Krasperdon, Dino

Dino Krasperdon was the pen name of a controversial flying saucer contactee from Brazil named Aladino Felix. According to the account later published in his book, My Contact with Flying Saucers, in November of 1952 Felix and a friend saw several flying saucers above a mountain in rural Sao Paulo state. Going back to the location, Felix waited three days for the saucers to return. He was rewarded when a saucer landed and invited him inside. He took a tour of the ship and was told it would return. That return occurred some three months later when the ship's captain showed up at Felix's house. During the visit, the captain said that at various times he had lived on Jupiter, Ganymede, and Io. Three subsequent meetings followed in which the captain spoke on a wide range of subjects from science and space travel to life on other worlds. As was common to contactee literature, the captain also spoke philosophically about the human condition.

The book-length account of Felix's conversations was published in Brazil in Portuguese in 1957 and in English two years later. It was not impressive for its teachings or as evidence of possible extraterrestrial contact, and was soon forgotten. Then in August of 1959 Felix emerged out of obscurity to grant an interview on Brazilian television. He claimed that the events recounted in his book had never occurred. Then several weeks later he was arrested as a member of a terrorist gang. Following his arrest, he was reported to have claimed that Venusians would soon appear to free him and his associates. The Venusians never came and when he was finally sentenced in 1971, he was remanded to a mental institution. Only writer John A. Keel attempted to defend Felix with an argument that he was a victim of evil supernatural entities.

Sources:

Clark, Jerome. UFO Encyclopedia. Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1998.

Keel, John A. UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1970.

Krasperdon, Dino [pseudonym of Aladino Felix]. My Contact with Flying Saucers. New York: Citadel Press, 1959.