Alternate Perceptions Magazine, November 2025
An Interview with Cynthia Newby Luce (1934-2011)
By Brent Raynes
-Photo by Brent Raynes
Though for a long time, Cynthia remained largely in the ufological background, she nevertheless played a significant role in this field. Especially with regard to Brazilian ufology. Speaking fluent Portuguese, she helped Bob Pratt, the author of UFO Danger Zone (1996), in his on-site interviews of many of his Brazilian UFO witnesses and researchers. Cynthia had a master’s degree in experimental psychology and anthropology. She did a lot of archeological and anthropological work in Brazil.
Raynes: My understanding is that you initially came from a pretty rigid and mainstream, grounded in science background and didn’t spend much time contemplating things like UFOs, the paranormal, cryptozoology, and the possibility of other dimensions, but something happened to change all of that. Do you want to kind of give us a little background on what happened? Cynthia Newby Luce: My father and my grandfather were attorneys, so there was always a certain logic in the atmosphere, and I only began to see things in a different light because I went to Brazil in 1964. I lived in a small village and I had no television or even radio. I rented a house from a friend of a friend who was English. I had a little guest house, and she never said much about it. It was an old place, and it was over underground springs, which I only found out later. But all of a sudden I began to see things there, and I’m not a person that drinks or does drugs or anything like that. But it was extraordinary and it sort of shook me up a bit. When a visitor also saw things I finally told this English woman about the phenomena (I was 30 at the time and she was 55). Sonia told me that other people who had slept in that house had reported seeing all kinds of phenomana. There were bursts of colored light and luminous worms and visions into what looked like another dimension.
But since I had, in my adult life, known a lot of physicists I began to think about physics to gibve an answer to the whole thing, but it wasn’t until I gave birth to my daughter and I woke up out of the anesthetic (given for the episiotomy) and I was outside of my body, looking down on the room, that I really started to look for answers. There was my mother asleep on the other vbed, and I was asleep in my bed, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to get back into my body because I’ve got to breast feed this child,’ and I went plunk, right back into my body. And then I began to look in the literature for things to do with that. My now ex-husband’s first wife, Gay Luce (I was his second) – he’s a scientist and she was a very well-known science writer – was always orienting me towards who to read and she pout me on to Robert Monroe. I began to read his books and see how these things fell into place. And I also had another friend named Valerie Meluckey who was involved in the Edgar Cayce group and she put me onto that and so I started reading a lot of things that I hadn’t read before.
Then after that I had divorced and had gone back to Brazil in 1975. In 1976, when I was in Santa Barbara, California, taking care of my mother who was dying, I was coming home from picking up my daughter and I came around a corner. I was just going to go down into the property. My mother lived in Montecito. It was a bright day and not a cloud in the sky. It was noon, and this was a completely deserted road and all of a sudden, in front of me, in a V formed by the hills, up shot this huge UFO. It was like a squashed sphere and at arm’s length it was the size of a grapefruit. It was big! And it was the color of anodized aluminum. That kind of not bright but brushed golden aluminum, and it had a narrow belt around the middle and it shot up from about 30 degrees on the horizon, up from the right to the left, and sat more or less in the middle of the V of the hills. Sat there for about, oh it must have been ten seconds, Enough time for me to get out of the car. My daughter was 4 years old and she was looking backwards because she was riding in the backseat of the car and she was looking out the back window. So, I got out of the car, and then this thing zoomed off at an angle, to the northeast. It really sort of shook me up because up until that point all that I had known was everybody putting down Adamski. That was what my orientation was. It was all lunatic fringe.
But then my mother died and I got back to Brazil, and I met some people researching UFOs and they started talking about their sightings and what had happened to them and then I started going to conferences and that’s where I met Irene Granchi and a whole group of people whom I still know. It began that whole process, and that was in 1976. And I met Bob Pratt in 1979, I think it was, when we both went with Irene Granchi on the Bipendi case. That was a very interesting case. It’s on Bob’s website.
Raynes: Is it in his book?
Cynthia Luce: No, it’s on his website.
Raynes: Okay, and speaking of other dimensions, I recently had the pleasure of being introduced by you to a lovely young lady at the December 3rd, 2005, A.R.E. UFO Conference. I understand that she’s the granddaughter of the late General Alfred Moacyr Uchoa, (1) formerly the director of the Military Academy of Brazil (that country’s equivalent to West Point), and that he had described UFO close encounters, some in the presence of other highly credible witnesses, and telepathic contacts. He was interviewed by Bob Pratt (who has some details on his website). Anyway, his granddaughter now hopes to translate his various stories and books published in Brazil into English so that U.S. readers can learn more about his experiences. He also strongly believed that UFOs originated from another dimension, or other dimensions, correct?
Cynthia Luce: Yes, he was one of the first people, early on, to have this idea. This is also an idea that I had early on about an explanation and as I explained in the article that I wrote for you I had a discussion with Hynek about that subject and it always seemed to me to be much more logical than anything else. The physicists are just beginning to get into this because of the way that traditional mainstream physics has gone along.
But Gen. Uchoa was a very interesting man, and I did know him. Not the most concise person in the world but extremely interesting because we’d have these meetings and these conferences and he was only supposed to talk an hour and he would talk three hours, and Brazilians don’t like to interrupt, so it went on and on.
Raynes: Apparently, he must have subscribed to the interdimensional idea because of something from his own experiences, I guess. Cynthia Luce: Oh yes. He had many experiences, and, as to Denise, I think it would be to your advantage to speak to her as much as you can because she was the person who was closest to her grandfather. There were a lot of people in that family. You know, Brazilian families tend to be quite large. Especially a couple of generations back. She spent a lot of time with him, and she was with him and has witnessed a lot of these things he talks about. He claimed to have a lot of contact with extra-dimensional or interdimensional or whatever you want to call these beings. His whole way of looking at things was quite different and unique.
Raynes: Right. And these weren’t just his experiences. There were many witnesses. Many credible people in science and the military as well.
Cynthia Luce: Oh yes. I’m just hoping that we can get this material condensed because it’s really voluminous, and get it out there in English because I think that people would really benefit from seeing this kind of firsthand report. It’s one of the nearest things to hard facts that we have.
Raynes: Right, and someone of his background too saying these things. It’s always being run down as lunatic fringe but here’s a man who was a General.
Cynthia Luce: He taught physics.
Raynes: Oh, he taught physics too?
Cynthia Luce: He taught physics.
Raynes: Well, the man should stand up and talk for three hours. Wow.
Now another incredible story that you’re currently hot on the trail over involves three, I believe it is, prominent Brazilian anthropologists who were brothers. After retiring one of them went on Brazilian TV and confessed that in the Amazon region they used to watch the natives meeting and exchanging items with beings from landed UFOs. What can you share about this story at the present time?
Cynthia Luce: I’ve been chasing this story for a very long time because I heard about it many years ago (about 20) from Luiz Conzaga, who is a researcher, a writer, a kind of entrepreneur type. I kept chasing the info through him and never got anywhere, and then finally, through Mario Rangel, who is also a very competent researcher and a very sober kind of person, I was introduced to Orlando’s widow Marina. There were three brothers, Leonardo, Claudio, and Orlando, and Leonardo died early on. So, in the end there was Claudio and Orlando. It was Claudio who was more involved in researching the mythological and paranormal. This really interested him, and so his notes are sitting there with Orlando’s widow and his son Noel. At the end of their lives, they promised in a TV interview to publish this material. They said they had not published it before because they did not want to get so much flack from the peer groups, both the United States and the rest of the world and Brazil, but that this had really happened and now they didn’t care what anybody thought. Orlando’s wife Marina went on many of the field trips as she was a nurse. And since Orlando was the last of the brothers to die, Claudio’s notes are there with Marina and Noel, but they have not really gone extensively into those notes. So that’s where I am. I went down there to Sao Paulo with an archeologist friend of mine who works for the National Museum, who also has a lot of connections with the material, from a different angle, and we talked to Marina and Noel, who are very congenial people, and they seemed interested. I gave her a copy of the article, and she thought that it was a possible take on it all, but they had not really gone into the notes yet.
So, I’m kind of waiting. She’s still mourning the whole situation because they made such an enormous contribution. They spent their whole lives studying these Indians in the Xingu (pronounced shing-goo), and studying them as thoroughly as possible, and there’s just a horrendous amount of material. And it’s not been systematically processed. So, it’s a matter of waiting.
Raynes: Right. Now the story, as we know it right now, is that there was actual observation by at least one of the anthropologists of like a landed UFO?
Cynthia Luce: I’m waiting to find out. So there’s another problem. The Villas Boas brothers have become a kind of iconic legend in Brazilian social science and especially anthropology. The problem is if I could just see these notes I’d be happy But it depends on whether they decide they don’t want to possibly tarnish their credibility. I’m just waiting. The story I have is that Claudio and Orlando told Luis Gonzaga, who apparently knew them quite well, and he talked extensively with Claudio about the interaction between the Indians and UFOs. Gonzaga says that they told him that Claudio was the one who saw something and the Indians told him always, so it should be in his notes, if they’ll let me get at them. Because I told them, I said, “Look, this is an area that should be more logically and soberly divulged, as something that science eventually has to deal with. You have in your hands the tools to change the mindset of scientists.” I told them, “Look what happened about Cannibalism. Cannibalism was never talked about. When I was a student, back in the 1950s, when I began studying anthropology and psychology, nobody ever talked about cannibalism. It was a no-no subject, and it’s the same thing about sex in sightings. Irene Granchi would tell me about how this sighting and that sighting contained sexual reports, but she would never ever say anything about them, and I said, “Irene, you have to report everything. That’s the name of the game. Otherwise, it is not science.”
Raynes: So, they would have sexual elements, and they would just leave them out because they weren’t popular?
Cynthia Luce: It wasn’t that they weren’t popular. People were afraid. I don’t know if you know what happened with cannibalism. Cannibalism is something that was rife all over. There are still cannibals in Brazil. If you read Oliver Sacks, he wrote a book called The Island of the Color Blind, about that group in Micronesia, on the tiny island of Pingelap. That insisted on eating the brains of the dead. It was a ritual kind of thing, and nobody talked about it because they said, “Oh no, that’s an aberration.” But it wasn’t. It was part of the culture at various points.
So, it’s the same thing with dimensions now and UFOs. Do you see what I mean?
Raynes: It’s what at a given time is acceptable culturally or whatever?
Cynthia Luce: What the scientists will allow, which is not always the whole picture.
Raynes: Scientists aren’t always as objective as they say the are.
Cynthia Luce: I have known scientists all of my adult life and I can vouch for that. (Laughs)
Raynes: You and Bob Pratt investigated and wrote up a report on the amazing Varginha case involving possibly two military captured humanoid beings. Meanwhile, a good number of Brazilian civilians in that community witnessed the beings and had also reported low-level UFO activity. Please share your thoughts and observations on this intriguing incident.
Cynthia luce: Again, I think that there were a lot of things going on about that time because shortly before the date of January 20, 1996, with the actual capture of these beings in Varginha, there were incidents in areas around there. Like in Passos, and I tried to talk to Ubirajara and all of those people about that whole thing, but they said, “Oh, don’t muddy the waters.” They just wanted to focus on the beings. But there were actually other phenomena happening, but that’s the whole problem with a case that becomes so prominent. A lot of details fall through the boards and there’s lots of people wanting to get in on the sensationalism of the whole thing, and eventually it gets set in stone. But the version that gets set in stone, which is what I think is happening now, isn’t the whole story, and/or isn’t necessarily the most accurate story. There are a lot of details that we can’t prove. There are a lot of details that are kind of iffy. There’s that story about the man who was coming from Sao Paulo to be in a hang gliding contest and he was passing through, taking a short cut, to the place he was going, and he passed a field where he saw a UFO go down and then he went off the road and into little side roads and finally arrived where the UFO had come down. There were already military people there and he got out of his car, and he picked up a piece of what he thought was from a craft. It was kind of a metal that was flexible and you’d scrunch it up and then it retook its shape. And that report some people believe and some people don’t believe because he waited nine months to talk about it. He said the military shooed him off and took that piece out of his hand which he was going to keep and told him to go away and not say anything. He got so shook up that he got back on the road and came to a place (I know where it is, in Minas where there is a little luncheonette, where you can have a snack) and he stopped and he had some coffee and some of their famous cheese bread. While he was having a large coffee, he was pretty shaky, an unmarked car pulled up and two guys got out. They were not in uniform, and they came up to him, and they said if he said any word to anybody that his family would be in jeopardy. It turned out that from his license plate they knew his whole life and they talked to hm about his wife and what she did and his children and where they went and son on and so forth, and so he was very frightened, and it took him nine months to get up enough courage to say something about that incident. (And it was only that the case continued to be publicized for a long time that he finally decided to come forth with what he’d experienced.)
Now people have pointed out that the guy had input into that type of thing, so they don’t know if he made it up or not.
Raynes: Does that have any connection in time and geography to this other case?
Cynthia Luce: Yes. It was right then. It was at that same time and in the region and there was also a couple who saw an UFO the night before the day the so-called ETs were captured. And there were these other guys in Passos that I was very interested in because they even had scratches on their chests. They had been attacked by this creature that was bipedal but black and nasty and furry, and really attacked these guys. They were all separately attacked at different times and different places. So, I think that there may be something to this idea of dimensions. A window opens, or there is an overlap or a warp, and something comes into our dimension which is outside of our consensus reality. Things happen, and then it shuts up again, and we have to deal with it. The problem is that unless you have an attitude that it is a dimensional situation, then it’s hard to deal with, difficult to explain. So, the Varginha case, to me, is still not finished because there are a lot of details now that Bob and I were straightening out, about the smell for instance. When we interviewed the girls, they said that they went back to the site and there was this ghastly, sulphury, nasty smell. Very strong. And then later on, I think it was Liliane who went on television and she said there was no smell and Roger Leir said there was no smell, but it was because the mother and one of the girls went back and there was a smell. It’s those kind of details that I think have to be sorted out, and not all of them have been resolved. So, I don’t want to say yes or no about the Varginha case.
Something happened in the region, and it was more than just those beings, but exactly what went on I can’t tell you.
Raynes: And you’ve been there three times?
Cynthia Luce: Yes. I knew Ubirajara (Rodrigues) from day one because he and Bob Pratt and Irene and I were all there researching the Bipendi case (2), a long time ago. And I took that photograph, that’s on Bob’s website of all the people in the Bipendi case. My daughter is in it, and Chica who is the daughter of Irene is in it and her kids. We all went there together. And Bob is there. I’ve known Ubirajara since about 1979. He’s the one who first started doing the research on the Varginha case as he lives there, and then he called in Pacaccini and then they had a falling out, and since they had a falling out there’s no coordination of the whole story. Because they really had a falling out and that’s too bad.
Raynes: They were all trying to hold on to what they each had researched and trying to say that it’s my case?
Cynthia Luce: It was more on a personal level. At first they were working together and it was going well and then they had a very violent, personal fight really and it wasn’t about data. It was about personal stuff, and they separated and Pacaccini went on doing research. Ubirajara published his book and Pacaccini published his book, first in Portuguese and then in English, and that whole thing got very complicated and ugly. It still is.
I just hope that American people who were involved in studying it realize that the whole story has not yet been sorted out. I will say that to anybody in any language (laughs). I really feel strongly about it.
Raynes: What was it like working with Bob Pratt? I know that a few years back in the pages of Saucer Smear magazine a letter he wrote was quoted where he stated that if he could have been made ruler of the world he’d have had several qualified investigators tracking down UFO cases in Brazil, and he said that country had several very fine investigators itself, and I’m sure that you and Alberto do Carmo of Brasilia, who you introduced to me over the internet last year, were no doubt at the top of Bob’s list.
Cynthia Luce: I think that Alberto is a very intelligent guy and I like him very much, and he does track things down. He was also working with Hulvio Aleixo, whom I also met at that same point in the 1970s, and Hulvio was an extremely thorough investigator. Alberto has the advantage that he speaks several languages, and he also taught physics and so he can do a lot of different things and have a perspective on things that a lot of investigators can’t because they haven’t been trained enough. Hulvio is a psychologist. He’s an ex-professor of psychology and he had a group in the Belo Horizonte area and for years and years he did a lot of work. People split off from him because he tended to be pretty dominating, and people in the end got very frustrated, but he was an extremely thorough investigator using color charts and models of different colored clay, going at it in a very systematic way, which I thought was really good. Both Alberto and Hulvio are very thorough and don’t invent details.
Raynes: Right. Well, I know from our correspondence we’ll kind of review things and he’ll write me back and point out “you need to correct this” or something, and I’m sure it’s a little difficult too with English not being his main language, but he does very, very well communicating.
Cynthia Luce: We communicate all of the time. He calls me up a lot. He was very hard hit by Bob’s death, as I was. Raynes: Yes, he had expressed the same thing to me, and how difficult it was to go to the computer and there wouldn’t be an email from Bob.
Cynthia Luce: The other person that we worked a lot with and whom I also like a lot is a man, who is around Bob’s age, from Forteleza, in the state of Ceara, and his name is Athayde Reginaldo. He also has been researching for a very long time and often has some very interesting cases. The only problem is that he does not speak English. His son does, but that’s the main problem. People come out and say, “Oh, America has all of these cases. More than any other place in the world.” Well, I’ll bet you that Brazil can match or pass that. It’s just that there aren’t enough people who get out there with English. People in the U.S. don’t really know what’s going on, which is unfortunate. I hope that we can remedy this. Maybe with Alberto or somebody.
Raynes: Where do you think, or hope anyway, that all of these anomalous events and research into them may be taking humankind? Cynthia Luce: I’m thinking far into the future, because I’ve been watching the trends in the maverick scientists, you know, what direction they’re taking, and recently the Harvard physicist Lisa Randall has come out with a book called Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions, and I would urge people to read that book because she’s a theoretical physicist, and an expert on particle physics, string theory, and cosmology.
Now if I were really advising people, I’d say watch what she says as it seems that’s where it’s all going, and that’s where we’re all going to fit in with the mystery of our experiences. That’s what’s going to explain it.
There’s a lot of resistance because people have to change, but that’s the way that science works.
Raynes: How have your experiences and your studies of these phenomena changed or shaped your own life and your perceptions of the world and the universe around us?
Cynthia Luce: To put it in a couple of sentences, I came to realize that our consensus reality is discontinuous. That is a very important point, and that’s a point that I think Lisa Randall makes in that book. Once you realize that, experiencing all of this anomalous phenomena is not so strange. It’s just there. It’s just a matter of perceiving it.
Raynes: Right. You described in your article in our August 2005 issue (3) of your experiences of seeing a craft sliding into a hillside and the other incident of the four legged being that went up your stairs and disappeared, and how afterwards you found out that other people had reported similar things, though you didn’t know this at the time of your own experiences. It definitely had to help to reenforce the idea that it was something interdimensional going on.
Cynthia Luce: I never even enumerated all of the different types of phenomena that I have experienced. We can do that another interview if somebody is interested (laughs). I haven’t even begun to tell you all of the things. But with each thing that happens I begin to find other people or people also find me and tell me things. The strange thing about what has happened to me is even though I have been trained on a more scientific level than most people, is that these things happen to me and then I begin to look for other material and see if other people or where it is in the literature they are cited. So, it isn’t that I try and fit my ideas into some hypothesis. Shove everything into a hypothesis that I already have. The hypothesis evolves from the experiences from the data.
Raynes: And of course, that’s what true science is supposed to be based on.
Cynthia Luce: Well, I hope so! (laughs)
References:
1. https://apmagazine.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1803&Itemid=53
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/uymxs3/baependi_case_in_brazil/
3. https://apmagazine.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=124&Itemid=53
