Thinking Sideways: The Lead Mask case

all of the legwork on this thing. They'll also notice if you had listened to what we're calling the last twenty six episodes before and you're re listening now, the music and sound effects are gone. Yes, we've we've gone back to straight audio, so be warned. We sound a little different today than we do in what you're about to listen to. Yeah, bye bye, Thinking Sideways. I don't understand. You never know stories of things. We simply don't know

the answer too. So Hi everyone, this is Thinking Sideways the podcast. I'm Devin, I'm Steve, I'm Joe, and we're going to talk about a mystery and unsolved mystery I know, and it's actually my favorite kind of unsolved mystery. It turns out I'm seeing a pattern and the unsolved mysteries I bring, like the ones where people die. They're all cases where like apparently healthy middle aged men die under weird circumstances. That's really disconcerned. So I don't know what

that says about the future of your guys lives. Run a story ideas going to be like, oh gosh, we have a perfect story because Joe disappeared the other day. Sound so weird. Sound hung from a tree but there was no rope. Well how did that happen? Okay, anyways, we're going to talk about the lead mass case today. We're in Rio Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in nineteen sixty six. It's Auguste and Uh to TV repairman tell their relatives

that they need to go buy supplies for work. UM and some accounts say that they also mentioned they want to buy a car for work. Uh And they're close friends. They travel a lot together. They're always seen together. They had money for a vehicle maybe, but they definitely had money for the supplies with them. The men who are Miguel who Jose and Manuel Uh later stop at a bar to get a bottle of water and they get a receipt for a deposit. You know, nineteen sixty six.

You get like a glass bottle or something that you bring it back, You put a deposit on it, you bring it back there we use it ten cents twenty cents, which it was real money. You know, it's not like millions of dollars, but it's real money. It's worth the return. The bartender said that Miguel appeared to be in a hurry because he was frequently checking his watch. Some accounts I've read said that the bartender said that he looked nervous. I think it's just you know, semantics. At that point,

somebody's retelling it to make it more mysterious and inviting. Okay, bounce around. The tailor is really told, you know, things get embellished a little bit too. So that's the last time either of them were seen alive. Well that's a quick story. Wait, okay, so there's gotta be more here. There's more here. So a boy flying a kite found their bodies three days later on Vintem Hill in re Aditionary.

Both men were dressed in suits and wearing waterproof coats, which wasn't really out of the ordinary because it had apparently according to most accounts, most reasonable accounts it had been pouring rain recently, so it makes sense. You know. Again, there are definitely accounts that say it was weird because it was sunny, but I suspect that it probably was rain. If it's Readian arrow, the weather is, I mean, it's subtropical areas and the weather goes back and forth. It's

it's known for storms. It's out of the coast. A lot of yeah, a lot of areas like like you know, when I was in South America, like they had the rainy season, and the rainy season is usually pretty nice, but then for about a half hour to an hour out of every day, it just dumps, you know, and so and then and then it clears up and it's nice again. Yeah and yeah, and so that's probably what the case we're down there. Yeah, So the rain jackets

weren't really out of the ordinary. However, the lead eyemasks, which were like sunglasses almost but made out of lead with no holes poked in them, But that was a little out of the ordinary. That's a little different. And by the way, I soon pictures of them, and then they appeared to be handmade. Apparently they made them themselves vaguely handmade. I don't know they were there. I've read accounts that said they made them themselves and just for

everybody to to picture what these look like. Because when I first saw this, it was really weird because the first article or two I read didn't show the photo. And it wasn't until I saw the photo that I understood what they meant by lead imasks. They look vaguely like like goggles, like scientific goggles like the A band. Have you ever went to the top of the eye doctor and then they give you they dialate plastic on your face. That's exactly what they look like. Yeah, or

they look like safety glasses kind of like that. You know, they're beat out of lead and they have no eye holes poked in them. Um. They said that it's the sort of thing that someone would wear to protect their eyes from radiation, which was from common at the time when people were working with radiation. It was common at the time to wear that they have. They found the empty water bottle with these men um. They had two

towels with them, which I don't really understand. Galaxy, Well, so the thing is about the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, right, it does say to always bring a towel. But the Hitchhiker's Guide wasn't written for more than ten years, obviously obviously, right, yeah, and and and correctly if I'm wrong, But in at least one account that I read, they had a plastic bag with them, and they had soaked the towels in water. I didn't read that. I don't. I didn't see that.

I really didn't see that. So in one account that I read, they had a plastic bag and they had two towels in there, which they had when already moistened, and that that accounts for the need for the water. But I'll talk about that later. Okay. Is this your theory, it's it's it's a possible theory, all right, so we'll read visit that great. They also found a notebook which

just confused everything further. It was written in Portuguese, and the translation read, uh, sixteen thirty b at a greed place, eighteen thirty swallow capsules after effect, protect metals, wait for mask signal, wait for masks a single signal. And that was it, just those two lines protect metal. Yes, and okay, and to add you know to it, the money that

these men supposedly had wasn't found on them. You know, whether or not the kid who found them took the money, whether or not somebody else took the money, whether they just didn't have the money, that's maybe they spent it all, and maybe they did. I mean, water in Brazil is very expensive, so yeah, probably probably that the whole kiddie right there, that's the story. So we can get into theories now if you guys want, Well, I was gonna,

I was gonna. I wanted to point out is that I know that the kid that found him, of course, turned around and called the authorities. And everybody's remember this nineteen sixty six, don't have a cellphone, so we had to run to the town and it probably didn't probably walked. He probably walked, and then he had to make the phone call and correct me if I'm wrong. But because of the conditions and where was that in the time of day, the police didn't go there till the next day.

It wasn't as if they were in a hurry to get him. And these guys were already dead. Well and well, but and these guys have been missing for three days, so they've been gone for three days. That granted the boy didn't know who they were, But it's it's kind of odd that it took so long. To me, you would think, well, well, we've got to go get these people that are lost up there just fairly fairly terrain and there were no roads leading up to where their

bodies were. They did all of the pictures of the crime scene. They had to carry the bodies out some things. I don't know what time he found them. I didn't find a record of that. You know, if it were later in the evening and it was getting dark out, I would expect that, you know, it was muddy, train it had been raining. Okay, that then that makes more sense. It would just seems strange to me that nobody rushed up there should take care of it. Okay. There are

a couple theories, some mundane, some fantastical. Fantastical is exactly the word I was. One of the theories is that the lead masks suggest that the men were expecting radio activity, which is fair, um, but there was no radio activity found on the hill where they were found, which kind of brings up the idea that, um, these men not may not have been found at the reference to agreed upon place that might not have been where the agreed upon place was so that they may have gone and

done their business elsewhere that these little notes reference. And to be fair, even there's no proof that says that this note reference to you know, that day. You know, they could have gone and done all of their business that had their little notes and then you know, run into a murderer who killed them and was like, whoa, there's lead masks, you know, takes the cash, puts the

lead masks on and just walks away. But so for all we know, this is you know, there's still a mystery here, but it doesn't actually pertain to their deaths. Well that's we know the cause of death and days, so they were in somewhat deteriorate. What happened was they were found three days after they had disappeared or that

they had been seen last. But the corner in de jan Eiro at the time was really busy, so when they were performing the autopsies, he left all their organs out a room temperature for just like hours at a time. So by the time he got around so just secting them to see if there was anything in them, they

were just spoiled. There was no telling what was going on. Okay, so no, you couldn't un any ten so they couldn't run any kind of time, okay, And there was no outward signs of what it wasn't as if you know, there was not There wasn't like a bullet hole in their head or anything. Yeah, so robbery it seems unlikely. So robbery does seem unlikely. I mean, you don't really poison people. But they did reference capsules, right, yeah, they did.

They didn't find any capsules, so they must have taken them. But you know the evidence of those would of course be in internal organs, which were spoiled because the corner was really busy that day, he might have been maybe

that was he's part of the conspiracy. Yeah, um. And then you know there there are claims of UFO activity stuff, and there are a couple around this because these two men were UFO enthusiasts and the place that they were found was known as a UFO hot spot quote unquote, there were there were reports of UFOs being sighted the day before they were found, or I guess the night before they were found in the area, and it didn't none of the articles I could find made clear if

these were reports that came before or after. There you know discovery, you know, and that's we talked about this before, right, that's a big problem if they come after they're not really, but it was this area was known as a UFO hotspot.

UFOs were reported pretty frequently in this area. So there was a theory that since they were UFO enthusiasts, they went to this area to perform a suicide pact that coincidentally was at the same time that a mother ship would come, and so if they killed themselves on Earth, the mothership would beam up their souls and they would be able to travel with aliens the whole heavens gape

actually like that. Actually they referenced it. You know, the joke was, well, maybe these guys were wearing nikes, but do you think these six so they in Brazil, so they probably weren't. But but why But in that case, if they're just going to kill themselves, and why they lead? Why they lead sunglasses? You know, maybe they were misinformed, maybe they thought they had to wear those could be like the old thing of when was it that they used to put pennies on your eyes for the boatman.

So so they figured that the aliens were short unlead, and so they've just thought they could have been that. But it's you know, it's it's one of those weird things where there's a lot of cultural oddities around. When someone dies, eyes always come up. There's always you always place something on their eyes. And I don't know why that is. You just reoccurring a lot of things, and so it strikes the chord here. Doesn't make sense, no, but it strikes a chord that I can't help it.

I can't ignore, you know. And the towel thing is is weird to me. You know, they say, well, in the case, they were expecting moisture, and it's like, well, yeah, it was raining, but you wear a raincoat. You don't bring a towel like you've gone swimming right when you get home. Yeah, So I don't know. The towel thing

is still super weird to me. I don't know. So my thinking about the whole the whole towel thing, I said, is that if they were up there, supposing, supposing they were expecting to make contact with a UFO up there, they don't know exactly what to expect, but they're thinking,

probably it's entirely possible. We can expect like intense light, intense heat, and so that was why they made themselves some lead spectacles because they thought, well, you know, we can go buy sunglasses, but no sunglasses we buy are probably going to be adequate, you know. There, So it's kind of a worst case scenario kind of thing. So they've had the towels along and might understand I read one account of this the paper there that the towels were in a plastic bag and they had been they

had been pre soaked, they were wet. So by thinking is that their plan was that when the UFO showed up, that they would put on the lead shades to protect their their vision from intense light. Should there be intense light, and should there be very intense heat, they could pick up the towels and hold the towels in front of them, and the towels and kind of the moisture and the towels would actually absorb some of that he give it off in steam and protect them from the intense heat.

And I think it was kind of a worst case scenario kind of thing for them to have wet towels handy, just in case there was they were experiencing intense that's really planned out, it is. I was also going to say, that's like one of the smartest theories I've heard out

of you. Um So I think that explains the water bottle. Yeah, I mean they probably wanted to drink a little bit of a hiking but yeah, And my other thing is that is that why they died, is that if they were expecting possible radiation, they might have thought it would be a good precaution to take idine pills to protect their thyroid if they if they had pills that were a much stronger mix of idon than what they believed they were taking than iodine poisoning actually can kill you.

And it's also possible that they could have gotten tainted drugs also, and they were just poisoned by the tainting drugs. Well, this idine poisoning kill you relatively quickly. No, not really, it's a slow process. Well it's not. It's not weaks or anything like that. But my understanding eyeim poisoning takes it's not an instant sort of but it's kind of pain. Kind it's a bit painful. You you're you're sick or not, you should throw up, you get diarrhea and stuff like that.

So that's a mark against that theory. But well, I was gonna say, is one of the things that is reported about these guys when they when they were found is that the grass around them was undisturbed. So that means if they were sick and they were flailing and they remove around, you have thought that they would have beat the grass down and after a couple of days that grass isn't gonna have stood itself back really resilient. But yeah, not likely now. And and I don't know

how thoroughly they examined the bodies. And of course my research and idem poisoning is indicate that it affects different people differently, So not everybody's going to have diarrhea, for example, but and it is kind of it's going to take

a few days probably at least to die. Um, so that would lend credence if they were right on capsules, if they were taking for that reason, that they were just painted and so they just were poisoned by bad drugs, and which which happens even today, I mean and modern in sixty six obviously controls, especially in the Third World, thank yeah, in Brazil. Uh So it's entirely possible that they got just got a bad bade. Yeah, that's definitely true.

Um so the other kind of well, one of the other fantasy theories out there is that these guys were time travelers. What yeah, so okay, And so this is the thing, right, is that like my reaction to is like what, I don't actually understand how that explains anything, except for I found one reference to one scientist who was also supposedly a time traveler that wore a raincoat

and lead eye protection. But I couldn't find any reference to this, so like this apparent scientists time traveler anywhere else. It was just in this one thing I was gonna say, It's just it's one of those things on the internet that you find the blurb. Yeah, and you know in this article that particularly that I was reading, he was making all these pop culture references, and it was kind of like, well, maybe I've just missed out on this

on this particular reference. Maybe somebody out there listening can tell me what you know that reference was too, But I don't know, we we don't know at all, And I couldn't like googling it didn't give me any insights. Yeah. So anyway, so that so, how does this theory work? So these guys went off, they traveled in time a bit, they popped back into in our time on the top of this hill, and the experience killed them. That how

is that? I don't know that they thought that they had glimpsed something into the wrinkle of time and they took this these capsules to help them travel transition, transition or something, and it failed catastry orophically and they've died. So I you know, again, this is one of those like little blurb theories that I thought i'd throw in there because it's vaguely interesting. Yeah, it's like it's fun.

That's it's really kind of fun to read the stuff that people come up with, even though it's obviously some of the landish. Yeah, so, um, that's all of the UFO theories. Um. There's one other kind of blurb that I kind of talked about already that was, um that we don't know that these notes are actually pertaining to the day that they died or to their death at all. The thing that none of these theories really explain is there's a little blurb in their note that says protect

the metals. Yeah, I remember seeing. Yeah, so what does protect metals mean? I don't know, we don't know one of the other theories, which I think is probably the most reasonable, since they were UFO enthusiasts. They were kind of into the elect tronics of the time, and you know, they said, we're going to go buy a car, which would be the reason that they might have a lot

of money. So the relatives weren't questioning, you know, why did you leave with all this money, why did you take your life savings, but that they were going to do a deal that had to do with radioactive medals or materials of some kind, and that perhaps they did take iodine or something of that nature to protect them from the radio activity of the metal. And they went and they did the deal and got these metal and then you know, died for whatever reason from the iodine.

And who knows where they got these capsules. It may have been the person who was doing the deal. Anyways, it may have been like it could have been a way to make a quick buck, right, Oh, I have these radioactive materials you guys are looking for. Here, I'm gonna send you some pills to help protect you from the radio activity. And then you know, take the money and just follow them for a day while they die slowly, and then take your radioactive material back. I don't know

the other like theoretically radioactive material. But so that's really one of my big problems. You know, they were waiting for someone to tell them to put the mask on, some kind of signal to put the mask on, and they talk about protecting the metal, you know, kind of in an The feeling that I get of it is like protected at all costs. Right, Those are two things

that none of these theories really speak to. The fact that it implied their notes imply that there are other people involved, and that there's something that's they're trying to you know, get I guess the metals they're trying to protect, well, this whole thing from the outside it. As we've said,

there's there's these elements that seem so far fetched. But if these guys are TV repairman and they're into electronics, probably the you know, the big technology that everybody get was like a ham radio or something at that time. It makes me wonder if they weren't doing what a lot of people do these days, the equivalent of getting on a form. We're getting on a chat channel and chatting and somebody realizing that way these guys are kind of naive and I could make a couple of bucks

on him. And whether it was they intended to, you know, give him these pills and they were just knockout pills and they just intended to knock him out and take their stuff, or they intended to kill him. I don't

know which way. They didn't and it went bad, or they did, who knows, But it seems like that that's the most plausible thing that I can get out of this, is that somebody was stringing them along and then when they died, just for to add to it, to make it seem weirder, to throw the police off the case, they took those silly little glasses and put them on

the faces when they when they left him dead. But that's that's the only thing that I can ever see that that makes any coherent sense in this whole thing. That's the problem that it's none of it is coherent. It's kind of just like slapped on there. You know. It's like, oh, two guys found dead for no real reason. Okay, that's a mystery. Oh. Also, they had towels, okay. Also they were wearing these weird lead masks. Okay. Also they had a note in their pocket. That was like totally

an explainable oh okay. Oh. And also on top of that, you know, my problem with the suicide pact, right is that they bought a refundable bottle, right, so they seem to intend to return. It's not like they went out there with the intention of never coming back. I mean, maybe they did, but surely there there's an option to just say, oh, no, we just want a glass of water, or no, we'll take the non we won't you know, pay the deposit. We're just gonna we know, for the

receipt for your bottle if you're not coming back. Well yeah. At the same time, though, I mean, haven't you gotten a receipt and stuffed it in your pocket and then you know, at the end of the day you take it out and then you throw it away. The impression that I had was that it was like you had to really say you know that they would say, okay, do you want their seat to return this or are you just going to take it with you? That was my impression. And you know, that could be totally wrong.

It could be that they just printed out a receipt and you know that that could totally be the case. But you know, in my in my little world, these two men who are like super excited about getting something trapes out into the wild with there. They're like, we're gonna come back tomorrow and it's gonna be perfect, and we're gonna return this for ten cents, which is going to be enough for bus back to our home. Now in the bus that they had to ride the bus

like three hours. Yeah, it was three hours. Yeah, that's that's that's a heck of a commute. Yeah, because a hundred and six from Yeah, so you know, and it's true they were UFO enthusiasts. Maybe they were going out to see if they could find a UFO or something,

but obviously something went horribly wrong. It might be that they were just swindled, like Steve was saying, they were just if somebody, somebody gave him some knockout pills so he could take their money and flee, and then hops he gave them a little bit too much and they just sort of died. It's entirely possible, all right, It's just you know, a weird one that it's got. I have to say, so far in the shows that we've done that probably has the most clues left behind so

far that make no sense. It's just like a menagerie of weirdness. I am. I am giving this one the menagerie war. Yeah, but you should know, like the possibility that that maybe these guys decided to just check out and they decided to commit suicide, and they thought, well, what can we do to make sure our names live on? And so they just decided to put together a whole pastiche of weird stuff. I'm explainable stuff. Let's write a cryptic little note, let's let's hammer up and lead sunglass.

Not that's not the behavior of people who are intending to do themselves in that. That doesn't hold That doesn't hold true to any case that I've ever heard of somebody who's playing ending plotting their own demise. Never heard of anybody saying, well, I'm gonna make this as weird

as possible. Yeah, And you know, we talked about recently that guy who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and you know, he was uphone enthusiast and he you know, for you know, we talked about the theory that maybe he faked his own death and there was you know, he wanted to go out with a bang, and that's fine. That even seems more reasonable to me as like I'm gonna kill

myself but also fake a UFO thing than this. You know, travel a hundred sixty miles when you're like pretty broke anyways, go, you know, make lead masks, which couldn't have been easy, you know, And I want to I want to speak to the lead masks. Yeah, I've read a number of these, and I was doing and I started thinking, well, are they lead mass? Are they really lead mess? And that's that's what I was trying to figure out what they look like. And then I started doing a bunch of

looking around. And I've seen accounts of city weren't actually lead, but they were tin, which would be much easier to get ahold of than lead. Yeah, and you can kind of out with pair of tin snips. Well know, these things look like they were hammered out. I mean, it looks like somebody hammered them out. But I don't think. I don't know that they were really lead. Yeah, they might have been. Everybody said, well those look like the

glasses you put over. I don't know, you know, And then and I can't really tell they do like hand hammered. I think. But but if you go, if you go to like your your local fishing store, you can buy those weights that come in like their cylindrical like you can buy Yeah, you can buy those ones that are in a long sort of cord of lead, and you can just you could basically pound that with a slush that was flat and then just cut out your sunglasses

from it. So it's entirely feasible to do something like that. Well, it's just I've seen accounts to go both ways. It's another was like, Okay, well, if they're going to protect radiation in their tin, yeah sense, Yeah, I though they're going to protect from super intense light and that radiation ten works just fine, Yes it does unless there's a lot of heat, and then maybe again again we're going

down the same rabbit hole. Yeah, and I don't have any more theories, you know, anything else you want to talk about with this? Well, so if you have any theories or you know, have anything to correct us or any more insight into this um, you can email us at Thinking Sideways Podcast at gmail dot com. Check out our website. We've got links. Probably will post a couple of pictures of the lead masks and that's thinking Sideways podcast dot com, so thanks for listening. Thanks everybody dot