Thousands of Brazilians across multiple states were shocked and puzzled by emergency alerts sent to their cell phones in the middle of the night, some containing gibberish while others warned them to brace for an imminent alien attack.
The false alarms were sent between Friday night and early Saturday morning through Brazil’s national Civil Defense Alert platform, a system normally reserved for serious warnings about floods, landslides, storms and other emergencies.
Instead, residents in several cities were jolted awake by “extreme alert” notifications containing the word “misanthropy” – meaning hatred or distrust of humanity – while others received messages that sounded less like public safety advice and more like the opening scene of a low-budget sci-fi blockbuster.
Em Belo Horizonte, complementaram como “Ataque Alienígena” pic.twitter.com/1rml1Gzf8u
“Protect yourself: ALIEN ATTACK. Humans, we have arrived,” read the message received by some residents of Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais state, according to G1 Globo. Another version also warned of a supposed tornado in the metropolitan region.
"Alien attack. People, we have arrived" - such a warning from the Brazilian Ministry of Defense woke up millions of people. pic.twitter.com/drgZiODcYV
There was, officials later clarified, no alien invasion. The real emergency, according to Brazil’s National Civil Defense, was much more earthly: the alert platform had apparently been compromised.
NOTA OFICIALA plataforma de envio do Defesa Civil Alerta foi tirada do ar às 1h30 da madrugada deste sábado (20/6), após ter sofrido uma invasão e disparado um alerta para diversas regiões do país, ordenado remotamente por alguém alheio ao Sistema Nacional de Proteção e Defesa… pic.twitter.com/0YYXk3yIJW
The agency said the system was taken offline at 1:30am on Saturday after an unauthorized third party remotely triggered alerts to several regions of the country. The Federal Police have launched a probe, while technicians are working to restore the platform.
For many Brazilians, the first response was not official concern but memes. Others were less amused, noting that the same alert system is supposed to warn people of real disasters and that a false “extreme” message in the middle of the night could easily cause panic.
Residents in Belo Horizonte reportedly called Civil Defense, firefighters and police in search of explanations after the alerts blared on their phones. Some said they woke family members or looked for safer rooms after seeing the tornado warning, while others quickly suspected a hoax after reading the extraterrestrial portion of the message.
The incident came at an awkwardly cosmic moment. Just days earlier, the Pentagon released another batch of declassified files on unidentified anomalous phenomena, the official term for UFOs, including witness accounts, photos and videos of unexplained objects.
That release, however, came with the usual caveat that unexplained does not mean extraterrestrial. The Pentagon has maintained that the material contains no confirmed evidence of alien life, alien technology or a government cover-up.
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