Berlet, Artur
Artur Berlet is one of the more fascinating and obscure figures in the history of UFO contactee claims, particularly notable for being a South American case from the 1950s.
Background
Artur Berlet was born in 1931 in Sarandi, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, of German/French descent. He was described as tall, with bronzed skin, dark brown hair, and blue eyes — a man of little formal education who worked as a tractor driver in rural Brazil.
The Abduction
On May 14, 1958, Berlet was returning from the countryside when, at around 7 o'clock, he passed Dr. Dionisio Peretti's farm. About 200 meters away, he noticed a strange light in the woods by the roadside and ventured through a wire fence to investigate. When he got about 30 meters from the light, he found a massive round object roughly 30 meters in diameter, shaped like two trays turned in opposition to each other.
According to his account, he was taken aboard the craft and transported to the home planet of the beings who took him — a multi-level, deep-bowl disc-shaped spacecraft. After arriving, he was kept there and shown around the planet for about eight days while the beings examined and interrogated him, before being safely returned to the area near his home in Sarandi.
Planet Acart
The word "Acart" — meaning "message" — is what the beings conveyed to Berlet as the name of their world.
His guide on the planet was a tall, powerful man named Acorc, who initially addressed him in perfect German. Acorc told him that Acart was 62 million kilometers from Earth, had no natural satellites but two enormous space platforms, had a constantly freezing climate, and used aerial propulsion. Its cities were described as similar to Earth cities, but restricted to pedestrians only.
Some remarkable details from Berlet's account included descriptions of subterranean automatic trains without conductors, unique agricultural methods, fish-farming, and different animals and vegetation — details that struck some researchers as oddly prescient for a rural, barely literate man in 1958.
One particularly striking claim: Berlet reportedly observed from space that the Earth was blue — a description that predates Yuri Gagarin's famous 1961 confirmation of the same observation by three years.
The Return and Aftermath
He was dropped off 5 kilometers from Sarandi and made the three-hour walk home on foot. In the first week after his return, Berlet stayed home to recover his energy and try to process the eleven days he had been away.
He wrote everything down in 14 notebooks — a total of 422 handwritten pages in pencil. Investigators Jorge E.M. Geisel, Carlos de Oliveira Gomes, and Rui Schmidt later arranged a meeting with Berlet and conducted what amounted to a 5–7 hour interrogation, after which Geisel concluded that Berlet had genuinely disappeared for nine Earth days, from May 14th to May 23rd, 1958.
Character and Credibility (in UFO circles)
Berlet never sold a book or tried to profit from his story, and investigators found no way to discredit his detailed descriptions. He had not read science fiction and was not a reader by habit. He was well respected by neighbors, friends, and family, and always stood by his account despite widespread ridicule. He simply accepted that most people could not believe him.
Publication
The story remained largely in Portuguese until the 1980s, when UFO researcher and publisher Wendelle C. Stevens had it translated. The book UFO Contact from Planet Acart was published in August 1988 by UFO Photo Archives in a limited run of 1,000 copies, and is now quite rare and collectible.
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