The Lead Masks case: what the failed autopsy cost

On 20 August 1966 a boy flying a kite on Morro do Vintém, a hill in Niterói across the bay from Rio de Janeiro, found two men lying dead in the undergrowth.

They were wearing formal suits and waterproof coats. Over their eyes were masks cut from lead. Beside them were an empty water bottle, a packet containing two wet towels, and a notebook with a short set of instructions in it.

Sixty years later the cause of death has never been established, and the reason is more prosaic and more infuriating than anything in the folklore.

Who they were

Miguel José Viana, thirty-four, and Manoel Pereira da Cruz, thirty-two. Both were electronics technicians from Campos dos Goytacazes, a town some distance to the north-east.

They left home on 17 August. Viana told his family he was going to buy materials and took a substantial sum of money with him. Both men were carrying that money when they were found, which removes robbery as a motive.

A waitress at a bar in Niterói remembered serving them. She described Viana as agitated and repeatedly checking his watch. A receipt for the purchase of two towels was among their possessions.

What the scene showed

The bodies lay side by side. There was no sign of a struggle, no injuries, no marks of violence, and no disturbance of the surrounding ground.

The lead masks were of the general type used as eye protection against radiation, and they were homemade. Both men had the technical skill to make them.

The police had considerable difficulty reaching the site. The hill is steep and thickly overgrown, and it took a day after the report before officers and firefighters got to the bodies.

The failure that decided the case

The bodies had lain in tropical heat for days before recovery, and longer before examination. Decomposition was advanced.

The post-mortem that followed was not adequate to the question. Toxicology — the one test that mattered, given a note explicitly referring to ingested capsules — was never satisfactorily carried out. Accounts of the handling of the organs are poor and contradictory.

That is the whole of the mystery's durability. A case that turns on what two men swallowed was investigated without establishing what they swallowed, and the material to answer it no longer exists in usable form.

What was claimed

Investigators established that both men were involved in a circle in Campos interested in spiritualism and in contact with what its members described as beings from elsewhere, and that the group's practices included ingesting substances.

That context makes the objects legible. The capsules, the appointed time, the waiting, the protection of metals, the masks: these are the components of a ritual the men intended to perform, written down by them in advance.

The competing reading is poisoning by a third party over the money. It has the difficulty that the money was still on the bodies.

What was added later

A landing site. Radiation. Official suppression. An unidentified fourth man. Lights over the hill on the night in question.

None of these appear in the case file. They accumulated in the retelling, and they are why the lead masks became a UFO case rather than what the documents describe, which is two men who went up a hill to do something they had planned and did not come down.

Where the evidence points

To a self-administered experiment that killed them. The note is theirs. The objects are the objects it lists. Two men in formal dress climbing a hill to keep an appointment with something they expected to arrive is strange, but it is strange in a way that fits what is known about their beliefs.