Well done, AJ Gevaerd!
Tribute from the UFO Team to our eternal friend, leader, editor, ufologist Geva, the founder of UFO Magazine, the oldest Ufology publication in circulation in the world and the largest in Brazil, with almost 300 editions, belonging to the largest UFO community in the country and Latin America.
By Marco Antonio Petit
It is not easy to write in just a few pages about the trajectory of my friend and brother of all hours since our initial meeting in the city of Petrópolis (RJ), at an event, in 1981.
Gevaerd was born in Maringá (PR), on March 19, 1962, studied and was a Chemistry teacher until 1986, when he gave up the area to dedicate himself exclusively to Ufology, a passion he had had since before he was 10 years old.
In 1983, at the age of 21, he founded the Brazilian Center for Flying Saucer Research (CBPDV), the largest organization of its kind in Brazil, based in the state of Paraná, with thousands of members. Among its consultants were or still are the most prominent and recognized Brazilian and foreign ufologists.
I remember perfectly the day he called me at the end of 1984 to talk about his dream of creating a new UFO magazine in the country. The most important one (OVNI Documento) had stopped circulating years before. During our conversation, the man who would become the greatest editor of World Ufology invited me to participate directly in the project. A few months later, in March 1985, the magazine “Ufologia Nacional e Internacional” was born, which hit newsstands in the main cities of the country with an article written by me and other columns, written by names such as Claudeir Covo, Victor Soares and our great Matriarch, Professor Irene Granchi. The main launch event, also in March (1985), organized by me, took place at the Cultural Center of the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL), in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The day before, Gevaerd had the opportunity to be received by the President of the ABL itself, the academic Austregésilo de Athayde. The magazine initially had only 18 pages, but it was a success, marking the history of Brazilian Ufology. In his first years as editor, he also launched a magazine on Parapsychology and then the periodical “PSI-UFO”, which merged Ufology with Parapsychology, among other titles, before the launch of the UFO magazine in 1988, which had hundreds of ufologists and researchers from numerous countries on its editorial board, something unparalleled abroad.
In addition to the current UFO series, Gevaerd was the editor of a series of books specialized in Ufology, called the UFO Library collection, which currently has almost 60 titles by selected national and international authors, and the coordinator of a series of UFO documentaries on exclusive DVDs, the UFO Video Library collection, with 170 titles, four of which were authored by me, considered the largest collection of its kind in the Portuguese language. At the end of 2021, which would also include the launch of the book “Agroglifos no Brasil”, by Gevaerd himself, who had been coordinating field investigations of one of the most important phenomena of our time, crop circles, unexplained geometric signs produced without human action in grain plantations in more than 40 countries, totaling thousands of figures today. Having started in England in the late 1970s, the phenomenon was originally called “English circles” and spread throughout the world, arriving in Brazil in 2008 and appearing in cities in Santa Catarina and Paraná...
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