The Schneider Pottery Workshop Encounter

Henrique Schneider Jr went out to check his pottery kiln at about three in the morning, on the night of 26 to 27 September 1968. In the courtyard of his workshop in the Villa Baumer district he found two flat metallic rectangular panels. He could not move. What followed, by his account, was an exchange of about ten minutes conducted without speech, and in his account it was the panels themselves that spoke. They said they had come down to check the smoke and heat coming off his kiln, which he fired with tyres. They described how they fed themselves and how the craft moved, and said they had come from space. Then the ramp went back in and the conical craft lifted away in silence.

What is on the record

The site is the strongest part of this account. Schneider reported a burnt circular mark on the ground with tripod impressions around it. Roof tiles had been shifted out of place. A smell like kerosene hung in the air and a truck would not run properly afterwards. Those are the kind of traces that can be examined. Nothing in the archive shows that anyone did examine them, and no photograph, report or measurement is held here.

The file itself is narrow: one telling on one channel in one video. Four claimants are recorded, but only Schneider has a described role in the encounter; Paulo Mertens, Carl Sleva and Udo Schmidt appear as names with nothing attached to say what each of them saw or when. The archive holds no documents of any class for this case, primary or otherwise, and no independent source restates the account.

Why it sits where it does

The case carries the L3 label for independent claimants, and the label rests on four names sitting inside a single telling from a single channel rather than on separate sources arriving at the same event. That is a weaker footing than the tier normally implies, and it is worth saying so. What the record holds is a detailed, internally coherent first-person account with physical traces described but never verified. What stood in that courtyard is not resolved here.