The Connections Between Bolsonaro Supporters, QAnon, Satanism and Aliens
PHOTOS BY FABIO TEIXEIRA, taken in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. NOVEMBER 02: ‘Bolsonaristas’, supporters of the defeated president Jair Messias Bolsonaro, protest against the election results in front of the Eastern Military Command.
Since the end of this year’s Brazilian elections, supporters of the losing candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, camp outside military headquarters around the country asking for an intervention against the results. They claim fraud, and invoke an article of the constitution which, according to their interpretation, would grant the armed forces the power to “guarantee order” and “uphold of the law” when “there is an exhaustion of the traditional forces of public security”. This exhaustion of traditional forces would be, to them, the president-elect being a convicted criminal, aided by forces of a new world order, against which aliens ought to intervene. Some of these supporters went as far as sending help signals to an alien general with the flashlights of their smartphones.
It's no easy feat to track down the origins of the relationship between Bolsonaro supporters and the belief that aliens are actively involved in partisan politics. In 2018, The Guardian published an article calling Bolsonaro, a front running candidate for the presidency then, a “cult leader” who claimed to have had contact with aliens. However, the article provides no sources regarding when, how or why Bolsonaro made the claim of alien contact. The author of this piece is a man called Dom Phillips, who was killed this year in a high-profile assassination case, alongside another journalist, Bruno Pereira, while investigating a corruption case in the Amazon region.
OCTOBER 28: At the debate between the 2022 presidential candidates of Brazil, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva and Jair Messias Bolsonaro.
Satanism
Other more sinister and conspiratorial connections have been made, involving a satanic cult from the 80s accused of horrifying killings of poor boys. The woman who founded the cult, Valentina de Andrade, wrote a book called ‘God, the big farce’, where claims were made that, not only aliens are among us, but that they influence human births; one alien general and ship in particular are to soon come to earth and request help from good citizens to achieve a crucial (possibly political) task.
Somehow, the name of Bolsonaro’s family lawyer, Frederick Wassef, shows up in documents about the court case against Valentina. He testified about how he bought Valentina’s book in 1988, which describes her experience meeting aliens and how God is not the Creator of the Universe, but instead a sort of Devil. This sparked Wassef’s interest, leading him to write her a letter and, upon her invitation, travel to several cities to visit certain spaces associated with the cult, including the cult’s headquarters in Buenos Aires. In these trips, he met Valentina and several people from her circle, and attended several courses and lectures, none of which, according to him, discussed anything besides the core principles of the group — no drugs, prostitution, abuse of trust or disrespect.
This whole saga ends with it all being attributed to the Satanic Panic phenomenon, a period between the 80s and 90s where there was a spike in unverified cases of satanic rituals involving the murder and abuse of children. It’s widely known to have happened in the US, but Brazil, so it seems, also fell victim to it. Both of these countries have unexpected political ties — the 1980s marking the end of a Brazilian military dictatorship financed by the CIA, and the 2020s marked by the symbiosis between Bolsonaro, Trump, and their supporters. Now, the connection between these politicians, Satanism and Aliens falls right up QAnon’s alley.
NOVEMBER 15: Thousands of supporters of Jair Bolsonaro gathered in protest against the October election results.
QAnon
In an ideological landscape plagued with conspiratorial ideas, it’s not hard to imagine a natural progression from the theories of QAnon to UFO Conspiracies. In 2019, Vice published about how, in the absence of Qs posts, “many of his followers have turned to the UFO narrative for their conspiratorial fix” — especially since Q himself had made a few posts about UFOs and several about Satanism — earning QAnon the reputation of bringing the Satanic Panic back.
The merging of Aliens and QAnon being attributed to a conspiratorial “fix” is insufficient, though. The parallel between Satanism and aliens predates QAnon, and some researchers from the late 90s and early 2000s have explored a “striking” similarity between the reports of Satanist abuse and alien abductions, as shared in their respective support groups. Interestingly, the study which asks the question ‘Who Are the UFO Abductees and Ritual-Abuse Survivors?’ answers this by saying they are both overwhelmingly white. This answer begs another question of why a chunk of the white demographic leans towards these explanations for the political and social unrest in the world.
In his 1997 research titled “Satanist abuse and alien abduction: A comparative analysis[…]”, John Paley speculates on yet another explanation — a spectrum of temporal lobe epilepsy and bad therapy. Considering that the vast majority of those who identify as abuse survivors or abductees are women; the framing of these reports as delusional (page 47) needs to be looked at from a more modern, intersectional lens. The truth is that no one fully understands or can provide a sturdy scientific explanation for these social phenomena.
[LEFT] OCTOBER 28: Bolsonaro at the presidential debate. [RIGHT] OCTOBER 30: Brazil’s president, and candidate for reelection Jair Messias Bolsonaro, speaking to the press shortly after voting.
The US Army and Navy
There is, however, a more conservative (or at least less peculiar) explanation for the fact that Bolsonaro supporters are flashing their phones at an extraterrestrial ship and its general. The US government has been putting effort into destigmatizing the belief in UFOs (or UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.) In May, the US held a congressional hearing with the purpose of encouraging the general public, and specifically Navy officers, to collect data and report on unidentified flying (and under-water) objects.
It's in the US Army's interest that new technologies remain classified. Upon unexplained sightings, it would benefit them if the public associates it with aliens and not with secret military technology being tested. For instance, it would be fair to assume that, by the time the “Predator drone” was introduced in the early 2000s, it had already been in testing for the better part of the previous decade (Perhaps not by chance during the X-Files era). In fact, at the hearing, it was stated that drones were tested to see if they served as an explanation to modern-day Navy Intelligence data on unexplained sightings.
Some data was made public. Some was discussed in a classified hearing. And some they admit they have no explanation for, due to insufficient data or lack of understanding of this data. Nevertheless, the US Army is navigating a fine line between the need to have their own classified military technology kept secret, but also relying on reports from the population, and Navy personnel, on what could be secret technology from ‘non-allied’ forces.
NOVEMBER 15. Protest in front of the Eastern Military Command.
Technology
There is a significant segment of the Brazilian population which believes certain technology we have today, such as the internet, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, motorcycles which don’t fall over, and so on, come from aliens. Someone recently told me, “humans are smart, but not that smart.” This relates to the theory that the pyramids couldn’t have been built by humans, so they must have been built by ancient aliens, and so on. Interestingly, we now live in the era of smartphones, which can be used to collect more data than ever on UFOs (or UAPs), expose classified military technology and who knows what else. And yet, there is doubt about whether the very object we hold in our hands to collect this data is of this world.
The human experience is marked by the distress of realizing the exorbitant number of things we don’t understand about the universe, and all that we can’t control or predict. Not even this statement can be said with too much certainty, which is probably why we look for meaning in the most varied, unexpected places. That in itself can be a healthy coping mechanism for the absurdity and frailty of all life on Earth. Having said that, once we advocate for Democratic principles, or any basic mode of co-existing on a planet with 8 billion people, we are bound to face situations where certain groups take their theories to a Dictatorial level. When it comes to these people camped in front of Brazilian military headquarters, asking for the regression from Democracy to Military Dictatorship, believe it or not, our strategy has been to wait them out, and for panic to subside. Because an understandable or manageable line of political reasoning is even further from sight than this extraterrestrial ship they are trying to communicate with.
Mirna Wabi-Sabi
is a writer, site editor at Gods and Radicals and founder of Plataforma9.