Giram os Sputniks nas alturas, ferve a Imaginação nas planuras: a ciência e o bizarro no Ceará em fins da década de 1950

Abstract

This Dissertation intends to recover the many different perceptions around some phenomena occurred in the 50’s, in the State of Ceará, described as flashes of light, blasts and luminous objects. These events repercuted in a controversial way in the local press as, on one hand, some people considered them as a result of progress in Science and Technology that allowed Space and Arms Race (that become one of the ingredients of the power dispute between US and USSR in the Cold War) and, on the other hand, for some other people, they showed up as strange and inexplicable phenomena, to which were given fantastic explications. In a search through newspapers from many tendencies -- American Time magazine, the communist paper O Democrata, and other papers from Ceará local press, such as O Povo, Unitário, O Jornal etc, besides some other documents (some of them just declassified by US Department of Defense) -- I intend to recover the debate that was established and the feelings of euphoria by the progress that they represented as well as those of fear and oddly, once they seemed fantastic, bizarre, and unusual.