Denise Slater (right) with Cynthia Newby Luce at he ARE UFO Conference.

An Interview with Denise Slater - Part 1

by Brent Raynes

Denise Slater, the granddaughter of famed Brazilian General Alfredo Moacyr Uchoa, is now a U.S. citizen and lives with her husband and two young daughters in Virginia, where she teaches Portuguese, Spanish, and French to the Special Forces at the U.S. Naval base in Norfolk, Virginia. Read this exclusive interview as Denise shares many extraordinary stories and memories of her grandfather and what he learned about UFOs and psychic realities, and what she learned from her own first-hand experiences.

Editor: I read the information about your grandfather, the famous Brazilian General Alfredo Moacyr Uchoa, on Bob Pratt’s website, and I don’t know if you’ve had an opportunity to read it or not?

Denise Slater: That’s how I met Bob. I did a google search with my grandfather’s name and I picked many different sites, but I ended up on Bob Pratt’s site and I was just very happy with what I read. Through the years, I had read a lot of very untrue or very shallow comments about his work, and I was just very impressed with what I read at Bob’s site. He was very precise. I wrote to Bob and complimented him on it and we started a friendship that lasted for about two years, until his death. Most unfortunately very recently. But that information that he put there really caught my eye. He was kind enough to mail me the original interview tapes of my grandfather’s interview that he did in 1979 at his house, in Brazil, and what I really loved about that was that it was in English. You see, most of my grandfather’s work is in Portuguese, so I was happy that for once I could show my husband the different opinions that my grandfather had based on those interviews. They were about two hours worth of tapes. About four cassettes. And I thought they were a treasure, and Bob Pratt mailed them to me.

Editor: That was very nice.

Denise Slater: Yes. He offered and I was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s incredible.” I have them here, right in front of me.

I came to live in the U.S. in 1990. My grandfather died six years later. When I left Brazil, he was already in bed. He had had a series of mini-strokes that did not affect his brain but did affect his legs, and I asked him for the copyrights to his books because my goal was to translate them into English, and he gave them to me. No one else in the family would do such a thing.

The problem that I have encountered, which Cynthia [Luce] knows well as she was here with me in December, is lack of time. When you have two little children you’re just not in control of your time. So that has been my problem, and I had this thing that April 21st would be the 100th birthday of my grandfather and I wanted so badly to have translated one of his books, to celebrate and honor him and maybe even make him a website, but I haven’t been able to. So it’s a matter of time constraints and I hope soon that I’ll be able to get back to that.

There were ten grandchildren and I was the only one that really and totally got hooked on it, and I lived with him and my grandmother, along with attending college, and so that gave me the opportunity to really get to know his work. I lived across the street from him since I was fifteen, so every event and everything that happened I was always there too. So I witnessed a lot and then later on as an adult I had a chance of living with him while I was going to college, so there were years and years and hours and hours of conversations and witnessing things that I feel, because they’re just so unique, they’re so different, so rare, that I feel a true obligation of not keeping it to myself. I have no intention of hiding it.

Editor: It sounds like it had to be truly incredible because just what I’ve read is incredible and certainly we should be able to get it into Alternate Perceptions early in April.

Denise Slater: I won’t be able to translate a whole book by April but that would be a wonderful way to honor him.

Editor: What memories do you have of what you actually experienced yourself?

Denise Slater: Well as far as UFOs goes, he had interest in several different areas. He also had that broad array of interest which in some ways made me think that he was very similar to Edgar Cayce. Edgar Cayce was the closest I can think of to someone like my grandfather. He was holistic in his areas of interest and psychic abilities.

So just narrowing it down and identifying it one by one, I can start with the UFOs. My first experience with UFOs, with him, I was twelve years old. His UFO experiences started in 1968. He moved to Brasilia in 1967. I was born in 1964, and my parents moved to Brasilia in ‘64. My dad was a military officer, a young Lieutenant at the time, and he was assigned to the Battalion of the President of the Republic, to a Brazilian Army Unit.

While my father was doing military exercises 80 to a 100 kilometers around Brasilia with his troops, he came across several reports of people seeing very strange things in the sky. As he went on with his military exercises more and more reports kept coming and this is a very sort of deserted area around Brasilia. There was nothing there in the 1960s. So he found that highly interesting, and because his father, my grandfather, had always been interested in psychic and paranormal phenomena and he had just retired as a General, he thought that he should call his father and report that. “Here dad, here’s something for you to investigate.” So he called my grandfather in Rio, and mentioned everything that had happened, and my grandfather came to Brasilia and decided to move to Brasilia.

So he had retired as a General, he was living in Rio, and he packed and moved to Brasilia just like that. He bought him an apartment in Brasilia, and later on he bought a small farm near the area where these things were taking place. All kinds of different phenomena happened there. This started when I was three, and so by the time I was twelve this was the most current, normal thing for me to think of UFOs as being a part of everybody’s life. “Oh, my father and my grandfather go see UFOs every weekend.” So this was a very current fact of my life, and by the time I was 12 my grandfather had written probably two or three of his most important books, which was a report of everything that happened in that area, and my father was the most active member of his research group. My father would never let my grandfather go alone. He would always be with him. So I’ve heard these stories all of my life.

So they would take us kids to my grandfather’s farm (or actually more of a ranch than a farm) for the night so that they could go to the bigger areas where these things were happening, which was about 22 kilometers away from that place. We were always left behind. The kids were not allowed to go with them. But when I was twelve, I decided that it was time for me to see something, and so I was very bad, I decided to cheat. I knew that I was not allowed in the car to go to the farm, so I pretended that I was sleeping and my grandmother said, “Oh, she’s sleeping. Leave her in the back of the car. She’ll sleep the whole time.” So they didn’t drop me at my grandfather’s ranch. They carried me in the back of the car and I was pretending that I was asleep, because I knew, at that time, that my grandfather had telepathic contact with the extraterrestrials and they would tell him what time the sightings were going to be, and I heard my grandfather telling my dad or my grandmother that that night there was going to be a sighting at 9 o’clock, and the group had to go, and the group was a very large number of people. It went from 12 to 20 people that would go regularly to see things with binoculars, telescopes, cameras, everything.

So I pretended that I was sleeping in the back of the car and when we got to the big farm, 22 kilometers away from my grandfather’s ranch, and the owner had seen this phenomena going back some 10 years, and he just opened his doors to the researchers and to my grandfather to just come over and study anything you want (laughs). He was just tired of seeing things and those phenomena were scaring his employees.

So we went to that farm, and I had heard that they had a particular point on that farm called the Pedra Preta, which is the black stone, the highest point on the farm. A big black stone, and they would stay up there. I saw the group get out of the car. Dad was there, Murilo Bettamio, a great friend of my grandfather’s, all the friends that I knew, and I had this little Walt Disney watch that I kept looking at and when it was 9 o’clock I just got out of the car and I saw the group standing in a circle holding hands and they were looking up and when I looked up I saw maybe 6 to 8 objects. I don’t recall the exact number. They were just pieces of light, in the shape of small elongated eggs. I could not see anything else but light coming from them, and they were moving over the top of our heads making geometric drawings with no noise. Extremely fast. They would stay still, and then move again. They were big and there were several of them, and there was no noise, like the regular sounds of the farm. There was no cows moving. No frogs. Nothing.

My grandmother was very worried. She said, “Go back to the car! This is not for children! Go back, go back!” I didn’t move. I was just like, “Oh, my gosh.” But they allowed me to stay. Since I was there there was nothing they could do. At this particular time, there was no landing, no other phenomena. Just this display of lights, and then they just disappeared, just swoosh, in one direction, with no noise. Nothing.

My grandfather had this long talk with me. He said, “Denise, you’re lucky this time that nothing happened to you, but very often, even among the members of our group, these beings or these UFOs emit such a level of energy that they can make you feel very bad. Some people just get knocked down to the ground and can’t move, some people just get very sick. Others faint. So we don’t want children to be exposed to that. We don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with. This particular people who were here tonight are friendly. They’re scientists. They tell me that they’re scientists. They want to show that they were here and they want me to write about them. But I don’t know what they can cause to you so you should not be allowed until you are older.” That’s what he told me.

After that he would allow the children, I mean like 12, 13, 14, the grandchildren, to come along and to visit the area and just take away our curiosity. So they let us come a couple of more times, in which he knew that nothing was going to happen.

So between this time and the next time that I saw something, I was already 18. So between 12 and 18 I was not really allowed to go back, but it got me hooked and when I entered college, the University of Brasilia, to study architecture everyone in the city knew who I was, who my grandfather was, and there was this huge interest and people just come and talked to me. So I decided to form my own UFO research group and this little group was coordinated or advised by my grandfather. My grandfather at that time also had founded a university. I don’t know if you know, but my grandfather’s background was that he was an engineer and a physics professor at the Military Academy in Brasilia.

Editor: Right, and he was also like the deputy director?

Denise Slater: Yeah, of the department of mathematics and physics. He was also responsible in the late 1940s, like 1949, he was sent with a team from the Brazilian Military Academy to the United States and they stayed at West Point Academy for two months. They were supposed to learn about the U.S. military system and compare it with the Brazilian system. He was taken even to see, in a private fashion, in the Embassy, the film of the UFOs over Washington, D.C.

He came here more than one time. 1949 was his first assignment. He kept coming for this purpose other times. I don’t know the chronology well, but I know that’s how he was interested in UFOs and what was happening here.

Editor: According to the information on Bob Pratt’s website, the experiences began at a farm initially at Alexania.

Denise Slater: In the rural area of Alexania, yes. That is the big farm that I was telling you about. It is not my grandfather’s ranch that is located in the city of Alexania, which was not really a farm. He never had an interest in growing anything on his property. It was just a big piece of land that had a river, it had maybe over 20 different types of fruit trees, and there was a property keeper who had some chickens. The farm where the phenomena happened was 22 kilometers away from there, in the rural area of the city of Alexania, and they used to go there every night during the weekends. We would go on the weekends, to my grandfather’s ranch. It was like a second home. And from there the people could drive only 22 kilometers, instead of going 122 km to the ranch and 122 km to return home to Brasilia on the weekend. That was too much. My grandfather had that ranch for 25 years. No, more than that. It just got sold five years ago.

Editor: How many books did he write about his experiences?

Denise Slater: About seven. I have them all here. The very first one about UFOs is the one that made him very famous, which is a collection of all the sightings, from the very first one to the very last one.

Editor: According to the report that Bob Pratt wrote it was just about every night for months that they would see UFOs, and that your grandfather came within ten to fifteen meters of a craft at one time, and saw someone who came within about a meter of one of the beings.

Denise Slater: Yeah, he wanted to hug it. He wanted to run and give it a big hug (laughs) and the creature emitted a telepathic message saying “Danger of death. Don’t come near.” Not that he didn’t want to hug my grandfather. It was because of some kind of clash in their energetic field between the two worlds or whatever that was, and it could kill my grandfather. His biggest dream was to be taken inside an aircraft and be taken away. The feeling was very scary (laughs). It never happened, but we were very terrified that that would happen one day.

Now in 1981, I was about 16 years old and that’s when we moved across the street from my grandfather and most of the big stories started. Do you know about Thomas Green Morton?

Editor: No.

Denise Slater: On one of my grandfather’s books, Diving in Hyperspace, my grandfather wrote one chapter about him. This was the strangest man. His story starts when he was 12 years old and while he was out fishing he was directly struck by lightning. He almost died, but since then he started to present several inexplicable supernatural powers. He became a man who was totally lost because he was as illiterate as you can be and he had no idea what to do with his powers and he ended up with my grandfather. This man had incredible, incredible, incredible powers, but he was not bright and he was eventually lost. He started making money with it and he got taken away by the media, by sensational propaganda, and then we just lost contact with him. The first year he came to my grandfather, and I met him, and I saw this stuff that he did. It was just incredible. He would speak and then this light would pop around him Bubbles of light, and those were beings who were with him the whole time, and he could levitate at any given moment, and he did not control it. He could be just glued to the ceiling, and he would scream for his wife, because the baby was playing under him, and he had no control. He didn’t know when he was going to fall and smash the baby, so he had these incredible powers that he had no idea how to control. The one that he had learned how to control is the one where he would twist and change metal, and he would just, without touching anything, he would just scream, “Raahh!” and this light would pop around him and whatever metal was in front of him, it could be coins, forks, knives, whatever it was it would just swirl and melt in front of your eyes. I’ve seen it.

When I was little he took my father and my grandfather away during Christmas. They missed Christmas. The women in the family were just livid furious with the whole thing. But these two scientists from Duke were there and they registered everything and Thomas was just an incredible phenomenon. He was just absolutely incredible, and when we analyzed the metal that he melted and the conclusion was that they were not melted. Their molecules were reassembled. There was no sign of heat on them. They were not stretched or anything. Imagine a fork that the end of the fork was just a twirl. That was the appearance of how they looked. When they analyzed these in the lab here in the U.S. at Duke University they didn’t see signs of heat melting it or bending or anything. It was just that the molecules were re-organized, reformed and reshaped the fork that way. So one of the books is about this guy, and later on he became like the guru of the TV stars and we just lost him, and my grandfather lost interest in him. But that first year he was searching for help from my grandfather and the point where we lost him was when he started pretending that he could heal people. That was when my grandfather started putting distance from him. Thomas could not control his energy. He could not focus the energy to do a thing. The energy came whenever it wanted and then he’d be frustrated because he’d call like a TV crew and then nothing would happen. And then other times it would happen. I remember seeing a movie done by French television. It was incredible. He had an egg that turned into a chick in his hand. This was in the film by the TV crew. Turned an egg into a chick, a living chick. The egg was broken. He had the egg in his hand. He had the yoke in his hand and the yoke just swirled and formed a chick in his hand. It was incredible and this is on film by the French television crew. I saw this film. I didn’t see him doing it, but I saw the film.

Editor: But you’ve seen him bending the metal.

Denise Slater: Yes, and I have a coin right here in front of me, and my grandmother was very mad after his visit to her ranch because you see everyone wanted to have a souvenir from him and so everybody put their coins and their scissors, knives, everything we could find to put on the table for Thomas to twist and do whatever. So he would twist nothing that he brought but things that you would bring to the table. But what my grandmother did not know was that he would twist things that were hidden, that he did not know about. Things that were not in the room. All my grandmother’s tweezers, nail clippers, scissors, and things like that in the house were bent. They were all ruined. She was very, very mad. There was not a single pair of scissors, a single pair of tweezers, nothing in the house that was not twisted.

Editor: And you saw him do the “raahh” and the light.

Denise Slater: Yes. And he had a scent to him. He smelled like pine. He smelled like a tree.

Editor: Like a pine tree?

Denise Slater: Like a pine tree. The elevator that used to go to my grandparents apartment (in Brasilia they live in apartments) and the elevator smelled like Thomas for years after he was gone (laughs).

Once my grandfather went with Thomas for a trip in the interior of Minas Gerais State. Somebody forgot to put the gas in the car. So many interesting things happened! They stopped the car, the one that my grandfather was in had gas and the one that Thomas was in had no gas. Thomas asked them to put the two cars side by side, opened the gas tanks and Thomas said “Raahh!” and they started smelling this horrible smell of gas in the air. The result was that in the end, both cars had the same amount of gas.

Editor: And he would just say “Raahh”?

Denise Slater: At that time yes, but it is good to remember that sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. He had no control, and that’s why when he started to try and make money and schedule events and things wouldn’t happen, that’s when my grandfather backed off. My grandfather never had any financial interest in anything. He was a very well accomplished person financially as a retired General, and as I previously mentioned to you he was the dean, the founder, the president of a university in Brasilia. You can look it up on line. It’s called UPIS. Uniao Pioneira de Integracao Social - Pioneer Union of Social Integration. Check out their web site: http://www.upis.br/ It has over 4,000 students. A huge university, and he founded it with a group of retired professors. So financially my grandfather had no interest in this whatsoever. His only goal was pure scientific research. It was part of his eternal “search for the truth” (which is the title of his autobiography, by the way) He saw himself as a physics professor, an engineer, as somebody that had a solid academic and scientific background that he could address things in that way. So when he studied these phenomena he tried to follow a scientific method and do scientific research in which he would try and isolate the event. He really tried to make them credible. Not for others but for himself. He wanted to find the truth. That was his whole thing. So there was no interest there for money, for sensation, for books. He would give things for free. Actually what is interesting about him is his relationship to his university and whichever student wanted a scholarship they just got it. All that they had to do was talk to my grandfather. There were hundreds of people in Brasilia who came to his funeral. People that we never knew. They had attended his college for free. It was a private school and he just gave it away. He was a person who had almost no connection to the material world in the sense of wanting things. So all of his work was just pure, pure search for knowledge.

Editor: He had a lot of respect.

Denise Slater: Actually, if anything, he would have things to lose in life by promoting these things as a dean of a university and as a general, he could have lost his reputation instead of gaining anything with that kind of publicity linking him to UFOs.

Editor: Right. Many people have.

Denise Slater: And that’s why he was so famous because everyone knew him and at that period of time Brazil was a military dictatorship and my grandfather had been the professor of the past three presidents and I remember him at one point telling me that six ministers were his students. He was highly, highly respected, and people just assumed that whatever he was saying was true, or at least should be looked at because this was not written by a lunatic.

Editor: Right. This was not lunatic fringe stuff here.

Denise Slater: No. And actually in one of the contacts that he had with the extraterrestrials, in the telepathic method of communication, they told him that was why he was chosen to witness these phenomenon, and they specifically told him to write about it because they knew that he would be a credible force. They wanted a credible person, a credible force, someone that had the ability to write and be taken seriously. That’s also in his book.

Editor: Wow!

Denise Slater: It’s amazing and that’s why I tell you that the closest person I know to him is Edgar Cayce because he was just holy. There was much more to him than just the UFO phenomenon. He was also a healer. I don’t know if Bob Pratt ever mentioned that.

Editor: No, I didn’t read about that.

Denise Slater: He was a healer and he said, “The power doesn’t come from me.” And at this point he had a very strong faith. He was not (how can I say this) a man with a religion. He was not a religious man. He didn’t belong to any organized religion. None whatsoever. But he was the most profound, religious person without belonging or being affiliated to any religion on the face of the earth. He used to say that he loved all religions because all of them contained truth and that he was totally enchanted to pray in their temples. That was precisely why, he used to say, that he could not have one religion, because if he adopted one he would have to forego all of the others. He said he was eternally Christian, that the healing powers came straight from Jesus’s

power and to the person that deserved it according to his karma. If his karma allowed he was healed, and he would just put his hand on top of a person’s head and ask in the power of Jesus if that person was to be healed to be healed, and in his autobiography he listed I think 400 cases of total healing. From cancer to anything. You name it.

This side of him was not as sensational, amazingly, as his work with the UFOs. It was never something that he publicized, that he mentioned, but his motto with that was that if there was a person in Sao Paulo, with cancer or with whatever disease, especially terminal people, they would send for him and all they had to do was send him an airplane ticket, that’s all, and he’d go. He’d interrupt his function as a dean, as a writer, he would just interrupt whatever and he would go. He never charged anyone for this. It was just sheer compassion.

There was one specific healing that to me was the most amazing of all. He organized the first two international congresses on UFOs and paranormal activities in Brazil. The first was 1979, in Brasilia, and J. Allen Hynek came to it, among scientists from the entire world. I was there for the second one, in 1981. On the second congress, that was attended by 2,000 people and over 50 researchers and professors. People from this field came from all over the world. Including Hynek. My grandfather put me in charge of showing Brasilia to Dr. Hynek. I took him sight-seeing all day in my orange beetle. He had a great time at the arts and crafts fair, called “the Hippie fair” where he purchased some earrings for his family (wife, daughter? I don’t remember). He got a chance to speak to me all day so he later told my grandfather that he wanted me to do the consecutive translation of his conference, instead of the hired professional translator they had. His conference had lots of slides. He was very organized with his slides and the comments that followed them. It was my first experience with translation at that level and I remember I was truly impressed (no power point at that time, but everything was timed and really well organized). The format of the translation was “consecutive” meaning the speaker would read a small segment and then I would read the same small segment in Portuguese. He gave me the text several hours in advance so I had time to look up words in the dictionary and my dad got a chance to revise and make sure I was to the point. There were 2,000 people in the Convention Center building that day. It is an impressive modern construction, all in concrete.

That’s why I went to the ARE conference here in Virginia Beach because Dr. Vallee was very good friends with Hynek, and my grandfather always mentioned Jacques Vallee so highly that I was extremely curious to meet him. So that’s why I attended the conference here at Virginia Beach.

But going back to the healing, during that congress he was extremely busy. He was the dean of the university and he was organizing this gigantic congress and he got this phone call from the sister of a father in the city of Petropolis, Interior of Rio de Janeiro State, which is the distance of flying from lets say where you are in Tennessee to Nebraska. It’s a long way. The woman says, “General Uchoa, I heard so much about you. We need your help. My nephew is diagnosed with a terminal disease and he is in terrible pain. We know that there is nothing to do for him. The doctors have already told us that there is no hope, and we have accepted that, but we haven’t accepted the level of pain that he is in,” and the boy was like ten years old. Even morphine ceased to relieve his pain. “My brother, the boy’s father, is a doctor and godless, but he allowed me to call you asking for help,” she added. My grandfather was just horrified because he couldn’t go, he was just too busy that day and he couldn’t go. Then my grandfather said to that anxious woman that he could not do anything physically at that moment, but he had some previous experiences of cases in which he could do the treatment at a distance. He then asked for the child’s name, his address and finished up the conversation saying: “Remember that in this very moment the Superior Forces could be already working. Let’s have Faith.” So my grandfather hangs up, with his heart heavy and he goes on with business.

A few weeks pass and the phone rings again in Brasilia. My grandfather answers it. It was a call from Petropolis. At the other side of the line, the sad voice of a grateful father. “General I am the father of that child that had a terminal illness that my sister talked about three weeks ago. I am calling to thank you for everything you did for us. After your visit here, after you spoke alone with our son, he never felt any pain again. He died yesterday, because his disease was incurable, but your coming to Petropolis brought him the miracle of relieving him from the pain.” My grandfather, shocked from what he was hearing, told him, “My dear doctor I did not go to Petropolis.” “How can that be?” was the answer from the father of the child. “As soon as my sister told me that you had said that you could not come I just could not take no for an answer an as a last resort of hope I decided to call you up myself. The phone rang just one time and you answered it. Before I could say anything you said, “I know what this is about. Wait for me tomorrow afternoon at 3 p.m. at Petropolis, at the bus station. I will come see your son.” Then I asked you how I would recognize you and you said that it would be easy because you would be wearing a suit, with a long white jacket and a white hat with a blue ribbon. At 3 p.m. I was there. I had not problems in identifying you. You said almost nothing and I brought you to my home, which is a small ranch in the outskirts of the city. When you got there you immediately asked to see the child, but did not want anyone to accompany you. You stayed in his room for about half an hour and when you came out you just said “please take me back to the bus station.” Middle of the way back, in an isolated area you asked me to stop because you wanted to get out. I reminded you that there was no place for you to go there but that I would take you wherever you wanted to go. You insisted that you wanted to be left right there. And you did. I did not understand but did what you asked me and came home. My son never felt any pain again. He died yesterday and today I am calling you to thank you from all my heart.”

At that point, my grandfather had already figured out what had happened, but he only said: “Doctor, I need to speak to you in person. I will visit you in Petropolis in three days.” My grandfather separated some 15 old photographs of people who lived long ago and brought them to Petropolis. As soon as he met with the child’s father he heard from him the following cry: “But it was not you who I picked up that day at the bus station.” Then went on talking until they got to the ranch and there, at the presence of his sister, who was the first one that called him, my grandfather took from his pockets the pictures that he had brought. “Was this the person that came?” he asked them. “No, it wasn’t,” they said. “We would recognize him immediately.” He showed them the second, third...the sixth picture. The seventh picture they screamed like a scream of joy, “It’s him!” they said. “Turn the picture upside down” said my grandfather. When they turned it they saw the name on the back: PHILLIPE DE LION. Calmly my grandfather explained that Phillipe de Lion was a French doctor that had died in the first decade of the twentieth century. He was famous for healing people in a “supernatural” way. He also told them that Phillipe de Lion had been, through several years, his great mentor of the healings that had been intermediated by my grandfather. In reality, Phillipe de Lion was my grandfather’s Master. He was famous by his blue energy used during work of paranormal healings. The same color of the ribbon that ornated his hat when he came out of the bus station in Petropolis, wearing his white linen suit on the style and fashion of the end of the XIXth century. The explanation of that phenomena was “very simple” to my grandfather. Master Phillipe intervened in the phone call already with his decision to take on personally this matter. He materialized himself to be present with the family and to execute the alleged miracle. The father never learned what he had spoken to the boy. When he asked the boy he just said “I liked him very much and we made a deal of keeping a secret that I cannot tell.” So without any pain the child died a few days later. The doctor, a godless person, deeply moved by these events, asked my grandfather for guidance in what to read, because he no longer wanted to be godless. My grandfather recommended some Theosophy books, especially the ones written by Helena Blavatski, Annie Besante and Charles Leadbeater.

As a final note on this matter I know a Brazilian lady here in Virginia Beach, who is from Petropolis. Her father was also a doctor there, and SHE KNOWS this family and this doctor. He remembers that this is considered “a miracle” to this day in that city.

My grandfather was the most free thinker. He questioned everything in the universe. He was just very, very different for his time. When I asked permission to translate his books, he just laughed. Because I worked with international trade for a long time in exports. I speak four languages. I’m totally a worldly business person and he just started laughing and said “Denise, with your international commerce you’re never going to have time for this. You’re going to be the busiest woman on the face of the earth and you’re never going to do this,” and he started laughing. And I said, “Grandfather, don’t make fun of me. I will translate that one day,” and he looked at me and said, “Yeah, I think you will, but let me tell you one thing. Don’t be in a hurry. When you’re old and you’re this little old lady and you have nothing else to do, then when you translate this book it’s still going to be very, very far out. Fifty years it’s still going to be as far out as it is today. So don’t worry. You live your life and do it when you can.”

It really is. It’s totally far out.

Editor: It certainly is. It is truly an incredible story, and there’s a whole lot more to it than I initially realized. We’ve been talking now for close to an hour.

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Editor’s Note: This concludes Part One of the Denise Slater interview. Part Two will appear in the upcoming May 2006 edition, and it gets even more incredible!

Part 2 click here