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type. case. area. The investigating officers did find a few drops of blood a little over 160 feet from the da Silva home. Laboratory analysis later classified the blood as that of a human, but whether or not the fluid had come from Rivalino da Silva was impossible to determine since there was no record of da Silva's blood Police are pretty much the same the world over. To the officer in the field, a single fact is better than a dozen theories. The authorities began to conduct the investigation as if they were dealing with a murder Somewhat cruelly, the police began to suspect the now orphaned boys - their mother had died about a year before - of having killed their father and disposed of his body. The suggestion of three boys, ranging in age from twelve to two, having committed a murder, although seemingly ludicrous, is not without precedent. The officers tried a number of psychological ploys, carefully crafted to trick Raimunda into a confession, but the spindly 12-year-old stuck resolutely to his story of the smoking globes and the floating shadow. At last the officers themselves became touched by the obvious sincerity of the boy's grief and began to conduct an investigation along lines they considered utterly fantastic. Strangely enough, they began to turn up corroborating testimony of an extremely eerie nature. A fisherman testified that he had seen two peculiar, ball-shaped aircraft circling over the da Silva home on the evening of August 19th. Two miner friends of Rivalino da Silva's had laughed at him on August 17th when he had told them about coming upon "two strange persons, about three feet tall, digging a hole in the earth." Now, after their friend had disappeared, the miners had had second thoughts about da Silva's "queer story" and wondered if there might not be some connection between his mysterious disappearance and his sighting of the "two strange persons." Lt. Wilson Lisboa's report of the investigation was published in two Brazilian newspapers, Belo Horizonte's Diario de Minas and the Rio de Janeiro Correio da Manha. In the report, a Dr. Giovani Pereia in Diamantina was quoted as saying that he had seen an object similar to the one that had allegedly swooped off with Rivalino da Silva above his own house two months earlier. The doctor hadn't mentioned the object before, because, wisely, he knew that no one would believe him. Four days after da Silva's celestial abduction, more than fifty people, including the Chief of Police, witnessed the flight of a "large round ball-shaped object" over the nearby town of Gouveia.