.
5. The Niterói Circus Fire.
In 1961 fire breaks out during a performance by the Gran Circus Norte-Americano in the city of Niterói in Brazil.
The circus, billed as the most complete circus in Latin America, had opened two days earlier, with sixty performers and and 150 animals.
The circus's owner, Danilo Stevanovich, had purchased a new tent which was advertised as being made of nylon but was in fact waxed cotton; in less than five minutes the circus was completely devoured by the flames.
There were over five hundred fatalities, 372 people died immediately; about 70% of the victims were children.
No animals were killed, though three elephants escaped.
6. The Disappearing Cup.
In 19DEC1983 the original FIFA World Cup trophy, the Jules Rimet Trophy, was stolen from the headquarters of the Brazilian Football Confederation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This was the second time it was stolen, but there was no dog to find it this time; the trophy has never been recovered, and it is widely believed to have been melted down and sold.
7. The Oldest One.
Around sixty-five million years ago, during the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, part of the asteroid (or spacecraft) that struck the Earth impacted in Brazil. Other fragments struck off the Yucatan peninsula (the largest), in the North Sea, in Alberta and the Ukraine.
8. Radiation.
In 1987 scavengers broke up a radiation therapy machine left in an abandoned clinic in the city of Goiânia, capitol of the Brazilian state of Goiás. In doing so they allowed the cesium137 source was removed and sold to a junk-yard owner.
The blue glow of the cesium chloride made it appear very valuable, so it was broken into pieces and used for decorative or magical purposes, including rubbing on the skin.
Around 250 people were effected and four died.
The Amazon.
While not generally as weird as the Congo River, with it’s history of cannibalism, Belgian genocidal slavery, nuclear reactors and unceasing wars the Amazon, region and river, has a history of lost expeditions (including of course Percy Fawcett), hidden cities (e.g. Fawcett's Lost City of Z), disease, wildlife both large and small1, a hostile indigenous population, illegal miners and rubber collectors, slave traders (and entire plantations using slave labour or debt bondage), political considerations and other purely human menaces.
Ideal for a trip by boat or aeroplane (engage the services of Biggles). Or hovercraft these days.
The Rubber Pirates.
Yes that does sound a bit odd....
In the 1870s Henry Alexander Wickham of the Royal Geographic Society had been commissioned by Joseph Hooker (director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew) to acquire viable seeds of Hevea brasiliensis , the most commercially productive of all the Brazilian rubber trees to break the Brazilian monopoly on rubber.
Wickham acquired some 6,500 seeds and (illegally) shipped them to London. At Kew about 2,800 seeds were successfully germinated and transported carefully to British possessions such as Malaya. There tea planters were persuaded to grow the new crop and, thanks to better cultivation practices and the lack of natural predators, they thrived. It would take decades but by 1910 Brazil’s rubber crop was in freefall; by 1915 it would lose 80% of it’s value and by 1919, 93%. In the process the Brazilian economy was devastated.
Germany, the Graf Zepellin, mysterious monks and the Nazi connection.
From 1935-37 a German expedition, led by Otto Schulz-Kampfhenkel, explored along Jari river with the stated purpose of research in the border area with French Guyana. The Amazon-Jary expedition was supported by Getulio Vargas, the Nazi sympathetic president of Brazil and sponsored by Heinrich Himmler and the Ahnenerbe. The expedition was well supported and equipped (including a small amphibian aircraft) and dispatched hundreds of crates of material home to Germany.
There was already a large German population in Brazil, from nineteenth century immigration. In the 1930s German airlines played in major part in Brazilian aviation. A Nazi-style fascist party (the ‘Integralistas’ or Greenshirts) was prominent in Brazilian politics and attempted a coup in 1938. After that the Brazilian political police (the Department of Social and Political Order) acted against them.
The expedition’s leader, Schulz Kampfhenkel, was an SS officer and proponent of the ‘Guyana Project’; this was a plan to establish colonies in South America, especially after acquiring French, Dutch and British colonies after a victorious European war.
Kampfhenkel wrote to Himmler:
He recommended colonising Amazonia for "people without living space" saying that “For the more advanced white race it offers outstanding possibilities for exploitation”. One of the other expedition members, Joseph Greiner (who died of yellow fever and is buried in the jungle) said of the indigenous peoples "[they] cannot be measured in civilised terms as we know them in Germany". During the war Kampfhenkel was one of Germany’s leading experts in photo-reconnaissance.
The airship Graf Zeppelin operated from Germany to Brazil from 1932 to 37, carrying mail, high value freight and passengers. It also overflew the Amazon and filmed the river from the air.
Of course the Nazis might have been searching for something else in the jungle. Like Fawcett they may have sought advanced technology from a lost human society, or alien settlement, in the deep jungle. This may be linked to ‘The Glove’ (a group that spnsored Fawcett's expeditions).
During World War 2 the United States feared Nazi infiltration in the Amazon, specifically secret airbases that might be used (possibly in concert with Japan) to launch an attack on the Panama Canal and disrupt shipping movement from the Atlantic to the Pacific. A report of a huge shipment of fuel being sailed up the Amazon by a group described (in official papers!) as ‘German monks’ was viewed by the FBI, US military intelligence and the State Department with alarm. Of course in the end there was no planned attack on the Panama Canal.
After their defeat in World War 2 some refugees fled Germany and settled in South America. While Argentina is the country most commonly associated with them (via the Peron regime) some settled in Brazil. In fiction there is of course the book and film 'The Boys From Brazil' with it’s plot of Hitler clones, run by Josef Mengele from his jungle hideout.
The Eddington Experiment.
As I mentioned elsewhere the 1919 experiments to photograph the sun during a solar eclipse from widely different locations was an important validation of General Relativity. Eddington tends to be the better remembered of the two but there was an expedition to Brazil, to the town of Sobral. This involved two staff from the Greenwich Observatory (Andrew Crommelin and a 'computer', Charles Davidson) and went quite smoothly; the pair encountering few problems in Brazil (though some of the photographic plates were blurred due to technical issues with equipment) and the measurements were excellent (showing values far closer to the Einstein prediction than to the Newtonian).
Unidentified Flying Objects.
On 23JUL1947, at the beginning of the post-WW2 UFO panic, a photopographer named José Higgins was working with a group of in Bauru, near São Paulo when they claimed to have heard an extremely sharp sound.
Immediately afterwards they saw a lens-shaped object landing near them. The workmen ran off and Higgins reported that three humanoid figures emerged from the UFO and spoke to him in an unknown language. They failed to communicate and left after about half-an-hour
On 05MAY1952 a journalist named Joao Martins accompanied by aphotographer (Eduardo Keffel) claimed to have seen a flying disk in the vicinity of Barra da Tijuca. Keffel took some photographs of the UFO, which were published by the magazine O Cruzeiro.
On 13SEP1957 another journalist, Ibrahim Sued, received a latter with three fragments of metal.
The anonymous author of the letter claimed he's seen a UFO which exploded in the sky over the beach of Ubatuba. The metal was fragments he'd collected. Analysis showed the fragments were magnesium.
On 16OCT1957 one Antonio Villas Boas claimed to have been abducted by extraterrestrials, one of the first alien abduction stories to receive wide attention.
In the evening of 054NOV1957, two soldiers on guard at the Itaipu Fort (at Praia Grande, São Paulo) supposedly suffered burns after being hit by a "heat wave from an unidentified flying object".
The entire electricity of the fort, including the emergency generators, went down during the incident.
Afterwards Brazilian military and United States Air Force flew to the fort to interview the soldiers.
At around noon on 16JAN1958 the Brazilian ship Almirante Saldanha, engaged in geophysical research was preparing to depart Ilha de Trindade, off the coast of Espírito Santo, when several people, including the captain, several scientists and members of the crew, saw an unusual flying object.
It was described as having 'ring'. The object approached the island from the east, and flew towards the Pico Desejado (Wished Peak), made a step turn and went away very quickly to the northwest.
More.
In 1977 the Colares flap saw several UFO sightings around he Brazilian island of Colares. During the outbreak, the UFOs allegedly attacked the citizens with intense beams of radiation that left burn marks and puncture wounds. These sightings led to the Brazilian government dispatching a team to investigate under the codename Operation Saucer.
In 1996 the Varginha UFO incident also involved multiple sightings of, and interactions with, unidentified flying craft and strange creatures.
Meteorites.
There have been a number of meteor impacts in Brazil, and more in surrounding countries.
On 13AUG1930 over Amazonia, near the Brazil-Peru border, an impact was preceded by ear piercing whistling noises and the sun appearing blood red prior to the detonation. The object came from sunward and appeared to spewing debris in it's wake. The detonation was also preceded by a fall of fine ‘ash’.
More.
In 1995 in north-eastern Brazil there was another impact.
Comments? Contributions? Ideas?
1. Including, but not limited to; rattlesnakes, vipers, giant otters, electric eels, candiru (the infamous tiny parasitic freshwater fish), the
Brazilian Wandering Spider (large, colourful and possibly the most venomous in the world), giant centipedes, the spectacularly coloured Poison Dart Frogs, jaguars, payara (‘Vampire Fish’), bull sharks, the Black Caiman (larger and less pleasant cousin to the crocodile), anacondas, Tree Boas, vampire bats, piranhas, mosquito, Assassin Bugs, Bullet Ants, stinging bees, hornets, wasps, piums (stinging black flies), pólvoras (tiny mosquito like insects that travel in huge swarms), carrapato (burrowing tick-like beetles), ordinary centipedes, scorpions, ticks, red bugs and more.
The butterflies are harmless and quite spectacular in the afternoons.
The Matter of Brazil.
Politics and general history.
1. Keeping the Emperor.
One of my favourite alternate history ideas is a surviving Brazilian Empire with the Republican coup being stopped and Emperor Pedro II surviving. If someone meddled and convinced Pedro that it was his duty to remain in power rather than capitulating to an unpopular coup might his programme of reforms have continued? What would Brazil be like a century later?
2. The death of Vargas.
In 1954 Getúlio Vargas, the popular president of Brazil, 'commits suicide' and is succeeded by João Café Filho. There have always been doubts about the circumstances of his death; was he murdered? And what if someone intervenes to save his life, might the right-wing military have been faced down?
3. The Other Pedro.
Then there is Pedro I, a key figure in Brazilian and Portuguese history, who fostered liberal ideals and enabled both nations to change from absolutist monarchies to representative forms of government.
Might his tuberculosis be cured?
4. The Flight of John VI.
In 1807 facing the advance of Napoleonic forces during the Peninsular War, John VI of Portugal and the Portuguese Court fled Lisbon to Brazil. In all around fifteen thousand people, including Queen Maria I of Portugal, Prince Regent John, and the Braganza royal family and its court, left Lisbon. The Portuguese crown would remain in Brazil from 1808 until the Liberal Revolution of 1820 led to the return of John VI of Portugal.
5. The Niterói Circus Fire.
In 1961 fire breaks out during a performance by the Gran Circus Norte-Americano in the city of Niterói in Brazil.
The circus, billed as the most complete circus in Latin America, had opened two days earlier, with sixty performers and and 150 animals.
The circus's owner, Danilo Stevanovich, had purchased a new tent which was advertised as being made of nylon but was in fact waxed cotton; in less than five minutes the circus was completely devoured by the flames.
There were over five hundred fatalities, 372 people died immediately; about 70% of the victims were children.
No animals were killed, though three elephants escaped.
6. The Disappearing Cup.
In 19DEC1983 the original FIFA World Cup trophy, the Jules Rimet Trophy, was stolen from the headquarters of the Brazilian Football Confederation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This was the second time it was stolen, but there was no dog to find it this time; the trophy has never been recovered, and it is widely believed to have been melted down and sold.
7. The Oldest One.
Around sixty-five million years ago, during the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, part of the asteroid (or spacecraft) that struck the Earth impacted in Brazil. Other fragments struck off the Yucatan peninsula (the largest), in the North Sea, in Alberta and the Ukraine.
8. Radiation.
In 1987 scavengers broke up a radiation therapy machine left in an abandoned clinic in the city of Goiânia, capitol of the Brazilian state of Goiás. In doing so they allowed the cesium137 source was removed and sold to a junk-yard owner.
The blue glow of the cesium chloride made it appear very valuable, so it was broken into pieces and used for decorative or magical purposes, including rubbing on the skin.
Around 250 people were effected and four died.
The Amazon.
While not generally as weird as the Congo River, with it’s history of cannibalism, Belgian genocidal slavery, nuclear reactors and unceasing wars the Amazon, region and river, has a history of lost expeditions (including of course Percy Fawcett), hidden cities (e.g. Fawcett's Lost City of Z), disease, wildlife both large and small1, a hostile indigenous population, illegal miners and rubber collectors, slave traders (and entire plantations using slave labour or debt bondage), political considerations and other purely human menaces.
Ideal for a trip by boat or aeroplane (engage the services of Biggles). Or hovercraft these days.
The Rubber Pirates.
Yes that does sound a bit odd....
In the 1870s Henry Alexander Wickham of the Royal Geographic Society had been commissioned by Joseph Hooker (director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew) to acquire viable seeds of Hevea brasiliensis , the most commercially productive of all the Brazilian rubber trees to break the Brazilian monopoly on rubber.
Wickham acquired some 6,500 seeds and (illegally) shipped them to London. At Kew about 2,800 seeds were successfully germinated and transported carefully to British possessions such as Malaya. There tea planters were persuaded to grow the new crop and, thanks to better cultivation practices and the lack of natural predators, they thrived. It would take decades but by 1910 Brazil’s rubber crop was in freefall; by 1915 it would lose 80% of it’s value and by 1919, 93%. In the process the Brazilian economy was devastated.
Germany, the Graf Zepellin, mysterious monks and the Nazi connection.
From 1935-37 a German expedition, led by Otto Schulz-Kampfhenkel, explored along Jari river with the stated purpose of research in the border area with French Guyana. The Amazon-Jary expedition was supported by Getulio Vargas, the Nazi sympathetic president of Brazil and sponsored by Heinrich Himmler and the Ahnenerbe. The expedition was well supported and equipped (including a small amphibian aircraft) and dispatched hundreds of crates of material home to Germany.
There was already a large German population in Brazil, from nineteenth century immigration. In the 1930s German airlines played in major part in Brazilian aviation. A Nazi-style fascist party (the ‘Integralistas’ or Greenshirts) was prominent in Brazilian politics and attempted a coup in 1938. After that the Brazilian political police (the Department of Social and Political Order) acted against them.
The expedition’s leader, Schulz Kampfhenkel, was an SS officer and proponent of the ‘Guyana Project’; this was a plan to establish colonies in South America, especially after acquiring French, Dutch and British colonies after a victorious European war.
Kampfhenkel wrote to Himmler:
"The two largest scantly populated, but rich in resources, areas on earth are in Siberia and South America. They alone offer spacious immigration and settlement possibilities for the Nordic peoples."
The airship Graf Zeppelin operated from Germany to Brazil from 1932 to 37, carrying mail, high value freight and passengers. It also overflew the Amazon and filmed the river from the air.
- The trip cost 1,500RM (~US$490), one way, in 1934. Departs every other Saturday, summer only. The trip takes a little over three days and there’s almost always a reporter on board, in case the PCs get up to mischeif.
Of course the Nazis might have been searching for something else in the jungle. Like Fawcett they may have sought advanced technology from a lost human society, or alien settlement, in the deep jungle. This may be linked to ‘The Glove’ (a group that spnsored Fawcett's expeditions).
During World War 2 the United States feared Nazi infiltration in the Amazon, specifically secret airbases that might be used (possibly in concert with Japan) to launch an attack on the Panama Canal and disrupt shipping movement from the Atlantic to the Pacific. A report of a huge shipment of fuel being sailed up the Amazon by a group described (in official papers!) as ‘German monks’ was viewed by the FBI, US military intelligence and the State Department with alarm. Of course in the end there was no planned attack on the Panama Canal.
- Or was there? Perhaps a side project of the Ahnenerbe's plan to gain control of the advanced technology of 'Z' to defeat the Allies...
After their defeat in World War 2 some refugees fled Germany and settled in South America. While Argentina is the country most commonly associated with them (via the Peron regime) some settled in Brazil. In fiction there is of course the book and film 'The Boys From Brazil' with it’s plot of Hitler clones, run by Josef Mengele from his jungle hideout.
The Eddington Experiment.
As I mentioned elsewhere the 1919 experiments to photograph the sun during a solar eclipse from widely different locations was an important validation of General Relativity. Eddington tends to be the better remembered of the two but there was an expedition to Brazil, to the town of Sobral. This involved two staff from the Greenwich Observatory (Andrew Crommelin and a 'computer', Charles Davidson) and went quite smoothly; the pair encountering few problems in Brazil (though some of the photographic plates were blurred due to technical issues with equipment) and the measurements were excellent (showing values far closer to the Einstein prediction than to the Newtonian).
Unidentified Flying Objects.
On 23JUL1947, at the beginning of the post-WW2 UFO panic, a photopographer named José Higgins was working with a group of in Bauru, near São Paulo when they claimed to have heard an extremely sharp sound.
Immediately afterwards they saw a lens-shaped object landing near them. The workmen ran off and Higgins reported that three humanoid figures emerged from the UFO and spoke to him in an unknown language. They failed to communicate and left after about half-an-hour
On 05MAY1952 a journalist named Joao Martins accompanied by aphotographer (Eduardo Keffel) claimed to have seen a flying disk in the vicinity of Barra da Tijuca. Keffel took some photographs of the UFO, which were published by the magazine O Cruzeiro.
On 13SEP1957 another journalist, Ibrahim Sued, received a latter with three fragments of metal.
The anonymous author of the letter claimed he's seen a UFO which exploded in the sky over the beach of Ubatuba. The metal was fragments he'd collected. Analysis showed the fragments were magnesium.
On 16OCT1957 one Antonio Villas Boas claimed to have been abducted by extraterrestrials, one of the first alien abduction stories to receive wide attention.
In the evening of 054NOV1957, two soldiers on guard at the Itaipu Fort (at Praia Grande, São Paulo) supposedly suffered burns after being hit by a "heat wave from an unidentified flying object".
The entire electricity of the fort, including the emergency generators, went down during the incident.
Afterwards Brazilian military and United States Air Force flew to the fort to interview the soldiers.
At around noon on 16JAN1958 the Brazilian ship Almirante Saldanha, engaged in geophysical research was preparing to depart Ilha de Trindade, off the coast of Espírito Santo, when several people, including the captain, several scientists and members of the crew, saw an unusual flying object.
It was described as having 'ring'. The object approached the island from the east, and flew towards the Pico Desejado (Wished Peak), made a step turn and went away very quickly to the northwest.
More.
In 1977 the Colares flap saw several UFO sightings around he Brazilian island of Colares. During the outbreak, the UFOs allegedly attacked the citizens with intense beams of radiation that left burn marks and puncture wounds. These sightings led to the Brazilian government dispatching a team to investigate under the codename Operation Saucer.
In 1996 the Varginha UFO incident also involved multiple sightings of, and interactions with, unidentified flying craft and strange creatures.
Meteorites.
There have been a number of meteor impacts in Brazil, and more in surrounding countries.
On 13AUG1930 over Amazonia, near the Brazil-Peru border, an impact was preceded by ear piercing whistling noises and the sun appearing blood red prior to the detonation. The object came from sunward and appeared to spewing debris in it's wake. The detonation was also preceded by a fall of fine ‘ash’.
They landed in the centre of the forest with a triple shock similar to the rumble of thunder and the splash of lightning. There were three distinct explosions, each stronger than the other, causing earth tremors like those of an earthquake. A very light rain of ash continued to fall for a few hours and the sun remained veiled till midday. The explosions of the bodies were heard hundreds of kilometres away.
In 1995 in north-eastern Brazil there was another impact.
"Scientists in Brazil's northeastern state of Piaui are baffled by a crater that was punched into the tropical rain forest shortly after witnesses reported seeing a bright light streak across the sky. Researchers are uncertain whether the crater, 16 feet wide and 32 feet deep, was left by a meteorite or a piece of a comet. Physicist Paulo Frota of the University of Piaui believes it was caused by a block of ice from a comet because the surrounding vegetation is not burned and the crater's rim is not raised.
Comments? Contributions? Ideas?
1. Including, but not limited to; rattlesnakes, vipers, giant otters, electric eels, candiru (the infamous tiny parasitic freshwater fish), the
Brazilian Wandering Spider (large, colourful and possibly the most venomous in the world), giant centipedes, the spectacularly coloured Poison Dart Frogs, jaguars, payara (‘Vampire Fish’), bull sharks, the Black Caiman (larger and less pleasant cousin to the crocodile), anacondas, Tree Boas, vampire bats, piranhas, mosquito, Assassin Bugs, Bullet Ants, stinging bees, hornets, wasps, piums (stinging black flies), pólvoras (tiny mosquito like insects that travel in huge swarms), carrapato (burrowing tick-like beetles), ordinary centipedes, scorpions, ticks, red bugs and more.
The butterflies are harmless and quite spectacular in the afternoons.
