Bob Pratt Passed Away on Monday, November 21, 2005. Click Here to Read His Obituary
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Bob Pratt passed away on Monday, November 21, 2005. Click here to read his obituary. My name is Bob Pratt and this is my personal web page. I was once actually paid to chase down UFO reports but found the subject so fascinating that for more than twenty years I have dug into my own pocket to do it. I created this page partly as something to do now that I am retired, and partly because I have many stories in my files that few have ever seen. Some of The beginning of an adventure. The horsemen them date back to my early days of are (from left) Daniel Centeno, Omar Forti and research in the United States and several Army Lt. Jorge Antequera. I am on foot. We were other countries. Most of those written in in Bolivia beginning a hike deep into the Andes the past twenty years tell about incidents to look into reports that a UFO had crashed. See in Brazil, a place of extraordinary UFO 'You DIDN'T Get the Story!' below. activity. For more than fifty years, Brazil has been one of the world's top UFO hot spots. Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of encounters have taken place. A small but significant number of them have been harmful, causing injuries and even deaths. What happened to some victims is recounted in this book, which was published by Horus House Press in 1996. Brief summaries of a few of these encounters are told in "Brazil's Dangerous UFOs" below. Some incidents, which are described below, occurred in 1977 and 1978 in an extraordinary UFO flap that has never been fully investigated. Contact us • About This Site • All rights reserved Online March 2, 2002 • Last revised June 23, 2005. The Links page is updated periodically. ROBERT V. PRATT Robert Vance Pratt died Monday, November 21, 2005 at a local hospital following a brief illness. He was born August 12, 1926. He was 79 years old. A journalist and UFO researcher, he retired in April 1999 after 48 years as a newspaper and magazine reporter and editor, writing under the byline of “Bob Pratt.” He studied at the University of California-Berkeley and American University. During the first 22 years of his career, he worked in various reporting and editing positions on the Alexandria (Va.) Gazette, the Charlottesville (Va.) Daily Progress, the Evansville (Ind.) Courier, the Buffalo (N.Y.) Evening News, the Miami (Fla.) News, the Philadelphia (Pa.) Inquirer, the Louisville (Ky.) Times and Courier-Journal. He worked for the Charlottesville newspaper three different times for a total of 10 years, twice as a reporter and the third time as managing editor, for seven years. After leaving the Louisville Times and Courier-Journal, where he had been executive assistant to the editor and publisher, he worked for eight and a half years as a writer and reporter for the National Enquirer. The last 17 years of his career he worked in computer page design and production for three other tabloid magazines, the National Examiner, Globe and the Sun. During his newspaper days he was a skeptic on the subject of UFOs, but in May 1975 as a reporter for the National Enquirer he came to believe UFOs are real after interviewing more than 60 people in one week who had seen UFOs. From that moment on UFOs became a major interest in his life, and since then he has interviewed more than 2,000 people who had UFO experiences. He traveled all over the United States and Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Puerto Rico, Peru, Uruguay, the Philippines and Japan looking into reports of UFO sightings. During the six years he worked as a UFO reporter for the Enquirer, he traveled to Brazil four times. He found that UFO encounters there were often more hostile and harmful than anywhere else in the world. As a result, after leaving the Enquirer in 1981 he began investigating UFO reports on his own and traveled to Brazil ten more times, most recently in 2003. He wrote the book UFO DANGER ZONE: Terror and Death in Brazil – Where Next? (Horus House Press 1996). An updated version in Portuguese was published in Brazil in July 2003. In recognition of his research in Brazil, on May 3, 2003 at a conference in the city of Curitiba in southern Brazil, he was given a diploma naming him an “Ufólogo Brasileiro Honorário” or Honorary Brazilian Ufologist. Seventy-eight Brazilian ufologists signed the diploma. He also co-authored (with Dr. J. Allen Hynek and Philip Imbrogno) NIGHT SIEGE: The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings (Ballantine 1987) and the NIGHT SIEGE Second Edition Expanded & Revised (Llewellyn 1998). He was also editor of the MUFON UFO Journal in 1983-84. In more than 28 years as a UFO researcher, he never saw a UFO. He was a veteran of World War II, serving in the U.S. Army Air Force. At a New Year’s Eve party in Charlottesville, Virginia, he met Faith Collins. They were married October 22, 1955. She and their son, Alan Collins Pratt of New York City, survive him. Another son, Robert Scott Pratt, died in 1975 at the age of 17. A cousin, Richard Taylor of Boca Raton, and numerous nieces and nephews in California also survive him. Home • Contact us • About This Site • All rights reserved Covering the May 6, 1978 “UFO crash” south of Tarija, Bolivia (for that story, click here) was a significant time for me. By then I had traveled quite a bit in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Uruguay, reporting stories for the National Enquirer, many of them about UFO encounters. But going deep into the Andes Mountains of Bolivia was the first real adventure of my life. Over the years since then I’ve had half a dozen more little adventures. None of them were as dangerous as covering a war or going undercover to investigate mobsters or corrupt officials, but they were exhilarating, especially for someone who turned fifty-two just three months after visiting Tarija. What was also remarkable about this story is that it was never published even though I worked on it for nearly four weeks and four other Enquirer staff members put in an addition three weeks of effort on it. More on that later. Tarija – capital of the department, or state, of Tarija – was a pleasant little city about six thousand feet up in the mountains. Today it has a population of around a hundred thousand, but the first time I was there, in May 1978, it had about twenty thousand souls. I remember being impressed by the fact that most of the houses looked clean and were nicely painted in various pastel shades, and that nearly every morning I would see people sweeping the streets in front of their homes. I learned soon that this might have been due to the fact that the army colonel who was governor of Tarija had decreed that homes and streets would be kept clean and neat. COOPERATIVE AUTHORITIES Even though the country was under military rule, I never saw any signs of repression. The governor, the major commanding the local army garrison and the colonel in charge of the Tarija air force group all treated me cordially. All three found the border incident a mystery and they cooperated in my efforts to find out what happened. At least a half dozen Bolivian and Argentinean reporters were in the area but I was the only American reporter to show up. On May 16 I had flown to Rio de Janeiro to look into a report that a Brazilian Air Force colonel had seen a fleet of perhaps a hundred UFOs pass low in formation over an air base near Rio. I also intended to work on several other UFO stories in Brazil as well as one in Uruguay, where I had been in 1977. This was my first real trip to Brazil, although not my first time in Rio. The previous July I was one of more than a hundred unhappy passengers who had spent a miserable night in Rio after our Pan American jetliner from Montevideo to Miami developed engine trouble over Brasília. We turned back and landed at the international airport in Rio. After a couple of hours of sitting in the terminal – where one irate American passenger had a flight attendant in tears, blaming her for all the ills of the world – we were bused very late at night all the way across the city to the few dreary motels on the far south side that still had empty rooms. Then early the next morning we were bused all the way back across the busy city to board the plane after the engine problem had been fixed. This visit to Rio in 1978, however, was far more pleasant. Arriving on the morning of May 17, I checked into a good hotel that was just off Rio’s Leme beach and only a block or two from Irene Granchi’s apartment. Irene was one of Brazil’s best-known UFO investigators and at the time was my sole source for UFO news in Brazil. Irene (say Ee-RAY-nee) kept me informed of what was happening, and later, through her, I was to come to know many other investigators throughout the country. The story about the fleet of UFOs, however, was going to be tough to get because the colonel had told her he wasn’t going to talk about it anymore and there apparently were few if any other witnesses.