Two Men Found on a Hill Wearing Lead Masks, With Instructions to "Wait for the Signal"

On the afternoon of August 20, 1966, a boy was flying a kite on a hill called Morro do Vintém, above the city of Niterói, across the bay from Rio de Janeiro.

The kite came down in the brush. He went in to get it.

He found two men lying on the ground. They were dead.

They were dressed as if for a business meeting. Formal suits. Over the suits, raincoats. And over their eyes, each man was wearing a mask made of lead. Crude, homemade, hammered into shape. No holes to see through.

There were no wounds on them. No sign of a fight.

And next to them was a little notebook, with a note written in pencil. It read like a set of instructions.

Be at the agreed place at four-thirty. Take the capsules at six-thirty. After the effect, protect metals. Wait for the signal. Mask.

Almost sixty years later, nobody knows what killed them. Or what signal they were waiting for.

Two technicians from Campos

The two men were Manoel Pereira da Cruz and Miguel José Viana.

They were electronics technicians from Campos dos Goytacazes, a city in the state of Rio de Janeiro, a few hours' bus ride northeast of Niterói. They worked with radios and televisions. Repairing them, building them, tinkering with them.

In the 1960s, electronics was an exciting field. Radio and television were changing the world. And for some people who worked with them, those signals moving invisibly through the air raised bigger questions. What else might be out there, sending signals of its own?

On August 17, 1966, Manoel and Miguel left Campos. They told people they were going to buy materials for their work.

They took a bus to Niterói. They arrived at around two-thirty in the afternoon.

Their last afternoon

What happened over the next few hours has been pieced together by investigators.

In Niterói, the two men went to a shop and bought two waterproof raincoats.

It was not raining.

Then they stopped at a bar and bought a bottle of water. The waitress there later remembered them. She said Miguel seemed very nervous, and that he kept checking his watch, as if they had somewhere to be at a particular time.

That bar is the last place anyone is known to have seen them alive.

From there, investigators believe, they went straight up Morro do Vintém.

Morro do Vintém

Morro do Vintém is a hill rising over the neighborhoods of Niterói. From the top, you can see across Guanabara Bay toward Rio de Janeiro.

In 1966, the upper slopes were brush, rocks and trees. A quiet, isolated place, but close to the city.

Somewhere up there, the two men found the spot they were looking for. They put on their raincoats. They lay down. And they put the lead masks over their eyes.

Three days later, the boy with the kite found them.

What was found

The boy reported what he had found. Police and firefighters reached the bodies the following day.

The two men were lying side by side, in their suits and raincoats. Each had a lead mask over his eyes.

Near them, police found an empty water bottle. A packet holding two wet towels. And the small notebook.

The note in the notebook, in Portuguese, reads:

"Dezesseis e trinta, estar no local determinado. Dezoito e trinta, ingerir cápsulas. Após efeito, proteger metais. Aguardar sinal. Máscara."

Roughly translated: "Four-thirty p.m., be at the agreed location. Six-thirty p.m., swallow capsules. After the effect, protect metals. Wait for the signal. Mask."

The way the last part is written, it is not completely clear whether it means "wait for the signal, then put on the mask," or "wait for the signal from the mask," or something else.

There were no obvious injuries on either man. No sign of a struggle.

The autopsy

This is where the investigation went wrong.

The bodies had been lying outside for days in the Brazilian heat. And the autopsy did not take place until weeks later.

By then, the internal organs were too decomposed for reliable testing. No toxicology tests were done. Nobody was able to check for poison or drugs in their systems.

So the coroners could not say how the two men died. The official cause of death was never determined.

Scientific spiritualists

Investigators began looking into the two men's lives. And what they found changed how people saw the case.

A friend of the men told investigators that they belonged to a group of what he called "scientific spiritualists." People who believed you could make contact with spirits, or with beings from other worlds, using a mix of science and ritual.

According to this friend, Manoel and Miguel had been trying to make contact. They planned to use a drug to put themselves into an altered state. And they made the lead masks to protect their eyes from a blinding light they expected to see when contact happened.

This account was supported by what investigators found at the men's homes. Materials for making the masks. And books and writings about spirits and the supernatural.

Why lead?

The masks are the detail everyone remembers. So it is worth asking: why lead?

Lead is heavy, soft and easy to cut and bend with simple tools. A technician could hammer a piece into the shape of a face in an afternoon.

It is also one of the best materials for blocking radiation. It is why the apron a dentist puts over you before an X-ray is lined with lead. Anyone who worked with electronics in the 1960s would likely have known that.

So a lead mask with no eyeholes makes a kind of sense, if you believe you are about to be exposed to something powerful. A blinding light. Or a kind of energy you cannot see. It fits the friend's account almost exactly.

And the phrase "protect metals" may point the same way. Some people read it as an instruction to protect themselves with metal. Others read it as an instruction to protect the metal objects they carried. Nobody knows for sure.

What it does suggest is that the two men were not panicking or improvising. They had prepared. They had made equipment. They had a schedule. They were expecting something specific to happen on that hill.

A country watching the sky

To understand why this case became so famous, it helps to know the moment it happened in.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Brazil, like much of the world, was gripped by interest in UFOs. Sightings were reported in newspapers. Groups formed to study them. People talked about contact.

So when two electronics technicians were found on a hilltop, in lead masks, with a note about waiting for a signal and protecting metals, many people jumped to one conclusion. They had gone up the hill to meet something from the sky.

Over the years, stories have been added to the case. Some later accounts say a local woman saw a strange glowing object over the hill around the time the men died. That claim is often repeated, but it is not part of the core official record and is difficult to verify. The basic facts are strange enough without it.

The theories

So what killed Manoel Pereira da Cruz and Miguel José Viana?

The leading theory is an accidental overdose. Following the friend's account, the two men took capsules of some drug as part of a ritual to make contact, and took too much, or took something more dangerous than they realized. Lying down on the hill in raincoats, with masks over their eyes, waiting for a signal, they slipped into unconsciousness and died.

That fits the note, which tells them to take capsules at six-thirty. It fits the lack of injuries. And it fits the materials found at their homes. But because no toxicology tests were ever done, it cannot be proven.

The second theory is foul play. The men may have been carrying money to buy work materials. Someone could have lured them up the hill with promises of a spiritual experience, given them poison, and robbed them. The note, in that case, could have been instructions written for them by someone else.

The third theory is the one that made the case famous around the world. That they were attempting to contact something from beyond Earth, and something answered.

There is no physical evidence for that. But people still point to the masks, to the instruction to protect metals, and to the phrase that seems to say they were waiting for a signal.

What we still don't know

The lead masks case has never been solved.

What we know for sure is this. Two men from Campos traveled to Niterói, bought raincoats on a dry day, bought a bottle of water, checked their watches, and climbed a hill. They put on suits and homemade lead masks. They followed instructions in a notebook. And they never came down.

Were they part of a ritual that went wrong? Victims of someone who lied to them? Or were they, as they seem to have believed, waiting for something to arrive?

And what was the signal?